Movie break (Quick Vu): Whether tasteless or laugh-a-minute, a period piece: The Jerk (1979)

Third in an occasional series, “Patchouli and B.O.” (a recollection of the ’70s)

 

I saw this movie when it first came out—which occasions an amusing anecdote, to be told at the end of this entry.

By the way, this review is not meant to be making any sly comment about anything of current interest—in part because this film, itself, was (and is) non-topical, seeming to exist in a world of absurdist imagination.

The Jerk was comedian Steve Martin’s first feature film as an actor, after he had had a stellar run as a standup comedian who could pack arenas in the 1970s (and he had previously written for the Smothers Brothers’ late-’60s CBS show). A lot of his comedy was a loopy sort involving such droll ideas and props as wearing a fake archery arrow that seems to go through his head, and his part in the “wild and crazy guys” routine he did with a regular troupe member (Dan Aykroyd?) on NBC’s Saturday Night Live during its late ’70s heyday.

In The Jerk, Martin plays Navin Johnson, a white young man raised by a family of poor Black sharecroppers or subsistence farmers in Mississippi—who is surprised to find from his mother, in the film’s opening sequence, that he is adopted (through tears, he is plaintive: “You mean I’m going to stay this color?”).

Thus begins a film that combines some in-your-face absurdist humor, some of which skirts what might be called politically incorrect today; Catskills humor/flavor (such as with the contribution made by Jackie Mason and various gags by others throughout the film); and a sort of couldn’t-care-less larky comic presentation that seems to blend the older-time comedy sensibility of its director Carl Reiner with some echoing (not always respectful) of the garishness of 1970s styles (especially among the nouveau riche). In the same way, it touches on manners (especially among the likes of carnival showpeople) and the randomly occurring crassness of the middle class. (Some of the score seems as if the film was aimed about as much as older viewers, say baby-boomers’ parents, as it was at the young—baby-boomers.)

There are a number of things to like about this film—if you want simple guffaw-inducing humor that doesn’t have a whole lot of deep socially-edifying qualities—though it tends to sag in its last one-third or so, when it is more concerned then with rounding out its plot than in delivering the density and often cleverness of the gags in its first half or so.

Navin is played as a simpleton given to ridiculous errors—this is consistent with Martin’s previous standup absurdist/“crazy guy” stuff—who, after he fixes a traveling salesman’s eyeglasses, enjoys the dumb luck of the salesman parlaying the eyeglasses innovation into what becomes a tremendous nationwide seller. When the salesman shares royalties with Navin, Navin becomes rich and thus, if sounding less stupid, saunters around like a nouveau riche completely lacking in true taste and good sense. Then Navin loses almost everything after he is sued by consumers, spearheaded by Carl Reiner playing himself (“a celebrity”), in a class action that prevails with the jury and judge showing the same harm from Navin’s invention as do the plaintiffs.

I watched this film about three times recently, and have seen it several times in the past—the very first time (in 1979) occasions a funny anecdote—but it definitely wears thin after the first fun viewing. (I mean this to be true in a given period; if you watch it again years after you first saw it, you might enjoy it anew; but then watch it immediately a second time, and a fair amount of it falls flat.)  On second (right after the first) viewing, some of the gags induce impatience or embarrassment; and from a certain perspective—you need not be as “social science”-oriented as I am—it would seem to be in general poor taste insofar as it seems to poke fun, in Navin, at what might be considered a mentally retarded man (or one with an unusual personality disorder) (though Navin is something of a savant, able to invent problem-solving “solutions” to such issues as eyeglasses that constantly slip off a man’s head).

 

Navin deranged in good times and bad, merely more dopey-suave when rich

Navin shows his odd qualities even when, with his own home, he’s become rich and has a girlfriend who is truly such for him (because she actually kisses him, unlike his first girlfriend, a slovenly carnival motorcycle-stunt person whose sequences are black-comic and, at times, amusingly exemplify, in their rude way, the kind of “comedy of manners for the middle class” that you don’t really see in movies anymore). At one point, Navin is in a bathtub calling out to his girlfriend, played by Bernadette Peters, who is (unseen by him) tearfully writing him a goodbye note; and at one point he sings her a song he says he wrote for her that morning, including the lyrics “I’m picking out a thermos / for you…” and ends with the lyric “and a rear-end thermometer, too.”

A lot of this is the kind of pointless humor you can see certain varieties of wild-comic romps today, but without the kind of socially rooted (if not political-point-type) premises—which embody some ideas that would be “politically incorrect” today—that may make this film edgy. In line with the ’70s social bearings, this film has parts that maybe (for some) are tolerable for one viewing (and take-you-by-surprise hilarious for others), but are dated and tacky on a more considered reflection by a wider range of viewers.

In terms of “wild and crazy” characters, Jim Carrey’s Ace Ventura, from films in 1994 and 1995, may appeal more today, and not simply because of the manic verve and constant sense of zany fun Carrey brings to the role, but because the character seems less identifiable as “the type of people we try not to laugh at”—such as a mentally retarded person (developmentally disabled is the term today) as is the possible case with Navin. Ace more entertains us simply because he is both energetically wackiness-delivering and simply weird.

The race aspect

One thing that barely skirts being offensive in The Jerk, perhaps, is the premise of Navin’s adopted family being a big set of poor Black sharecroppers, complete with a rousing singalong, on the dilapidated front porch, of the old folk/field-call tune “Pick a Bail of Cotton” (performed by blues musician Huddie Ledbetter [i.e., “Lead Belly”], according to film credits). But I admit that this is to me, in one respect—especially for the fun-Americana aspect of the music)—one of the more enjoyable sequences; and as drives home the tongue-in-cheek aspect of this, versions of the porch/music scene, with “grace notes of self-awareness,” come at both ends of the film. I can see how some modern Blacks may feel the sequence is—or somewhat dangerously skirts—an exploitative, dated depiction (rather as if an Amos ’n’ Andy sequence was shown). But I would point out how this particular sequence is presented as absurdist, playing off some goofy stereotypes that were even recognized as such in 1979.

Meanwhile—with a fair amount of the gags playing off the “whitebread” air that Martin has/had in a way—the joke that Navin “doesn’t have rhythm” when it comes to the Black music, but does have rhythm when some Muzak-like stuff is floating in on the radio (and this inspires him to seek his fortune in the outer world), may more decisively seem either OK but dated; or forced; or ugly; or trite.

But one thing that clues me off to how the larger sharecropper sequence is dreamed up, and performed, as tongue-in-cheek is that the Black performers seem to be having fun with it. They include, as the mother, Mabel King, who had roles on TV now and then; and Dick Anthony Williams, who is Navin’s oldest brother Taj. Taj has such incisive moments as sputtering into laughing/coughing on having heard one of Navin’s letters home read aloud by the grandmother, with its references to sexual crassness that Navin innocently reports that also seems to go over the grandmother’s head, but not over Taj’s.

 

My favorite gag

My favorite gag in The Jerk is when Navin’s adoptive father, played by gravel-voiced Richard Ward, is outdoors with him, about to show him the difference between shit and Shinola (the shoe polish). This plays on the old expression, if you never heard it, of “He doesn’t know the difference between shit and Shinola.” The father patiently points out which is shit (on the ground), and which is Shinola (in a can in his hand). Navin acknowledges he gets it, as if learning a genuine lesson. “Boy, you’re going to be all right!” the father says approvingly, and they walk on. In their first steps, Navin steps squarely in the shit.

