Movie break: A postwar noir/thriller that’s become a wide-audience classic: The Third Man (1949)

A sort of chocolate-tinged tough-history story for adults, with a buffered glimpse of fascism and bittersweet romance

Subsections below:

Getting my hands on what was once a hugely popular film

As lots of us might date ourselves regarding how we became familiar with The Third Man…

The film aimed to fit a developed tradition and social good

Certain staples of noir shape the story, but to its continuing interest today

Reed worked brutally hard, probably a sine qua non to the film’s achievement

A set of character actors adds essential flavor

With the Syrian-and-other-country refugee crisis in Europe right now, it’s said in news reports that it’s the biggest refugee phenomenon in Europe since World War II. But there are some key differences; most notably, in the 1940s, in the era of what was called “displaced persons,” part of the problem was the heartbreak posed by the extreme war that had taken place in the European lands as to result in people’s being refugees there, which isn’t the case now, with the refugees coming from outside Europe, from relatively distant foreign countries (and from more-different cultures from Europe today than existed between European ones in the 1940s). So the film at hand both may seem a bit relevant as to mood, and not so…

Getting my hands on what was once a hugely popular film

It was a little strange having a bit of trouble getting hold of a definitive DVD of this film, considering that, as a DVD commenter for The Criterion Collection version of it says in some way, it was “the Sound of Music of its day [the early 1950s]”—meaning, immensely popular. (If this isn’t said on the DVD, Orson Welles says it in the Leaming biography, to be referenced below, on p. 363. But the analogy isn’t a stretch.)

While I got up to my neck in working on a review of Mr. Arkadin—which may have made more than a few of my readers say, “Why bother about this one?”—I’ve seen enough references within the orbit of that film to The Third Man (1949) that I ended up looking at it. (And actually, my subhead for one entry on Mr. Arkadin, including “…postulates a dark personage behind machinations in mottled postwar Europe,” seems to fit The Third Man better—but that’s because Arkadin, by Welles’ very conscious intention, assumed the set of recent-history-and-thriller premises that Third Man was built on—which may be why that film struck such a chord that it became popular worldwide, and now has an iconic status similar to that of Casablanca [1942].)

And after trying to get The Third Man in a not-long-ago prepared Criterion Collection edition—which I thought should have a lot of tasty extras—I was given, by the New York State library network I devotedly get DVDs from, a single-disc, Korean-market DVD (everything—soundtrack, and most words on the cover—was in English, except a few bits on the cover), which had no extras. I watched it about one and a half times, then (per the due date) I had to bring it back. Then I got and viewed the Criterion Collection version, which has two discs that include extras. Hence, when I talk about what’s on the DVD hereafter, I mean the Criterion version, which also includes a booklet.

(The extras include two docs—one 90-minute piece in English [first shown at Cannes in 2005] that explains the making of the film, which is very interesting if you’re into that sort of thing; the other doc, about 30 minutes, is an Austrian-made, German-language thing from some years ago—with English subtitles—that looks at the film in part for how it meshed with Austrian cultural/PR interests in ~1949, and how aspects of the film look today. It’s basically respectful of the film, and somewhat quaint in its European way.)

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This film is classified as noir (to judge from its Wikipedia article, anyway), but it deviates from the formula, most notably in that it really doesn’t have a femme fatale or some other way that the protagonist is a dupe who gets roped into a horrible, domino-effect downfall situation by a simple (if “tragic-flaw-type”) mistaken choice. In some ways, it seems like a western with some fairly clear delineation between the good guys and bad guys (and its main hero, Holly Martins, is a writer of pulp western novels), though the overall atmosphere and story-“fact” conditions are the tattered state in which things are (infrastructure, social and economic conditions) in Europe post-WW II, and the moral ambiguity of some local Austrians who are allied with a character (Harry Lime) who turns out to be a more dastardly number than either his former best friend in America (Holly) or his European love in Austria had known.

British novelist Graham Greene, who was long a respected man of letters but who might arguably be said to have occupied a niche between popular-type books and good literature (he authored, among other things, what some have said to be his best work, The Power and the Glory, and  the Vietnam-related novel The Quiet American). His Wikipedia article points out the extent to which he was a Catholic novelist, especially in his more serious work, while he wasn’t above doing more popularly oriented thrillers at times. He developed the start of the Third Man story of this film (he first floated it to the film producer Alexander Korda, who was Hungarian-born and Britain-based, and who was key to this film). The story was then shaped—in a movie-development way that seems rather modern—by the input of American producer David O. Selznick and British director/producer Carol Reed. In the film titles, Reed is listed as director and producer, while Selznick’s and Korda’s developmental roles aren’t specified.

Greene, over the years, also worked with Reed on the films The Fallen Idol (1948), writing the screenplay based on his story (which, to my ignorant look at Maltin’s guide, seems similar to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt [1943]), and on the later satire Our Man in Havana (1960), with Greene adapting his novel to the screen. Thus, for The Third Man, he was good for writing a screenplay that could conform with adult concerns of doubt or guilt, malfeasance in the world, and romantic relationships compromised by same (and it turns out, from one DVD extra, that the character of Harry Lime, who adulterated penicillin in his black-market work—to the detriment of patients—was based on a real person in Austria who did the same thing).

In a way, The Third Man, which seems like very smartly made semi-pulp, not only is unsurprising for being adapted by Greene to a novella after the film was made, but this history allows us to see how Orson Welles took the approach a step further, to making a Harry Lime–like story like Mr. Arkadin (1955-56, ’62), which, all that film’s flaws aside, pushed the trope of the European black marketer (and the mysteries he spurred) further toward pulp. It’s ironic to consider how this genre approach suited audiences in the 1950s, who were dealing with the recovery from the trauma of the war, while in much more recent years, genre work making it to the big screen much more often aims for sci-fi and fantasy tropes than the likes of addressing the dark figures or historical phenomena that made a mess of things mid-20^th-century.

By the way, the British version of the film—which has Carol Reed doing spoken narration at the start, rather than actor Joseph Cotten, who did the preface narration in the American version—is the only one available on DVD today. The American version, under the hand of producer Selznick, had some bits cut and some story elements that added darkness/ambiguity to the mix washed away. But clearly the genuine version of this story is the pre-Selznick British version.

As lots of us might date ourselves regarding how we became familiar with The Third Man…

I’ve seen The Third Man before, a few times (the first time may have been on Turner Classic Movies). I admit it took me years to get acquainted with it, then come to really like it. Its excellence is brought into relief after I’ve (unexpectedly) done graduate-school-type work on Mr. Arkadin, which (as to certain story premises and aimed-for style) you can’t really understand (and, also, as to why it was made) unless you understand the basics of The Third Man (End note 1). And I am pleased to say that I am won over to The Third Man the more I view it, which I don’t think I can say about Casablanca, which was striking to me for its triteness when I first saw the whole thing within the past two or so years.

Another preliminary note to make about The Third Man is that its theme music, played on the zither on the film by Anton Karas, was so popular (and that for well over a decade; it sold some 40 million records, according to a bit on the DVD), that a version called “The Third Man Theme” was covered by the pop group Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass on one of their 1960s albums—and as you know, Alpert and his band did Mexican-styled, trumpet-featuring pop. So while the Karas music was famously played on a zither, Herb Alpert’s group did it with acoustic guitar (among other instruments, including maybe mandolins), which isn’t a stretch in terms of adaptation, because the zither looks, surprisingly, half like a guitar neck and half like a small harp, the two joined almost like a bizarre “mashup.” The instrument is laid on a table, and played with two hands—one hand (for right-handed people, the left hand) playing the rhythm/bass on the harp-like strings, and the other (the right hand) on the guitar neck playing the melody. (This is why someone can play “The Third Man Theme” on the piano—the playing on a mechanical level is fairly similar.)

My family had several of Herb Alpert’s albums in the 1960s, and we had them, to listen to, at least into the 1970s; for a spell, that music was more familiar to me, during our little 1960-70s lives, than The Beatles’ was. (I only started gluttonously getting into Beatles music in 1976, when I was 14 going on 15, and since then, they’ve been my favorite pop/rock band, cultural dinosaur that I am.) And when I hear the zither music on this film, I am reminded more of the Alpert version, in a way (i.e., I “interpret it for myself” in that style)…or maybe I should say, when I think of this music in my head (it sticks in there like the most infectious hook-laden pop), I think of it being “Hispanic,” or like mariachi music like the type Alpert specialized in. Yet I’m sure the people who snapped it up in the 1950s saw it as “Mitteleuropean”—central-European folk stuff that, really, is what it was.

This is one way of saying that The Third Man is an example of how the best pop art bridges—with our enjoying something in a sort of “shared sensibility”—not only different subgroups, but across decades or even longer. Another measure of this is that one character actor in the film, Hedwig Bleibtreu (there’s a Germanic name for you)—who plays the landlady in Anna’s apartment house complaining in German about the way the police invade buildings like hers—was born in apparently 1868; she is noted on the DVD by perhaps Carol Reed as having been 82 when the film was made. That means (similar to Rosemary’s Baby [1968] being a film still enjoyed today, though two of its stars were born before 1900) The Third Man features an Austrian actress who was born just a few years after the guns of the U.S. Civil War had cooled. That’s bridging the centuries for you.

