In the wake of the mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado, for some good perspective related to what will or should happen next with viewing movies in theaters, see this short piece by the main (or only) movie critic for The Star-Ledger in New Jersey.
My entry on Fiddler on the Roof that I posted yesterday was by no means intended to relate to the Aurora tragedy. It was in preparation for some time, and I opted to post it when I did due to practical realities. Moreover, there was, of course, coverage of many other things, in newspapers and other venues, on July 20 amid the heavy coverage of the shootings.
If I might add anything to all the public discussion on this matter, aside from the well-meaning-enough "We must come together as a nation at a time like this," it's that this country is also great for setting an example, or needing to, on how we can disagree. And of course that doesn't mean shooting up a theater full of people.
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Friday, July 20, 2012
Movie break: A child of its 1960s time, about great-grandparents’ travails: Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
…with a glance at Schindler’s List (1993) and Shoah (1985)
[This entry is somewhat hustled out, subject to editing later. In some respects, it represents a sort of “catechism” of mine in that many of the concepts and assumptions here, a product of cultural and values-related learning over many years, ought to take fairly routine, “pious” spelling-out; they shouldn’t require tough/conscientious wrestling-with, as some of my other, more-complex entries have required. Yet this entry has turned out long, covering a lot of ground, and may contain dumb errors. Edit 10/16/14.]
The topic of movies with particularly Jewish-related themes—which, as it happens, have to do as much with awful, disserving history as well as especially ethnic concerns—seems like it could be risky for me. But you could consider it a way station to other blog discussion I may do, when it is relevant and I can contribute healthily. My book idea I’d previously mentioned, with the working title The Jewish Experience in America from a Protestant Perspective, isn’t some frivolously tossed-off sneering remark. The title itself is meant to reflect what I intend to be its component of humor; since so much about Jewish culture that gets promulgated in the U.S. media seems the province of Jews, why not have Gentiles do it on occasion, too? (Even one like me, who has had a lot of his schooling in religious and cross-cultural matters from autodidactic means and hard experience.)
The main thesis of the book, which itself is very much in the formative stage, is that, not least in the U.S., Jews, try as they might to be assimilated into Western culture, or to be embraced, while maintaining some version of their ethnic identity, ultimately live out a paradox that badgers their trying to be integral to “Western identity”: they act as they have long been, as a very self-protective ethnic minority. This is not something they can be blamed for, or that in itself (for any ethnic group) is so very bad. It is, obviously, in part an inevitable consequence of the history they’ve had, often involving expulsion, stigmatizing, harassment, and so on, for millennia. One way the paradox can be measured is that, as much as the Holocaust (or the Shoah, as some consider the more proper name) gets discussed in educational contexts, Gentiles can be turned off—they can feel, not being especially mean, that this is, with all else, Jewish self-promotion—because, in part, haven’t there been other instances of genocide, too? Against the Ukrainians in the Soviet Union? Against the Armenians in Turkey? Against the Tutsis by the Hutus (and vice versa) in the Rwanda/Burundi region? And so on.
This whole subject—of genocide—obviously is freighted with many aspects, brings strong emotions, is addressed by many voices, and so on. My thesis about the Jewish paradox itself, just mentioned, invites possible controversy on an admittedly complex issue. Plus, the fact that I meant my book to combine scholarship (whether from within the academy, or autodidactic) and personal reminiscences, and serious as well as humorous passages, suggests I could encounter strong criticism from different quarters.
I remember when I was interviewed in December 2002, for a newspaper article on depression and the workplace that appeared in the Daily Record (the main newspaper of Morris County, N.J.) in January 2003, the interviewer, an astute reporter named Lorraine Ash who conducted a very hearty two-hour interview with me and seemed genuinely interested to probe for various things, once made a remark that has popped up in my mind numerous times since. Sometimes it has rankled; sometimes it has just been food for intense, creative enough thought. When I mentioned the subject of one of my key nonfiction books that I’d been shopping around for some years, and which was handled by a literary agent at the time (but not placed with a publisher), she said something very blunt like “I wouldn’t find that interesting” or such.
Then, in turn, she told about a book idea that she had: something about what it would be like to experience pregnancy and the aftermath—the first year of having a child, or such. I forget what I answered, but what I have long thought I could have said was this: “Well, just on its one-sentence face, I’m not that interested in that idea for a book to read myself, but you know, what an author does is take an idea in which he or she has a keen interest and finds a way to make it interesting to others. (And so I might be interested in it depending on what you do with it.)” This is, in sum, what I think any author does. So though the marketing blurb for something may seem like a dud of an idea, just read the book, and you see why’s it’s interesting.
And you can especially write an interesting book, I think, if you address both the negative experiences and the positive. Because that’s life anyway. So if I was to write a book about Jews, including from my experience with many of them going back to 1968, many of which are positive, I don’t care to hear from anyone, Jewish or otherwise, as to whether they would on the face of the idea have a lack of interest in my book or not. I would approach it to make it interesting, to myself first and then, hopefully, to others. If I was to write a rant about Jews, particularly how I have had more career setbacks and jolts from Jews than from people of any other ethnic group (and which of course would entail a minority of Jews I’ve dealt with, by no means all), I would not lack for material. But a rant would be like a stupid beer-ball blowout—it may serve a need in the short term, but you pay a painful price, and what lasting value does it have? But try to write your non-rant book with heart and balance, and make it an occasion for discovery for yourself as well as for the reader, well, then you have a chance of making something worth others’ time and maybe with some lasting value.
I think this is one way to understand what it means to write a Jewish-themed story for a general audience. In choosing the three movies I list above, it may seem like I am being coy, or cute, or harebrained—do I really know that much about Jews to group these three movies like that? Actually, this is meant to be a short review, and isn’t meant to be as jokey as, say, Woody Allen’s vignette in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) where his character, opting to become a Roman Catholic, piles up what he seems to think will pull off the trick: a crucifix, a loaf of white bread, and some mayonnaise.
I. Lanzmann’s Shoah and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List
The original spur for my doing this review—which was originally more to focus on Schindler’s List and Shoah—is a remark made by Claude Lanzmann, who made the latter movie, in winter or early spring 2011. He made some grumpy remark (reported in The New York Times) related to the fact that hardly anyone (in the U.S.) was seeing (or apt to see) Shoah, and meanwhile Schindler’s List was…he had little good to say about it. In flavor, he reminded me of the kind of grumpily, volcanically opinionated type (among Jews) who was forever bearing witness in thoroughly uncompromising terms and would stand for addressing the horror of the Holocaust until he died, and he would not simply debate you but press upon you his undeniable vision…. This is a bit of a caricature, and I would say that we need Claude Lanzmann types to do the job he has; and he also reminds me of a philosophy professor I had in graduate school, Steven S. Schwarzschild, who makes for an interesting story I’ll tell another time.
I myself have seen Shoah, in a truncated version (I saw part or all of it) that was shown around 1985 or shortly thereafter. I would recommend it in the sense that, if you want to see a movie that gives important witness to the Holocaust, this is the definitive one. But I just as quickly realize that it would not be a widely seen hit by any stretch of the imagination. This would be not even among Jews, in the U.S. Don’t take my Gentile word for this; see, for example, this one among articles that have dealt squarely with this (you have to go digging for the blog entry for January 4, 2011) when it was more a “current issue” (and especially when you talk about the nine-hour version of Shoah, which I think only the smallest group of people would be willing to do). This particular item is a Jewish person writing; I think the unaptness to be popular of Shoah isn’t simply an opinion that is typically Jewish, Gentile, or anything else; it is a matter of basic marketing sense, to put that in the least uncomplimentary light.
There was an interview of Lanzmann that includes a dismissive remark of his on Schindler’s List: The interview, conducted by a British journalist, includes (with the writer’s own voice incorporated): “ ‘We are a strange people,’ Lanzmann once said. ‘A people who carry such a heavy past, ever-present, and are confronted with such a harsh present.’ It is a mistake to assume that a man [like Lanzmann] capable of the most sensitive understanding of the plight of one people must necessarily feel compassion for everyone. Nor is there a law that says compassion in one field cannot be transformed into belligerence in another.”
So obviously Lanzmann is a drink that is not everyone’s cup of tea. But we respect his uncompromising position, as a sort of curator of an important type of, generally speaking, bearing witness.
