Movie break: Doing their own thing in their own time: Easy Rider (1969)

Rebels on the road, entry 2 of 3: Counterculture as shown in encounters in public

[This can be read in coordination with my August 8 entry on Five Easy Pieces. This entry, also, in concert with its subject’s slovenliness, is more casual than the earlier one.]

I was not eager to watch this movie this season to write on it, but because I could not easily get access to a copy of Five Easy Pieces, and this one was at hand, I picked it up. I’ve seen it several times before.

It is definitely a time-capsule movie, and for a lot of us who grew up in the 1970s or earlier, it may seem like an outgrown toy by now. Maybe it is still a “rite of passage” for modern teenagers, especially those of the budding-stoner variety.

Tedious autobiographical comment: How I’m not “cool”

I should note up front my position on illicit drug use. However I may strike people in some of my views or what they imagine of my personal style, illicit drug use is maybe the only area that I am approximately the “prissy Catholic kid” (a metaphor; I’ve never been Catholic; I mean “pious,” or ingenuous) that I was in my teens. I’ve long been a prude about it, and this was partly based on rather heartbreaking situations I was in during high school when it was a family issue, and also widespread drug use provided for some uncomfortable (to say the least) relations with certain peers then (i.e., peers who were not friends of mine in high school). But as much as I didn’t get into drugs, and did not socialize much in general, I still learned a fair amount about the drug culture. In the late 1970s, when you grew up in Vernon Township, N.J., there was no way you could not get exposure to the illicit-drug culture.

But in some very deeply rooted way, illicit drug use always struck me as a sort of anathema, possibly because my own personal problems during high school, and a certain integrity, both caused and inspired me NOT to look toward illicit drugs as any sort of answer. (This isn’t to say I was a total teetotaler; but what little illicit drug use I did, which actually was experimental, in 1979 [and 1980?] was so little as to be almost nonexistent, by late-1970s standards. Moreover, in these limited experiences, I don’t recall being stoned in any of the way friends, cultural representations, and whatever else would convey being stoned is like.)

My position on it has been such that, as much as I’ve learned over the past 30 years, the fastidious attitude I’ve had regarding it has remained. My disillusionment with the idea that someone could look to, say, marijuana as some kind of succor (independent of an acute health issue) even crept into my dealings with the pseudonymed Cheryl and Betty of my recent memoir on elaborate support-group dealings (A College Try…), to the point where the fact that Cheryl was a pot user had some droll dramatic role in the 2002-03 dealings recounted. In fact, if I had known how Cheryl and Betty had joined someone else to get stoned immediately after getting out of a psych inpatient unit in November 2002, I might not have gotten so intricately involved with them—in business quite apart from illicit drug use—in 2003, and hence the book might not have been written.

All that said, as it may then seem strange to you, I manage to have a certain attitudinal tolerance (and understanding) for at least the “pothead” culture (but I wouldn’t condone actual use within my regions of responsibility)—while I don’t for something like cocaine or, worse, heroin, or (something that seems largely limited to the 1960s and ’70s, I think) LSD. By “attitudinal tolerance” I mean that, for instance, marijuana jokes in movies and books often strike me as about as funny as they might strike those who support or condone marijuana use. Why this is I think has partly to do with the fact that humor operates, to an extent, independently of the meaning of the ostensible content of a joke—which is why humor can be such a bridge-builder—but also I think it is part of my having long “learned to get along with different kinds, despite inner differences” as you can’t help but do to some extent (as both a plus and something of a minus in your life) in New Jersey.

On a more legal level, I am generally in favor of the use (by others) of medical marijuana, and tend to be in favor of decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, but this does not mean I would choose to use the drug recreationally for myself, nor would I encourage friends to be in any long-term sense “potheads.”

Now, to the movie…

All this is background for my saying that the two principals behind Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper (who served as its director and played “Billy the Kid”) and Peter Fonda (who served as its producer and played “Wyatt Earp,” a.k.a. “Captain America”), seem in this movie like relics of their time.  This means in part that they aren’t usually acting in this film, but are speaking script lines largely in the style of what was their hippie personae of the time. Meanwhile, one of the few real actors in the film, Jack Nicholson, playing the ACLU-serving attorney George Hanson, is actually acting—complete with slightly artificial reedy Southern-type accent. In fact, this movie has long been known as the film—with its huge box-office gross—that launched Nicholson’s to-be-legendary career, after he’d been in about a decade of small-budget (including Roger Corman) films and was about to give up acting altogether.

The net result is, here, that in this very dated and fairly insubstantial (story-wise) film, Nicholson gets his true career start—and displays some very characteristic actorly traits of his, such as his relatively deliberate pace, colorful mannerisms like licking his lips in a pausing, thoughtful way, and generally being one of the more intelligent, deliberating people in a scene. Even if some of his work here—as in the “Venusian” campfire scene—was done under the influence of pot, you can say this film is notable in the following way: the only real acting is by someone (Jack) who is doing better than he had in films before, but essentially was being a nascent version of the future Jack Nicholson (someone who is both an accomplished, versatile technical actor and yet a “character actor”—one who almost always plays a Nicholsonesque character in the colorful, slightly-eccentric sense).

Meanwhile, Fonda and Hopper are essentially being stoner hippies (if that isn’t redundant). Hopper especially—who would end up with a far more substantial film career than Fonda, and whose career had already started in the 1950s with the likes of a small part in Rebel Without a Cause (1955)—is a Hollywood personage to be reckoned with, if you care about American movies. But perhaps it is this film where you have to assess Hopper as a personality this way: to anyone with an IQ over 70, perhaps, he is one part talented artist and one part kook, and it is a matter of opinion in what percentage these are. In this movie, the kook proportion seems pretty darned high.

How well the hipness of the film has aged, or not

Fonda, as has been noted by a critic like Don Shiach (see Reference), comes off in this film with all the self-importance of the hippie culture, in his druggie-spacy, seeing-things-for-the-first-time manner, which may suit the film fine, but (as may either be an asset or not) he is part of what makes the film so much a child of its time. Today, with some number of young middle-class Americans in their way more alienated from their parents than since about the 1960s and 1970s (not that they lack for some amount of reason), this film would seem to have some resonance. Yet Easy Rider may also be as much “someone else’s fashion” as a grimy, faded old tie-dyed shirt discovered in the corner of a garage. Today’s pot-avid, angry-at-the-system kids might think this was their father’s (or even grandfather’s) drop-out movie, not quite theirs.

That’s OK by me. I was about seven when this movie came out. I never really considered myself a member of the earlier part of the baby boomer generation (those born 1946-55), who generally have been more vocal and demanding, and have set more of the tone of the baby boomer-oriented marketplace since the 1960s. I was of the younger portion of the baby boomer group, i.e., the portion born in 1955-64 (I was born in 1961); this latter group—at least as I have felt about myself—has always seemed to have to settle for table scraps from the cultural table. That plus my not really being a hedonistic type (especially of the druggie subtype) make me not the best partisan to “get behind” this movie, as the slang term once was. (By the way, I think I first saw it only in the 1980s.)

But it is still interesting, for a few reasons. The color photography is beautiful, courtesy of cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, who also worked on Five Easy Pieces (though there are technical features of Easy Rider—which testify more to the on-the-fly way it was done than to Kovacs’ virtues as a cameraman—that today wouldn’t make viewers blink an eye: lens flare in places and adjusting the focus/zoom in mid-shot, moves that would have been considered unprofessional beforehand, and became typical later on, and in this movie add to its comfortably casual, cinema verite quality).