I’ve liked this gag because it seems to reflect a truth you see a little too often in life: point out to someone the difference between shit and Shinola, and they may say they get it, but then they step in the shit. Big-time.

 

Some fun sequences

A couple sequences have a lot of fun moments. The long sequence at the gas station, whose owner is Mr. Hartounian, played by Jackie Mason, has the most fun—and the least stupid—gags per sequence; and this location is where Navin concocts his eyeglasses invention (for a salesman played by Bill Macy, of Maude fame) that eventually gets him rich and later gives this peripatetic film some semblance of a plot.

(Mr. Hartounian’s wife is dressed and made up to look like a tacky ’70s version of an unusually nubile trophy wife. Ironically, she looks fairly much like the main actresses of today’s film American Hustle, with her teats half hanging out of her dress. Actually, I don’t think too many women dressed quite that way in the ’70s—maybe the Studio 54 types [and miscellaneous trampy sorts] did. But you should remember that even if the ’70s today seem like a time of tastelessness in fashion and self-comportment, there actually still was [among some] a sense of propriety and good taste, while there was a lack thereof among others; and the good taste wasn’t simply among who would become Jerry Falwell’s followers in the next decade.)

There is also a sequence that some might shudder at today, when a sniper with a high-powered rifle turns up on the bank across from the gas station and tries to kill Navin, after having randomly found Navin’s name in the phone book. Played by M. Emmet Walsh, the sniper later turns up, apparently reformed, as a private investigator who tracks Navin down to give him a letter from the traveling salesman who is going to make him rich.

Another fun sequence is when Navin is with his first girlfriend, the motorcycle stunt person, in her trailor…and if you don’t want yourself or loved ones to witness crude sexual humor (but nothing terribly graphic), this may be what triggers your saying “Not for me” to this film.

I was almost sad recently to find that Maurice Evans is in this film, as Navin’s properly British-flavored butler Hobart when Navin is rich. Evans, you may know, played Hutch in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and had a distinguished career that included Shakespearean work.

Carl Gottlieb, who was one of the writers and actors for Jaws (1975; see my review a few entries back), was also a cowriter and actor within The Jerk.

 

An old autobio bit

The anecdote from 1979 is simply this: That year, I was becoming a discriminating filmgoer for the first time. The year saw the release of Kramer vs. Kramer, Apocalypse Now, and others; The Shining would be the next year. In retrospect, it seems to have been a good time for young viewers to cut their “film critic’s teeth” on new films; and even at the time, from my own 17-year-old perspective, it rather seemed a time of often-good cinema, too.

When I first went to see The Jerk, for some reason I went by myself (I usually went with others, like my friend Joe Coles [and others] or my sister). I went to a movie theater at the Preakness Mall in Wayne Township (only locals would know where that is). I sat through maybe about 25 minutes of the film, and got up and left, as if in distaste at the film. That was the first time, and I think the last, I ever did that—in a theater (where you paid good money)—with a film I hadn’t seen before and would normally have seen in its entirety. When I told Joe Coles about this, he seemed impressed I had done this—and I don’t recall whether he took it as reflecting the quality of the film or something about me. I think the former.

I guess the point today is that, if to modern viewers The Jerk seems to sputter into tastelessness or near-pointlessness at times, it did in 1979 too, even if I wasn’t the acme of film criticism as a 17-year-old viewer.

In the “Patchouli and B.O.” series: A little quibble about peculiar flavors of the ’70s

Something about the Jersey Boys stage show—not a big deal

[Edits 1/18/14.]
 

The remarks here on Jersey Boys were originally attached to another entry, but I thought I would toss them out here, because of their potential contribution to serious debates of moment. (Joking? A bit. But how about this: a line from a TV commercial for the Jersey Boys show talks about how, obviously in a place like Jersey, to get out of the neighborhood, you either went into the Army, “mobbed up” [snort], or “became a star”—said with slight NYC-urban-area accent. Some people outside New Jersey, who are taking in the George Washington Bridge scandal, might wonder what else some locals might aspire to do….)

The TV commercials for the staged Jersey Boys—about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons—reminds me of something whenever I see it. Now, today, people who were “aware in an adult enough way” during the 1970s may vary in their memory of manners and little cultural artifacts from those times. And today’s young people (born after 1980 or so) might not care about these.

But in the developing youth culture of that time—and the air of debauchery, rudeness, “earthly delights,” and so on that characterized much of ’70s pop culture (at least some of its premises)—certain manners were current some years, and not others; changes even in slang terms could change so readily year by year. And popular music “of the moment” had a certain flavor, varying with year, decade, etc.

It was such a time of “hewing to the current concrete” that if, today, you really want to depict the ’70s, you have to be careful you’re not anachronistic…but of course, various mountings and production of popular art have been erring on what happened what decade, and what year, anyway. And for many audience members, this might not matter.

One can get kind of fanatical with these quibbles. For instance, and I don’t think this is too crazy, whenever I see Apocalypse Now, a film I like quite a bit, I take note of how some of the slang that Clean (played by Laurence Fishburne) and others use was current in 1976, but not in 1970, which is about when the movie is set (references to Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the reference to the Manson Family murders of 1969 all help root this timing).

For instance, someone (Chef) says to Clean, “Get down, bubba!”—but “get down” was very much a disco-era phrase, starting around 1976, and not used in 1970. In one of the scenes added to the 2001 edition of the film, there is a scene (when the PBR crew is leaving the USO-stage location) where Clean is telling a long anecdote (and maybe Fishburne was allowed by director Francis Ford Coppola to improvise here a bit), and Clean says, in a rather extraneous phrase, “Don’t do it like that!” This was also a mid-’70s phrase, not seen during the height of the Vietnam War (say, around 1970).

To the point at hand:

The Four Seasons songs “Who Loves You” (1975) and “December 1963 (Oh, What a Night)” (1976) were very much ’70s songs, with a sort of vaguely disco-oriented flavor to the former (with its bass and drumming styles) and a certain obvious risque element in the lyrics of the latter (along with some disco touches, such as wah-wah guitar in an instrumental transition [did a correction; got the songs mixed up]). And strangely, the lineup of the Four Seasons for these songs was not that of the 1960s, with Frankie Valli’s falsetto voice front and center. In fact, I remember when the songs were out, I was surprised to hear they were from that group, because they did not have the typical, 1960s Four Seasons sound (which sounded distinctly old-fashioned by 1976).

In fact, on “Oh, What a Night,” Valli’s voice comes in only on the middle eight (or whatever transitional section that is) in a somewhat deepened version of his voice. The bulk of the song is sung by someone else, who sounds atypical of the band in its 1960s heyday.

But to judge from the TV commercial, the Broadway version of Jersey Boys has the 1960s-like lineup—looking like identically dressed dweebs, dancing in sync (and rather like robots), and with Valli’s falsetto crowning the sound—doing those two 1970s songs as if they were hits in about 1963. Not so.

Maybe you don’t care.

Movie break: The house that Spielberg built, and vice versa: Jaws (1975)

First in an occasional series, “Patchouli and B.O.” (a recollection of the ’70s)

Landmark horror film was a first in several ways, and still holds attention today

When I think of Jaws, I think of both courage and stupidity.

—Steven Spielberg (paraphrased), in a 1995 making-of doc commenting on how he made the film as a young man, including with the unforeseen many problems the production had

[Edits 1/17/14. Further comments on interesting facts on this film may be included in the "Jersey Combo Plate" package. Edit 2/8/14. Edit 3/24/14.] 