When it comes to Schindler’s List—I have seen the movie a few times, but not read the book—I would strongly disagree with Lanzmann on its being, for his type of purposes, a silly or unworthy movie. I think if you’re going to have U.S. cinematic treatment of the Holocaust, this is about the best way to do it—fashioning a story that includes not just an ashes-in-mouth depiction of pogrom-type or herd-into-gas-chambers horrors, but something else that gives us some healthy perspective of some kind.
The debate on which is better cinematic treatment—Shoah or Schindler’s List—has certainly aroused a lot of talk. The amount of discussion/controversy comparing the two films hits you like a brick in the forehead if you Google “claude lanzmann schindler’s list.” There are several pages of relevant results. They suggest that discussion would be daunting for me—I would be a pipsqueak to try to be equal to it.
All I’ll say is that, if you want to see how a movie can treat the Holocaust, Schindler’s List is worth a look (and remember, among director Steven Spielberg’s movies, especially his more acclaimed ones, it is not by any means among his biggest hits in terms of box-office receipts [see, for an update, my review of Schindler's List on my other blog, in mid-October 2014]). Controversy is so apt to arise regarding this topic, or any aspect of it, that people (as I’ve heard firsthand and otherwise seen written in a letter to the editor of a major publication) have criticized its main character Oskar Schindler—more exactly and to the point, the real-life correlate—as if he was only working to save about 1,000 Jews because he made money doing it. I think this misses the point big-time. Claiming to be a businessman, using a large number of Jews as factory workers, and while acting as if his motivation was making money was obviously good cover for what he ultimately did, no question: save 1,000 Jews within Germany’s territory while World War II was on. Even if his motives were mixed or ambiguous early on—it is interesting that, apparently, at every other time than when he was sheltering the 1,000 Jews, he was not a successful businessman—the fact that he ultimately resolved to do what he could to save the Jews within his responsibility—at obvious risk to his own life—shows how heroic he was being. To me, there should not be much controversy on this.
The more valid question may be Lanzmann’s—is this the only way you can depict the Holocaust? Were there so many Oskar Schindlers in Germany
And I think how Schindler is portrayed, by the large Irish actor Liam Neeson, is canny: visually and in some acting ways he is somewhat opaque, if a formidable mover-and-shaker of some kind: he is shown the way an Oskar Schindler can only have been, a big galoot of a German who could get a large bunch of people into motion in line with his project, which is the only way a Schindler could have operated, even if he was hoodwinking the Nazis in the process. I think this also says something complimentary about the Germans, that not only did you have insidious Nazi functionaries, but courageous souls who knew how to work within the awful regime at hand to work to a higher cause. And it says something wise about the broader issue of how a magnanimous person can function sanely in a temporarily insane society.
II. Fiddler on the Roof
Fiddler on the Roof is a tough bird to have to analyze today—offering layers of meaning to have to explain similarly to another story that is a “child of its time,” The Crucible (see my May 5 blog entry).
Thumbnail sketch of historical aspects. Fiddler was probably the hugest stage hit of the 1960s; it ran for thousands of performances. Numerous of its sources are well known; the story is stitched together from smaller stories by the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem. Jerry Bock wrote the music, and Sheldon Harnick wrote the lyrics. Jerome Robbins created the original choreography. Zero Mostel (see my April 13 entry on the movie The Front) apparently crafted definitive aspects of the original stage version of Tevye the milkman (see the Wikipedia article on the movie); perhaps people who saw him on stage always remember his version as the definitive Tevye. Herschel Bernardi (see my The Front entry) also performed as Tevye at some point.
My own personal history with Fiddler. Herschel Bernardi recorded versions of Tevye’s singing parts that were included on an LP—my family had a copy of this, I think; and I vaguely remember his “If I Were a Rich Man” being on the radio in about 1967. By the 1970s, to me, Fiddler on the Roof was—I might exaggerate a tiny bit here—one of the most familiar cultural things I was aware of that had singalong songs, and a certain piquant flavor due to the poignant story and cultural trappings it brought. In 1978, my high school’s drama club mounted a stage version of Fiddler, in which I served as part of the “stage tech” crew. While other students took on the colorful roles of characters in the play, I was among the unseen noodges who helped build scenery and, when the play was performed, moved scenery around in enough shadows to keep us, hopefully, largely unseen by the audience. By 1978, I was familiar enough with the play via both the recordings I noted above and the film version, which I had to have seen either in the theater or on TV (probably the latter) in the mid-1970s, that what I learned during the mounting of the play in 1978 was many of the details—lyrics, bits of the story….
When I see the film today, so much of it is as familiar as the Pledge of Allegiance or an Irving Berlin song like “God Bless America,” and yet, as often happens with re-watching an old film on something you should know well, you pick up on details you never knew well before, or you appreciate “old familiar” things anew, from an older person’s perspective.
Also, my own experience with Jewish ethnic realities in the 1960s-70s is complex, and can only be sketched in a tiny way here. My own family, while my father was from German stock, had some “indoctrination” into Jewish ways in the minor sense of a family we were friends with in the late 1960s, the Heynes, who later ran a bakery in our town for about 30 years. Carl Heyne, the paterfamilias (who helped my father on a house-building project my father helmed), had a Jewish mother and a German father who converted to Judaism; both the parents of his wife Doreen were born Jewish. That “family-historical fact” was the first root of what I would develop as a very widely informed consciousness of Jewish values and manners. What also helped, in an indirect sense, was my own tendency to decline to identify with German ethnic background: my mother is not at all German, and my immediate family, after my father’s death, was more apt to have humorous irony about Germans than to adopt the identity in some way. (In part this reflected idiosyncrasies of my mother’s.) I also had a sense from about age seven not to identify with any ethnic group and to think of myself as “American” only. Along with this, I had a sense that, given the Holocaust, which was the sort of thing I kid could grasp as a historical mooring without too much trouble, I couldn’t have unadulterated respect for the Germans. (My attitude in this regard has changed slightly over the years; but my “ethnic position” is such that, after all these years, if I were to visit a European country, Germany would not be at the top of the list; meanwhile, my sister and all my cousins who are children of my father’s brothers have been in Germany at different times for different reasons—which doesn’t necessarily reflect ethnic pride on their part, I think.) All this relates indirectly to the fact that my sympathy toward Jewish experience was inevitable from an early age. (This whole area invites elaboration.)
And among the writers who had an early impact on me, before I left town for college, were Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller. One of the more important psychologists I would discover in college was Viktor Frankl, some of whose teachings derived from his experience in a concentration camp. (Of course, once I started in college in 1980, and I semi-jokingly told a Jewish peer there that I knew some Yiddish, or such, from having seen Fiddler on the Roof and I was responded to with a kind of cool irony, I was—certainly not only on the basis of that—on my way to a large journey of discovering a wealth of things about Jews, not all positive.)
Broader historical aspects of the story. Part of what makes Fiddler a bit of an odd cultural artifact is that its story is not of the Holocaust, though in some obvious ways it metaphorically depicts things like the coming Holocaust, or historical things that give some relatively remote predecessors of the Holocaust. For instance, when you see the film, you get the sense that the Russian authorities who harass the Jews, and eventually get the citizens of the shtetl Anatevka to move, are like Nazis, but they aren’t quite. The story takes place before World War I, say around 1905 or 1910; and the location seems to be in, or close to, what was called “the Ukraine,” a territory within Russia that contained its own (Gentile) ethnic group, the Ukrainians, whose language is very similar to Russian but is not exactly that. Ukrainians’ identity as separate from Russians’ is such, and the historical fact of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster was such, that in the early 1990s “the Ukraine” became one zone of the Russian empire that wasted no time becoming a separate country and thereby became the heftiest new country in Eastern Europe, with a population of about 50 million, representing the greatest single loss to the Russian Federation in terms of economic might.
So, while government functionaries in the Ukraine in the early 1900s, such as the heavies in Fiddler were modeled on, may have actually been ethnic Russians, if Anatevka was in the Ukraine, that shtetl wasn’t exactly chafing under Russians, but in a sense the larger Gentile population around it (mostly Ukrainians, some Russians) was close enough to Russian in general attitude and social standing—so that to say the Anatevka Jews were “encircled by not entirely friendly Russians” is historically not quite accurate, but close enough for the vague story purposes of Fiddler. Much less were the Ukrainians, or the Russians, of about 1910, Nazis, though the threat posed by the Russian government to Jews was real enough, with pogroms and such being a fact (and writers like the Jewish short-story writer Isaac Babel show some of the harsh realities within that historical framework).