A fair amount of the soundtrack music is still interesting to me. Some samples of music may sound dated/pretentious; one candidate for me is The Band’s “The Weight,” which I think in the past 40 years has become quite stereotyped in its sense of being “an imprimatur of coolness” or “setting context for ’60s authenticity.”

Luke Askew, who plays the hippie whom Fonda and Hopper are accompanied by for a good portion of the first half of the film, tries to insert a little pomposity-puncturing humor into the film, and pushes back at times against Hopper’s pain-in-the-neck personality. And in years-later DVD commentary he adds some interesting insights. He died recently.

Shiach in his Nicholson book extends his indignation at this film to remarking on Askew’s character’s name being Jesus, with Shiach using this as one catalyst for hammering hard at what he sees as pretentious religious resonances in the film. But this film didn’t get this pretentious; the hitchhiker is never named, and “Jesus,” I believe, was the name of one of the Mexican characters involved in the drug sale at the beginning of the film.

Fonda, for his part, comments on numerous occasions in the DVD making-of doc, and is strange to listen to at times, with his uneven voice—he sounds as if he had a stroke, though I don’t know if this is the case or whether his years of drug use have taken a bit of a toll on his brain. If you look at his Wikipedia biography, there really wasn’t any film of great note he did after this. Meanwhile, Hopper appeared in some notable roles, but that probably at least as much due to the directors involved than to his own prestige, initiative, or whatever: he was the photojournalist in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and had a sort of comeback role in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). He was even doing TV commercials within the past few years before he died in 2010.

Other participants in this film were also in Five Easy Pieces: Karen Black plays a prostitute in New Orleans, as does Toni Basil, who was one of the hitchhikers in the later film. Terry Southern, the writer who also had a screenwriting role in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), was credited as one of the screenwriters of Easy Rider.

William Hayward, an associate producer of this film, is quoted several times in the making-of doc (he appears, as if dressing-up tongue-in-cheek, in hippie headband). He was Hopper’s brother-in-law at the time of shooting of this film, and was also a son of a Hollywood producer-or-such.

Quotable lines (echoed with or without smirking irony)

In an early scene where Fonda and Hopper are having dinner with a farmer and his large family, Fonda comments in a way that those alienated from this film—either forever culturally or due to its becoming old fashioned—can look to as a good example of its pretentions: he says, congratulating him, that it’s not every man who can pursue his life on his own farm; “you’re doing your own thing in your own time. You should be proud.”

Another pretentious point is not only a cultural fluke but also a product of clumsy script-writing. At a point where the plot’s direction toward later things needs to be underlined, when Askew’s character gives Fonda one “tab” (I guess it is) of LSD and counsels that there is a right time for it, and hints that now might be the time, Fonda says—especially in view of Hopper’s nagging him to get going from the commune they’ve been visiting—“I’m hip about time, but I’ve just got to go.” Shakespearean, huh?

Reference.

Don Shiach, Jack Nicholson: The Complete Film Guide (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1999).

Next item in series to come:

Movie break: Awe at “desperadas” in the awe-inspiring West: Thelma & Louise (1991)

Movie break: Countercultural case study of a dissonant prodigy within a musical-genius family: Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Rebels on the road, entry 1 of 3: Counterculture as shown in alienation from family


[This has been edited somewhat, partly in coordination with a few future film reviews. I apologize for dumb errors that appeared in the first edition of this.]

I’ve wanted to write on this film a long time, and I wanted to view it yet again before doing so, but unfortunately, I can’t, so I’ll write with reference to memory and some online resources. Also, a useful source for some information on this film is in Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, & Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).

This film is counted among the best, or most representative, or seminal (take your pick) films of the 1970s, by such critics as Don Shiach in his often insightful, occasionally questionable Jack Nicholson: The Complete Film Guide (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1999). (I like reading this critic’s book on Nicholson, but I find numerous points on which to disagree with him, and some of them derive from what I think is a certain tone-deafness British seem to have to some stylistic or self-assertive aspects of American life.) Five Easy Pieces was the first, or a major first, effort by the production company headed by Bert Schneider, who died recently, and Bob Rafelson, the latter of whom also directed this film and directed later, notable films, including the remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). (Schneider’s and Rafelson’s production company helped make Easy Rider [1969], under the name Raybert Productions, and their company behind Pieces was named BBS Productions.)

In some ways, Five Easy Pieces seems a rather crudely made film, but this is deceptive; I think it says a lot within a small budget and seemingly simple production values, due in large part to its script, and also due to several of its notable actors, not least Nicholson, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work here. One of its writers (with Rafelson) is Carole Eastman, under the pseudonym Adrien Joyce; I believe this was Eastman’s first script (noted in Biskind?), and it was nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay.

When you read the Wikipedia description of this film, you get a very bare-bones, rather philistinish account that lays out plot elements tonelessly. I think a useful key to understanding this film—not least because I’ve known a person or two like Bobby Dupea, played by Nicholson, but because I know a fair amount about the type of personality generally—is looking at Bobby as an example of a personality disorder that leads him to draw away in a consistent, irresistible “undertow” from the direction his talent, upbringing, and family orientation should lead him. (Leave aside the question of what specific personality disorder Bobby’s would be, whether borderline, narcissistic, antisocial, or something else. More on this topic in a minute.)

Two cultures that may seem to echo cultural divisions in the U.S. today

Bobby’s birth family is all accomplished musicians, playing classic works (and five classic pieces are played by different individuals, including Bobby, during the film, hence the film’s title). They seem to have grown up, and some still live, at a remote enclave up the West Coast (Puget Sound, says the Wikipedia article), on an island or peninsula or such reachable only by ferry. Bobby has left this situation—which seems to mix elements of “home” and a highfaluting artists’ colony—and has ended up in working in an oil field (where the movie opens), and for intimate companionship he has taken up with a rather simple girlfriend (named Rayette, played colorfully by Karen Black). She waitresses for a living, and has aspirations of being a country singer, while spending time with repeated playing of her Tammy Wynette records. (The latter’s music frequently plays on the film’s soundtrack, both as a sort of atmosphere enhancer that is sympathetic to Rayette, and as a way, I think, to display a certain irony toward the music and the country culture behind it; in this film, you can really appreciate how Wynette’s music is so banal with its major chords and idiotic lyrics such as extolling “stand[ing] by your man.”) Rayette and Bobby hang out with a fellow oil worker, Elton, and his wife, who live in a trailer with one or two young children.

Bobby is, on one level, like the rebels of the 1950s through 1970 who thumbed their nose at middle-class respectability, did more “earthy” or blue-collar work, partied “hard” at night, competed avidly at peasant-level games, slept around…. At the time, their tendencies were addressed by such thinkers as Erik Erikson as cases of “identity crises,” and today we would characterize at least some of them as instances of personality disorder. (Shiach’s interpretation in his Nicholson book, that Bobby is merely a case of a male who won’t face his commitments, is laughably oversimplifying. “Failure to commit” doesn’t explain why Bobby drinks and channels his competitive instincts into games like bowling or cards as he does, or supposedly can’t feel anything when he plays a Chopin piece he knows well.)