The film aimed to fit a developed tradition and social good

In many ways, The Third Man seems about as iconic in its trend-following and trend-setting style, as does Casablanca and its like: it’s like an old standard that may seem charmingly “right in every way” to some, and respectable enough but maybe strikingly trite to others. Apparently there were rumors or suggestions in past years that Orson Welles had a hand in directing it (though Carol Reed basically has his remaining reputation based on The Third Man more than on the numerous others films he did over decades [End note 2]). (Welles says in an interview [done in the late ’70s, it seems] that is sampled on the Third Man DVD, that—as seems the truth—he didn’t help Reed direct his ferris-wheel scene, but the speech he gives in the ferris-wheel gondola, he basically wrote himself. [End note 3])

The striking visual style

There is the standard noir-type photography, fine use of black-and-white that got cinematographer Australian-born Robert Krasker an Oscar. (The film as a whole also won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for film year 1949.) Vienna, both intact and in war-ruined aspects, is so much key to how this film looks, especially at night, that it is considered by some to be another notable character in the film. Most strikingly, the film uses a slanted approach to many of the shots, which some have thought Welles originated. (Actually, Welles didn’t make a trademark use of this sort of slanting until his Mr. Arkadin, which of course he made to capitalize on what, by the early 1950s, had become a Harry Lime franchise.)

The probable truth about the visual look is that Reed and his executive associates (perhaps Krasker and also producer Korda [?]) wanted the film to fit squarely (at least visually) with the noir tradition that had developed in the U.S. in the 1940s. Actually, to hear it from the 90-minute making-of piece on the DVD (as well as another, 30-minute, German-language Austrian piece), the film was made in a very earnest, workmanlike way to serve some noble ends: to foment some goodwill among different European nationalities in the wake of the war. In the process, this project was the first British film to include location work in a foreign country (and ended up becoming regarded possibly the greatest British film ever made).

The Austrian linchpin

To get help from Austria, there was key support coming from a film executive in Austria, Karl Hartl, who ran Sascha Films and who was the only (or among the only) such executives in Austria who was cleared of damning collaboration with the Nazis (both the U.S. and the Soviets signed off on him, in presumably the last years that the U.S. and the Soviets were still operating as allies). Hartl’s studios would provide some facility support for Reed’s film, which was officially being made by London Films, headed by producer Korda. (End note 4)

Also in the mix was the British government, which partly financed the film. Of course, as a historical matter, Vienna, similarly to Berlin, was occupied by the four Allied powers in 1948—Britain, France, the U.S., and the U.S.S.R. Some formal activities of this somewhat cumbersome alliance are glimpsed duly (and early) in the film, giving it a newsreel effect.

The slightly illusory Welles angle

Today, this film’s interest seems often to be partly couched in terms of it being associated with Orson Welles, which is a little unfair, as Welles was not majorly responsible for its success in 1949 or later. But in terms of people’s thumbnail ways of classifying it—aside from the fact that Welles’ role as Harry Lime was a smallish but important component—Welles’ qualities as an artist manage to dog this film. But Peter Bogdanovich, who probably due to the Welles connection turns up in an intro piece on this DVD, comments that while Welles obviously didn’t have any directing role here, the look of The Third Man wouldn’t have existed were it not for Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), The Stranger (1946), and The Lady from Shanghai (1948).

Bogdanovich also considers this film—and this could well not be hyperbole—as one of the best, if not the best, non-auteur films ever made (which is partly to say that it almost has an “auteur-made” quality about it). Of course, other practitioners of the noir genre (with that genre’s staples like venetian blinds shaping the way light looks in a room, etc.) were turning out trend-setting work, like Billy Wilder (with Double Indemnity [1944]). (Welles, by the way, in agreeing to appear in this film—and engaging in some brinksmanship to up his fee—did this to raise money for his next film project in Europe, Othello [Barbara Leaming, Orson Welles: A Biography (Viking, 1985), p. 362; some details are also on the DVD].)

The American angle extended to stars

In view of all this, you could say that, on the esthetic level, Reed with this film was merely fitting squarely, and in workmanlike way, with a well-established genre of the time. Further, there was an intent to craft it in as much of an American-looking way as possible, including in who starred in it (this while key to its starting was input from an American producer, David O. Selznick). Selznick would help fund the project; but, as a historian named Charles Drazin says in the DVD package, by May 1948, a deal was struck whereby London Films (headed by Korda) and Reed would make the film, while Selznick would extend some production money, along with some American stars (he especially wanted Joseph Cotten for the Holly Martins role and Alida Valli for the Anna Schmidt role)—in return for distribution rights in the U.S. Selznick, of course, ended up editing the American version of the film his own way for release in the U.S. with its more innocent-minded audience.

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Thus what in some formative phase was the film’s being a British goodwill gesture to make a life-affirming-enough story, with a relatively small “production scope,” and the story shaped by dire conditions in Europe (with crucial production aid from an Austrian filmmaker), and with the whole thing meant to put noir features onto a fairly workmanlike production—became a creative process more conducive to an American major release, which would furthermore be a worldwide hit. This combination of somewhat mismatched factors may be why Bogdanovich calls the film, in the best light, a “happy accident.” And more than one DVD commenter notes in some fashion that the resulting film seems a bigger work than what Reed would later do, in a more intended ostentatious production, that would actually be less successful, such as the award-winning Oliver!

In the formative stages, Selznick apparently wasn’t keen on Welles being in the Harry Lime role (he felt Welles would hurt the box-office prospects), but Reed was in favor of Welles, and Reed won the day on this. (Interestingly, both Greene and Reed would remark years later on Selznick being an “overbearing” and “philistine” film mogul, according to an essay by Drazin in the DVD-package booklet. But Selznick also contributed to the story development in a way that shapes how we remember the film, including in how it doesn’t have a happy ending: Greene’s original idea was to have Anna and Holly be a couple at the end, which is not what happens in the finished film.)

Certain staples of noir shape the story, but to its continuing interest today

In some ways (though these are limited ways, as I’ve suggested), the film seems so standard a type of noir that it might induce yawns in the more jaded. Anna Schmidt (Valli) is the newly melancholy former lover of Harry Lime, who at first isn’t aware of how dastardly a racketeer Harry was. Her fealty to Harry is such that when she learns of his crimes, she still harbors an attachment to him. (Valli is an Italian-style surname—it was actually the actress’s stage name; she was born at least partly of Austrian stock, and even by today’s standards, in this film, looks quite attractive, rather like an aunt of today’s Jennifer Lawrence [End note 5].)

Holly Martins (Cotten) is the former friend-in-youth of Harry from America, and in his American earnestness he tries to find out the truth about Harry, as the newly delivered story that he was killed by a traffic accident starts to unravel fairly quickly. Thus both Holly and Anna have an idealistic sort of attachment to the absent Harry (while they develop a mild attachment to each other) that gives them an impulsion to do something more to preserve Harry’s interests, so to speak, amid the postwar-occupied semi-ruins of magnificent Vienna, and while various Viennese whom Holly meets are multiple-agenda about Harry (Harry is still alive, for one reason), in ways that leave us in suspense about how the story will unfold.

The staple of a sort of love triangle, and a mystery amid excellent black-and-white shots of an old-Europe city, probing one’s way along through night and doubt/un-full-knowledge—all may seem almost too-trite yet still makes it worth watching—almost like a best example of what Hitchcock, Welles (when more straightforward), and others could do at their best: a story that might seem shallow in some ways but is emotionally rich and suspense-making in others.

This goes along with how the film moves along rather quickly, with every shot seemingly storyboarded to move the story along at each step: shots often convey an emotionally rich and/or intriguing development, making The Third Man seemingly one of the best-constructed films of its era. If you’re seeing it for the first time, you may be confused by it at times; but see it a second or third time, and you may be quite pleased how so much is telescoped into shots in an efficient yet tasteful manner. By the film’s end, you may feel it was longer than it is.

Reed worked brutally hard, probably a sine qua non to the film’s achievement

Reed may not have been a conscious artist; he seems to have impressed people with being a warm-hearted sort, and various shots and other hints suggest he was a solid example of British good sense and competence. But the materials he had for this film—a tight story well-made by Greene, good actors who could articulate their impressive characters well (even the Viennese character actors are memorable), photography that is well executed (e.g., with water sprayed on cobblestone streets making for fine shots)—all combined, in a well-edited mix, to make for a film that still attracts us today, more than 60 years after it was made.

Reed also seems to have done a sort of 1970s-style crazyman thing in directing: due to the fact that (with production starting in Vienna in October 1948) the coming winter meant he had to speed up getting finished footage, he had three crews (or “units”; each with its own photography director, though Krasker was in charge during the night street scenes) for what was more or less three “shifts” of work (day, evening, and “graveyard shift”). So Reed took benzedrine (a new drug at the time) in order to be awake and present for all shifts of production, which in Vienna went on until roughly late December. (He was lucky he didn’t make himself sick with this.)

Further production work (presumably with Reed operating more moderately health-wise) was done at Shepperton Studios in England, in early 1949 (in which period Welles was more exclusively employed for a time), with film editing starting in April. (By the end of May, after Reed had played some samples of his zither tunes during rough assemblages he watched on Wednesdays during the Shepperton phase of production, Anton Karas was brought to London to more deliberately perform music to accompany the film; he couldn’t read or write sheet music, so he performed and apparently “created music on the spot” while watching the film on a movieola.)

Reed’s use of benzedrine seems to have been not quite as bad as what producer Selznick reportedly routinely did in his life, which (from what I could gather from remarks in a DVD extra by who I think is his nephew) he took for six days a week, only catching up on sleep (for 20-odd hours) on Sundays. He also was a chain-smoker (and routinely had women taking dictation in various situations); this apparently contributed to his seeming overbearing to the likes of Greene and Reed. Selznick was half-manic with his drug-influenced, “Type A” way of living his life. (A remark is made on the DVD, which accords with others, that Selznick was an interfering kind of producer, while Alexander Korda would step in to offer input just when it was needed.)