The fact of Russian harassment of Jews foreshadowing the Nazi Holocaust in certain broad terms but not really in historical terms provides a certain “framework of sympathy” for the Anatevka Jews for Fiddler’s audience; but it needs to be kept in mind by educated viewers of this play that the bearish Russia providing some of the background of the story was not exactly the Nazi horror to come. Meanwhile, historical realities add to the dark complexity of all this, really offering a story of the phases of difficulty that various populations went through in the twentieth century: a commenter on the DVD making-of documentary for Fiddler says that when such shtetl Jews in real life (like the fictional Anatevka Jews) dispersed, some could have ended up in safety in the U.S. or elsewhere in Europe, but some could have ended up in the gas chambers at the hands of the Nazis. This latter historical eventuality is due to the fact that, once World War II had started, the Nazis were occupying territories of the Soviet Union and other parts of Eastern Europe, and at their hands Jews were shipped off to concentration and death camps as part of the Nazi “project.” And quisling governments in places like Romania, and what became Yugoslavia, and elsewhere had their own Nazi-sympathizing components that also shipped Jews to camps.
All this gets into complex and dark history I didn’t mean to get into so much here (see my April 16 entry, specifically a dry litany of numbers of dead in World War II, which I related to the movie The Front; that entry also has historical sources that can support at least some of my claims here).
In any event, the historical roots of Fiddler are interesting, and what’s even more interesting that in fashioning this iconic play, with its so-familiar songs and characters, there wasn’t an attempt to actually address the Holocaust as full-on as, much later, was the point of Schindler’s List or Roman Polansky’s The Pianist (2002). I suppose it’s safe to say a money-paying 1960s audience wasn’t ready for this at all. (Those World War II vets who wanted to see the many war movies that were churned out through the 1950s and 1960s had plenty to choose from, but by and large those were about American heroism, not about the gross realities of the Holocaust.)
Where we are today. All of this shows the historical setting of Fiddler. In a way, the play parallels the historical facts, and the willingness of middle-class audiences to deal with some of the horrors, of the twentieth century. The Jewish people behind Fiddler—such as its writers and its actors like Zero Mostel—knew they could go all out in turning out a kind of richly ethnic revue, but they also knew they would work within very firmly, safely defined limits. The result is that, today, 40 years after the release of the movie, and about 50 since it first appeared on Broadway, we have a cultural artifact that has its charms but also is dated in some ways…to put it mildly. But how today’s viewers react to it may be a function of cultural background, and in a sense of political inclinations, such as those fiercely defending Jewish prerogatives.
That plus the cultural sensitivity of a Gentile like myself, for whom in some vague sense Fiddler was a sort of “religious schooling” without knowing it was such at the time, look at the movie now with a fancy task of unpacking a range of things: the time-bound concepts of the movie itself, and one’s own changed perspective on the story and its many assumptions. Plus, my personal experience with Jewish associates—at college, work, or otherwise—since 1980 has been complex, rich, and not always pleasant.
So when I come to this movie today, I look at it in a range of ways that in some respects may make me seem like a jaded Jew being somewhat appalled at what seems like an old “Jewish minstrel show,” a kind of Amos and Andy about Jewish shtetl life. (It amazes me when some Jewish friends find out how much Yiddish I know; and my secret response to this is, Do you Jews want to be assimilated into, or embraced by, Gentile culture or not? Why should it shock you I know so much Yiddish?) But my experience is such that I say the movie can’t be so readily dismissed, but I do feel that, if young people were to view it today, it should be accompanied by a big effort to put it into historical perspective where its many assumptions are analyzed, and not merely in a mealy-mouthed, superficially philo-Semitic way.
The movie in itself. The film was produced at a time, according to the making-of doc, when the movie industry was in crisis—finances across studios were tight, and this supposedly was the only big-budget film being produced in its time, which would have been 1970 (for a 1971 release). Actually, if we look at the historical account of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls [end note 1], the movie industry was on the cusp of becoming a thing, for a decade, of director-artists redefining movies—in the ways of Coppola, Scorsese, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, and many others—while production/funding was unusual (for instance, Apocalypse Now, as I hope to write on soon, was weirdly funded like a cross between a self-financed indy and a giant-budget extravaganza, an arrangement that ultimately broke Coppola as the big name he had cultivated for himself in the 1970s, putting him on the artistic and business-related defensive for some years after). Fiddler on the Roof seems surprisingly reminiscent of Apocalypse Now in its production arrangement: the Mirisch Production Company, a sort of independent firm that had success in the 1960s with films including some of the Pink Panther romps and other, more respectable ones, was the producing entity behind director Norman Jewison, who had the role of both producer and director for Fiddler, giving him unusual freedom—until he started going over the large budget, which apparently was meant to be no more than $9 million. The distributor was, I believe, to be United Artists, which not only helmed numerous significant movies of the 1970s but also got financing for Apocalypse Now started (Coppola’s first big shot of money was the foreign distribution rights, at about $7 million, for that film).
Jewison is a Canadian who had worked in films in TV and movies through the 1960s, and had started at Universal. He directed such notable films as In The Heat of the Night (1967), which won one or more Oscars, and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), with Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen. (Jewison would later direct Moonstruck, starring Cher and Nicholas Cage, and released in 1987.) Jewison, despite what his name sounds like, was a Gentile; there is a funny moment in the making-of doc where Chaim Topol, the actor who played Tevye, notes that Jewison knows even more about Judaism than he does (Topol was born in Tel Aviv); then he is asked about a “rumor” that he was trying to convert Jewison to Judaism. Topol responds that he has a running joke that if Jewison converts, Jewison will also change his name to “Norman Christianson.” (Jewison comments at another point in the doc that he finds Judaism a “very personal” religion.)
Joseph Stein—who, as it happens, was friends with writer Joseph Heller (see Heller’s memoir No Laughing Matter [1987])—wrote the screenplay.
The movie, which was filmed on location in Yugoslavia and also on a sound stage at Pinewood Studios in Britain, is very well crafted, I think. The scenery, costumes, Yugoslavian countryside—all add nice ethnic and historical color and flavor, and show the meticulous production work that was done. John Williams, the famous composer who has provided essential underscore music to Spielberg’s films since the 1970s, adapted the Fiddler stage music and expanded it a bit to more movie-like proportions. The original Russian-inflected music has enough character (with minor chords and a certain offbeat modal flavor while having majesty); I recall from the 1978 production I was involved in that the music, played by a tiny theater orchestra, was still fulsomely inflected and tasty enough with few instruments. But in Williams’ hands, it sometimes reaches a sort of stirring Russian-classic quality at times that doesn’t seem to make the movie a self-parody or an overblown cultural artifact: the potential of the music to flesh out what turns into a kind of local-color opera is shown to favorable enough results. Isaac Stern’s violin solo toward the end of the opening credits spells things out in an even more virtuoso way. Perhaps younger viewers who are not as familiar with the play and its music as older ones, who view this film, might say, “Well, it’s all well crafted, but doesn’t it seem to go a little far stretching out a sort of minstrel show?”
Now, to the details, which really are the proving ground for how winning and convincing this film is, and an important root of its value.
Topol’s performance as key. If this film is to succeed with any audiences today, it would be on the basis of the character of Tevye, who is the most complex character (the others largely are types, pretty two-dimensional). And Tevye’s inner character is the battleground in the most personal sense for the conflicts of the film’s story, which center on tradition versus changes coming amid personal mores and societal trends. As it happens, to me, the aspect of this film that stands the test of time the best is Chaim Topol’s performance as Tevye. If you don’t simply dismiss Tevye as an emblem of everything that is wrong with the film—he is a sort of Jewish Stepin Fetchin in a vast, grotesque minstrel show—you have to admit that Topol roots the film admirably.