Bobby’s case on a psychological level

The movie can be looked at as (most notably) a character study (as does critic Leonard Maltin in his compendium Movie & Video Guide), with Nicholson doing a good workmanlike job of portraying the talented, moody, quixotic, and inscrutable Bobby Dupea. But of course, the film is also about pre-marital relations (Bobby with Rayette), about family (with his birth family), and about immediate community too: a range of interpersonal relations. And the ensemble cast is crucial in helping this out. Further, not just “by extension” in the case study of Bobby, the film reflects the broader countercultural issues of the time, but it does so quietly within a story that seems as if it’s only about a small corner of the world. Yet the inadvertent result may be that, today, young people might find the film evocative of social implications that it had for its time, and that still might resonate with social issues of today, but might feel it is still dated and may seem, on a technical level, almost like a home movie of sorts.

Ironically, it may be the psychological “case study” aspect that might hold the most fascination for people today.

I should point out a few things: first, this movie doesn’t go to any lengths to look at Bobby in a sort of clinical or pathologizing manner, though the personality study of him does square with the metes and bounds of personality-disorder types in a laudatory intuitive way. (Personality disorders, or PDs, wouldn’t be spelled out explicitly in psychiatric diagnostic protocol until, I believe, the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM-III] of 1980.) More fundamentally, to call Bobby an example of this doesn’t mean we have a full explanation of his behavior, or any clue to what to do about it (if he were to seek treatment). Indeed, it would be fair to say that a lot of the personality “slovenliness” of young people of the 1960s and 1970s—hippies with their new manners, rebels with their choices that left them as dysfunctional within society as they still felt they were “suiting their own needs”—could be considered to represent psychological disorder, such as Erikson’s 1960s statements tended to outline some kind of conceptual groundwork for. Not that all of it was psychologically disturbed, either by the standards of the times or later; but in retrospect, the overlap between the two categories is quite suggestive; and some specific cases of people “doing their own thing” in that period could have been (or were) at some point cognized by the psychiatric establishment as fairly easily defined psychological disorder (e.g., Mark Vonnegut’s case as recounted in his book The Eden Express [1975], or Susanna Kaysen’s story in Girl, Interrupted [see my blog entry of April 19]).

But of course, for a swath of such people who are “societal rebels” on their face to really be instances of psychological disorder would have meant, in accord with more modern standards, they would have received some direction from some “authoritative sources” to receive professional attention (which of course happened in some cases 40 years ago), or would have sought it on their own initiative. And of course, being as rebellious as they were, many were not apt to do this. Another aspect of this matter is that, today, we might be quick to regard some of the rebellious stuff as psychological disorder, which could be said to represent a cultural shift toward over-pathologizing behavior, which can have enough of a point in a lot of cases. Lastly, because the cultural-rebel phenomena of the 1960s and ’70s were so widespread, you start to ask whether something that is a cultural trend can be really psychological deviance, which you tend to look at as more idiosyncratic and not culturally widespread.

But when we look at Bobby’s case, while the film makes no specific “clinical” points about him, the many features of his behavior read much like a list of what comprises a PD (and you could compare discussion of Travis Bickle as a sort of representative pathological type—of the “pathology of loneliness”—in the Taxi Driver DVD; see my June 8 blog entry). Bobby, on what seems like a general, poetically evocative level, identifies with, and immerses himself in, a lifestyle below his talents, incidentally putting himself at some significant risk (for health or legal issues). His lifestyle, social life, and leisure pursuits (consider even his drinking while driving to work) seem like negatives he dares to embrace, despite his “upscale” upbringing, while he seems to run away from some negative he senses, and doesn’t want to recognize, in himself. He feels, as we duly find out, that he cannot relate to his birth family for a cent.

But at certain key points, he—typical of this kind of personality—can suddenly assert that he is better than the “slobs” he has been taking up with, and tears himself away from them with recriminations, a show of snobbery, maybe even a level of violence. He does this with his oilfield buddy Elton when the latter has suddenly dared to be a bit self-righteous with Bobby in reminding him of his responsibility to Rayette after she has turned out to be pregnant, and Elton shows he couldn’t respect a man who would run away from his girl at a time like that. Bobby explodes with, “It’s ridiculous—some cracker asshole [who] compares his life to mine! Keep on telling me about the good life, Elton, because it makes me puke!”

Technical aspects: meeting requirements on a tiny budget

From what I’ve read, the film was worked on by two different editors (certainly, two are listed in the Wikipedia article), one for the first half-or-so, and another for the second half. The different editing styles reflect the parts of the story: Bobby in his rather random oilfield life is captured with choppy editing, scenes that seem vivid but lopped off short like sneak-looks; the later part of the movie, starting when he goes to visit his sister when she is at a recording studio, is more conventionally, calmly edited. Also, you’ll notice that Bobby affects a hick accent when he works in the oilfield, and he has shucked this off when he returns, if uneasily, to his family on a sort of pilgrimage to pay respects to his dying father, and otherwise seem to be forlornly looking for some kind of recognition or “closure.”

The cinematography throughout is by Laszlo Kovacs, who also worked on Easy Rider; one typical feature of his work is beautiful landscape shots lit a certain way by a sunset or the like.

A number of actors, some who would be more famous later, flesh out the cast: Billy “Green” Bush plays Bobby’s oilfield coworker and friend Elton (Bush would later appear in, among whatever else, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore [1974]); Sally Struthers, as a tart Bobby has a fling with after meeting her in a bowling alley, would later be the daughter Gloria on TV’s All in the Family; Karen Black would appear in numerous films of the 1970s (such as Nashville [1975]), then seem to disappear; Fannie Flagg, probably more famous as a writer, is Elton’s wife; and Ralph Waite, who plays Carl, Bobby’s supercilious twit of a brother (he is a true believer in the family’s musical ideals), is the musical preceptor for Susan Anspach’s character, and he indirectly provides comedy with a neck brace; Waite would of course be famous as the father on the TV show The Waltons. Another minor player is Richard Stahl, the aloof, impatient recording producer when Bobby visits his sister; he would turn up, I believe, in later TV.

Susan Anspach, a 1970s actress whose career in movies wasn’t substantial past 1981, plays Catherine van Oost, a budding classical musician taken under the wing of the Dupea family, specifically Carl; when Bobby meets her, he is attracted to her, and later, after she has gotten him to play a classical piece regarding which he says he didn’t feel anything, he has sex with her, like the type he is who would rather “bond” with such a woman not over artistic common ground but in order to show power sexually (and in a sense to “sully” her). She eventually sees through to his loner, emotionally impoverished nature, and spells it out to a gently, sadly beseeching Bobby in a speech near the end of the film (she says, in dated, seemingly teenage fashion that she can’t “go with” him); her speech seems as naïve and self-congratulatory as it is a poetic, elegiac summing of the film’s portrait of Bobby.

This is actually a point that is emblematic of the quirkiness of the film in its being elegantly insightful and yet seeming amateurish, like a college sophomore’s proud first-creative-writing effort—such as in the many quirky character names.

The diner scene

For some reason, for years, the most famous scene from this movie is the one where Bobby, accompanied by Rayette and the two hitchhikers, is at a roadside diner, and Bobby has trouble getting what he wants from the waitress, an omelet with plain toast. The latter of this is the sticking point: he finds he can only get it if he, creatively, orders a chicken salad sandwich and asks her to hold the chicken and the lettuce and mayo. The meaning of the scene concerns how Bobby, the consummate outsider, tries to work around the arbitrary impositions of “dull society,” but I guess because the scene is so well written, staged, and roundly filmed, it seems like a lot of later, more modern-style movies, hence it has long been a favorite, including having its own YouTube presence. But if you think this is all the movie is about, you’re missing a lot.