A set of character actors adds essential flavor

Actors in this film depict vivid characters that are types without being too corny:

* Trevor Howard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Howard) as Major Calloway, the locally assigned Brit in command of Holly’s situation—quick with dry or wry comments, but not cold-hearted;

* Bernard Lee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lee) as Sergeant Paine, something of a “good cop” to Calloway, more simpatico—and he’s read Holly’s books, so he speaks to him as a fan;

* Wilfrid Hyde-White (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfrid_Hyde-White) as British Council representative Crabbin—a sort of focus of comedy; he lines up Holly to, at a thoroughly unexpected time, give a public-educational lecture, which saves his hide at a crucial juncture (otherwise Crabbin is a bit of a clown, and Greene is said on the DVD to have always depicted such British Council types in his work in a negative light, having had an experience with one that was not terribly unlike Holly’s);

* Erich Ponto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Ponto) as Dr. Winkel—a Germanic type (the actor is ethnic German) and, as an ally of Harry Lime’s, he’s somewhat ambiguous, but not a coldhearted “ve haff vays of makingk you tdalk” kind of Germanic type;

* Ernst Deutsch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Deutsch), an Austrian, as Baron Kurtz, another ally of Lime’s and somewhat similar in the ambiguity department to Dr. Winkel, but an amalgam of, in appearance, a sort of “Euro-creep” and an unctuously appealing sort; with his little pet dog he seems both exotic and ambiguous as to trustworthiness;

* Siegried Breuer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Breuer) as Popescu, said to be a Romanian and another ally of Lime’s;

* Paul Horbiger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_H%C3%B6rbiger) as Karl, the porter; Horbiger was a favorite actor in Austria at the time, it seems, and he cuts an interesting figure in his limited but colorful role here (and he had to utter his English lines without being able to speak English fluently, it is said on the DVD);

* Hedwig Bleibtreu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedwig_Bleibtreu)—discussed near the start of this entry;

* Herbert Halbik (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0354752/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t32) as the little kid with the ball, who later mistakenly, innocently, suggests Holly was involved in the murder of Karl the porter. This kid is both cute and annoying; nicely, the actor about 55 years later is shown on the 2005 90-minute doc, at the time in a wheelchair but giving a bemused comment related to the film. As a middle-aged man he has basically the same round head as the little kid, though otherwise you wouldn’t recognize him.

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End note 1.  There is something amusing that happened in about 1953, among the interesting “backstory” bits noted in Barbara Leaming’s bio of Orson Welles (Viking, 1985, pp. 390-91): when Welles lined up actor Robert Arden to have the lead role in his Mr. Arkadin, he extricated Arden from the stage role he had at the time (in a version of Guys and Dolls done in Britain) with seemingly-too-unlikely, but readily-coming help from Carol Reed. Reed contacted Arden with the news that he was now available for Welles after Welles had told Arden—in a phone call in a break in the middle of Arden’s performing in the show—that his, Welles’, “London representative” would be in touch with him. Arden inferred that Welles must have requested of Reed that he get Arden freed from the stage show for Welles, which Reed was then able to do.

End note 2. Reed also directed Odd Man Out (1947), which gets mentioned along with The Fallen Idol as among his early successes. He also, 20 years later, directed the musical Oliver! (1968), a take on the Dickens novel Oliver Twist (the film had the popular song “Consider Yourself”); and his stepdaughter Tracy Reed plays the only female—a secretary to General Buck Turgidson, indoor-sunbathing—depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964). There’s your trivia fix for the day.

End note 3. Welles’ speech includes the remarks ending with his saying (in whatever specific words) that, in the history of Italy, the Borgias did all their violence but ended up with the country’s producing Michelangelo, etc., while Switzerland, for all its peace and democracy, produced all of the cuckoo clock. In this way, Welles summed up the fascism that was definitive of what the character of Harry Lime had turned into; this was the only material in The Third Man not written by Greene, and this is the verbiage people most remember of the film today. (Also, this theme seems to foreshadow a thematic point that Welles would do more floridly, arguably more powerfully, and not always successfully, in Mr. Arkadin.)

End note 4. It was Hartl, throwing a party for the film’s executives, who furnished a zither player, Anton Karas, whose music so appealed to the party that he ended up doing the film’s soundtrack, to his enormous record-selling success—and to our still having the music in our heads almost 70 years later.

End note 5. The DVD package has a remark where her birth surname is given as Von Altenburger, or something like that; but the Wikipedia article on her gives her full birth name as Alida Maria Laura Altenburger von Marckenstein u. Frauenberg. 

Movie break (Quick Vu): Welles’ journeyman noir: The Lady from Shanghai (1948)

A famous-enough B-level Welles work that means you could stretch your Welles-viewing bucket list to about five titles to include it

[For my “director’s dossier” of Welles’ films, see here.]

Subsections below:

Caveats

The overall story is a bit routine; and reading it in line with its genre

Biographical backstory gives some spice for embracing this film

Welles’ career helps us with bearings; the impetus for Lady

A droll/grotesque element involving a law firm

The thickening plot, and the colorful denouement

A mixed-feelings conclusion

[Edits 8/21/15. Edit 8/28/15.]

Caveats

This film poses an unusual problem for my reviewing, but this sort of thing has happened before. I only had about three days to review it as much as I could, because of the limits placed on my borrowing the DVD from a New York State library system (four days is the shorter limit, imposed by some libraries in the overall network, and in effect here). What I did was watch, on the 2000 DVD of the film, the extra of scholar and one-time Orson Welles confidant Peter Bogdanovich talking about the film—I saw this extra three times; the film itself I saw once all the way through (in two separated bouts), and a second time only partway through. This means I have more of a scholarly/abstracted familiarity with the film (as aided by Bogdanovich) than that of watching it several times through. But somehow this isn’t so bad, and I’ll explain why.

When Welles films get talked about in a sort of career-ranging way, The Lady from Shanghai gets mentioned as if it’s both “one of Welles’s films” and pretty well known, but it’s never mentioned as one of his best. I myself found that it was interesting to look at as a Welles scholar—and Welles, of course, is interesting today from a sort of analytical, scholarly look, as well as for typical-film enjoyment (including appreciating his unusual esthetics); and with Welles, often the “about-the-film” DVD extras can be at least as interesting as the films themselves.

There is a lot of visually interesting stuff in Lady that typifies Welles (the shots from near the end with the two-mirror repeating-image motif is one of the most famous images from all of Welles’ work): he goes beyond what we might expect from this kind of story in terms of style, and usually this doesn’t detract from it as if it were merely empty style, but reflects an intelligent man seeing how film can marshal its resources to go a step further in doing what the medium does best to tell a story.

On the other hand, what makes this film worth reviewing today is as a noir, but not a first-rate example; as a Welles work, but not first-rate in that regard either; but also as an example of 1940s films, going beyond the usual fare visually in a way that can still intrigue and satisfy us today.

The overall story is a bit routine; and reading it in line with its genre

I thought the film slid along at a fairly decent pace, but it seemed synthetic a lot of the time—until you got to the famous “shootout in the hall of mirrors” sequence, which in the film’s own terms seems the most well-planned and well-executed sequence in it. But for much of the film—which Bogdanovich describes as one of the notable members of the class of film noir (from its period of first flowering), and which he says was made before some of the others—if you compare to it one that may be one of the very best examples of the genre, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), which came out before it, Lady falls short.

On the 2008 DVD of Touch of Evil that contains all three versions of that film—and I think Touch of Evil as a sort of noir is quite superior to Lady—the “preview” version has probably the best set of during-the-film commentary you can opt to play, by both of Welles scholars Jonathan Rosenbaum and James Naremore, and in this commentary, Rosenbaum remarks that Touch of Evil didn’t impress him so much (contrary to the case with Naremore) when he first saw it in the theater, which he says is probably because he was reading it so much in line with the genre it was supposed to be in.

I think that, though I wouldn’t make that sort of assessment about Touch of Evil myself, I would use that way of criticizing Lady. If you compare Lady with Double Indemnity, Lady seems flaccid indeed. As with so many noirs, in Lady there is the lynchpin of the femme fatale, Elsa (I only got this name from reading the Wikipedia article on the film after the weekend in later July I saw it and bit of the immediately following Monday morning) in this case played by Rita Hayworth. There is the man she is already, socially-acceptably linked with, her husband Arthur Bannister, a criminal-defense lawyer, played by Everett Sloane. Then there is the poor sap (Michael O’Hara, played by Welles, rather casting himself against type here) who is roped into her machinations-of-sorts, an innocent whom “one is put over on,” and becomes victimized almost like a Kafkaesque hero, usually involving some murder or other. If you consider these plot staples, you can follow Lady and find that it traces the path fairly recognizably.

But with this film—though it has some visual niceties, and also some relatively banal full-face close-ups especially of Hayworth, as if rather excessively milking her star status of the time—it doesn’t seem that all the details and writing really count for a lot and grip you, as can just about every minute of Touch of Evil, especially if you watch it several times over a few years (which is worth doing). Lady seems puzzling at times—the labyrinthine way in which the poor sap, Michael O’Hara, is willingly-enough included in a manipulative murder plot was a bit confusing on my first viewing—and of course this is one of Welles’ films heavy-handedly edited by the studio after he got done turning in a rough cut. The result? A story that sometimes seems standard noir, and sometimes seems to pile up details, whether visual or not, that you don’t always recognize as to whether they’re so essential to the story, or just decorative. That helps make the film synthetic, I thought.

(Sloane, who in Welles’s films usually cuts a distinctive face and lucid manner of speaking [if nothing else], is in Lady given two canes, one held by him along each leg oddly, to walk with as if he is oddly crippled. Bogdanovich says he did this with Sloane because Welles knew the latter was really a radio actor, not good with his physical composure or distinctiveness for film, so Welles gave him something to do to make him stand out physically. I tell you, as Sloane walks along, he just strikes you as weird.)