I’d been toying with reviewing this film for some time. When, in 2012 or 2013, I heard a girl of about nine say, in a public library to a friend, something to the effect that this film was definitely creepy, in a sort of approving way (i.e., it was an effective horror film), I knew that this merely wasn’t an artifact of the 1970s—that it’s as timeless in its way as are horror films like Frankenstein (1931), Psycho (1960), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and others.

Jaws was only Steven Spielberg’s second feature film, and he was about 26 when he made it. He had made the TV film Duel (1971-72), which was added to for European theatrical release the year after it appeared on U.S. TV. He had made The Sugarland Express (1974), which was built on a real story that intrigued Spielberg and featured, as an apparent condition of its being made, a star in Goldie Hawn, who had achieved fame via TV’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Jaws was based on a pulp story, a first novel by Peter Benchley, and it was seen by film producers David Brown and Richard  D. Zanuck as having potential as a gripping film. Spielberg was tapped to direct, after another director had shown interest (thinking hopefully it was about a whale) and then bowed out.

The production was hurried into starting in about spring 1974, in order to get photography going before a film-related strike that, for whatever reason, would prevent any films’ being started after a June date, or such (though whatever was started could be finished during the strike period, apparently). Spielberg and his production team set up shop in Martha’s Vineyard, though the film was set on a fictional Long Island, specifically a town called Amity. According to Spielberg on a 2005 DVD extra, Martha’s Vineyard was chosen because, 12 miles out—enough to remove views of land on the horizon in all directions—the ocean was still about 30 feet deep, enough to accommodate special effects that would be launched from the seabed.

Thus began a protracted production that went well beyond the time limit anyone imagined; it lasted about seven months, to about November 1974 (for 159 shooting days, per producer Brown; Spielberg said one day a week was always off). The main reason was that, for the on-the-sea shots, there was so much interference—from wind, waves moving the boats around, and distant vessels entering shots so that the shots had to be redone—that production slowed to getting a very few shots on a given date, or none at all. In this regard, the stretched-out principal-photography phase was something like that of Apocalypse Now (which, for reasons not just including environmental conditions, ran from March 1976 to May 1977).

The result was two things: with the famously malfunctioning mechanical sharks (there were several, for different views), which were state-of-the-art in their way for Universal production professionals but still ushered in a bounty of technical problems, a lot of shots for the film—as a substitute for ones including the shark—were subtle, with only glimpses of the shark, or some shots without the shark visible at all but presumed to be present.

Also, with the tediously long shoot on the water, it would seem that partly due to chance, enough really-good shots were accumulated that, with the professional editing of Verna Fields, a solidly made film was compiled, with attention to detail and ability to render suspense through a host of vignettes, plot diversions, and visual situations.

Jaws’ accomplishment

At two hours, Jaws may seem a little long—today, a film like this would probably be no longer than 90 minutes—but it seems to have few boring or hokey parts. The deliberateness with which it unfolds its story seems excused by the well-roundedness of the main characters and the sense of place and of the classic middle-class diversion that some people can’t get enough of—seashore living. And while there are some bloody scenes—and the situation where one of the principals (I won’t spoil it by saying who) is swallowed by the “enemy” Great White shark is awful—in all, you have a detail-oriented, concretely fleshed-out horror film that often uses subtlety in a way that today seems old-fashioned. And it taps into an instinctual fear—of a “monster” animal, this one plaguing that American “Mecca” of the shore vacation—in such an effective way that you wonder why it took about 60 years of film history before this kind of story was delivered.

And it certainly appealed at the time. Jaws became the highest-grossing film up until that point, outselling even longtime champs like Gone With the Wind (1939) and the more recent The Godfather (1972), surprising even its producers. In fact, it inaugurated the “tradition” of the summer blockbuster, or at least big-budget summer fare that is aimed mainly at young audiences, which I believe has gone on every year since. And some of its facets even entered the spray of cultural “received wisdom,” rather as happens with great art: the idea of a shark approaching, only its dorsal fin shown slicing through water, with the rhythmic dark notes from the famous score by John Williams, has long been a cliché, or at least widely understood. And such lines as “We’re going to need a bigger boat!” have become about as famous as quotables from the likes of Apocalypse Now.

And this film established Spielberg as a great director—while maybe he often aims at the middle of middle-class audiences, more than some discriminating film connoisseurs might like—and it establishes him as a director of good story-recognizing instinct and well-rounded ability to deliver the full set of organs of a story on film. If you thought Spielberg’s grand career only really started with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), or E.T. (1982), take another look at Jaws.

Just about all the Spielberg trademark features are here: a good grip on suspense (whether in specific vignettes or in how to vary the texture of the larger story to make this work); adept handling of the camera (with influence by Hitchcock and others), such as to move from one still, evocative face (showing a grim reaction) to other characters in one sweep of a pan or dolly, getting to another point in the story in an economical manner; and as is maybe grating to some critics, his rooting his main characters in the middle class in a way that can’t help but allow average audiences to identify with them, especially using young children as frames of reference (not just as passing objects of “cute” shots), as sorts of “conscience” brought to the ongoing activity in the film. (This latter feature would be crucial to CE3K and E.T., among others.)

By way of a closer look

If you want to take a scholarly approach to Jaws, you should view Duel first, if you can find it. Duel is a more barren, narrowly short-story-like tale, but it exemplifies how much can be cinematically done with such a story, with maintaining suspense over a long period, through simple means. As Spielberg says in the two-hour (!) making-of DVD extra for Jaws (from 1995, and most of which is gripping enough), and as another producing person (Sid Sheinberg, former head of MCA, parent of Universal Studios at the time) says, the idea of Jaws was originally as a sort of repeat of the formula of Duel: a dark, linear chase story.

For his part, Spielberg notes that both stories involve a menacing “leviathan,” as he calls both the truck/trucker of Duel and the shark of Jaws. (Spielberg, ever a user of little allusions within his films, even has edited in a hokey B-movie dinosaur sound near the end of Jaws, which sounds like a sort of grace note as the dead shark cascades, in a cloud of blood, down in the water; this same sound, more distinct, is heard in Duel as the truck meets its end.)

If Spielberg had never made another film after Jaws, people would still remember it as a solidly made, gripping horror film, and film buffs could group it with Spielberg’s two prior movies and ask, “Whatever happened to that Spielberg guy? He made two good, creepy ’70s thrillers (along with an accomplished crime/semi-comedy road film), and achieved a huge hit with his third film….”

Spielberg’s career wasn’t just cemented with the dollar signs that were raised by Jaws; his longtime partnership with composer John Williams started here, and he didn’t have to wait long for his longtime editor: that is Michael Kahn, coming on board with Spielberg’s next film, CE3K. (Joe Alves, an important production designer for Jaws, also was key to CE3K; and he would actually direct one of the Jaws sequels.)

By the way, Spielberg in the making-of doc says John Williams’ score is responsible for half of the success of Jaws—a roughly similar situation to the contribution the score of Psycho has been said to make to that film.

A look at details

Jaws is so familiar, and is so fairly simply structured, that the real fun remains in looking at certain details, from different angles. The story is in two big acts: the first hour or so is mostly on land, and amounts to a sort of “making the case” for catching and killing the Great White; and the second half is almost entirely on the water, with Chief Martin Brody, played by Roy Scheider (died 2008) , ichthyologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and local arch-fisherman Quint (Robert Shaw [died 1978]) all forming a task force on the fishing vessel Orca, set on locating and catching/killing the shark—in waters with no land on the horizon and no other ships in the area. Men alone against a wild evil: easy to get.