Colorful side characters make the scene

Another notable, but bit, player is Helena Kallianiotes as one of two hitchhikers—her name is Palm Apodaca (!)—whom Bobby, with Rayette, picks up as he drives north to his family; she provides obvious comedy as a hippie who rails on about all the dirt and filth in the world, mixing a sort of starry-eyed idealism with a neurotic obsessiveness (to the point where she seems to wear out her welcome with Bobby and is dropped off along the way with her companion). Generally she is arguably one of the great addle-pated hippie characters of cinema, along with the likes of Dennis Hopper as the photojournalist in Apocalypse Now (or as one of the costars of his own Easy Rider). (Side note: Shiach’s book notes that the two hitchhikers are lesbians, and Kallianiotes’ Wikipedia bio makes a rather explicit comment about her character being the “butch” half of a lesbian couple. Funny, but I never thought much about whether these characters were lesbians or not. Even if they were, that didn’t color how I regarded them. The “butch” comment may be by a modern writer who “can’t get into” her character entirely, but I think that’s due to the character’s rather obstreperous hippie nature, not to her being a butch lesbian.)

Lois Smith is Bobby’s sister Partita, who provides some of the real genuine affection in the film; Smith is a quirky actress, with her unusual cadences in delivering her lines; you can see her, 30 years older, as the important plot-mover Iris Hineman in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002).

The middle names of Bobby and his brother Carl are Eroica and Fidelio, which I believe are titles of compositions by Beethoven. It seems pretty obvious that, as much as Rafelson wants to show a balance in this film—and not tendentious social commentary—by exercising sympathy for this family, he also doesn’t hesitate to portray them as pretentious at worst, and quirkily, almost fanatically arts-ambitious at least.

One clear swipe at high culture is when an intellectual woman, Samia Glavia (another odd name!), played by Irene Dailey, is pontificating about various grand issues in a mixed get-together at the family house—Bobby and Rayette, who recently arrived from her motel unbidden by Bobby, are there, as are other Dupea family members and a few other “respectable” types. A storm is portentously making noise outside, and if the group was all of the same intellectual and educational status, the college-dorm-like conversation might not be so bad (though not the stuff of a mainstream movie). But Glavia goes on like a third-rate Simone de Beauvoir, all European contemplativeness and inadvertently-comically arch tone of voice, and has unexpected exchanges with Rayette, who innocently puts in banal comments from her own perspective, such as that there are good things on TV. Eventually Bobby, having earlier not disguised embarrassment about Rayette in front of his family, abruptly stands up for her in confronting Glavia in the firmest terms possible, describing her as a “pompous celibate.” Score one for the young rebels against the dying civilization of the Old World.

Movie break: Matchstick Men (2003), Part 2 of 2: Family opportunity counterbalances the story’s grim side

Alison Lohman’s Angela brings novel heart into the film, while raising the question of dual loyalties and stark betrayal

[Spoiler alert: For those who care, because of the type of part Angela plays, and because of how well Lohman performs this role, I should look at this character in some detail through the story’s arc. Unfortunately, I have to give away something of the surprise ending to explain what I need to, including how well, overall, the film works (and in some measure doesn’t work well enough), and how important the Angela angle is. Edit done 3/16/13.]

Subsections here:

Roy and Angela’s relationship as the most winning one of the film, and the biggest story-development challenge

Lohman’s personality style does double-duty

Lohman’s appeal as an actress

The questionable allegation about Lohman’s being treated long-term for ADHD

The credibility of Angela’s character, apart from Lohman’s performance

At a local park, Roy Waller first meets the person his new psychiatrist has told him is the daughter whom he never met, Angela—as Roy has been divorced, and apparently has not seen his wife in many years. Angela is played vividly by 22/23-year-old Alison Lohman, who had the lead role in White Oleander (2002; see my February 17 entry). To look at her, with the personality Lohman shapes and her short stature and costuming, this seems to be a frumpy, retainer-wearing, skateboard-riding girl, maybe carelessly redolent of summer sweat. Definitely, where the spectrum of female bearing and appeal are concerned, Lohman’s Angela is closer to snaps, snails, and puppie-dog tails than to sugar and spice. There’s a certain nerdy cuteness about her, including an occasional lisp that is conditioned by her retainer.

Then, with the advent of Angela’s importunate visit one evening and her needing to stay over at Roy’s house because of what she claims was a fight with her mother, Angela more broadly adds a particularly interesting dimension to this story—and the one that perhaps makes this movie appeal to people the most, up to a point, though it also is the basis for what makes this movie’s overall story arc problematic.

When I first saw this movie in September 2003, I was impressed enough by it to see it again shortly afterward. I think I wanted to see how well the con was played in the movie as a con, as to allow the later surprise ending, which I think is the main thing that has turned some viewers off this movie over the years. This sort of rechecking is what you might do with Hitchcock’s masterful Vertigo, but there the layers of meaning and double-dealing have to do with romantic emotions woven in amid the more intrigue-type goings-on, and everything in Vertigo is written so very carefully. With Matchstick, on the other hand, where the writing can sometimes be quite casual, you figure that, in a movie about obvious con men, the richness of the performance has to do, in part, with actors playing at being actors; and we might try to measure their more ostensible non-conning modes against their conning modes. And in a particular case (such as Angela) you may ask, how well was this done?

Well, whatever I found on second viewing in 2003, I would later see this movie several times more over several years, because of its entertainment value. But I think what really draws me back to it is not quite the issue of the tensions between the conning-versus-non-conning modes I just mentioned, but the complexity of style it has, the way it renders the flashing variety of the “surfaces” of American life without being chaotic or pretentious. There is something quite artful about the intricacy of everyday life within this movie. But then, looking again at the character issue, the question arises, is the movie really a triumph of stylistic use of detail over the substance of a dramatic arc that we can believe in?

Roy and Angela’s relationship as the most winning one of the film, and the biggest story-development challenge

I think the main basis for answering this lies in the relationship between Roy and Angela. Now, the con man shenanigans may or may not get old—they’re amusing in the short term, but con games might not be what we might return to a movie repeatedly for. Here, a kind of love relationship carries the main moral heft of this movie, and probably the actor who has the biggest task to make it work is Alison Lohman.

The awkwardness of how the story was developed, as I only hinted at in Part 1 (my second July 31 entry), makes you think it was a minor miracle that Lohman could pull off a character portrayal that perhaps is the crucial one to anchor a lot of viewers’ emotional investment in this film. Ted Griffin, one of the film’s screenwriters (along with his brother Nicholas), and also one of the producers, wanted to deviate from the book in eliminating the twist ending, and his first draft really had Angela as Roy’s daughter. Robert Zemeckis, one of the producers, early on wanted the twist ending putting in. The writers then came up with the film’s coda, which came after the reinstated twist ending, which paid respect to the audience’s investment in the relationship between Angela and Roy.

Further complicating matters is that director Ridley Scott and composer Hans Zimmer, who wrote the well-crafted, if busily varying, score, thought the film was primarily comedy, but Ted Griffin and another producer, Sean Bailey, though the film should be primarily a character study, and on the dark side. Overall, we can see that “many cooks” of different schools of thought were involved in the making of this broth, and the fact that the coda was changed a bit with a late reshoot of a few lines shows how the nature of the story was not entirely set for so long—which might make you think there’s something incoherent about it, or not well enough formed. I think the film ends up, as it seemed to me pretty much from the beginning, to be complex in how it varies flexibly in aiming toward, at times, (1) a comedic approach regarding Roy, and at other times (2) a sympathetic respect for the Roy/Angela story, and at other times (3) more darkish-hued suspense in the “long con” part. Probably some viewers like the con game aspect more, others the family-drama aspect more.