Biographical backstory gives some spice for embracing this film

Bogdanovich in the interview of him is interesting—he mumbles a bit at times, so you have to work to listen to him, but if you play his discussion a second time, every sentence counts—in telling not simply about the film, including its admittedly odd qualities (he is among Welles fans who would count Lady as among the larger film “canon” today, but inevitably he mentions features of Lady that helpfully convey it as rather unusual, stylized, and Wellesian, but not among his very greats). Bogdanovich also tells a lot of backstory, including about Welles’ marriage to Hayworth (which has value here a bit beyond mere gossip) and how the production fared (including a month-long shutdown due to Hayworth’s being ill). (The Welles/Hayworth marriage broke down just before the picture opened; but it seems, from Bogdanovich’s implications, that Welles made a game try to have things work out, and that a prime source of the personal problems were Hayworth’s own personal issues, which included the residue of child abuse she’d been subjected to when young.)

Notably, the final cut was two and a half hours long, and the studio cut it down by an hour, quite a significant cutting. The film was made in 1946 [added 8/28/15: according to Barbara Leaming, in Orson Welles: A Biography (Viking, 1985), p. 336, filming ended in March 1947], but released in 1948; the beginning titles list 1947 as the copyright date, so apparently postproduction work went well toward the end of the year following that of production (1946). The fact that Lady is missing more than a third of what Welles originally envisioned makes us wonder if his version would have made more sense, or perhaps if it would have been an hour more of visually intriguing but synthetic stuff (it does turn out that a lot of the funhouse sequence was lost, that we have only a precis of this).

Generally as with Touch of Evil, Welles wrote a memo after viewing the studio’s chopped-down cut, requesting changes in line with his vision. In the case of Touch of Evil, in late 1957/early 1958, the studio (Universal) originally honored about 20 percent of his famed 58-page memo on that film, and much later, in 1998 (more than a decade after Welles’ death), a further reedit was done, putting a new cut fully in line with the memo. However, with Lady, the studio (Columbia) didn’t honor his memo at all.

Welles’ career helps us with bearings; the impetus for Lady

The history of Welles’ films, as Bogdanovich gives a thumbnail sketch of, is that with Citizen Kane (1941), which had no studio butchering, the problem was that its distribution was interfered with by William Randolph Hearst, on whom the character of Kane was based; with The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), the studio (RKO) removed some material, and reshot a happy ending that seems incongruous tone-wise. The next film Welles directed, The Stranger (1946), which Bogdanovich relates Welles considered the least of his films but still considered his because the studio didn’t recut it, actually made money. It is a minor Welles film, but definitely worth a look for those interested in Welles.

Welles was, in effect, blacklisted (Bogdanovich’s term] among one or more Hollywood studios after the commercial failures of his earliest two films, but apparently this status was lifting when he had an idea for another film by 1946.

By the 1946 production year, Welles was already in the phase of his career where he would take on some projects in order to finance others (which, we find from the 2005 DVD for F for Fake, meant he took a lot of acting jobs in order to finance films he was making on his own). (All the following facts except for some details of Castle’s career are related in Bogdanovich’s discussion or otherwise on the 2000 Lady DVD.) Welles was mounting on Broadway a version of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, which was expensive, and (per Bogdanovich) he had no money for costumes. So as an assumed potboiler, he proposed to Hayworth’s boss at her studio, Harry Cohn, that Welles write and direct what he anticipated being a minor thriller, an adaptation of a novel titled If I Die Before I Wake (by Sherwood King).

William Castle, the director of later (1950s-60s) shlock pictures and, contrarily, producer of the great Rosemary’s Baby (1968), owned the film rights to the Sherwood novel (and did some work on the screenplay for what became Welles’s film); but Welles managed to get the rights acquired for his film (Castle is noted in credits as one of the producers). Welles wrote the script, and agreed to act in the film as well as direct; his wife Hayworth’s involvement meant it was a sort of star vehicle, which wasn’t his original intention. One might conclude this was an unexpectedly fancy project for Welles to get involved in, just to get money to finance part of his stage production.

The film production became elaborate enough, for whatever reasons, that it had no fewer than three cinematographers (though only one is credited); and of course it was on location in multiple sites, including Acapulco and San Francisco, which adds to the visual and vignette-level variety and exoticism of the film. But one could just as readily say that there is something rather arbitrary about the plot: a lot of the story revolves around a cruise (allowing shipboard scenes) that Michael O’Hara takes in filling the ad hoc role of a sort of spontaneously adopted ship hand, when Hayworth’s character Elsa goes with her wealthy husband (Bannister) on a trip on their yacht; the favor to O’Hara is ostensibly as repayment for O’Hara’s fortuitously helping her when she had been attacked by thugs in a city park. (If this all sounds rather far-fetched, I tried to describe as elegantly as possible, in as plausible a set of terms as I could, the plot setup, which is a good example as any of the story peculiarities of this film.)

A droll/grotesque element involving a law firm

Adding to the oddness of the film is a character—he’s another attorney (who is a firm partner with Bannister), but he’s certainly weird—named George Grisby, played by Glenn Anders. As a fairly conspicuous, steady element, this character is presented as an eccentric of sorts, and of course Grisby becomes the entry point for O’Hara’s getting roped into murder-centered shenanigans. (As I’ll focus on more later, the aspect of the film’s looking at the legal-practice world for satirical and spooky-noir possibilities is, on an important level, one of the most modern and still-relevant features of this film.)

Anders, whom Welles had liked from a 1930 work, is led to play up his surface oddness with various ways of speaking and leering (such as eyeing Hayworth through binoculars), and it isn’t enough that he seems rather “too weird” for the smoother intents elsewhere in the film, but huge close-ups of his somewhat homely face (including a spot on the white of one eye) happen a few times. The result is Welles’ using his visual sensationalism at turns—which Welles scholars point to as typical of his innovative ways—to add a sense of dislocation to this film. Thus it goes beyond the smooth, level-headed, if moody, styling of Billy Wilder and other ace practitioners of film noir, and Lady becomes a sort of “eccentric cousin” among the entries in this genre.

On the Monday morning after the weekend I squeezed this film in, I watched part of the DVD, most importantly scenes 15 through 18 (as numbered by the DVD), and got more of what the murder-plot was. As it turns out, this film followed the noir template of having a rather elaborately planned-out murder scheme, and maybe this film’s murder plot is a little more convoluted than most. I have to say that gleaning it from a viewing (almost two) was less fun—or there seemed less tasty substance there—than pulling out all the machinations, subtleties related to the plot, and so on that you can do with Touch of Evil.

Grisby first seems to want to tempt Michael into pulling off a fake killing—that Michael has killed Grisby, but Grisby would really flee the country or such, pointing out that, as a function of the law (per the script), Michael could produce a confession of killing Grisby, which becomes the basis of a declaration of death made about Grisby (so insurance on him can be collected—following the Double Indemnity kind of malfeasance), but without Grisby’s body, Michael couldn’t be charged with murder. (This is how the film lays it out; whether actual state or federal law would have conditioned this sort of thing, I don’t know.) Spookily, Bannister, in one throwaway shot, tells Michael that if ever he needs a lawyer, he is available.

Then, a rapid sequence of events unfolds that starts with Grisby seeming to trigger Michael into doing his bidding, with Grisby heading off from a shore-club location in a motorboat, while Michael fires a few to-nowhere gunshots to attract attention that is essential to staging the fake killing. Michael flees…and Grisby catches up with him, including accompanying Michael in a car, where Grisby causes the car to crash into the back of a truck to condition an alibi with respect to the fake murder. Grisby also wipes blood on Michael….

The thickening plot, and the colorful denouement

In the midst of this mess, Grisby encounters a private detective (played by Ted de Corsia, the only “marquis” name on the DVD box beyond the more recognizable stars noted), who lets Grisby know he is onto what Grisby and others are plotting (whether he is partly bluffing, I don’t know; I found this scene confusing when I first saw it, and it was only explained for me later in the Wikipedia article).

Long (or twisted) story short, inaugurating more tumultuous doings, Grisby shoots the detective, seems to try to pin it on Michael, and it seems to Michael as if Grisby is (in a more clever, overarching plot) going to kill Bannister (?)…. Michael hastens on the road (amidst all this, in visual shots we’re given, Elsa is taking in some of the sordid developments with a face we can’t entirely read, assuming our not already knowing how much she is supposed to know all of this)….

And when the law finally catches up with Michael, it turns out that Grisby really seems to be dead, taken away on a stretcher. Looking like the picture of an unsuspecting bystander to all this, Bannister comes out of some big building with his weird handicapped walk, very much alive. Michael is now about to be tried for murder. And Bannister, we find, will be his attorney.

The rest of the film is (I think) fairly straightforward plot-wise—that is, it winds through a trial sequence (played by Welles very pointedly [but in part] for satire of the excesses of the legal system). Here we see a judge who’s a bit of a buffoon, and a court process that includes some passing rude behaviors (like a big sneeze in the courtroom from a juror); the whole idea of a solemn, well-mannered procedure is intermittently mocked here (though it’s not always clear whether the satire’s focus is the putative pretentiousness of the legal process itself or the fallibility or boorishness of people in their roles in this process).

Most pointedly, an attorney questioning Elsa on the stand is a good case of an abusive litigator. We appreciate Welles’ focusing on the potential for hypocrisy of the legal system (and Bogdanovich, I think it is, comments that Welles had an antipathy toward lawyers). But Welles will do this kind of satire in a much more tooled, socially pointed way in Touch of Evil about a decade later.