The source novel had an adultery subplot—actress Lorraine Gary (as Brody’s wife) speaks in the making-of doc as if she regretted that subplot’s not being in the film script and hence her not being able to take part in that subplot. Actually, the story as presented on film, I think, doesn’t need it.

Autobio blip: I also recall having read the novel in about spring 1975; I was in seventh grade, and it had been a best-seller; apparently we students could choose ourselves what books we read for an English class (the teacher was an Alice Carr); and as part of the work I drew pictures that related to the books I read. (I still have them somewhere, including for Jaws. [Update: I found the Jaws pic, but I can't include it (for grins) as a Google Drive "exhibit" because it is on colored paper and has colored features, making it in black-and-white too large an electronic file for my purposes.]) The Jaws story, it’s not hard to understand, seemed especially attractive to a young mind (not that I read a lot of horror or pulp in those days), where the simple marketing gimmick of a huge shark torpedoing up from the depths toward an unwitting female swimmer—on the book cover and on movie posters—was all it took to hook you into opening the book or buying a movie ticket. (Not that the swimmer's being female was key here in any perverse sort of way, not for me, anyway.)

But when I read the adultery stuff (which was fairly graphic, as I recall), I was 13 and wasn’t that wise in the ways of sex and I found alienating or embarrassing the goings-on (in bed, with the narration paralleling the activity to a boat’s movement, if I recall). Maybe it was just my own young person’s tastes and idiosyncratic squeamishness about sex at the time, but I think I thought this marred the book. In any event, the film is fine without it.

Details:

Robert Shaw (1927-78) delivers a character that is both a cliché and a treat. Somehow Quint rises above cliché, with Shaw’s rough-hewn help. With Shaw’s face as broad and proud as the front of a truck, his largely Scottish accent, and his he-man bearing (including that eternal measure of manhood, swilling down the last of beer in a can and crushing the can with one hand), he adds blue-collar spice that you have no choice but to be able to enjoy in order to get through the film’s second half. (Dreyfuss in the making-of doc says Shaw was “extraordinarily competitive—unnecessarily so,” but he speaks of him appreciatively, too.)

Shaw’s speaking delivery (probably angled to convey Quint) is something: with his often-short sentences and his almost musical patterning of cadences that seem a relatively stupid person’s on the surface but are literarily canny on a closer look, he gives the most potent character in a film that one critic has said is Spielberg’s only film with truly interesting characters [this was a writer not long ago in The New York Review of Books; update 2/8/14: I thought it was in NYRB, but now I'm not sure; I checked "How Close to Lincoln?," by David Bromwich (Jan. 10, 2013, pp. 8, 10), on Spielberg's nice 2012 film on that president, but it appears not to be there]. “It ain’t like goin’ down to the pond and catching blue gills or tommycots [sp?]. Bad fish. This shark—swallow ye whole.” [some of this maybe minorly mistranscribed] “I value my life more than 3,000 bucks. I’ll find ’im for three. But I’ll catch ’im—and kill ’im—for 10.”

Even when you can’t understand what Shaw is saying, you get Quint’s point. And even if you might want to parody him (eyepatch and peg leg optional), he’s still fun to take in. Spielberg also notes that the long war story Quint delivers during a break late in the film—about the torpedoing of the U.S. Indianapolis and the swarm of sharks’ eating some of the military men—was originally written by one of the screenwriters, Howard Sackler; rewritten by director and screenwriter John Milius (otherwise not involved in this film); and rewritten again by Shaw, whom Dreyfuss says was a writer as well as an actor. If you listen to the war story closely, even with Shaw’s slightly puzzling enunciation at times, it sounds like a darned good piece of anecdote that is like the best pulp literature.

(By the way, one of the screenwriters for Jaws was Carl Gottlieb, who also plays the Amity news reporter/PR guy, rather unobtrusive—and occasionally with garish 1970s sport jacket—in several scenes.)

From revelers, the shark’s first kill. The film starts with an almost entirely-offhand sequence that includes what became a horror-movie staple: young partiers doing their off-the-grid thing without a care in the world, one of whom is about to become short work for a local monster. The group is fireside on the beach, with guitar, wailing harmonica, beer, and (for those partaking) some “wacky tobacky” (someone reminded me not long ago of an All in the Family gag where Edith observes to Archie, “Those people next-door must be poor. They’re sharing the same cigarette”). Groups of kids partying outdoors were not an uncommon phenomenon in the ’70s, though this group seems pretty cleaned-up and stagy.

And wouldn’t you know? Our young, long-haired male hero (for the intro sequence) has eyes for a girl sitting apart—she’s kind of looking fierce, not too pretty (guess that beer he’s quaffing is affecting his judgment, prettying her up a bit, huh?)—but no surprise, because when she runs off to go swimming, she’s played by Susan Backlinie, by her own admission not an actress but a stunt performer, who appears collegially on the 1995 making-of doc.

The famous scene with her in the water, jerked around mercilessly by the unseen shark, is an iconic horror moment, though if you listen to her water-gurgling screams on a second or more viewing (making-of info tells how this was effected in the “looping” stage), it sounds a little over-the-top, darkly comical.

Rooting the story, shot-wise, in solid “American-ness.” The first shot of Brody in his home with his wife shows some of the texture of this film, which is good for a generally tasteful kind of horror and which Spielberg has mastered as well as anyone: alternating scenes of violence or horror with quieter, “average American day” stuff. And certainly Spielberg shows one of his trademarks—placing our main hero in such a “relatable” home that we connect with Brody from the first time—after he gives chary advice to his kid who was injured on the swings—as he unwittingly answers the phone about an ugly development.

The shark girl—in the long July 4^th beach scene—who first alerts others to the fact the shark is going into “the pond”: first, she’s dressed rather warmly for July 4^th, with a bandanna on her head, worn jeans, and other non-bathing-suit clothes (she looks like a ’70s Special, no?); maybe indicating this shot was done in the cold spring. But also—the real point—doesn’t she sound like she first says, “Syark!” She doesn’t seem like an actress—maybe she was an island resident (as are, evidently, others in the film) enlisted to be an extra.

Adept use of camera movements shows influences and Spielberg’s own arriving cinematic style. Spielberg’s having learned from technicians like Hitchcock shows fairly early, when the post-first-violence scene in the police office has the camera first placed before the somber young man (after some of the girl’s remains have been found), and shifts with the passing through of the dowdy secretary who’s just coming in (first greeting the dorky assistant policeman), going into Chief Brody’s office: in one camera sweep, a number of characters with different personalities and attitudes are caught just enough to see what kind of community (and emergent situation) we have.

You could call this a use of a “master shot,” but the most impressive use of such a thing (at least for the bases it tries to touch on) is in the scene almost midway through the film, where Brody and Hooper have a more spirited attempt than usual to convey the unambiguous menace posed by the shark to Amity’s mayor, played with restrained ambiguity by Murray Hamilton (died 1986; remember him as Mr. Robinson from The Graduate [1967]; and his manner crafted for Jaws suits a politician looking out for his resort-community constituents’ business interests—not so “evil” today). Brody and Hooper want to make perfectly clear that a Great White shark is endangering the community, and so the July 4^th festivities can’t be held as usual. But to no avail.

Here, it may seem puzzling that the whole sequence, which goes on for some minutes, has Brody and Hooper pressing their case with the mayor in some remote location, and then the visual attention turns to a billboard that has been defaced humorously by vandals, about which the mayor makes an argument to Brody. In this latter phase, the camera has moved to be low, to accommodate (from almost a ground-level view) the billboard as well as the actors—and seems to present the actors Orson Welles style, as if looking up onto a stage.