Probably what would disappoint people the most, in terms of judging the characters, is how the plot twist toward the end involves Angela—the fact that it includes her at all—and this might disappoint not just the family-drama partisans.

For her part, Lohman has the task of playing someone who seems 14—which in itself is not hard for her—who is really a little older than that. And while Roy and Frank show their “professional stuff” by “acting a part” as con men sometimes, Lohman’s Angela doesn’t really appear as a con woman acting somewhat artificially (as a 14-year-old) with Roy; she really seems a charmer of a 14-year-old, if a somewhat tomboyish one. And this is not only well done but is, I think, the only way she could have played this role for 95 percent of her screen time.

Lohman’s personality style does double-duty

I’ve always found Lohman appealing. The two main movies I’ve seen her in (a few times each) are this one and White Oleander. I’ve also seen her in Drag Me to Hell (2009; I saw this twice, I think), to which I’ll return, but that is not the sort of film that would highlight an actor’s capacity to bring life to a story of emotional richness.

In both White Oleander and Matchstick—both, ironically, directed by Britons—Lohman plays characters who are different ages at different times. In the former, she is a young daughter, Astrid, of a licentious, charismatic woman who is an artist, and due to her family/home circumstances, she becomes increasingly embittered and jaded as she gets older, eventually ending up as a Goth girl who toughmindedly confronts her mother when visiting her in prison. Later she resolves her own wounded bitterness to some extent. Lohman seems credible at all ages of Astrid she plays.

In general, Lohman can be girlish at times—befitting an upscale sort that she apparently is—and at other times can be earthy/testy, though this later personality style seems in the watered-down way of an upscale young woman.

In Matchstick, by far the most time she spends in the movie, she is acting the part of a 14-year-old girl. Yet she is supposed to be someone in her twenties pretending to be 14. As it happens, during most of the filming Lohman was 22 (she had her 23^rd birthday during production), and yet she seems convincing as 14. (A spoiler follows through the rest of this subsection.) In a late scene in the movie, when Roy encounters her for the first time in many months, she is acting her character’s real age, which would appear to be in her early twenties. Roy recognizes her, despite the animal-pelt-like hair style she has, and—while not verbally admitting to her (or to her California slacker boyfriend with her) that he recognizes her—he stares at her steadily, making her realize he recognizes her, and in his glare shows his anger at her, as well as likely disapproval in view of her young age, for what she and Frank (and Chuck) had done to him; and she freezes on the recognition, and looks guilty and fearful. The moment stretches out.

This wordless moment is one of the few excellently done dramatic moments in the film, serving as a final sequence that restores some amount of moral balance to the story, particularly in giving respect to the charming relationship “14-year-old” Angela had had with Roy. In particular, as the scene develops, we are asked to find that Angela isn’t so bad after all. The overall sequence seems rather weak in the writing; indeed, it does not reflect a scene in the book, and was added by the screenwriters to suit the audience, and also themselves (a short bit was even filmed in a later “re-shoot”; the DVD has information on both the coda and the mini-reshoot). But the general idea of the sequence is laudatory, and when it works, it works well.

Lohman’s pulling off her part in the late scene goes about as well as can be expected given the writing. Her wistfully getting some accord with Roy on the fact that “We had fun, didn’t we?” seems to reflect a shallow way either character could have come to moral terms with where their relationship stood; but this movie is about con people, and in some ways its screenwriting (not least, here) seems not well enough thought through. But to the extent that either character shows that it tries to aim toward an honest and loving life, the actors—Cage as well as Lohman—seem to do well enough in performances that seemed aimed to be, and were confined to be, spontaneous.

On another level, you could say that we can find Lohman appealing enough as “the actress behind the role”—to the extent we confuse the actress with Angela—but we still might find Angela the character, as more abstractly considered, to be an undesirable to have participated in the con on Roy that she has, even it it was the only one she has taken part in, as she tells Roy.

Lohman’s appeal as an actress

Though Lohman has struck me as fairly consistent (not oversimplifying) in the flavor of overall personality she projects—compare her turn in Drag Me to Hell with her 2002 and 2003 roles—you would still call her a talented actress, unlike, say, Jessica Alba, whom I saw in the darkly amusing Machete (2010), who seems like nothing so much as a nice young woman and not an actress. [An End note can help support this, but is deferred for now.] Lohman has long seemed to me intelligent, sensitive, and—if you want to call this a fault—seemingly “too nice” in a way. She is able to play “dark” in moments, too. She could play bitchy moments in Oleander, and cry floridly enough, with dramatic taste, as a young girl in Matchstick. She can, at times, have a certain earthiness of expression about her. Girls younger than her age, obviously, she can do. Meanwhile, more generally, she seems to have a refinement of an upper-middle-class sort, but still a sense for what gives a character some emotional body.

Her eyes—which Sam Raimi had remarked on (I believe in DVD commentary for Drag Me to Hell) being a distinguishing feature of her when he cast her in his 2009 horror film—have always struck me as “soulfully alert,” if that doesn’t sound corny. She is somewhat unusual, slightly exotic, in appearance in being a blonde with big dark eyes (and dark brows); but her eyes seem to show a center of interest, or a demanding-yet-fair quality; she isn’t simply a doll to more globally look at. On another level, even if she is tired, you could say, she is paying attention.

To round out my personal sketch, I’ll note that she has not appeared in a film since 2009, and is apparently raising a young family, according to her Wikipedia bio, and we would welcome seeing her back in starring roles when she is able.

The questionable allegation about Lohman’s being treated long-term for ADHD

There is a curious detail about Lohman that turned up recently on the Internet. If it is true, it complements the picture of her (in my view), and may help to explain some of her personality-flavor and maybe why she has appeared in a relatively limited range of roles. But there is a surprising lack of backup for this information.

Lohman’s Wikipedia biography, in a detail that I believe was only recently added, has been treated, apparently since childhood until now, for attention deficit disorder. The implication in the article is that once she was treated, she did very well in school in almost all her subjects (one in which she did not was drama!). The somewhat banal passage claiming this all is: “In her first school year, Lohman was diagnosed with combined type [sic] attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and put on [sic] medicine for it, which she still uses as an adult. Afterwards, she had straights A's in everything, except in drama, because she was too shy.” [Update 3/16/13: This allegation about her being treated for ADHD, and the supposed cited reference for this, were found to have been removed from this Wikipedia bio by 3/15/13. Comments on this remain here for pedagogical purposes regarding online remarks about psychological issues that are inadequately backed up.]

The only reference for this whole statement is a blog page (from “psychcentral”), of all things. The relevant part of this merely states her having gotten A’s in school and getting a C in drama…and the blog entry seems to link this to a more general theme of self-scrutiny amid certain kinds of brain processes. But nothing is said on this blog entry about ADHD, either in general or regarding Lohman.

When we look up other Internet sources on her, we find:

* A Yahoo biography, which makes no mention of her having been treated for ADHD;

* An article in Variety from 2003, which makes mention of her early drama experience but nothing about ADHD. Interestingly, the “psychcentral” blog site seems to reference this Variety article, but there is no live link; but when you check it out, this article backs up the school history in its way (with a quote from Lohman), but not at all the ADHD connection.

Meanwhile, when you Google “Alison Lohman ADHD” (as I did a few times through August 3), among other things, you can find:

* a Facebook general information page on her, which seems, from the initial link data shown on the Google results page, to include info on her having been treated for ADHD, but this is not shown on the Facebook page, as far as I can see (and what information it does have is indicated to have come from her Wikipedia bio); and

* Another site, which has chunky enough bio info, including the ADHD allegation (apparently gotten from the Wikipedia bio), but no direct backup for this. (Interestingly, on August 3, I found that someone had inserted the bracketed “citation needed” for this claim.)