Sidebar: Welles gets better at skewering the errors of the legal process years later. As one measure of how “topically” well-tooled Touch of Evil is on the issue of lawyers, one set of details is something that the much-later Coen brothers could equally well have arranged in a story: we find in Touch of Evil, in a relatively closely associated set of scenes that the same attorney, Howard Franz, in the fictional U.S./Mexican border town of Los Robles, has served all of Rudy Linnaker [sp?], a local construction-company owner; Eddie Farnum (played by Gus Schilling, a Welles acting regular who also appears once or twice in Lady), who has almost gotten prison for involuntary manslaughter and now works for Linnaker’s company; most comically, Joe Grandi, the temporary head of the Grandi family, an Italian clan that operates as a sort of clumsy gangster family on both sides of the U.S./Mexican border (seeming to deal in drugs as well as operate more legitimate businesses, like a bar and motel); and most recently Marcia [sp?], the daughter of Rudy Linnaker, who has been cohabiting with Manola Sanchez, who becomes the prime suspect in the bombing murder of Rudy Linnaker, and who—as the key plot driver of the film—is set up by Hank Quinlan (Welles) in performing his duties as the main detective for the town. Yet Howard Franz, the local attorney, pointedly does not represent Marcia’s boyfriend Sanchez, who impetuously (and bitterly) reveals, during the famous long-take scene in which Quinlan plants evidence on him and has him arrested, that he doesn’t have an attorney. Welles’ point couldn’t be plainer in showing that nearly every white male (and occasional female) in town, no matter how sleazy, can have the services of a local attorney (even when there is a risk of conflict of interest), but the local Hispanic man who becomes a criminal suspect, and is relatively poor, can’t get one.

There is a situation of Michael’s fleeing (a set piece in a kind of Chinese theater I felt was gratuitous aside from just allowing a visually intriguing few shots), and then there’s the climax of the movie where Michael tumbles down a big slide in an amusement park funhouse, and eventually ends up in the hall of mirrors where the final killing takes place (between who and whom, I’ll leave aside as not to totally spoil it for you).

When O’Shea is walking off (not quite into the sunset) at film’s end, making a remark about his being “stupid,” this doesn’t quite rise to the level of other of Welles’ modern-story films that include a Shakespearean one-liner or two.

A mixed-feelings conclusion

If one were to look (as film buffs) at this work (as can readily be done with others of his oeuvre) as a chance for Welles to milk some potential for cinema out of the exotic locations he was in, then it’s a feast of various tasty possibilities. The story, though, is confusing (or dense) at times, and lax at other times. The fact that (as happens, posing less of a problem, in other Welles films, like Touch of Evil) a lot of plot information gets shoehorned into a visually complex scene (though it’s not that it can’t be appreciably read on second or third viewing), here the aquarium scene (between Welles’ O’Shea and Hayworth’s Elsa) helps show that, throughout the film, you can find yourself feeling a bit bored at times (in slower moments), then (as here) needing to play closer attention at others. The inconsistency in story quality is one reason, I suppose, that this film’s rating by Leonard Maltin as three out of four stars seems about right.

So this is a good film for your short-ish Welles list to see. But if you had a chance to see only three of his, leave this one off.

A big footnote for the PH School series: Temp agencies shown yet again for their downsides

Showing that in the ambiguous employment armpit of New Jersey, a dedicated freelancer becomes like a Viet Cong guerrilla—armed with little more than bamboo, spit, and a whole lot of spirit

For those blog readers who don’t know, Part 9 of the Prentice Hall series and the three subparts of Part 10 (basically the concluding section for the tale of the HS-literature project) are on my other blog:

PH 9: A journal entry showing how my 1997-98 Prentice Hall gig started

http://jnthetransient.blogspot.com/2015/06/ph-9-journal-entry-showing-how-my-1997.html

PH 10, subpart A: A closer look aided by a heat-aged journal, before freelancer Mike arrives at the project in December 1997

http://jnthetransient.blogspot.com/2015/07/ph-10-subpart-a-closer-look-aided-by.html

PH 10, subpart B: Mike lends a cheeky western academic’s eye to this process

http://jnthetransient.blogspot.com/2015/07/ph-10-subpart-b-mike-lends-cheeky.html

PH 10, subpart C: Graduating out of PH School (not such a bad idea)

http://jnthetransient.blogspot.com/2015/07/ph-10-subpart-c-graduating-out-of-ph.html

Subsections below:

Temp agencies: For freelancers, a necessary evil, and something to try to outgrow

A year-plus with Olsten (1994-95)

Sidebar: the insulting skills test from Olsten

Prime Time Staffing (1997-98)

Interlude: The occasional downside to temp agencies: plugging the leaky lifeboat, so to speak

Adecco (2009)

Higher-class placement agencies specializing in medical-promo, other corporate-client editing, and such work (2001-07)

The Creative Group (2006?)

The pros and cons, especially the cons

Grateful for their role?

The present clot of stuff relates to some general features of temp and placement agencies as I dealt with them over about a 15-year period. This would have been a subsection of Part 10 subpart C, but that subpart was getting too long, so I saved it for here. And, in a way, it may seem more like technical mumbo-jumbo than most of the rest of the parts of this story (except for those who’ve worked through placement agencies and are only too glad to compare notes about them, with some vinegary attitude).

By the way, my comments here on agencies for payroll work do not imply any conclusions, attitude, or other idea/motivation that I have regarding literary agencies. They are generally different kinds of agencies, and in my life for more than 20 years (from very late 1985 to late winter 2005), my dealings with literary agencies were “walled off” from my dealings in the paid-work world. (It is only in very recent years that I would suggest that there are some general parallels [more than dissimilarities]—not entirely favorable to participants who are relatively naïve about these sorts of things—between literary agencies that specialize in genre writers and placement agencies that represent “creative” workers. But that’s for another possible blog entry.)

I hope you are looking forward to my future story on working for Prentice Hall’s Higher Education division, when I will hopefully be more warmed up for it (in a certain way, past summer trouble) in the fall. The PH School (HS lit) story became a bit of a bear, and in a way this paralleled the kind of schooling (at large) it is tied to: just as in grade school, you’re shepherded along, expected to conform (not throw pencils across the room, etc.) and maybe learning things or adopting practices some of which may not be your bag (in the late 1970s, I had some amount of pleasure doing the proofs for trigonometry in high school, but what exactly do you use trig for in later life??), in the PH project there was a pell-mell, be-a-good-lemming aspect to the work…. Also, in a way, grade school can be like what that 1997-98 HS-lit project was (or represented, or catered to) to an extent: education by committee, idiot conformity, your being neglected by the prerogatives of the herd and bone-headed power issues….

But college is more about tailoring education to your talents, and about your developing sophistication as an individual. And my time with PH Higher Ed rather echoed this: the books were not built by committee (and to this extent they were more like trade books), and your individual power as a skilled white-collar worker was what was valued. That suited me better.

But also, the Higher Ed story (from few-month periods in each of 2001 and 2002) has some eye-openers. For instance, my supervisor Ginny, who was generally quite good to work for—but who ended up in about September 2002 making a decision that ended my time with Higher Ed for the indefinite future—did not have an education above high school. But she was in charge of getting supplement books that were bundled with Higher Ed’s Social Sciences and Humanities textbooks off to the printer. Is there a tasty “insider story” here? We’ll see….

Temp agencies: For freelancers, a necessary evil, and something to try to outgrow

I’ve spoken on aspects of working with temp or placement agencies before, and will make a few apropos summaries remarks here. I remember, in 1984-85, some temporary workers doing minor tasks in a special project in the administrative office at the Marvin Center, the big student union at my college, where I worked over a five-year period. I remember thinking that that (temping) was one line of work I never had to do, and maybe hoped I’d never do.

But after my editorial career started in 1990, I found the occasional need to utilize a temp agency or a placement agency. Note: This sort of work arrangement was something I did intermittently, and over the long term, I could work (very roughly speaking) alternating temp arrangements with arrangements where I negotiated with (and worked for) an employer (that was a media company) directly (and in fact, all significant cases I had of “entre” into a new sort of company or field, from 1990 on, I did without using a temp agency; the only specialized area where I started with this “form of entre” was medical promotions in 2001, and even in that field, I eventually started occasionally working for such companies directly, not through a placement agency, in 2006. In fact, 2006 was my most successful year money-wise, and variously throughout the year, I did this via both a placement agency (GLG) arrangement and via clients I worked for directly.

(It is something of a coincidence that I also, in the trade-book realm, both worked with literary agents—four of them, in total, and intermittently—and corresponded with publishers’ editorial offices directly [starting in 1986]. And in fact, even after the start of the millennium, when it seemed literary agents had become both essential and exclusive to getting trade books published, I still heard directly from some trade-book editorial offices—in 2005 and 2006 [and these weren’t ones I’d dealt with through any literary agent previously, at least since ~1997].)

A year-plus with Olsten (1994-95). After what I had seen at the Marvin Center in 1984-85, I wouldn’t work for a temp agency until 1994-95, and that was Olsten; through Olsten, I worked at an insurance company, and this overall arrangement was the best thing I could scrape together after the cold, saddening end to my time at Clinicians Publishing Group in late winter 1994. The insurance company—I was at the pensions and annuities division of MetLife—was a very pleasant place to work, and I did consider the idea of going into that field and (for payroll work, anyway) leaving publishing; but insurance is respectable work but boring, and—as with sales—you have to have the personality for it. The crazy office politics that were rampant in publishing were blessedly absent from insurance, but I felt that publishing was really where my heart was, so I wanted to get back to it.