Also, Dreyfuss’s Hooper seems to devolve into rather broad comedy in this scene, and you wonder about the scene’s length and the variation in tone. But from the making-of doc you can understand why this was shot this way, and thus appreciate it as effective enough. As maybe Spielberg pointed out, Martha’s Vineyard’s community reps were so particular about how the movie crew did their work on the island that they required the fake billboard to only be up one day at a time (or one day in total—I forget which). Therefore, any scene or scenes with it had to be shot within a day. It is apparently because of this that what seems like several pages of script were shot with this scene with the three men and the billboard.

Other Hitchcock-like visual touches include the “trombone shot” when Brody appreciates that someone is getting attacked by a shark in the first extended populated-beach scene; a “trombone shot” is when the camera zooms in one direction and dollies in the opposite direction, seeming to make the picture warp (Hitch pioneered this in Vertigo [1958]). Another technique—admittedly minor—is when Hooper is in the coroner’s lab and is examining the dead girl’s remains—and in one shot a lamp is conspicuously within the frame. Hitch did this in a few of his movies, and it gives a sense of there being “middle space” when a character is fairly close, but it also seems to give a little claustrophobic effect.

An implausible plot part is when Hooper suddenly wants to go out on the water, with Brody with him (and Brody drunk, no less), in order to check on evidence bearing on the shark during the night, when the shark exercises his habit as a “night feeder.” In Hooper’s specially fitted-out boat, they come upon an abandoned fishing vessel, and Hooper compulsively has to go into the water in wet suit and check out the abandoned vessel’s hull. (I also understand that at least part of this sequence was shot in a pool after principal photography was done.) Of course, he finds a shark tooth that will be key to his trying to make the case to the mayor about the incipient danger. And—especially valuable to the film—the appearance of the dead man’s waterlogged face in the hole in the hull is one of the guaranteed-scare parts of the film.

But think a minute: if the Great White is such a beast that it’s all the three men can do to not get snagged by its jaws in the second, hunt half of the film, how smart is it for Hooper to go into the water, at night, near the shark-attacked boat when, for all he knows, Mr. Dorsal Fin may still be in the area?

Dollars & sense: A project with Jason Aronson (1994), Part 1 of 2

A tightly time-and-money-defined project leads to an irascible reaction to my work from my contact, and an implicit sense I might not get paid—though I did secure payment  [JCP]

[I fashioned an account on this experience at least once before, in 2010 or 2011 (but didn’t publish it), and it has certainly been in my memory for many years. It’s nice to lay it out here, explaining it so that, hopefully, outsiders can understand the situation. One good thing about this is that it encompasses all phases of doing honest work as a freelancer in a “creative” publishing situation—getting the work, finding a reasonable method for doing the work, pursuing pay issues—and dealing with a company that seems it might end up being crooked with you…and I even have a later corroborating anecdote, from someone else’s experience, presented in a Manhattan editors’ newsletter in 1997. Edits 1/15/14.]

A different version of this essay may appear in the “Jersey Combo Plate” package, not available online.

“They didn’t want it good, they wanted it Wednesday.”

—Robert Heinlein, commenting in relation to doing stories for the old sci-fi pulps; quoted in a standalone way in The Freelancer (March-April 1997, p. 7), editorially placed next to a letter by another freelance editor (the latter to be quoted at the end of this essay [in Part 2])

Subsections below:

My triggering getting work involved both dogged efforts and weird luck

A draconian budget-consciousness

How I managed my time, and the semi-amateurish nature of the manuscript

A “good enough edit”

Part 2 will include:

My vacation, and making the deadline

The denouement

Chasing after the pay (and catching it)

A 1997 anecdote shows a worse experience than mine

Here is a story that’s almost 20 years old. It involves a project, one of the few non–educational-book manuscripts I’ve done copy editing work for, and the published book you can find information on online, in terms of it being linked to me. (This has to do with a Google Books listing for a work of my own, and the way the information on the copy edited book is linked to me is quirky—it is [or was, not too long ago] cross-referenced to a self-published book of mine. There was no apparent reason for Google Books to do this other than that I had worked on both books in some way.)

The story below may seem a bit overly detailed, and moreover it is from “another world” to the extent it is from pre-Internet, early-1990s publishing. From another angle, you may ask, Did I ever try to edit for psychological publishers? Yes, I have, and the one covered here, Jason Aronson, is one. But it would seem there are general oddities about psychology publishers, even in a wider field (print publishing) that would seem to outsiders to typically have oddities that almost seem contrary to the industry’s business interests. Other, much shorter anecdotes I have on other psychological publishers would help bring this point home.

But this Aronson experience is relevant for this reason: it was, I believe, the only time I’ve done editing for a book—arguably a sort of “trade book”—where I would have presumably been the only copy editor. (This though what actually happened is that the production editor did a second edit—and may have gone a bit too far.)

Meanwhile, despite with how my being a novice at this point in 1994 may help explain Aronson’s handling of me here, starting in 1995 I would do editing work of one sort or another for a book within every year until 2013. This would account for at least 24 books, by a rough count, and all of them educational, reference, or otherwise narrow-audience books—including four literature textbooks, about a dozen yearly library reference books, three editions of The World Almanac, some religious-school textbooks, and a book compiling essays on the “psychology of terrorism.” In all or nearly all these cases, there are typically more than one editor doing the level of work I do on them (even if I am relied on, in specific instances, as a “main editor” of sorts). The bottom line is that, despite the high-handed way the production editor of the project described below summed me up after my work, I would end up doing some form of copy editing for many, many more volumes.

What can I say about this 1994 situation after all this later work? One thing is that you “always have to start somewhere,” and learning to ride a bike may “require” falling down. But sometimes a project is handled by a publisher so questionably that it still looks about that bad 20 years after the fact. And what that means for people starting out in the field can maybe be gleaned from a careful look, combining memories and a re-check of records. And the issue of getting paid is one handy lesson that can be gotten here, if nothing else.

##

Maybe attuned to more modern viewpoints: Nowadays, when it comes to arguably sleazy book-editing arrangements, perhaps the more common stories are characteristically freelance-business matters mediated by the Internet, with that medium’s being apt to deliver problems such as with other dubious “business propositions” regarding book publishing (such as for new authors), like cases examined by the blog Writer Beware. As we will see, in 1997, Jason Aronson worked with a freelancer (unsatisfactorily to her) in another state, leaving her hamstrung partly because of her distance from its offices. (This doesn’t necessarily mean the current form of Aronson is likely to do this.)

But the peculiar nature of this story I’m to tell from 1994, and what authority I have to tell it, relate to a situation that I think potentially can still come up today, because new technology, for some kinds of books at least, hasn’t erased the need to have books copy edited. And this particular story is one of a pretty cheap company, which is the sort of thing that doesn’t go away.

I am writing this in part from memory, but I also started to refer to my old business records, and I hope not to need to recheck too many little details. Jason Aronson Publishers was in 1994 a book publisher of a few decades’ duration, started by a doctor named Jason Aronson, and it specialized in psychology books, and later it started publishing Judaica books as well (it still does this now). I speak in the past tense because it was bought by a firm (Rowman & Littlefield) that is located in—and hence Aronson moved to—Maryland. And even if Aronson currently “exists” as an imprint called Jason Aronson that produces the same kind of works it once did (and even if it does, it’s safe to say this is merely an imprint, little more than a name at the foot of a title page), Aronson most likely had its main business “essence” when it was located in the New York metropolitan area.