The problem with a claim being entered on a Wikipedia page about some long-term psychological-health issue, even if it is about the “less scary” long-term problem of ADHD (less scary than, say, bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder), is that if it isn’t documented, you ask, who put it there? If it wasn’t, in this case, by someone close to Lohman, by whom, then? Was it someone with a bitterly competitive attitude toward her? Such as a former classmate who thought, “She started getting treated for ADHD, then did well in school, but she couldn’t act at the time. Then she became a recognized movie actress, and was still on ADHD meds. She’s almost a fraud!” The unacceptability of this is obvious. For any person, in fact, whether famous or not, if health matters of a long-term nature are stated on the Internet, at least some indication of the source would be required.

So I have serious doubts about the substantiation of the allegation of Lohman being treated for ADHD. Until and unless I find it, I leave this information here as a curious allegation online, but probably to be ignored in my—or anyone else’s—larger appreciative look at Lohman.

The credibility of Angela’s character, apart from Lohman’s performance

Though in the coda the movie makes a valiant attempt to respect what it set up with Roy and Angela’s relationship, and though it is generally well acted, we are still left with some dissatisfaction in the character of Angela. Ridley Scott, from his general-view director’s perspective, in DVD commentary talks about the character as if she was some gamin who hitchhiked across the country, from truck stop to truck stop, or some such thing. This sounds like a British idea of what some kind of waif/free-spirit types in the U.S. might do, roughly similar to British rock musicians’ culturally-removed romanticizing of American blues and country styles, but I think that’s implausible in this connection. (The “truck stop waif” idea seems to have been all the more likely an attractive trope to British-born Scott, in the way British people are fascinated by the surface qualities of American life, when you see Thelma & Louise, where the gritty, diesel-exhaust Western world evoked so redolently there seems to be both sensually realistic and saturatedly romanticized.)

First, by her look and some of her behavior, while Angela the 14-year-old seems to come from a less-than-upper-middle-class background, and has some earthiness about her (and maybe has learned a few tough lessons from hard knocks), there is still something sweet, trusting, and on the naïve side about her. But she’s a con artist, you say. OK, even if you look at the Angela in the carpet store at the end of the movie, and you consider she is cultivating a long-term relationship with an apparent slacker boyfriend seemingly on the main basis of that he is “sweet” to her, you still get the sense that this is not such a “skeevy” young woman that she was making the rounds of truck stops, or the like. That kind of girl would probably be a druggie, and have a personality disorder to boot. She would have a look about her, leaking around the “nice girl” act, of a kind of “dirtbag.” And more fundamentally, if a young woman like Angela—whether 22 or 14—should get involved in such an elaborate con as Frank is leading, wouldn’t you expect her to really be a hardened crook who showed her grim, hard-to-reform sociopathic side in the chinks of her 14-year-old act, especially to a presumably canny type like Roy Waller?

You would. And you realize that on a surface level, and perhaps despite what the screenwriters were thinking of what to do with her, this Angela seems a lot more like a relatively upscale sort, maybe in a phase of her young life of being “mixed up,” where she thinks all she’s good for is being a grifter, but she’s made of better stuff. Hence—as we know, from the coda—Frank (one of the masters among the con men) ends up gypping her out of her cut. So Angela is closer to the real Alison Lohman than to the truck-stop-hopping gamin Ridley Scott outlines.

Which goes to show that on certain aspects of this film, you can’t analyze them too much, because then the flimsiness of the script on some levels shows through. Ultimately, the surface liveliness, and broader questions the film raises about authenticity and “having a heart,” are more its redeeming features.

Getting bearings: My more spotty, mixed-bag time with CommonHealth, 2004-06: Unwittingly heading into a storm, Part 2 of 2

[Part 2 is presented first because it is ready first. It is not Part 1 because Part 2 relates incidents that followed those of Part 1. Part 1, which is pending, recounts mainly my first experience of the division of Ferguson, in 2004 and 2005 and/or 2006, when it was located and functioned fairly autonomously, as the apparent flagship division of CommonHealth. An update, made 9/4/12, is included below between asterisks.]

[The fellow editor I have pseudonymed Sqodox has been in touch with me within the past several days, and the entry below, which includes e-mail content from him from 2006, does not imply that he either approves or expressly disapproves of my use of this material.]

[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.]

A scorecard on one player: Jen C.’s role

Let me banish some illusions you might have, if you’ve closely followed my CommonHealth story to this point.

If you thought “Jen C.” was a person directly involved in an allegation of “sexual harassment” made about me in 2010, she isn’t. She was a longtime friendly-to-me element at CommonHealth in the first few years of the past decade—and a good measure of how things changed from 2007 on. She turns up in a few episodes of my history with CommonHealth, including a few I’ve already posted, but she is not a significant part of my story after 2003, though she will again become somewhat important later….

Thumbnail sketch of my time at different divisions, through 2006

From 2001 through 2006, the array of divisions of CommonHealth I worked at, some for the briefest of times, was: Noesis, Xchange, Quantum, MBS/Vox, Carbon, Adient, Qi or some such small division, and Ferguson (and at the last, my first stint was in 2004). I’m not sure if there was another division I worked at.  [CC #1 in some cases; CC #3]

After the period in early 2007 in which I worked under Mark K. at what was the successor to the newly combined Quantum and Xchange divisions, I believe the only division of CommonHealth I worked in was Ferguson, in later 2007, in 2008, and in 2010 (the last period was my second-longest stint at CommonHealth after MBS/Vox in 2003). [CC #3]

In this entry we will take a step back to 2006, which—as I couldn’t know at the time—represented a curdling of the CommonHealth culture in terms of what I could see when I worked within it: more specifically, my time at the one division of MBS/Vox would end up comprising part of the basis for my not getting paid on time for a few months’ work, a piece of the mess I experienced in the breakdown of “The Gary Laverne Group” (GLG) in 2007 (see my first July 9 blog entry, “…Anecdote 4…”). That is, by early 2007 GLG would owe me several thousand dollars in payroll pay, and it was for work for two firms—the firm in Berkeley Heights I worked at for about six months in 2006 (I was owed for about four weeks there, and this comprised the bigger half of the total owed); and MBS/Vox, at which I worked through about a four-month period in 2006, and which was the basis for less than half, I believe, of the GLG amount I was owed. [CC #3, 4]

Interestingly, part of the outrage of the delayed-pay situation is that the firm in Berkeley Heights solidly wanted me to come back for more work starting in February 2007, but I put my foot down with GLG and stopped working at the Berkeley Heights firm until I was paid the large amount owed. [CC #3, 4] With MBS/Vox, the situation was different: they used my services pretty heavily in 2006, and then there was some hint I’d be brought in again in 2007, but a call for me from them was never made, as far as I knew through mid-February 2007. [CC # 3] But once I opted to “go on strike” with GLG, this clearly meant I was not available for MBS/Vox, even if they did call GLG for me.

“Homecoming?”—back at MBS/Vox [CC #3]

In September 2006, I started working at MBS/Vox, this time through GLG, for the first time since summer 2003. The year 2006 was a busy one for me in that I worked at numerous medical-media locations, some through GLG, and some not. When I started at MBS/Vox in 2006, the same year I had already put a chunk of time in at the place in Berkeley Heights I mentioned above, as well as at Cardinal Health in Wayne, for which I worked directly, not through GLG. (I also worked for a division of ICC in June 2006, again directly and not through GLG.)