Olsten turned out to be bastards in handling an unemployment claim I made in mid-1995, after my time at MetLife was over. (What triggered this is an interesting little episode that would add too much meat to this entry. After MetLife ended, where I got $10 an hour—this had been raised from a smaller amount when I started there—and which was less than the $12 an hour I’d gotten at CPG, and following a tiny Olsten-arranged stint at an auction house, in about late June Olsten suddenly put me in a demeaning clerical position at a big company’s office in Parsippany, at $8 an hour. The day I started, I asked to be removed from this and not be placed at a site until they had a job for me at $10 an hour. Well, there was a kerfuffle where I was taken out of the placement—there was a misunderstanding, or lie, on the part of either my supervisor at the client location or the Olsten rep [or both; the Olsten rep involved was also not the nice one I’d worked under when I was at MetLife]—and then I didn’t have work through Olsten for a while. I then filed for unemployment, and on the decision of the local [Sussex County] unemployment office, I was denied benefits at first on the premise that I had recently refused work. The rest is a long story that ended favorably for me, but not before five months of an unemployment juridical process.)

Then (independent of a temp agency) I started work for Reed Reference Publishing in October 1995, and the unemployment issue with Olsten—which was in a sort of court process—was still going on, only to finish in about December. Winning the most important part of the case, I said good riddance to Olsten, and never wanted to work for that kind of temp firm—essentially, what I call an “envelope-stuffing temp” firm—again, and I never have.

Sidebar: the insulting skills test from Olsten (this in draft form was a footnote for Part 10 subpart C that I redacted at the last minute):  Similar to Mike’s getting tested for computer skills in a way he found insulting, I had a banal experience with Olsten temporary services in 1995. After I had worked for them at MetLife (doing clerical work, including writing customized letters to clients) for over a year, almost as if I was coming in completely new, I believe in May or June 1995, Olsten ran me through a battery of tests in their Parsippany office to see my full set of basic office/computer skills. There was some problem with getting the printouts of my test, and as an indirect result, I ended up taking home a bunch of bum printouts, which I used for scrap paper for some time after. Anyway, the only thing among the computer skills I proved good in was Word (I forget whether Word Perfect or MS Word—this was 1995, remember), which accords with what has been my long experience in the work world. Among today’s suite of Microsoft programs, I still am better at Word than anything else; and rudimentary on Excel and PowerPoint, and with basically no skill at all in what is called Access.

I remember feeling a bit humiliated at the type of tests I was run through, as if I was to be considered little better than a potential low-level admin. Needless to say, this was while they weren’t considering me for my editorial skills (before then, I’d done millions of words of work at All American Crafts, AB Bookman, and CPG; and in the future I would work for Prentice Hall, The World Almanac, Peoples Publishing, and eventually Cambridge Scientific Abstracts/ProQuest). Mike’s experience of 1998 and my experience of 1995 comprise a good example of what defines what most outsiders would think of as a “temp agency”—what I call the “envelope-stuffing temp” sort of agency, like Manpower, Kelly, and Olsten. These handled lower-level office workers and were a firm part of the business landscape by the 1980s. But over the years in more recent decades, agencies for “creatives” and such sprouted; as one example, Robert Half International, today, includes these in its panoply of different-market agencies; and, more broadly, even lawyers and accountants can be handled by the relevant temp agencies (including within the Robert Half fold). The Guy Louise Group was a “creatives” type agency—and then in 2007, after existing about seven years, it collapsed due to non-payment of its bills by several of its clients.

Prime Time Staffing (1997-98) was more of a “creative staffing” agency, or a placement agency, as I would come to identify the likes of Horizon Graphics and The Guy Louise Group. By June 1998, I was fine with ending my relationship entirely with PTS. PTS was the sine qua non for my getting into PH, but then when the manic HS-lit project went on, all PTS did was collect money off my back (as it did numerous other temps) without adding any value to the work process.

Once Christina B. ended my time at PH as I’ve described in Part 10 subpart C (and now you can see that with all my previous experience in working for nationally-distributing publishers directly, and with my having dealt with trade publishers as a writer for more than 10 years by 1998, her condescending attitude as if I should be “tamped down” in my status as a temp was grossly inappropriate), I don’t know if PTS held out any “hope” of my getting more editing work through them (and probably I didn’t realistically expect or desire any from them, anyway). But also, because I had much experience with getting work from publishing entities without the aid of a temp agency (and had some in hand at the time); and given my experience with Olsten in 1995 and considering PTS’s parasitical role in 1997-98, I felt it was right for myself to end my association with PTS. Luckily there was no nasty incident (regarding PTS alone) to how this association ended.

Interlude: The occasional downside to temp agencies: plugging the leaky lifeboat, so to speak

From much more recent experience, I can tell you, among other things, that one defining feature in common to all the different sorts of temp agencies is their occasional willingness, for sheer momentary practical reasons, to try to shoehorn you into work that either is afield of what you want to do or have experience in (but may be a grubby expedient you might consent to resort to), or is simply something you’re not qualified for, in a way that should forbid your being considered for it.

(This experience has its analogue for other workers in different ways: Tony, a fellow freelancer I worked with occasionally in the decade 2001-10, and with whom I traded many humored e-mails about our work lives, for years worked in temp arrangements, and this dovetailed with his aim to be able to collect unemployment when he wasn’t in a temp-agency-arranged placement. This is one indirect benefit of temp agencies: you are a payroll employee, with taxes deducted from paychecks, including unemployment tax. Thus, if you square with the requirements you must meet to collect benefits based on when you stop having work, etc., you can go on unemployment [a state program]. [I personally didn’t prefer this arrangement, for reasons I won’t delve into here.] But the downside Tony faced from one or more of the several temp agencies he worked with is that he sometimes had to require of them not to place him in certain cities [near the Hudson, like Jersey City, etc.] that they occasionally tried to put him in [he lived in a township in Passaic County quite close to the western part of Bergen County].)

(A metaphor for the issue of bad placement by temp agencies is: deciding to work in a temp role is like getting into a special kind of lifeboat, from a putative emergency service, after you have been floating unsupported for some scary time. But then you find the boat occasionally springs a leak, and as a preordained condition of your staying in it, you have to put your bare buttocks into the hole to plug up the leak. This is what it means to be subject to occasional bad placements in this work arrangement.)

Adecco (2009). This almost doesn’t merit mentioning, but there is an interesting aspect to it adding nicely to my gallery of temp-agency ambiguity. In 2009, the nadir year for many of us who were punched in the stomach economically by the 2007-08 financial crisis, I bit the bullet and applied to work for Adecco, meaning sign up with them to get placed elsewhere, in September 2009. I guess I saw them advertise in the newspaper; I don’t know why else I chose this firm. And again, as has happened at other junctures in my life, if I wasn’t financially desperate, I wouldn’t sign up for a placement agency after all I’d learned about the nature of them since 1994.

Well, as it happened, this place showed its stripes early enough that I withdrew my application from them when I was still in the protracted sign-up process. Adecco is yet another big corporation, with offices throughout the country; this one is based in Europe (Switzerland?). I read up some stuff online about them in 2009; there was the usual layperson snark/such where there was questioning, or such, about whether they were a scam. There was some information about a legal investigation; without the info readily at hand right now, I suggest you merely Google “Adecco fraud 2009” and see what you see (disregard the site that seems to show a “stolen” Adecco Web site page). Let’s just say that in September 2009 there was enough to find online that I felt I should be cautious with looking to Adecco for work.

I went to the interview (the office I was involved with was in Parsippany, as it happened, it was on the same basic office-campus complex that the Ferguson division of CommonHealth used to be in). I had to stop there a few times. They even had me watch a video on the procedures to be followed regarding sexual harassment and some other type of corporate issue, and this was before I was even fully hired. Anyway, the sticking point was some questionnaire, an online or intra-office computerized deal, where you had to answer questions related to how you functioned as an office worker. There were measures that were obvious enough for testing your honesty (e.g., questions roughly along the lines of, what if you became aware of a coworker stealing goods from the office, and/or what if you were required to fudge some data, or such). I answered as best as I could, to try to reflect how I was as a worker. Then I got word that I didn’t meet their requirements; they said, fudge your answers a bit—obviously meaning, show how you could be less than honest regarding some of the questions, just to get a better score. So, a bit bothered by this, I took the test again, this time answering “to make myself look better” (I believe that was almost the phrase given to me), to try to meet the desired goal.

They came back and said I still didn’t have a good enough score. In other words, I answered the questions to make myself look worse than I aimed to be as a worker, to the point where I was a bit uncomfortable with how I answered, and I still didn’t pass. At that point, I withdrew my application from Adecco; and this was with some resignation and annoyance (I felt slightly justified given the item I’d seen on the Internet about Adecco getting in trouble for fraud in Missouri or some other Midwestern state). It was better to avoid sleaze rather than cave into it just to get some money rolling in. And signing up with Adecco didn’t even guarantee I’d have steady work (from some factual statement I got from one rep, I think), or work at places I didn’t feel comfortable, or served professionally well, at.

To add insult to injury, when I talked about this experience in about 2013 with a man who has run a support group/coaching setup for people long out of work, in Warwick, N.Y.—a nice man in other contexts, and I repeatedly attended the group when its main facilitator had previously been a female who has since left the region—he didn’t quite get what I was talking about (specifically the creepy computerized-questionnaire situation), or was surprised as if he found it hard to be true. At one point—he was familiar with one or more branches of Adecco from his own work experience—he even corrected me (pedantically) on how to pronounce Adecco’s name (which was petty, given what ethical anecdote I was trying to relay to him). He knew of a branch of them in Orange County, N.Y., where apparently they handled jobs like box-making in a factory, or such. Well, maybe Adecco was on the up-and-up in Orange County, but the sleaziness I saw in the branch in Parsippany turned me off them a good bit, enough to withdraw my application. Enough said.

Higher-class placement agencies specializing in medical-promo, other corporate-client editing, and such work (2001-07). Horizon Graphics and GLG were different animals. Horizon I’d actually first contacted in later 1993 (they used to run ads a lot in the classified section of the state newspaper), when I was itching toward getting into substantial (or at least, better-paying) freelance work. Horizon in 1993 rather snootily said they required three professional references for its workers—or else they could get sued, was the rather ridiculous-sounding claim, by none other than Louise A., whom I would find a principal of GLG in 2004. I did not have three professional references to use until late 2000 or early 2001, when I would start signing on with Horizon (and then, I wanted to try to make more money hourly, which the likes of Horizon would help me do).