It was located in New York City in its earlier years, but when I dealt with it—and for quite some period of its existence—it was in Northvale, N.J., which is in Bergen County, immediately to the west of New York City (across the Hudson River). Whether its quality as a business declined when it moved to New Jersey, I don’t know.

It had been a reputable enough publisher, I suppose, for its niche; in my independent research into psychological matters, I encountered a book by Murray Bowen, a noted psychological researcher/writer who specialized in a systems theory approach, which was published by Aronson. The book was Family Therapy in Clinical Practice (New York: Jason Aronson, 1978).

My triggering getting work involved both dogged efforts and weird luck

How I learned about them I’m not sure, but I probably saw them advertise for editors or the like in the classified section of the newspaper (they used to advertise this way for staff jobs a lot), so I wrote them the type of query letters I did in the early 1990s to try to get work. No one I directly knew tipped me off (or otherwise helped me) to get work there. I recall writing them a number of times (with cover letter and resume; I don’t recall if I would have enclosed a work sample at that time; probably not).

When I finally got a response that led to work, it was quite quirky—and this in a sense presaged how odd they would be to work for. (I think in prior years I’d written them and gotten a sort of routine letter saying my resume would be kept on file—this was when that was a kind of standard business practice; but nothing more came of this from Aronson. Also, as I had learned to do, and as I would continue doing, at different levels, for many years, I contacted this employer more than once to kindle or rekindle interest in me. A recheck of my business records shows that I was given a copy editing test by them in November 1992, then I didn’t get the results—with my “failing”—until February 1993.)  (See End note.)

It was possibly in late February 1994, maybe very early March, that Muriel J., the woman who was the editorial director there at the time (and who seemed, I think, to be the main one to contact to seek freelance editing work), wrote me a letter as if I’d just failed a copy editing test they gave me, or such (this may have been in response to my having earlier sent a “tickler” letter to Aronson, but Muriel J.’s letter may have come out of the blue). I had taken no such test yet in 1994.

My deciding what to do in response would have happened by about early March 1994; I answered by mail, including my noting that I hadn’t just taken the test. In response, a letter from Muriel J. came, dated March 11 and arriving March 16. This was a little more than two weeks after I had left the medical publisher Clinicians Publishing Group in February, which for me was a time resounding with shock from how it ended.

(This may all strike you as of personal interest mainly; but it’s interesting to re-piece a history of this time, to explain for you why I dealt with Aronson as I did—and it also seems like from a “greatly different time of my life,” unlike some other stuff from that time, as in local politics.)

As I suggested, March 1994 was a depressed, rather desolate time for me; it had been a tough winter for everyone, and the principals of CPG had been scandalous with me as led to my being fired from their company (this situation, actually having developed over months back into late summer 1993, included, as I’ve said elsewhere [see the subsection “2. Into a Kafkaesque situation”], my having been declined group health insurance by their carrier in fall 1993; I had been in touch with the state about this by December 1993, and the CPG partners came to know this). In March 1994, after having left CPG and having made an unemployment claim, I had been pursuing an appeal of an unemployment-insurance denial (and I would win the appeal); and it was almost a shock that I ended up getting regular work again starting in April, now doing clerical work at a branch of the insurance company MetLife, through the temp agency Olsten. Of course, I was desperate for paying work given my expenses, including car payments.

In any event, how my business with Aronson slotted into this several-week situation was about as densely arrayed as seeking work ever was in those long-walk years; and certainly I was eager to continue publishing work, especially trying my hand at editing of books if I could. So I wrote back to the editorial director after receiving the “you failed” letter, saying there was a mistake; I had not just taken the copy editing test (which was true). I added something like that it would be a shame to be denied work based on such a mistake.

Muriel J. then sent me a test to take—her cover letter (already mentioned) was dated March 11, 1994—and this time, according to an April 1 letter from her, I passed it. I was put on their freelancers list and was thus presumably able to get copy editing work (I should wait for a production editor to contact me).

This sort of oddity might lead some to say, “Watch out for this place.” (If I examined my records on them further, I might have to add more crazy details on an erratic place.) At that time, I was rather in a situation of “beggars can’t be choosers,” but I might also have felt this test situation was something of an isolated quirk, and I was glad to be able to get the copy editing work. Plus, in pursuing publishing work as I did in those years, you had to do a lot of “not taking ‘No’ for an answer.”

Then the waiting started. When would someone call me? I sent Muriel J. a tickler letter in late May, and this would lead to something that month. A production editor, Janet W., contacted me about a project, which I’ll refer to—as she did—as the “Bulka book.” This was a reprint of a book under their Judaica umbrella. I had forgotten all about this item until I went through my records days ago. I find that, after trying to start work on it in June, I returned the project to them, with apologies—I felt unqualified to do it. I think it was implicit in my previous applying letters to them (going back to at least 1992) and my educational background that I knew psychology, but not nearly so much stuff that was quintessential Judaica. (Janet in her June 15 cover memo said this book followed “Jewish book style,” not Aronson’s usual style manual for psychological books.) Today I remember very little of the “Bulka book,” but it must have been pretty foreign to me to return it. Surprisingly in retrospect, this didn’t cause hard feelings toward me at Aronson. (I will refer to it again briefly below.)

By the way, I mentioned an Aronson style sheet for the psychology books: they indeed had this, and I have at least one copy of it, and it was pretty detailed about technical matters such as how to style a list of references to books or other media (in a way generally typical of all types of style—whether AMA, Chicago Manual, and so on; Aronson basically, I think, adapted American Psychological Association style). But I think it may have been vague or unspecific on certain issues (which isn’t, broadly speaking, necessarily bad in itself), and one production editor in the correspondence I have says that the Aronson style sheet wasn’t complete, or such…which is relevant when you consider how much ground such an editor has (or may not have) to take you strongly to task for missing certain things in actual editing you’ve done for the firm. That is, if you are excoriated for how you’ve done editing for them (never mind your years of relevant experience), and yet they admit their own style sheet is lacking…then what standards are we talking about here?

A draconian budget-consciousness

The basic problem with this place was that—aside from such procedural carelessness as led to how I was added to their list of freelancers—it was very cheap. Years later, in 2001, I would work at a magazine publisher in Montvale, N.J., also in Bergen County. I encountered some people there who had done in-house editorial work for Aronson for a time, and they acted as if it was a fairly grand place to have been and they spoke of certain staffers there with a sort of fondness. In 2001 I regarded this with confident irony, or at least felt there were solid grounds for a difference of opinion on Aronson; you could say I felt about Aronson in line with what I think is fairly common, and not simply within the book-publishing world: a media place might be (in the opinion of some of its workers) “great” to work at in-house, but a stinker in one way or another for freelancers. Aronson would certainly turn out in 1994 to be a bit of a stinker in terms of how they handled me—which I think conformed with how they handled freelancers in general, though over some years, in a different context, I would cite my work for it with some pride (and from my angle as a freelancer) as an example of copy editing I’d done for a book. I’m always willing to highlight the positives of work I’ve done, if they are there, from a technical standpoint, even if the company from the managerial standpoint verged on making quality work there impossible.

The project I finally worked on came up in the later summer of 1994. This was several months after I’d been added to their freelancers list. The project would end up starting a few weeks before Labor Day, run through Labor Day, and end a few days after.