Chaim Topol seemed to director Jewison to be ideal for the role (he is billed as “Topol” in the film credits; I prefer to give his whole name, partly because I associate the name “Topol” with a brand of toothpaste an unpleasant college roommate used). Topol had performed in the role on stage, according to his Wikipedia biography; Jewison, according to DVD commentary, wanted a European actor for the role; when he heard about Topol and went to see him in Britain, where he was performing, Jewison knew no one else could take the role. Part of the reason given that Topol was chosen over Zero Mostel (pretty much said in commentary on the DVD)—Mostel being famous for the American version of the play in New York—was the risk of Mostel’s personality overshadowing others in the filming, or Mostel the familiar actor distracting from other performances and the story (I am interpreting in my own clumsy way; see the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the film).
In any event, I think Topol is the right choice and gives a very hearty performance, fleshing the role out about as well as you could want an actor to, and his ethnic flavoring (he was born in Tel Aviv) really adds to it, I think. I feel that if Mostel were in the role, he might have made it more cartoonish, a little too broad and maybe watered down, and somehow not believable; Topol makes the movie role believable.
Other roles. I watched the first hour of the film on July 19; I’ve seen the film numerous times over the years, including within the past year or so. Today I would say that the performances (except for Topol’s) seem surprisingly stagey for a movie, but aren’t so bad, usually, for that. What makes for a sort of confusing situation in analyzing the roles is this: Were Russian Jews, if they could speak English, so apt to be a little self-dramatizing in expressions, thereby nullifying the stagey aspect of these roles? Or, on the other hand, does the staginess draw out the cartoonish potential for Yiddish inflections, idioms, grammatical rearrangements, and personal styles, to the extent that it highlights the minstrel show quality of the movie?
One of the more important roles, that of Golda, played by Norma Crane, comes off as a sort of hard nag; you wonder if this was the best that could have been done with her.
Performance quality aside, perhaps the most offensive role is that of Yenta, the matchmaker, who seems—in character or performance—like nothing so much as a broad caricature. (Meanwhile, the concept of the yenta remains very relevant today, meaning a nosy parker, a busybody, someone who is minding others’ business in a way she [or he] shouldn’t be. I will return to this concept in a future blog entry.)
The lyrics of the songs can range from generally inoffensive to, for my taste, embarrassingly trite and mawkish, like those for “Sunrise, Sunset,” which seem like a Gerber’s strained-peas version of the message from the Book of Ecclesiastes.
One plus for the film is that story aspects and certain Jewish usages or concepts tell to be spelled out pretty accessibly, so that a child (age eight or above?) could pick up on what’s going on without too much trouble.
I think if this film were to be used in an educational effort, so that young viewers could appreciate the film but also “bracket” some of its more offensive qualities, viewers could be introduced to such things as the expression “Mazel tov,” what Torah scrolls are about, how rabbis held esteemed roles in shtetls, and all that sort of thing. For some of this, the film could teach you about it as much as an outside source. For other elements, an outside source might help you interpret what the film is doing with them.
If you watched the film A Serious Man (2009), written and directed by the Coen brothers, and you saw what was done with rabbis, a bar mitzvah, “Mazel tovs,” and so on in that film, it would pose an interesting contrast with Fiddler. (Ironically, A Serious Man is set in 1967, when Fiddler was a big hit on Broadway. And of course no mention is made there of Fiddler.) Speaking to the tradition-bound side of Judaism, a lot of the concepts and terms that turn up in the Coens film also bobble up in Fiddler, with the context shedding a different light on them; it could be remarked that “Mazel tov” has been said in all kinds of contexts, ironic or not, “cool-humored” or not, yet has maintained a certain absolute status.
If Claude Lanzmann were brought to discuss Fiddler, and he had more of a sense of humor about himself, what might he say? “Oy, that kitsch! Ay gevalt, such kitsch I have never seen! Am I right? Of course, right!”
##
End note 1.
Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, & Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Publisher watch: Who can keep up with where solid publishing stands anymore? Pearson and Author Solutions
Here’s an Escher-like (or Moebius strip) twisting story of where publishing’s going, and as a tiny part of it, how my ironic career goes. (I add my subjective angle not so much for what my own peripatetic career reflects on the industry, but to suggest how your small-scale work for big companies in the past may make you wonder where you’d stand today if you did similar for the successor big company. Among other things.)
Pearson PLC is the British-based corporate owner of Penguin, the trade-book publisher. Pearson also owns Pearson Education, which owns Prentice Hall and the successor to Silver Burdett Ginn/Scott Foresman, and other educational publishers that used to be separate smaller companies. (This is a rough sum. A slightly longer account of part of this is in my June 22 blog entry.) Prentice Hall’s URL appears to be this now, and the URL for the successor to SBG/Scott Foresman is this.
Penguin, the trade publisher, publishes the likes of Thomas Pynchon. I have had no professional relationship with Penguin.
As it turned out, I had worked at Prentice Hall, first (in its School division) through a placement agency (1997-98), and later directly employed as a freelancer (in its Higher Education division, specifically in the Humanities and Social Sciences supplements department) in 2001 and 2002. This was after a decade I worked within generally typical publishing jobs, and when (not to be defensive, but to contrast with Internet-based attitudes) I was generally respected as a publishing professional. Though doing production work for supplements in 2001 and 2002 was small-time in its way, it was having a fairly significant role in producing books of a kind.
Then, putting it summarily, “life as what happens when you’re making other plans” came along, and my status in the trade-book realm took a hit as is suggested in some of my earliest blog entries, and I’ve been self-publishing a few books of mine, not with any service that you pay, and not that I make any money with this.
Now, along comes the news Pearson is buying Author Solutions (see this release).
Maybe the culmination of all this is when we can all go online, and put into production a self-pub’d book with a title like Vanquishing Hitler: Vampire Wars 6000, and end up being established (how exactly, I’m not sure) within the great cultural pantheon whose works are curated (by such companies as Prentice Hall) among giants like Kant, Goethe, Darwin, Justin Bieber, and all the others.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Movie break: American cheese on white bread, with mayo, for a night you don’t want to think much: Witness (1985)
I remember seeing this one when it was out in theaters, when naturally a new release has an edge, or you see a state-of-the-art quality if it isn’t exactly a form-breaking work. Today, of course, this film is an old favorite among some viewers, though it may seem dated in some ways: it’s good comfort food, a Fluffernutter sandwich, Velveeta on white bread, or a big snack of some kids’ string cheese—it’s a good film to watch if you don’t want to think too much, and do want to feel something nice amid suspense and a certain “study” quality about an admirably Luddite culture, the Amish.
The DVD version I saw had a surprisingly low-resolution, analog-ish feel to it, which seems OK for this movie: it seems like you take a trip back to 1985 to see it, as if Reagan is in office, and the picture quality goes well with the tasty cinematography, which I’ll talk about later.
The DVD also has compulsory-viewing previews for a range of things, including other comfort foods (depending on your taste): there is a box set of movies starring John Wayne (yes, that fellow born Marion Morrison; yesterday’s big star and today’s homely lummox, as sturdy and enlightening as a telephone pole; sort of looks like Lyndon Johnson, except he had half the I.Q. of LBJ); and an apparent set of the TV show MacGyver, a 1980s action hero played by an inoffensive-looking sort—the hero seems to have the improvising skills of an Eagle Scout. So Witness comes packaged as if for people who’ve (per Paul Simon in about 1968) “all gone to look for America
Witness may seem so familiar to people already—or, for those who haven’t seen it yet, is so accessible—that the idea of explaining it is like explaining ginger ale: there’s no need; if you feel a desire to try it out, go ahead.
Witness and its extras give a fulsome story
The DVD contains just about all you could want in terms of a making-of documentary, which is broken down into five parts (viewable all together or separately). Harrison Ford, of course, is the main star as the police operative John Book who finds that a small Amish boy, Samuel Lapp, has witnessed a brutal murder in a train station bathroom in Philadelphia while he and his mother have been waiting to take the train to visit a relative in Baltimore. After Book has had the boy look at a police lineup to try to identify the killer, as well as be shown a suspect from a bar, back in the police station the boy points to a picture, of a high-ranking police staffer, Narcotics Officer McFee, who, as we know from his previously seen Danny Glover face, is the killer.