Signing on with Horizon—around the time I no longer worked for The World Almanac, which moved to Manhattan from Mahwah, N.J., meaning my hourly rate would have to be higher to accommodate travel expenses (our association ended quite peaceably)—finally happened, with my first placement through them at a first called Noesis, in Morristown; this meant a decidedly increased hourly pay. This also started my association with medical-promotions firms, which I had come closest (but not close enough) to getting into when I interviewed at a firm called Ferguson 2000 in early 1995.

I worked through Horizon at various firms—with ad/promo agencies in the Interpublic conglomerate as well as in the WPP conglomerate, among others—from May 2001 to about April 2004; Horizon had virtually gone dormant by very early 2004. Then I signed on with The Guy Louise Group in April 2004, and started getting more regular work at medical-promo firms again. I only found later that both Guy and Louise had started GLG in 2000, after having been at Horizon for years before (in fact, I met a freelancer who had known Guy originally from Horizon and automatically thought that Horizon, by 2005, was Guy and Louise, which by that point it hadn’t been for five years).

Horizon shrunk up enough by mid-2004 that it moved from its longtime location in Boonton, N.J., to one owner’s home in Montclair. The separate company of GLG, as I’ve recounted, suddenly collapsed in 2007, due to nonpayment (or increasingly lay payment) of its bills by several clients, including the medical-promo firms CogniMed and Access Communications.

The Creative Group (2006?). The Creative Group (which I think changed its name a bit) was (and still is) a “creative”-staffing agency, and I think Tony, whom I mentioned above, talked me into signing up with them (he had been with them, and would continue to after I left them). I was with them a year, but I wasn’t keen on working with them, and I can’t even remember what year it was (I can safely say it was within the period 2005-07). But I had enough other work gigs going on that the few times they called with a possible assignment, I preempted it by the fact I had something else.

This was a peculiar arrangement. I only had one assignment with them, a few-week (?) spell doing editing at a small firm in Fair Lawn, Bruce Leeb Associates (or something like that). The rest of the time (months after this), I kept them at bay by having something else that occupied my time, and I think they stopped calling me. Eventually I peaceably cut ties with them. I might not have mentioned them at all, but for the sake of completeness (and also in light of the fact that one or more of their reps have turned up among the “name cards” in my “People You May Know” section of my LinkedIn page) I include this here.

The pros and cons, especially the cons

Throughout the years 1994-2007, temp and placement firms were a crucial aid to my getting certain kinds of work. But as shown with Olsten and PTS, they could also (not over especially lengthy continuous time, but badly enough in certain pinching situations or limited periods) become seedy, parasitical places who seemed to be more out for themselves than for you. This is aside from the fact that every so often such firms—and this means Horizon and GLG, too—would try (as I said earlier) to wedge you into a position for which you really weren’t qualified (by virtue of type of work) or which was grossly inconvenient (located too far away, such as a gig I had in Manhattan in 2005). Olsten, also (as I said), fought my unemployment claim, and ended up losing on the bigger-money issue. PTS in 1997-98 was (to me) just distasteful, and I cut off from them at a good time to do it income-wise (and regarding what quality of companies I was with).

Horizon simply faded into nonexistence in my life. When they were virtually dormant in 2004, they spoke as if they would call me when they had work again, and they didn’t. I was surprised to find, in 2006, that a freelancer was working for them by late 2005 as if Horizon was back in the saddle again. So much for loyalty to someone like me.

GLG’s collapse speaks for itself—though I have to say I’ve always felt rather sorry for Guy, the principal who was left with trying to mitigate the mess he was in, getting his money in from clients “whenever” and paying the payroll money that numerous temps were owed (and I know at least one former worker was suing GLG by June 2007 [End note]). Others might have felt Guy and Louise were sleazes—I heard stray remarks to that effect—but I didn’t feel quite that way. I could work with them.

My mother has often said that Guy was more diligent about satisfying my demands or requests “because you keep after them.” Well, I acted to protect my interests to earn my money in a timely fashion, and I don’t think I was too difficult to them. I also found that, when GLG’s checks started to bounce (which first happened by late 2005 [and happened with a few other workers] and then happened in a much worse scenario about a year later), it seemed to be female temps who were being made to wait, more, than was a male like me.

Afterward, Guy (who had a family to support) founded a firm that wasn’t a placement agency. Louise, I found, was doing placement work again by 2010. When I was at CommonHealth in 2010, I heard something about Louise being used as a placement agent, and I was STUNNED. It wasn’t long after that I have found she was working for ADP, doing placement work. I have never wanted to work with her again post-2007. When GLG collapsed, she was cut loose from the situation, with Guy in effect left holding the bag.

Grateful for their role? Temp agencies and placement agencies, as I said, were key to my getting certain kinds of work (and I basically NEVER looked to them for permanent placements; rather long story why). But in general, after a certain point, whether with respect to specific longish-term gigs or over the very long term of your association with them, you become aware that they parasitize off you without adding a whole lot to the “work package” in terms of value for the money the client pays. If a childish person asked, “Are you grateful to them for their getting you work?,” I would answer that such childish morality doesn’t really apply to tough-minded commercial situations, not least when you end up victimized by them without adequate legal help. Temp/placement firms are a blessing, very loosely speaking, in terms of getting you work when you’re desperate for it. But their ambiguous nature becomes evident before too long, and they can sometimes do you a bad disservice.

When you also consider such news stories as, in The Star-Ledger (from 2012?), how a former state investigator for the Labor Department, in south Jersey, got five years in prison for taking $1.86 million in bribes from temp agencies regarding their being certified as in compliance with wage laws—you start to consider how, depending on the people running specific ones, temp agencies can be an unmitigated racket. (The news article is headed “Ex-state investigator gets 5 years in bribery case,” and is written by Jason Grant. Wish I knew what date paper it’s from—I usually scrupulously keep records of that.)

End note. The person who was suing GLG by spring 2007—there may have been more than one, but I’d been told of one specifically by a third party—was a former (retired) teacher, now working as a freelance editor, whom I’d met at Access. This person roots a few comments I could potentially make about the debatable suitability of teachers for the type of freelance editing work I’ve long dealt with the complexities of. But suffice it to say just this: When the symptoms of GLG’s breakdown were in my lap—i.e., I had several checks that would bounce if I cashed them—I found (from whatever legal resource I consulted in the library) that because GLG was a payroll employer of me, what I should do regarding the bouncing checks was make a formal complaint to the Wages and Hours division of the state Department of Labor, which I did. Suing was not the first step to take.

But this teacher/editor had elected to sue GLG (and I’m sure he had an attorney who came up with some pretext for taking the litigation route rather than his client’s filing a complaint as I did), and this teacher, as I could well imagine, had the sort of sense of entitlement that teachers can have: we can see this broadly from the phenomenon (not at all the teachers’ fault)—which is loud in New Jersey—of their public-employee pension funds needing to be more fully funded, and particularly the resulting personal complaints voiced in letters to the editor, the concerted union activity, the occasional childish rhetoric (in TV ads, or wherever), etc. It isn’t hard to see that when you are a teacher, and you’ve had union protections your entire career, you probably feel that, now retired and working as a freelance editor, you should have the perfectly accessible option of suing your employer if your paychecks are bouncing.

But I knew, from my own research, that we editors were in about as “unprotected” a situation (unprotected by unions, anyway) as we ever were: we had to file a complaint with the state, with whatever slowness and cumbersomeness that entailed. And as it happened, the state had contacted me and was just about to interview me on the phone to proceed with the complaint (this was in June 2007, after my complaint had been filed in about April) when Guy came up with the last check, and I could withdraw the complaint. (He knew I had filed a complaint, as I had few other practical recourses with the situation, but when he produced the last check, I cordially withdrew the complaint. As I said, I’ve felt sorry for him in this situation.)

Re Jonathan Pollard: I’ll have to get another metaphor

I remember probably when Jonathan Pollard was sentenced to jail—or, more exactly, I certainly remember hearing stuff about him within a very few years afterward, probably in the late 1980s, maybe even 1986 or 1987. (Much more recently, apropos of some other issue, I commented on his case in this blog entry from early 2013, within item #4 under the subhead “Some initial responses to the media discussion.”)

And certainly over the years, I knew enough about the case that I took notice, as have others, that every president since Ronald Reagan declined to release Pollard from jail every time his supporters tried another appeal for probation, release, or whatever, and the administration at hand reviewed his case records and apparently concluded easily, “No, keep him in jail!”

Also, every now and then in my private affairs, I thought—with some playfulness with the allusion—that I was “doing a Jonathan Pollard” whenever I reviewed in my records some key stuff about someone in the media-work world I’d had a very consequential falling-out with, and found that the specific, relevant history as recorded in my journal (or other records) showed that I should not be so forgiving, or otherwise forgetful of some key orienting fact, as I was in more recent times tending to do. (Because I did start thinking positively about these people, and then when I reviewed the old facts—some of which they, for whatever reasons [and serving their own interests], could have remembered just as much as I—I realized that my positive thinking was a bit too much wishful thinking.)

Now that Jonathan Pollard is slated at the hands of the Obama Administration to get parole after 30 years in prison—and parole could be very well what he is due, with his declined health apparently being one factor—I’ll have to get another metaphor than “doing a Jonathan Pollard” when reviewing old records.

What’s ahead? Is completion of the PH story just a mirage?

Where we’re going with a story that is mixed as to means of recollecting, and mixed as an experience

Subsections below:

The Prentice Hall series

An OFAD entry to come

A teaser for OFAD entry #8

[Edit 7/13/15.]