The way they worked with a freelancer was idiosyncratic—in a way biased toward cheapness—which will prelude to a story of how I got my money from them. As I was finding then when going to educational meetings of the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA), based in Manhattan (and whose meetings I started attending in 1994), the way a freelance copy editor worked with trade books published in Manhattan was this: a contract of whatever sort with the freelancer was arranged, with a deadline date pre-agreed on, which seemed usually to mean a project (editing a trade book manuscript) could be turned around in just a very few days. I recall hearing stories about a book being edited in 48 hours, with all-nighters “pulled” in the process. This was not a way I could work; and I don’t know how typical it was, but I have a feeling it was, in NYC. Anyway, it apparently worked well enough for those in NYC who routinely did this. And the freelancer would charge whatever hourly rate that person was apt to seek, and could be agreed on, for whatever hours it took.

So, for a 48-hour project, if the rate was $25 an hour, that could mean a chunky paycheck. But in the abstract, this might seem a bear of an item of work to do—in 48 hours.

The copy I have of the 1996 Rates and Business Practices Survey of the EFA says that, for copy editing, the following rates were used by practitioners (with hourly rates shown here as low, average, and high): books (“publishing industry”), $12, $19, $75; books (“nonprofit”), $15, $19, $30. For what I had more experience in at the time, magazine articles (with my own experience more often proofreading, but sometimes copy editing): (“publishing”), $12, $23, $50; (“nonprofit”), $10, $19, $25.

Aronson wasn’t quite so tight-fisted with a short turnaround as with the hypothetical 48 hours in Manhattan that I noted (or, at least and in practical terms, not as it seemed at first). But it was strict in how it worked out the terms of the project to keep it cheap for itself. First, as was unusual in any sort of book publishing I directly knew about (even educational publishing, at least Prentice Hall, didn’t do this), it strictly set pay rates at $10 an hour (I think) for proofreading, and $12 an hour for copy editing (EFA members in Manhattan seemed typically to negotiate rates). This was a bit low even then (compare the rates I listed above), and it’s certainly low by today’s standards. (In fact, even if you consider there was a “New Jersey differential”—things would be cheaper here—the Aronson rate was on the low end of the likely relevant scales—and there’s nothing “official” in New Jersey; you find through experience, and especially from work peers, what the going rates tend to be.)

Then Aronson had you estimate how much time it would take you to do the job. I came up with 24 hours, or just a little more. (I did this by calculating via a page-per-hour rate, referring to my own work style/speed on prior material I’d dealt with, including Aronson’s own copy editing test, which took me close to three hours, with two reads—this is a reasonable way to try to estimate work time for such a project.) The contract they would work up with you rather held you to that time—and they had a firm calendar deadline (a date). In this case, it was some weeks into the future. There was also (in some form) a clause in the agreement where, if you needed to renegotiate the schedule a bit, you should “immediately” give them a call.

Another feature was that they absolutely required that they ship the work to you by UPS, the cheapest delivery means at the time. I might have asked to pick it up myself, but this may have been declined by them. I don’t know if they’d said they wanted me to ship the work back by UPS, but I ended up sending it by U.S. mail, and I billed them for the postage for this. (Today this is fairly reasonable practice in the industry, at least the corner I work in, though I don’t remember how Aronson specifically liked this.)

How I managed my time, and the semi-amateurish nature of the manuscript

So I had this project (I was certainly working full-time at MetLife in summer 1994), and I had a very few weeks to turn the project around. It started in August (the middle of the month). I had sketched for myself a projected schedule that seems to have wedged the work into long Saturdays for a few weeks. Also, as it happened, I was supposed to visit a friend in Brattleboro, Vermont, for the Labor Day weekend. (This had been in the works for weeks.) So after some days of my work for Aronson at home, for a few days I took the project with me to work on, on the road.

This whole situation, as so far described, wasn’t so unworkable or unrealistic. One problem that arose is that the project got to me a bit late (six days from the date of the production editor’s cover letter, according to a letter of mine sent with the returned ms.). For some reason it took one or two days longer to reach me than was originally anticipated, so I lost a day or two (or more) to work on it. (All this account, to people who’ve worked on books for years, may seem rather plodding and “novice-like,” but I am showing how anyone, I think, would tackle such a project as an early effort, which everyone who ever works on books has to do—their first book-editing project: and it best involves careful planning based on your past experience and how you can most responsibly arrange your schedule.)

When I finally got it, there were some definite quirks in the project itself. The manuscript, for A Primer of Kleinian Therapy, was by a practicing psychologist (Irving Solomon, Ph.D.) who was not a multi-work author (the production editor who worked with me, Judy C., said Aronson had worked with him before, but I can’t find anything else by him in the long set of books listed as in the series [or “library”] presented in the front matter of the 1995-printed Primer, which “library” was of “object relations,” a specialized area of talking therapy). I don’t know whether the Primer was his first or second book to that point, but he certainly didn’t have many books to his credit by that point. (From a Google search, I find that on Amazon, a previous book by him, published by Aronson in 1992, is The Encyclopedia of Evolving Techniques in Psychodynamic Therapy.)

The manuscript was hard copy, of course, and it was printed in an early-1990s Apple format, with a rather nerdy typeface—and weirdly, the line width got narrower as the pages went on, until it was only about an inch and a half (or two inches) wide. So you had a manuscript that was about 442 pages (plus “front matter,” per the parameters-setting memo I got from Judy C.), but the line width got absurdly small. The finished book was 228 pages, including back matter (that included an index), with not much type per page. I’ve long estimated that if a manuscript is X pages, double-spaced, at the usual typing line width and character size, the finished book, if no major cuts are done, is about 65 percent of the X pages of the ms. In this case, the book was about 51 percent of the ms. size, which shows how few words were on each ms. page after a while.

Sidebar: An exhibit. Here is a copy of two documents that I copied together, reduced, so they fit on roughly an 8 ½ by 11 sheet (the originals each fit on such a sheet; note the documents are sideways). On the left is the parameters-setting memo from Judy C. that I mentioned; the lightly written-in numbers of 24 (for hours) 288 (for dollars) is what I sketched, but I don’t think I ever got a copy from them of the memo, with this information, as signed by them. The item on the right side of this pdf is a letter I received from the author in early 1996, long after my involvement on this project in 1994 was done (I never corresponded with him directly in 1994). I would be able to explain this letter in Part 2; essentially, I contacted Dr. Solomon in late 1995 (first try, October; second try, December, which he answered in January 1996), seeking to work for him as an independently contracting freelancer, not tied to Aronson.  His answer written on my letter is, “Sorry but I am not working on any ms so that I have no need for your skill.” It would seem, from an Amazon listing seen on about January 7, 2014, that he would not publish another book until 2005, and then through the New York publisher Springer.

This weird-line-width factor itself wasn’t so tricky to work with day to day, but it shows some of the amateurish nature of the project. It was written in a somewhat conversational, occasionally gossipy style. To my mind, it seemed to focus on sexual issues reported in the writer’s clinical setting an awful lot. (This is not to criticize or condemn it, but to show some of the source for how it would be a tricky editing task.)

A couple things can be addressed for laypeople who don’t know how, in publishing, people (writer and editor) can be jumbled together on a project pell-mell in terms of their backgrounds, though this might be beside the point in terms of making a competent finished product.

(1) With this project, the psychologist had his professional experience and wisdom, which informed his book. Deficiencies in the manuscript due to his not being a professional writer were not unlikely, but then the question was how these deficiencies should be handled. It should be noted I am not knocking the author as to his professional qualifications or experience in psychology, or saying that his book was “amateurish” for any other than technical reasons that can very understandably arise from people new to writing book manuscripts.