As John Book later infers in a powwow with his boss, Paul Schaeffer, McFee was in on the past theft of a massive amount of chemical (“P2P”) usable for production of speed, the illegal drug. Quickly, amid tautly suspensive modern-world plot developments including Book’s being shot by McFee in a parking garage, Book takes the boy and his mother back to their Amish home area in Lancaster County , Pennsylvania
Book then starts to be educated into the modest and old-time ways of the Amish as he lives within the household of the boy, with mother Rachel Lapp, played by Kelly McGillis, who would later star with Tom Cruise in Top Gun (1986). There is also Rachel’s father, with lengthy old-time beard, played by Jan Rubes, an opera singer from Toronto
As I’ve roughly described this, this may all seem rather an awkward juxtaposition of two worlds, and potentially a clash of very different tones, with a certain sentimentality mixed in—Book, as it happens, falls into a forbidden love with Rachel Lapp, which they have to be comfortable with letting go when he finally leaves the Amish village.
Film developers had a clear approach
Director Peter Weir, an Australian with limited experience at the time in helming American films (while he impressed Feldman and Ford with his work on The Year of Living Dangerously [1982]), speaks often in the making-of doc, and brings out that his concern about making the film was regarding details and tone, as well as the originally scripted ending’s being not quite right. Producer Edward S. Feldman was not the first to deal with the script, which when he got it he felt was too long, but he worked hard enough (with new writers) to trim and rework the script, get Harrison Ford attached, and finally tap Weir, who as Ford says brought a value to the film with his outsider’s view of America.
Ford himself, who was a major star at the time—which presumably Feldman felt added marketing heft—suggests he wanted to work on a film that showed he wasn’t merely a product of Steven Spielberg (with the Indiana Jones films) and George Lucas (with Star Wars). With his slanted smile and somewhat rugged WASPy good looks and dry sense of humor, he seemed ideal to play the worldly-wise but potentially paternal (to an Amish boy) policeman. (Interestingly, according to his Wikipedia biography, Ford on his father’s side is Irish and German and on his mother’s side Byelorussian Jewish. This leaves him with an appearance, I think, that is slightly hard to figure out as to ethnicity but generally seems like a “sturdy, inoffensive American sort.”) He also had (and has) a middle-of-the-road Everyman sort of personality—Feldman compares him (as qualifying for the film) to Gary Cooper; and of course Ford’s overall flavor was known to be such that even Stanley Kubrick, it is said, gave the surname “Harford” to the upscale New York couple focused on in his Eyes Wide Shut (1999) in order to echo a sort of Harrison Ford quality.
Ford, for his part, saw Witness’s script as “terrific” for its juxtaposing an old and new world as well as a “difficult” love story.
Craft of the film makes it smooth
Other features of the film include the camera work of John Seale, for which he got award nominations (such as an Oscar nomination) and actually won an award from the Australian Cinematographers Society. He says he moved fast through his work, including with the lighting, getting numerous alternate shots, multiple takes, and such, which would give the editor more “options” to work with. This perhaps explains why the film, with its numerous short shots of details and such, thus has an energetic-yet-precise feel, while there is also a placid or a familiar quality to a lot of the world it shows. Seale also remarks on certain shots—such as the Amish elders gathered at John Book’s bed—being composed and lit to imitate Vermeer (or other 1600s Dutch) paintings.
The music was composed by Maurice Jarre, and also received award nominations (including for an Oscar) and a win (from BAFTA). Its being “orchestrated” on synthesizers, even while playing a sort of classical-flavored theme, was typical for the 1980s (budget was apparently a concern for this film, and of course orchestras cost money), but it somehow seems right for this film.
Patti LuPone, who had done stage work and TV, is on hand as Book’s sister (somehow no critics complain that LuPone seems quite Italian, and Ford a little too WASPy, to be brother and sister). Alexander Godunov, a Russian defector and ballet dancer, provides his limited-acting-but-charming quality as the Amish man, Daniel Hochleitner, who is better suited to being Rachel’s future mate than John Book. And even Viggo Mortensen has a small role as the Godunov character’s younger brother.
On the realism front: How about that generic white New Wave music in the Black bar? (Prince was big by then; why not at least him?...)
Principals sum the film’s value
Ford remarks at the end of the doc that one value of the film is its especially inviting opportunity for the audience to empathize with characters. Ford himself, as he wouldn’t say in so many words, is an important asset to it in this regard; not a brilliantly expressive actor, he seems as sturdy and trustworthy as an old Buick and has something of the same can-do relatability of Tom Cruise, except with a sort of edgy baby boomer capacity for sardonic attitude. And Ford knows some carpentry (while Cruise can do things like scale up the side of a skyscraper—showing different generations’ priorities).
This film does seem like feel-good material that also seems like a star vehicle of its time, and yet it has remained a sort of favorite—“cult film” isn’t the right word for this one—after all these years.
Director Weir, after having told how earnestly he approached making the film, shows he doesn’t have flighty illusions about it. He says, not disparagingly, that it is a “slight, light film” and—in a phrase I’m not sure I got right—it’s like “wine to the drunk in the season,” or maybe he said “wine to be drunk in the season”: either will do here, I think. But, he’s quick to admit, it’s had a longtime appeal because of the product of its elements that make it “soothing,” along with all else. I would agree.
Note on McGillis
Monday, July 16, 2012
Sudden end of an idyll: How the best third (2001-03) of my time at CommonHealth met, peculiarly, with a group layoff
Another example of CommonHealth’s being high-handed with a placement agency, showing how it can blow hot and cold, and can hew to high-manager prerogatives, not craft-level carefulness…and, sometimes when hiring a worker on the basis of physical appearance (as for videotaping or videoconferencing “qualifications”), the move can backfire
[Future blog entries on the history of this firm won't be nearly as detailed or trenchant as this, but this one serves as an example of the way evidence, or at least suggestive "signposts," can be adduced to establish some of the nature of the ambiguous behavior within this firm. Also note (added 12/18/12): The term "medical media" refers to medical advertising/promotions, not to genuine medical academic publishing.]
[An editorial clarification, 7/17/12, is inserted within brackets about three-fifths of the way through this entry, just as the quoted e-mails are starting. Further edits done below 12/18/12. New edits 4/6/17.]
[Future blog entries on the history of this firm won't be nearly as detailed or trenchant as this, but this one serves as an example of the way evidence, or at least suggestive "signposts," can be adduced to establish some of the nature of the ambiguous behavior within this firm. Also note (added 12/18/12): The term "medical media" refers to medical advertising/promotions, not to genuine medical academic publishing.]
[An editorial clarification, 7/17/12, is inserted within brackets about three-fifths of the way through this entry, just as the quoted e-mails are starting. Further edits done below 12/18/12. New edits 4/6/17.]
[DISCLAIMER: The presence of quotes from others in e-mails, shown later in this entry, does not imply that these people (pseudonyms are used for two, and incomplete names, common enough not to be an easy locator for the person, are used for two others) approved of this usage or otherwise collaborated with me in the making of this entry. Further, these e-mails are not to be taken, clearly, as (1) a complete account (troublingly to me, they are not) or (2) in a sense of being solid testimony—that is, as something stronger than what might be called “hearsay” in a court proceeding. However, I believe they are useful as what would be called “relevant” material, in the court sense of being able to lead to what was not “hearsay” but would be “admissible in court,” and in the more journalistic sense of being very suggestive in support of a matter (in 2003) that the overall blog entry depicts. Further, saying this is not to imply that they definitely portend a future court matter, either directly related to what they discuss, or anything else business-related to which I am relating them in this blog. However, they are supportive of the larger picture of the set of business issues I am outlining piecemeal in this blog. Lastly, the satirical comments of the temp pseudonymed "Sqodox" may seem ungenerous regarding women, but I think their tone can be understood and sympathized with this way: at the time, Sqodox was about 50, my age now, and he was apt to be more acerbic regarding frivolous treatment by women than I would have been at the time; I am 50 now, so my recent tone does not imply he and I were the same then or are the same now in attitude, except that nearly everyone gets more conservative/selective-in-tolerance in older middle age, and becomes "more of a coarsened Sinatra of the 1960s ("That's Life," "This Town") than the nimble-crooner Sinatra of the 1940s or the artistic/exquisite Sinatra of the 1950s ("In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning")." Sqodox was a good e-mailing friend for about a decade, sharing a lot of personal things--in general, I'd say he has good horse sense that makes him valuable as a reference point for gauging a corner of CommonHealth. He had majored in biology or similar, and done journalistic work many years ago before doing editorial work in more recent years. Zdovox I know less well, but Sqodox knew him better, but Zdovox has a wide range of editorially related experience.]