The Prentice Hall series

It’s a funny thing about this Prentice Hall story. There are so many aspects (and sources of interest) for it, to the extent I am willing to square with these. And my memories of it are varied.

I originally thought I would do a series on this last summer, i.e., could plan it for the fall (of 2014). I held off. Meanwhile, this year, in the late winter and spring, the PARCC tests (as used in New Jersey, at least), with all the attendant controversy, were a big news item. I cut out a ton of clips from newspapers about the PARCC; how does PH relate to this? As you may know, Pearson Education, which in the U.S. is essentially a successor to Prentice Hall—Pearson PLC (a British firm) bought Prentice Hall and other properties owned by Viacom in the late 1990s, renaming Prentice Hall (and other properties combined with it) as Pearson Education—produced the PARCC (though it’s government and educational advisory boards/committees of some kind that produced the rationale and state-level directives for this test; Pearson is just a vendor who worked for them in making the test [End note 1]). But the type of entity that Pearson Education is now—as it has moved this year from Upper Saddle River, N.J., to Hoboken, N.J. (after Prentice Hall was located in Upper Saddle River from about 1995 to about 2014 and in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., for many years beforehand)—could well be different from how I knew Prentice Hall in 1997-98 and 2001-02.

But maybe not so much. The recent editorial updates I added to my entries on PH may suggest my memories of that old experience are in part faulty. But that’s not such a thing as should give you pause. My most dense time with Prentice Hall, 1997-98, was a mixed bag. The HS lit project (conducted at the division called Prentice Hall School) was an enthusiasm-stirring freelance engagement to be in, as it was for many other freelance workers in the HS lit project. But the project was slovenly in ways.

Prentice Hall once was a grand old publisher, of the more traditional type, as to produce (among other things) Edwin G. Boring’s magisterial 1950 history (a second edition) of psychology as an experimental field (yes, the book may strike some as having a quality represented by the author’s surname), which I had as a textbook when I was at college; and sociologist Erving Goffman’s seminal tract Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963).

But by 1997, not only was PH owned by a corporate entity (Viacom) that also owned a movie studio (Paramount), a major trade-book publisher (Simon & Schuster), and who-knew-what-else, but PH produced a wide range of (non-trade) books: among them, texts that were standards for grade school; college textbooks and their paperback supplements, the latter of which were pretty haphazardly produced…. About as many stories of work on products that we could be proud of could come out of our time at PH as there could be stories that we freelance editors would accompany with rolling our eyes. PH even was the distributor (and producer, as far as I know) of college-course editions of classic books like Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and/or such titles as used to be published by the company Bobbs-Merrill (PH apparently had acquired their line of old titles). PH was a big publisher (as a reference-book listing of publishers might suggest, in giving number of titles released yearly), of mainly educational products, and in a sense maybe (by the later 1990s) it overextended itself with what it tried to offer.

By 2015, I really don’t know what it’s become (with PH now known as Pearson) in all its facets, but certainly if people see it as a soulless, remote corporation that produced a highly questionable (in their estimation) test like PARCC, well, I don’t know much about PARCC beyond what I’ve gleaned from the newspapers, but these people from their own ingenuously consumerist perspectives may see Pearson as capable enough of erring like any corporate mammoth, the way I as an editor might have felt a bit trampled by Prentice Hall when it was a different kind of behemoth 15 years ago.

So there’s that as a set of factors shaping how my story comes out (which, admittedly, has been going on on the basis of “I’ll get to it when I get to it”).

Also, I found in probing more deeply into my journal entries on this experience that it was like many a manic production process where, when the corporation says “Jump!,” you jump. There were exciting aspects, and aspects of being personally very productive (in a way leaving you feeling satisfied related to more-genuine career aims) and earning good money (at least, what counted as this for freelance editors). There were also reasons for grievance, big or small. But I’d say, overall, that this was a fairly good experience (except for how my connection with PH School ended in June 1998).

One measure of this is that, compared to other big-corporate projects in my experience where the proceedings were rather manic and willy-nilly (Reed Reference Publishing in 1995-96 and one or more medical promotions places in the 2000s), the relations with most coworkers at PH School were pretty good: no snide, hyper-competitive, creepily aloof work-peers who seemed to have a much bigger sense of entitlement, and willingness to sneer at coworkers beside them whom they “couldn’t identify with,” than they had talent or dedication to the project at hand.

Another measure is interesting: Penny, my coworker, whom I discussed in some detail in Part 3, looks to have been worse, as my journal shows, than I recalled when writing (off the top of my head) for Part 3, which itself might have seemed not entirely complimentary to her. You may ask, in these big, esteemed companies, if there’s a close coworker you have long-term trouble with, are there no judicious ways you can get help from any processes or departments within the company? (End note 2) Well, I am pleased to see how circumspect and rights-respecting I was in the 1990s. My vocal quality in my current blogs is just me taking the liberty of sounding off about the craziness in this field after putting up with it like a patient “team mate” for about 20 years. And I tried all sorts of ways in those days (1990s) to try to get satisfaction about difficult coworkers in ways in which there seemed at least a chance of following gracious, even-handed “due process” by whatever means a company would allow.

So, for instance, after putting up with Penny for about four weeks (late July to late August), I made a deliberate complaint about her to AnnMarie, the head of the studio. As a result, Penny had a talk with me, though very typically for her, she was very unilateral in talking with me, not more negotiating and “mutuality-respecting” as you might expect in such an ad hoc situation. (And her unilateral ways, if toned down—and with her being friendlier at times—would continue almost to the “bitter end” of this project. Details in future entries in this series will give more nuances, hopefully.) My seat (desk location) was also changed several times, and there was talk issuing from AnnMarie’s direction (twice, in fact) that we proofreaders would be “split up” (as to what groups/departments we worked with, presumably; I don’t quite know what this meant) though this never really happened. The way I was consistently kept in the thick of things production-wise in this project will be clearly conveyed in time.

So some final entries in this series will come. I am sorry this has taken so long, but as I’ve said, I never wanted to sail full-speed-ahead into this series, but sidled up to it. My memories of it are partial, and helped by looking at old records. And still, I will keep some aspects of this story “by recent memory only.” This will result in an interesting mélange of a personal/workplace history. Maybe that’s appropriate for an experience that was so mixed. Sometimes all you can do with a hectic work engagement that gets out of you (per the staff management) only what can be pumped out in five months, and leaves you basically to look, by your own forlorn devices, for something else in other venues down the road, is something that you can only present a few snapshots from, with the whole picture more suggestive at times than complete, that might be edifying to others. Some of these projects are unique and can’t be duplicated. The lessons you may need for yours of today (maybe in an Internet-focused firm) maybe can’t easily come from mine.

An OFAD entry to come

By the way, along with finishing up the PH series, I have another story to present, which is in process of being put together (in part because the source experience isn’t fully done yet), that will combine the “OFAD” and “Getting the Knack” themes. It’ll be a doozy, but fortunately it has something of a happy ending.

A teaser for OFAD entry #8

Mr. Kodiak Grizzly, the Jersey Mountain Bear, is sitting, looking winded, grey-muzzled and frazzled. He looks as if he’s normally a king of his domain, but newly humiliated by being hit by a huge truck. Then he spies another bear sitting next to him, also large but looking old, frazzled, and injured.

“Say,” Kody manages to ask the bear next to him, “you don’t look in the best of health. Might I ask what happened?”

“Well, you look a little peaked yourself,” manages the other bear. “First, thumbnail sketch: what happened to you?”

“I just got rolled for about a month by the Medicaid system in New Jersey. My coverage was stopped for a while then restarted. What about you?”

“Well,” the other bear licks his lips as he starts, seeming a bit daunted, “I was crossing a highway and got hit by a tractor trailer. I went flying like a little rabbit. I landed on the road. Then I got hit by another truck, and I was sent flying into the woods! I lay there for about an hour, thinking I might end up dead. I felt like I couldn’t move for the longest time. Then I finally got up and tried to head home, but inadvertently I was back out on the road, and I was hit by another truck! I thought I had a few too many bones broken. Then I managed to walk a few miles to here. So what happened to you?”

Mr. Kodiak Grizzly tells about his experience with Medicaid over the past month.

After, the other bear rubs his brow. “Sheesh, before hearing that, I felt I was almost dead. After hearing it, I don’t feel so bad!”

##

End note 1. The New York Times, on July 10 (p. A22), had an article (I’m recalling from a quick scan of it yesterday) on how the firm making the test for New York State (on the level of the PARCC, addressing needs created by the No Child Left Behind Act, per the article) is going to be Questar rather than Pearson. This change, according to some spokesperson, was merely a function of the bidding process, not necessarily as a reflection on Pearson’s work with the other states it had served with the PARCC.

End note 2. You might ask, is four weeks (as I’ll refer to, shortly) an awfully short time to make an assessment that you have “long-term” trouble with someone? In these high-volume, high-pressure freelance situations, not really. And the problem may not simply be a function of time, but (more) a function of the characteristic quality of the behavior of the person you’re dealing with. Penny, despite her being nice “as a person, in terms of manners in ordinary circumstances,” was as a coworker a very one-sided, sometimes manic-mouthed type, never mind that her practical decisions in how to respond to the work demands were not only impractical after a while, but led supervisors to start bypassing her when it came to whether things would be proofread. And her “work style” was such that really disturbed your ability to work at times, aside from how she might have created a more long-term false impression among others (like staffers who might have influence over your being brought in again as a freelancer, later) about how you were as a worker. What I describe as what I did regarding her was the best someone in my position could do in such a situation. And you can understand more, in Part 3, how I slammed a set of papers down on a table in dealing with her one time, which happened in October.