(2) This book was a sort of handbook, a “primer,” that articulated concepts and practices in Kleinian therapy (which were originated by therapist and theorist Melanie Klein). This was not an area I was especially well versed in when I got the assignment of copy editing the book. But was my technical proficiency in the subject matter an issue? No. I did know enough from my own psychology-educational background and, importantly, I had enough basic psychological intuition and instinct to extemporaneously do well enough in grappling with the semantics of the book, while I was also expected to do not a lot of semantically-oriented copy editing (though we will see some paradoxes on that issue). This while the text introduced certain little new, intriguing, and edifying concepts to me.

(3) The conception that a lot of laypeople to the publishing world might have that it is a horror for someone who is not an expert in a field to be doing lower-level editing—such as copy editing and proofreading—on technical works is quite misguided. First, this level of editing often doesn’t require full understanding of all of the content of the material you edit (as I’ve found from experience in this area—when you can sometimes feel sorely put to the test in keeping up with what an article is saying). Second, as was no less the case with me and Aronson, a low-level editor is often thrown into material that he or she may be quite unfamiliar with. (This can especially happen in areas of more traditionally medical publishing or promotions, and sometimes in that realm the high-handedness of the manager-effected ill fits can grate on you—in moments of exercising your conscience—as the lower-level editor.) Yet as often happens, and as gives you a bit of a break, even with a medically specialized piece, you are only expected to straighten out errors in grammar, punctuation, and clarity that usually don’t require you to fully understand all the content as to its semantic or technical richness. (But with this Aronson project we will see some stark ambiguities in expectations from the managers.)

(4) Not so much an issue in this story I’m detailing, if the idea is that doctors or other high-level professionals are the ones best equipped to write on (and, therefore, by the laypeople’s apparent assumptions, edit) the particular subjects peculiarly within their field, this idea is quite wrong: doctors and the like can be among the worst writers you ever saw. They are in need of editors—in a way that is very generally true of many writers across all fields, and is particularly (even acutely) true of a fair amount of doctors. But then the question is, where do you find the best editors for them? This is, of course, as I’ve found, an area where editors get to do this by simple footwork, experience, trying a new career area, luck—as with any other kind of editing. You don’t go to school for this or get licensed for it. (At least, you didn’t use to.)

But in the case of this Aronson project, we weren’t even going to such a pinnacle of professionalism as could be strived for within the factors I’ve just described. The editing I was to do—aside from the issue of the pay for it—was decidedly “un-rigorous” in a way.

A “good enough edit”

Judy C., the production editor, had stipulated that the manuscript needed “a light edit only.” Which means what? So I tried to go somewhat easy on the ms. The book, as I’ve suggested, was supposed to be a Q&A thing, a “primer,” so it could be slightly informal in style.

The paragraph I just wrote was what I recalled based on 20-year-old memory. Actually, the phrase used by Judy C. to describe the expected editing was different; but I also find that Muriel J., in her March 11 letter to me, conveyed the “light edit” standard.

Fortunately, in a spare moment I located my original folder of Jason Aronson records, and found all the old letters, and even production-related materials for the Primer book. I had originally (days ago) thought there was no use here of the sort of production-related log that some books are edited with: this is something I’ve rarely used, but which numerous older-generation editors who work closer in the orbit of NYC are familiar with: something with boxes or spaces for editorial notes, such as on use of terms, that may be alphabetized or such. But I do find from my records that such a log was used by Aronson, including on this project; I find I have blanks for the log, but I hardly used it for this job (I used some page or two in a limited way; I did make a conscientious list of problems to follow up).

(Years later, I would encounter some project managed by Dee Josephson, an editor especially versed in educational books, whom I first met and worked with at TSI Graphics in 1999, where I worked briefly as a staff production editor of sorts; Dee had worked previously as a staffer at Prentice Hall. She knew about these logs, and seemed a bit surprised I had never worked with one before. She and I generally got on OK—including in freelance arrangements in later times [e.g., about 2001]—and I hope to return to her in another blog context.)

Looking today at the letters I exchanged with Aronson staffers is enlightening, but generally this doesn’t undercut my arguments here. First, the person who had said “a light edit only” (aside from Muriel J.’s variation) was Janet W., whom I had worked under briefly on the “Bulka book,” some weeks after I was first put on Aronson’s freelancer list.

The production editor who supervised me on the Primer, Judy C., had a cover letter with the project, dated August 9, 1994, that numbered a few specific guidelines, and had the general remark, “We emphasize what we call the ‘good enough edit.’ This means, in the words of Ann Landers [actually, it may have been someone else, but…], ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Please concentrate on what needs fixing, rather than improving what’s good enough.” Dwell on that last sentence a moment, and consider the guidelines:

            “It requires a light edit only.”

            “We emphasize…the ‘good enough edit.’”

When we get to Judy C.’s reaction to my work in a September 19 letter, I think my argument through this whole entry will be quite undergirded with nice details. In other words, if I seem to be tedious here, this is all important to explain the denouement—itself quick enough—of my involvement with Aronson in 1994. (And if I stumble with some minor details, that’s my fault, but maybe I’m just trying to do a “light edit” here, too.)

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A certain procedural approach was important to defining how I worked: to get all these pages done—even considering the tiny line width later in the ms.—I made a priority to keep up a certain pace. With the days limited by a hard deadline, and my getting a slightly late start, I kept myself moving, and did not try to fuss over the language. (Of course, I’d done millions of words of proofreading and copy editing in three in-house editing jobs beforehand.) It also seems I made an effort to rigorously read over the entire ms. twice (probably the second time I was more cursory than the first time).

Now you can see that there were a few sources for problems here: two were the time limits and the subjectivity about what constitutes—to adapt the earlier, spring 1994 guideline—a “light edit”—or, per Judy C., a “good enough edit.” How light is light enough, or too light? How “good enough” is “good enough”?

But another source of problems is more general, and insidious: the tendency for you as a freelancer to meet (maybe best appreciated after you have done the work) with a certain vagueness in expectations from a manager for your work: that is, you may encounter a first “iteration” of guidelines from the manager that suggest one level of precision, and then you may receive a later assessment by the manager, accompanied by her claim to be citing the original guidelines, that implies something a good bit different. (And this can create suspicion bound up with indignation: was the manager suddenly asserting a new standard in order to have “cause” for faulting your work, maybe even not paying you?). And this sort of thing, I think, is not uncommon.

There certainly has been generally promulgated discussion of this sort of thing in the freelance editor’s world.

In the 1991 EFA booklet Occupational Hazards: Problems Frequently Encountered by Freelancers, there is the category of “Jobs That Aren’t What They Were Supposed to Be,” and this section includes the remark (p. 9): “The most frequently occurring situations are the copyediting job that turns out to be a rewrite and the proofreading job that turns into copyediting.” My own version with Aronson could maybe be described as “the expectation for light, hurried copy editing that turns out to be an expectation for heavier copy editing that the time didn’t really allow.”

Part 2 is here, on my other blog.

For a 2012 situation defined by more modern technology (which didn’t entail getting work through the arrangement, thank goodness), see this entry. The problems with this are in many ways different from what I am describing about Jason Aronson.

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End note. There were enough peculiarities with this company that, if I expanded this account, it would include a situation in April 1994 where an editor (Elaine) phoned me with a seeming work offer, then (on no other apparent basis than what she had going on in her office, not that I was privy to) she seemed to back-pedal, ending with saying she’d “keep [me] in mind.” I didn’t hear from her again; and this situation again became something I alluded to when I wrote a “tickler” letter to the editorial director, several weeks later, reminding her I was available for copy editing work.