Subsections below:
Three different editors apparently were sufficient to provide quality—for months
Key parts of the story I get from memory, preluding e-mails giving color
Some notes meant to banish an impression of pettiness: (1) QC’er bitterness as partly based on long, dense work; and (2) the incendiary issue of CommonHealth’s occasional hiring value of female attractiveness
E-mail exchanges added to knowledge among us temps, and flesh out an eye-opening story
One very illustrative situation at CommonHealth in summer 2003 is important to look at, to see patterns that will be significant in other, more consequential situations. Though this occurred less than 10 years ago, it doesn’t pertain to a specific account—it actually touched on a few accounts, in a sense, and it more reflects on some typical (past) functioning of MBS/Vox as an overall division [CC #3, 4].
More to my longer-range point, this story shows a few things about CommonHealth’s structure. The abrupt, seemingly vision-lacking handling of us editors shows, in the short view, how seemingly ham-handed the company could be with editors—including ones, who were different in work style, who’d been giving them good service for several months.
But further than this, it shows that CommonHealth’s administration felt that there was wisdom in its building an increasingly large company, with many divisions and layers of management—rather than the smaller, “boutique” style in which ad agencies of various types seem to have classically operated. In consequence, one might ask, “What virtues does increased size bring? Is there a ‘scalability’ conferred? What do a larger number of bodies on a permanent staff bring?”
It turns out, I believe—and later examples will drive home this point in almost unequivocal terms—that the “scalability” is in the company’s ability to move large amounts of money around—in pulling in large accounts, and (in essence) spreading money from healthy accounts and divisions to divisions that are doing less well, seasonally—all for the benefit of the longer-term (and often managerial) workers, while such “scalability” is not done to benefit the craft applied to (and necessary to) what it produces, such as is done by freelance editors and (perhaps) freelance production workers, much or at all.
All of this also closely relates to aspects of a top-heavy managerial structure that could be called the “inverted pyramid,” particularly in how it puts pressure on a limited number of craft workers, and in how the issue of managerial control becomes a priority, if not a fetish. But I can’t go into all that in much detail here.
Three different editors apparently were sufficient to provide quality—for months
By July 2003, Sqodox, Zdovox, and I were the longest-running set of editors doing “QC’ing”—“quality control” of transcripts of taped interviews, or simply checking them for accuracy and fullness against the videotapes. This was at once a taxing, tedious, fun, and creative process, and in any event it was a “labor-intensive” thing: however many people were doing it at one time, each person had an adequate amount of work, and the value given for time spent I think was worth it.
We, of course, were paid as placement-agency “freelancers,” so this meant that on top of our $27 an hour we got in gross pay, there was another $18-23 on top going to the agency, for a total of $45 an hour or so for each editor. This might seem to add up to a lot of money, but MBS/Vox, at very least, found it agreeable enough to pay us this for eight months. At least, I was there eight months, from November 2002 through July 2003; Sqodox I think started shortly before I did, and Zdovox came on a bit later. By July, we were about as much veterans of that type of work as anybody who had been in that role in those eight months (and there were several others, including other editors about as good, or at least as good—this included the editor I pseudonym “Belinda” in my July 9 blog entry on the breakdown of “The Gary Laverne Group”).
The funny thing was, we each had different ways of working in the QC’ing process, with our being apt to pick up on, or be accurate in representing, different things, as I found when I worked on a transcript one other editor had started, or such. But obviously the work of all of us together was good enough, individual differences aside, that we were all kept there for several months (which would turn out, looking over about nine years, to be the longest single, continuous stint I worked at CommonHealth).
This ended rather abruptly in July 2003.
Key parts of the story I get from memory, preluding e-mails giving color
I have several e-mails, mainly by us editors to each other, about how the collective stint wrapped up. There are a few e-mails from Jen C., our supervisor, about things tied to this. The large story of the background, oddly, I have limited direct e-mails on, and in any event, important segments of the story I have to recount from memory, and some of it I never originally picked up firsthand, I heard about it secondhand, mostly or entirely from Sqodox.
The background story, most of which comes from memory, is that MBS/Vox, starting in winter 2003, wanted to hire a few new permanent staffers. This was perhaps the same agenda they had about a year earlier, when I first worked there, and when suddenly Helene of Horizon Graphics told me in February 2002 that none of us temps were right to be staffers, so MBS/Vox would keep looking, and meanwhile we temps might be brought back as temps. In 2003, there was enough of a “call” on the MBS/Vox management’s part for people to apply as staffers that some of us temps were allowed to apply—and two of us, myself and Sqodox, had been there a year before—as well as others being considered from outside (all of whom, I believe, had not worked there as temps at all). (I decidedly did not apply for a staff position.)
There was, I think, a several-month period, or at least a good many weeks, of the process of MBS/Vox’s selecting who would be hired. Sqodox applied, and had high hopes for getting hired. Another temp among us QCers, “Belinda,” whom I mentioned above, also applied; she was a crack medical editor in terms of being very well versed in a range of medical areas (Sqodox referred to her, by memory, in a 2006 e-mail as “that fun chick that we used to do QC with [who was] still there? You know, that chick who was a walking encyclopedia of medical terminology”).
I think it’s fair to say, as an outsider looking somewhat in, that the hiring process was so cumbersome because, in general, MBS/Vox was still trying to find out “what it was or wanted to be.” It had started in about 2000—the baby of one of the main managers there, who was still there in 2003 (but whom I had very little, if any, interaction with)—with a definite vision of what generally it aimed for. This was reflected in its odd name; “MBS” stood for “mind[,] body[, and] spirit,” and “Vox” stood for “voice," that of the interviewees, the main source of data in the studies that the firm produced. The real problem for management, in 2003, wasn’t the division’s global/idealistic parameters but what kind of technical staff it would have.
Finally, those that were to be hired were informed of this (in about June 2003): Belinda was the only one among the temps who was hired. (She would work for MBS/Vox for about two, or at least one and a half, years, but in a fairly telling development—telling about the division, I believe, not so much about her—she, the “walking encyclopedia of medical terminology,” was let go. She would be back to doing freelance editing for CommonHealth by fall 2005.)
Another worker who was hired as a staffer was a young woman who had not done any freelance QC/editing for MBS/Vox, I believe (or if she did at that time, it was for a very short time). I forget her name--I'll give her the pseudonym "Marta." She was in her late twenties, maybe, and she was an employee (in temp form) of Horizon Graphics. (Whether anyone else was hired by MBS/Vox when Bonnie and this woman were hired, I don’t remember, though in that general period, a young woman from New York
Sqodox would later remark that Marta was hired partly for her looks, and indeed several of the MBS/Vox staffers were attractive—Jen C. was one—and it seemed not improbable they were hired so that, if they were used to appear in some capacity on the interview videotapes that the division commonly used, which a client could see (and which we QCers used as backup to proofread transcripts), they would be suitable as would anyone who looked attractive in a “professional-grade videotape.”
If there was any development tied to this that CommonHealth or MBS/Vox would not want me to reveal, it may be the following—and I feel it is worth telling partly because it was the major turning point, for me, in CommonHealth’s seeming like such a healthy respite as it generally did from May 2001 through July 2003, before becoming—and for my near-term purposes, I say this is not with regard to any particular account [CC #3, 4]—the more ambiguous affair it was in my experience from about early 2004 on. (If you ask, If it was so ambiguous, why did you work there through another several years? The answer is fairly simple, and largely about a practical matter: as a freelancer from 1997 through 2007, I took what I could get from multiple employers within a given year; with medical media in particular, it could be tough to get work when you needed it, but then a godsend when even a two-month stint could mean a big shot of income, judged in hourly pay. And despite CommonHealth’s “grey areas” that I regarded as such from at least 2004 on, the firm was, for my main practical purposes and broadly, usually not so cheesy as other medical-media firms could be. For a long time I considered it the best medical-media firm to get into, whether via a placement agency or, later, working directly. Certainly the breakdown of “The Gary Laverne Group” in 2007, which CommonHealth was partly responsible for, gave cause for pause, but still I overlooked the shit, even when my “tenures” there could sometimes end so abruptly and, sometimes, under something of a cloud or for vague reasons. As I so often have done through many years of working in the media, you don’t ignore the negatives, but you always look toward the positives in lining up future work. Even when, from about 2003 on, I had a bit of sarcasm about or skeptical view of CommonHealth, I looked at it as a situation of “the glass being half-full.” But after what happened in summer 2010, I said with all validity, “What a minute: who’s kidding whom? Who is the suspect one here?” And as a matter of restoring sanity, you do a thorough, fair inventory of recent and past business practices, and you come up with a total picture that is not just “the glass half-empty,” but closer to “the glass almost completely empty and having a bit of poisonous residue in it.”)