Though I didn’t know it at the time, this was the start of a huge fracture in my experience of medical-media work—and not just regarding CommonHealth. This was because, with GLG’s breakdown [CC #3, 4], not only was my trust in the medical-media area of work shaken, but more objectively it certainly represented that the waters were getting choppy through the medical-media industry as a whole, as you could see in various “symptomatic” ways from 2007 on. And of course this was a natural consequence of sea changes (whose details I couldn’t know all of) happening amid the Big Pharma clients that these medical-media firms served, some of which broad changes could be gleaned from a less directly knowledgeable perspective in mainstream-media stories on pharmaceutical topics. (Through the time of writing, with the Big Pharma developments only getting more dramatic since 2007, stories abound of patents for big-selling medications running out; Big Pharma firms paying multi-billion-dollar fines/penalties for alleged marketing wrongdoing; Big Pharma firms leaving New Jersey for various legitimate business reasons….)

My return to MBS/Vox was a sort of “mixed homecoming.” For one thing, at the time the division was located in a rather cramped Lanidex Plaza building in Parsippany, not in Wayne Township, where I’d worked at it last; and this was before CommonHealth’s big move to its new, centralized location. This temporary relocation of MBS/Vox was one phase of the relocation of all CommonHealth divisions to the new building. So there was something uprooted and transient-disoriented about MBS/Vox in its location in fall 2006. But for me, the work was quite determined as to nature, and familiar due to my experience with it, so generally there was nothing especially distorted or new about what I was doing in my own sphere of responsibilities.

My time there in 2006 seemed productive enough, and it seemed I was trusted enough—and what direct management I faced even pressed me to pump a lot out, ostensibly because the budget year was ending. I rolled with the demands as I ever did with this division; of course, my adaptability even extended—when CommonHealth finally moved the last of its divisions out of the Lanidex Plaza building to the new, large building in Parsippany—to my going to this new location for the last few weeks of my MBS work. Indeed, this wasn’t a choice left up to me; the work was there, MBS was willing to have me continue with it; the main logistical change was my needing to be buzzed in, or whatever, via the new high-tech door-security system at the new building. Not a big deal, you might say, but it’s amazing how the feasibility of staying with certain high-enough-paying jobs can actually founder on something so relatively simple.

(When “Gary” of GLG told me about what clients were paying him late, and that this included for work at MBS/Vox, it wasn’t as if some issue about my work at MBS/Vox was any reasonable or ostensible excuse for this. He told me there was another GLG temp working at the same basic time for MBS/Vox [though I don’t think I ever knew who this was], for whose work the pay was also delayed; and this temp was actually preferred by MBS/Vox over me if only one was to be brought in. [CC # 3, 4])

All this GLG/pay mess was not an issue—the problem practically could not enter my awareness yet—during most of my time at MBS/Vox in 2006. It wouldn’t become so until late December 2006 or, much more extensively, in early 2007. In September 2006, I still seemed optimistic about my work there, and also took a sort of wistful look at my earlier memories of MBS/Vox, as reflected in an e-mail exchange I had with the temp Sqodox [see my July 5 blog entry, “Start of a Biopsy (this won’t hurt a bit)”], who had not been at CommonHealth at all since 2003, or if he had, it was only very briefly, maybe in 2004.

I had told him some news about the old MBS/Vox compadres among the permanent staff there, and he responded as follows (on September 22, 2006), with my own responses to each of his points inserted in the body of his e-mail in my long response of September 24. [CC #3] (This may seem like an exchange of several short e-mails, but it is actually one long e-mail with our comments interleaved.) Sqodox’s comments start with + and my responses start with ***, and I only fix a few things grammatically or punctuation-wise for clarity:

“Greg,

+ I can’t believe that even Jen has changed!!!! [I don’t know what I said to elicit this…]

***She hasn’t changed that much, but of course I didn’t get a good look at her. She seemed like in a busy-sloppy-appearance mode early in the day—maybe partly because it was casual Friday—but then looked more herself (2002 era) in the afternoon. She seems to have a position where they keep her running a lot more.

+ AND, I am quite impressed that you already remember all their names.

***You know, with some of them, I was quite rusty at first. It was strange being there—I really felt like “I don’t think I can ‘go home again’”… Working for Vox seemed, before I was there last week, like a one-shot deal; you have a productive time when you’re there [as we were in 2002-03], but once you’re let go for strange reasons, and 2004-06 intervene (the social changes in Bush’s America), it just seems you [can’t] be back there again with the same spirit and good faith. So I knew I could remember some names but it took some work. It was almost like remembering details of a dream, or of something from 10 years ago. And of course, I looked at name plates to “cheat.” [Surname] was the name of that [first name] woman. Incidentally, she is a vice president [now; she had been approximately entry level when Sqodox and I were there in 2003], which mainly seems to mean she goes out to haul in [new] business.

[***]I should tell you more later about doing the old OCing again. The task is pretty much the same—in fact, though they have more bells and whistles for rules to follow, the standards we followed (which I think we pretty much developed ourselves), are the same to a surprising extent. So I wonder why they let three of us go so unceremoniously. But they definitely try to have a big set of rules for everyone to follow the same way now. Incidentally, I found they never had [Asian] Indians [outsourced] do QCing [which I thought I’d heard in 2004, and which I’d told Sqodox to his shock in a prior year (CC #3, arguably 4)] but they do have Indians do some of the first drafts of the transcripts, which isn’t as bad an idea as having them do QCing. [CC #3, arguably 4]

+ [One manager] was always nice to me. Is [higher-level manager] gone?

***I agree, [first-named manager] seemed nice, but she could be a tough cookie when she needed—as I guess is to be expected for someone who stayed so long in the business. [Higher-level manager] moved to Health Learning Systems, which was the big department around the corner from MBS/Vox in Wayne…near where the bigger kitchen was. [Higher-level manager] became its president, I think. And that happened in 2004, I think—I think she was president there when I worked at Adient in 2004. I forget right at the moment where HLS moved to… Every department of CommonHealth that was in Wayne has moved out of that building, I’m told.

+ What about that guy who [would] only talk with that school teacher guy? He sat between [higher-level] manager and [first-named manager].

***I know who you mean, and I forget his name…it almost comes to me…he left in 2004 or 2005, I think.

+ I can’t even remember her name, but is that fun chick that we used to do QC with still there? You know, that chick who was a walking encyclopedia of medical terminology…

***That was [Belinda, pseudonymed in the July 9 GLG blog entry]—she was hired by M[BS] as a staffer [in 2003], and then was let go in 2005. She ended up in Carbon (another CommonHealth division) as a freelancer employed directly by the company (not through a placement agency)… That was late 2005, when I worked at Carbon for a few weeks. Mary [surname] was running editorial for Carbon [and Mary had been a fellow temp of myself and Sqodox at MBS/Vox in 2002]. So you had myself, Mary, and [Belinda] there, and we all had been Horizon temps at MBS/Vox in 2001-02, the first time we were there. Mary left Carbon earlier this year, but [Belinda] may still be there.

##

That is the end for specifically CommonHealth-related talk.

Sudden dropping-out of a young coworker

One interesting little tidbit of that time is one of those things you don’t fully know the reason for when it happens, but whose likely (hypothesized) reason becomes clearer in retrospect, considering all sorts of circumstantial things.