The woman, Marta, who was hired as I just described, had been employed as a temp by Horizon Graphics. Generally, the way Horizon—and as I would find later, The Gary Laverne Group—operated, if someone who worked for them as a temp was hired as a permanent staffer by a client company, then the client company would have to pay a large lump sum for the “privilege.” I think this is common across the placement-agency industry. I remember having an e-mail debate with Sqodox (which will be alluded to later, in a more concrete context) about whether a firm like Horizon really held as their main goal and desideratum to get temps (1) hired in order for the temp firm to get the lump-sum payment, or (2) have smaller, biweekly amounts come in off the backs of temps, sometimes for months at a time. I felt that either option was desirable for a placement agency, but that in fact, I saw it as more lucrative for the agency to have some workers be temps indefinitely, because that could add up to more money for the agency overall than the lump sum if the temp was suddenly hired after a few weeks of temping.
Anyway, Marta worked for MBS/Vox for about a month; then she was in a bad car accident, and had to resign.
Management of MBS/Vox, understandably, was not pleased. They were down a new staffer after having taken months to select the new hires. I don’t remember if a big effort was made to hire a replacement right away; I don’t think one was. (Mind you, this woman was not meant to be in a position like that of the linguistic-analysis woman from New York
Anyway, Horizon stuck to its demand that MBS/Vox pay the lump sum for Marta (I think that, in general, such a lump sum was one-quarter of the yearly salary to be paid the new employee—which in this case could have been, who knows, $15,000? $10,000?). MBS/Vox didn’t want to pay this. There was wrangling. We’ll see some bit of concrete evidence bearing on this.
Amid this situation, one net result was that MBS/Vox dropped three of us temps at once, at the end of July 2003. And they would no longer use Horizon for freelance staffing.
Some notes meant to banish an impression of pettiness: (1) QC’er bitterness as partly based on long, dense work; and (2) the incendiary issue of CommonHealth’s occasional hiring value of female attractiveness
Work-equity issue. One thing you might conclude in reading the e-mails below is that these guys seem almost like mere college students, with casual ways of regarding some of the coworkers, and snarky attitudes. I think one thing that’s hard to appreciate is the large amount of work we did—QC’ing, in general, at MBS/Vox was a pretty dense affair. It seemed like a fairly large amount in the two months I was there December 2001-February 2002; there was even more room for feeling it was a lot from November 2002 through July 2003; and even in my stint from September through December 2006, the density of the work was like an “old friend,” with mixed qualities, coming back—and even then, I was hustled along by my different immediate supervisors to push work through. Each account—for a specific product and medical indication—could have a raft of different kinds of interviews. We three temps—myself, Sqodox, and Zdovox—could have different ways of working, when we had developed comfortable grooves, and could still be trucking through a lot, for each of us. A woman beyond middle age, who had been a staffer at Xchange in 2002 when I met her, later stopped being a staffer at CommonHealth and was used as a temp at MBS/Vox for a time in early 2003; I have been in touch with her several times over the years since. She referred (in about 2010) to the “weird vibe” or such that she felt at MBS/Vox; I think what she was referring to was how, among us QC’ers, as enthusiastic as we could be about the work, it was a bit of a sweatshop way we were working: the work technically was very detail-oriented, could be tedious, and it flowed and flowed….
So no wonder that, if a few of us were suddenly dropped like hot potatoes at once, we might have spoken with unusual asperity: it was a lot of solid work we’d been doing, and suddenly this seemed to mean nothing. The e-mails we’ll see later will speak to this.
The looks issue. The issue of whether some workers of CommonHealth were hired in good part on their looks is perhaps the one criticism I make that would most irk some (female) workers there. It is a very touchy issue, and not to be dealt with carelessly, but I don’t mean to take it head-on and fully here. But it is an important part of the larger picture of the “darker side” of the company, which I am trying to draw. As a matter of critical gossip, which certainly was done by some of us workers particularly in the MBS/Vox context in 2002-03 or so, this issue certainly came up, regarding a few women who were already employed there, as well as regarding the woman who is central to the Horizon Graphics–dropping story this blog entry is about. It was originally a matter more focused on by one or more others than by myself.
In a way, the issue had an obvious basis: because MBS/Vox (I try not to delve too much into its usual, most good-faith style of business throughout this blog, though I have in reserve very pointed, critical things to say about the division in general) used videotapes of interviews as means to its products (largely, analysis of multiple interviews toward supporting a certain product of a client) that it turned out for clients, and also—in clips—as small parts of the final product. This in itself is not meant to be criticized. Also, understandably, some workers at MBS/Vox who were selected to be in some of these videos as some kind of functionary tended to be among the more attractive. Further, I believe later in the history of MBS/Vox, if not earlier, videoconferencing with the client was one work tool. All this is reasonable enough, and I don’t think anyone should have much issue with my disclosing this, to the extent it was simply a matter of ad hoc selection of a certain female for a certain task at a certain time. That is, this particular area is not one where it could be said, in the work environment in which we editorial workers were operating independent of any exposure to clients, that, apart from manager thought about ad hoc selection for being in a videotape, females’ qualities as attractive, or as “big personalities” toward the end of facilitating production, or otherwise, were a usual desideratum of the company (e.g., in hiring and in grooming workers).
The issue of judging a prospective worker on the basis of looks becomes more of a problem, I believe, when—as in MBS/Vox’s long process of acquiring new workers in the first several months of 2003—female attractiveness was a desideratum at the outset, and in what proportion this was in comparison to other qualities, such as verbal skills and judgment relevant to writing, analysis tailored to MBS/Vox’s products, etc.
Given that a few of the workers already at MBS/Vox were photogenic, the fact that this one woman was hired in the way that she was was ready fodder for such criticisms of Sqodox’s, which are vivid later in this blog entry. Let’s let the e-mails help this set of incidents speak for themselves. But I would stress that this set of incidents isn’t merely trivial or novel; this set of stuff might seem an interesting, somewhat notorious, but isolated business matter if it wasn’t seen in a context of a broader set of strange values and way of handling workers across several divisions of CommonHealth, including: (1) the frequent presence of other attractive women (without their having previously engaged in a “trial” of temp craft-level work) at CommonHealth at large, (2) the quick dropping of numerous twenty-something workers (for a variety of discernible or unclear reasons) as I’ve seen there, and (3) such high-handed treatment of a placement agency as I describe regarding “The Gary Laverne Group” (see the July 9 entry): these all support the idea that CommonHealth can be remarkably (1) shortsighted, (2) reckless, (3) inconsistent regarding criteria, and in some instances (4) petty in how it hires and employs people, in ways that seem to form larger patterns over time.
So though Sqodox’s grumping about Marta being hired for her looks, and his more general criticisms along these lines, may seem like easy satirizing of the place as an article of bitter disappointment, the larger patterns of the firm as I am describing, with some to come—and the fact that he put a lot of time doing the intense work a number of us QC’ing temps did—suggest that he had more of a point than the tone and rhetoric of his criticisms suggest.
I would further suggest that it may be a criticism as valid as it is easy to make that a woman, with limited craft-level experience of the type we temp editors had, has been hired with even an outsider’s strong suspicion of her looks being a desideratum; but an outsider/layperson can get to a more fundamental level: “Why are female looks being considered at all in support of a kind of business that designs marketing means for medical interventions?”