In early November 2006, my immediate contact, Pia L. (with Italian last name), an educated, nice young woman who handled my scheduling information at the MBS/Vox end and distributed my work to me, e-mailed notice of her leaving. I still have a copy of the e-mail, which I printed out November 5. [DOF] The e-mail has a confidentiality disclaimer, but what has always puzzled me about it is how suddenly she left, and that she gives no explanation but seems in tone regretful and/or sad in her brief notice. [CC #3] She directly addressed and copied several entities, companies and individuals, regarding whom you can say all needed to know, for simple work-logistics purposes, that she was leaving. She copied both me individually and GLG as a firm. [CC #3] She references who our new contact is to be, a woman who I don’t think I had ever had reason to deal with directly prior to this. There is a note I hand-jotted on my copy of the e-mail about my leaving a phone message for this new woman regarding her needing to get an e-mail I tried to send her. *UPDATE: On August 31, 2012, I found a copy of an e-mail (dated October 26, 2006) that contains a hand-jotted note of mine that says Pia quit, and that I'd heard this November 3. I don't think this undermines my point about how, generally, Pia seems to have been handled; while she may not have been fired, it makes sense she was handled in a way as led her to quit. Obviously, given my speculative position, and the likely defensive position of people still at MBS/Vox who would have a stake in how this item is discussed, our views could diverge. I think in general the e-mail from Pia that I have strongly suggests she was not managed in a way where she could have said management "fully had her back," and the management that I received by her ad hoc successor certainly suggested a cheap-o way of operating on MBS/Vox's part at the time.*

The new woman was my contact for the last month-plus I did work there. She clearly did not have the qualifications of Pia, in terms of education and subtle technical attunement to the nature of the QC’ing work. She seemed like nothing so much as a back-office worker, like a low-level accounting type, who I believe had been with CommonHealth some time. I remember that, particularly in December 2006, when there seemed as hard a push to get QC’ing transcripts jammed through my hands as ever (if not more so), she seemed good only in the sense of knowing what she had to have me get done—as if she was directed to do so from above—but had very little if any appreciation for what this meant regarding certain little technical issues that might come up.

I felt that I pushed through QC’ing about as hard if I ever had, if not harder, if I was left to pacing myself in a “quickening” way. And even then, I could happen to be pushed by this woman to get through stuff more quickly. I think I felt the last few transcripts were, for them to be pushed through as they were, not that important as to how well they were done. And then, as soon as these were done, that was it, my time was up. As I seem to recall, no friendly conversation, what’re you doing for the holidays or such. I was a little surprised that, given my willingness to accommodate her pushing, she had so little sense to be more friendly in my closing up time there, but I think I attributed this (at least in part) to her being, as I felt, a high school-grad type and not so much a college-grad type.

The sense I had in 2006 of there being at MBS/Vox a lot of year-end cleaning-up-shop to do, amid a tight budget, was very clear. [CC #3] It certainly was different from how things had been with QC’ing for MBS/Vox in 2003.

In more recent years, it has struck me as likely that Pia was fired; more generally, I can think of a number of twenty-somethings, including at Ferguson in later years, who would seem as a group to be more apt to be fired or laid off than any other age group. [CC #3] Since, in general, (1) twenty-somethings there have tended to be eager, earnest, and innocent—with their eyes on their first greeting you usually looking as if they are glad to say “appreciate me!” and to join hands on The Good Ship Big Media Company—and since (2), probably, they are the first to be dumped and, whether or not as an obvious insincere excuse, judged as “unfit,” when the real issue may be that they don’t adapt to the more ruthless business expectations there, it would then seem that Pia was jettisoned without adequate grounds, and more specifically this was probably done as a cost-cutting move. Her competence, in the longer view, doesn’t seem to me like it was an issue (though, as is often the case when someone is first purged, you wonder if he or she “did something wrong” to incur their dismissal).

I think what really seals the hypothesis that there was a lot of grimy cost-cutting shit going on there in the last few months of 2006, such as to purge Pia like an old broom, was GLG’s inability to get paid for MBS/Vox work time for months. “Gary” told me, in about February 2007, that he was owed by them for time back to September 2006—about six months before. [CC #3, 4]

A note on the issue of editorial value

When in 2006 I was being pushed to get through a lot of QC’ing transcripts, I did feel something of the minor vexation, that some of us editors felt even in 2003, of being expected to do work that really was so precision-based it could be tedious, and yet having the demands changed on us that made you wonder what management wanted, or being subject to picky little criticisms from management that seemed to show lack of appreciation for the nuts and bolts of what we did, which in many ways followed our mother wit used to meet the clear-enough management demands. [CC #3]

In 2006, the additional issue I found was speed, which seemed to increase as the months went on. Here, what is curious is a little complex, but not hard to understand. Whether or not the upper echelon of MBS/Vox that needed the transcripts could directly benefit from the precision we QC’ers followed—and Sqodox, for one, who had been involved in some of the “analytical” meetings whose work was derived from the transcripts in 2002 or so, could appreciate how the values there were different from ours—QC’ing actually gave value for effort, no matter how you sliced it. Because it was cleaning-up and precision-oriented, the work we turned out met some standards of quality—which the upper echelon had to have, because clearly—as was a bedrock way MBS/Vox operated—the division could never use a transcript that wasn’t QC’ed in some way by someone.

Moreover, unlike in other divisions where some system was in place to allow bills to Big Pharma clients to be padded—where you could sit idle for most of the day yet somehow have to provide your own recordkeeping grounds for the placement agency to bill for most of that time [see my June 19 and second July 9 blog entries]—at MBS/Vox, there was usually no way to pad bills at the QC’ing level. The reason was simple: if a transcript was to be fixed and it took two hours to do it, how could you then bill (i.e., despite whatever paths of billing “above you” were set up, either GLG billing MBS/Vox or MBS/Vox billing the Big Pharma client) for four hours when you, the QC’er, could do another transcript (or two) the rest of the day, at maybe two hours a piece? It would seem to me that the only area in the division’s work where there might be systematic padding would be on the upper-echelon, analyze-the-transcripts level. And on this latter matter, I am merely speculating, because I never directly took part in that.

It is not speculating at all to say that if transcripts are pushed through more quickly in late 2006, there is even less chance to “pad bills”—on MBS/Vox’s part to the Big Pharma client—when the number of transcripts to time increases. Plus, if the transcripts get more erratic as a result of pushing through work, that also undercuts quality, and presumably undercuts the ability to justify a high bill.

So it was one thing to say that MBS/Vox was pushing through work at the end of a budget year because it didn’t have much in its cash on hand for paying for transcript QC’ing. But when we see that then MBS/Vox delayed paying for this quality-heavy work for several months, as became clear in 2007 after my work there was done, we have a different kettle of fish. And then it isn’t hard to speculate (even later) that, with the quality-dependent QC’ing done, MBS/Vox could sit on paying for this work while, first, it tried to bill its client for the work when the time came for that. [CC #3, 4] Compare this with my story of GLG’s breakdown (first July 9 blog entry), and I leave it up to you to say how justified I became to have a dimmer view of CommonHealth.

Actually, in 2007 I was still giving them the benefit of the doubt; and especially in 2007, I looked at the firm in Berkeley Heights as the big monster that was primarily behind my own delayed GLG pay. But for his part, in February 2007, “Gary” voiced genuine puzzlement at how a big firm like CommonHealth, as he said, could delay paying its bills as it was.

I would work for CommonHealth later in 2007 and again in 2008. It would be my experience in 2010 that would allow me to answer more fully “Gary’s” question. And it’s not favorable to CommonHealth.