E-mail exchanges added to knowledge among us temps, and flesh out an eye-opening story
Editorial note: As all these e-mails are from 2003, per my own guidelines for revealing this information, am I being inconsistent with these guidelines in revealing this? If this stuff had happened a year earlier, in mid-2002 let’s say, I would note that the outside-10-year criterion I seek in terms of releasing “confidential information” [CC #1] is met. Well, I figure that here, I think because the story to be reflected below does not concern one client, and does indeed concern fairly elementary issues of fairness in hiring skilled editors, I am justified in releasing this. (Note: None of the e-mails quoted from below, which I have printouts of, have confidentiality disclaimers on them.)
It’s interesting how MBS/Vox’s dropping of Horizon Graphics was squared with by us temps. In summer 2003, I didn’t know the full story yet, i.e., how our end was linked to Marta's leaving. I might have suspect something along these lines, but…
In late July, I e-mailed some message to Sqodox; I don’t have the original, but it probably included some routine chatting about our in-limbo work situation.
In response, he e-mailed, “I got an email from Jen a second after I sent you the last email. Here is a copy of it. [Editorial clarification, 7/17/12: This entry was not meant to give the impression, nor do I believe, that Jen C. was involved in any significant way in the financially-based decision of MBS/Vox's to discontinue using Horizon Graphics. Her role, from all I am aware of, was to relay information and practical direction to us temps, and this would be fairly consistent with how such lower-level supervisory roles were handled anyway--whether at CommonHealth or at other such firms. The standard corporate pattern of "diffusion of responsibility" would have meant the hard money-based decisions were made higher up, and it was the task of the immediate contact/supervisor, such as Jen, to interpret for us craftspeople what was decided and what this meant for our work.]
“[Sqodox],
“All [specific medical indication] transcripts have been QC’d and transcribed. [The order of these terms was her trivial mistake; usually the order of these tasks was the reverse of what she said—transcription first, then QC’ing.] We thought we would need you until August 8, but we will not. I told Horizon the work ended sooner than we thought.
“You can mail in your timesheet for Monday [regarding work he’d done the day before, I presume] and I’ll sign it and mail it back.”
Sqodox commented, following this and to me,
“My reply to her was that I would be in tomorrow to pick up some personal items and give her my timesheet. [I think he was assuming we were done working there for the foreseeable longish term.]
More ascerbically, he added, “I am curious, though, about when she thinks the next transcribing work will begin and whether or not she will have any of us come in and do the work—OR [as I don’t think he meant she would say] if they’ve decided that they’d rather have people do it for free or have young chicks come in and do it with no medical background!” He signed off with me with a friendly sentence.
Either that day (earlier) or the next day (July 30), I started applying for unemployment benefits, something I’ve never been comfortable with doing whenever I had the occasion/need to do it, and in the past, usually running into technical difficulties posed by the unemployment office in Sussex County (apt to happen in the 1990s, not so much or at all in the 2000s, a decade in which it became possible to file online). I apparently e-mailed him something about my unemployment application, and he responded by e-mail (July 30, 11:46 p.m.) in a sort of approving, congratulatory way, then commented on what he found with Jen at MBS/Vox:
“[Zdovox] called me from work [at MBS/Vox] at 2…said that he had 3 hours to go [I think he was the last of us to do any remaining work there] and probably wouldn’t finish what he was doing. Chances are he was doing some sports writing [which allegedly Zdovox did in off-time at MBS/Vox]…LOL… The good news is that his wife[…]got a new job…he was kind of vague about it, but I think she is sort of like an account manager at a med advertising agency. The pay is good and he’s very relieved about that. Just in Cobra insurance alone [as many may know, this is health insurance continued with a previous employer’s group plan, per a provision federal law—maybe ERISA, I don’t remember—but where you, the employee, pay the premiums], they save over 10K a year when they have regular medical benefits from a job. [wife’s name]’s insurance will kick in right away. Meanwhile, he keeps landing these assignments, I think through his wife, where he makes over 1K for a day’s work editing medical documents from at home!!!! Man, I would love to get some of those jobs to do!!! [I don’t think it hurts revealing this communication, since this is all not so peculiar (as to invite legal investigation or other interest) or “proprietary.” Incidentally, I have had freelance medical stuff I was able to do at home in the 2000s, but rarely.]
“I went in this morning,” he got down to brass tacks about MBS/Vox, “to pick up my stuff and give Jen my time sheet. I got there at 9 a.m. When I gave Jen my timesheet, she was her usual cool self [I think he meant frosty/aloof, but I myself didn’t get this sort of impression from her]…. I had to ask all the questions and her answers were vague. I probed about when we would be coming back… I said, ‘Will you need us in late August or September?’ Her response was that she was uncertain. She did tell me that they have nothing else new except the cancer drug…. [In general, this sort of news about whether/when there were projects coming up was not atypical or reason for suspicion, but in this particular connection, in retrospect, I have to wonder whether there really was such a dearth of projects on the horizon.]
“I decided not to make the rounds saying goodbye to [one manager], [another manager], et al… since I don’t think they care if [I] live or die…. Maybe sometime soon they’ll realize how good an editor I am/was….”
He talked about some other personal stuff not related to recent work; that was it for MBS/Vox.
Then Sqodox shared an e-mail exchange he’d had with the third of us temps, Zdovox, which he sent to me July 31, at 12:03 a.m., meaning about 20 minutes after the e-mail I just recounted; I probably saw both of these sometime later on July 31.
“Greg,
“Here is a copy of an email I read from [Zdovox] right after I read and responded to yours [I don’t know which of mine he means; generally, and most likely here, we weren’t e-mailing back and forth “in real time”]….
“[Zdovox’s words, bolded in Sqodox’s e-mail] So I asked Jen, ‘What are the chances we’ll be called back, even in say, 1-3 months?’
“She said, ‘Well, it’s hard to say. Horizon [Graphics]…I can’t really say.’
“What the hell does that mean? Could they be looking at another temp agency? I hate to tell her this, we’re all regis[t]ered with all the different agencies [I myself wasn’t, though]; she’ll just see the same faces. Everybody knows that.
“Oh well. Life goes on. Hello, Monster.com!”
[Actually, in practical terms, as I found easily enough over the years, if other temp agencies would have suggested some of us “same faces” as potential temp workers to MBS/Vox staffers, they—as would other medical-media agency managers, not just at CommonHealth—could have easily refused us, not out of anything particularly personal but in order to make a clean break with the agency they were shaking off, which in this summer 2003 example is Horizon Graphics. Such a fact of trying for a clean break will become evident further below. And sometimes I think such managers—whether at MBS/Vox or elsewhere—may conflate a placement agency they are trying to “banish” from their use with the temp workers it offers in such a way that if there was something more practical in us that they would rather have not had to deal with again—quirks or professional habits of certain disagreeable sorts, or even actual technical work styles—they would decline having us as part of a “package” of banishing an agency, done under the possible rationalizing cover of avoiding a sort of “conflict of interest” (or, somewhat more sincerely, dealing with a temp’s spoiled morale) in having the same temps back in the wake of banishing the previous agency. This sort of rationalization could become evident enough in being implied in practical terms, if not spoken aloud by anyone. As a general proposition, this whole set of practices and consequences may seem like a bitter batch of ideas; an actual example starts to become evident below.]
By the way, I almost never had dealings with Monster.com myself, as a matter of long practice and preference.
Sqodox added,
“This was my response to [Zdovox]’s email:
“[Zdovox],
“WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“Now that’s a revelation. Maybe, with any luck, they will go to Manpower and hire a bunch of dumb young chicks to do the editing!!! [Actually, MBS/Vox did hire some new agency, I don’t think The Gary Laverne Group (pseudonymous) at first; their use of a new agency was, I believe, within the period July 2003 to December 2003 or so, certainly by late winter/early spring 2004.] Better yet, they might be able to hire college interns to do the work for free! The interview would involve them [the interns] walking down a runway in the latest fashions. The personality phase will involve getting extra points for mousiness!!! [Later, October 2003 e-mails will help justify my inclusion of this bitterness here.]
“This is why I have decided to leave this whole editing field behind. If freelance at-home work comes my way [which I knew he had done within the previous few months], then of course I would love that, but this field of work is just a bunch of bull.
“Sorry if I sound so bitter, but you know that I never hold back.
“The bottom line is that THEIR jobs [i.e., of Jen C. and other MBS/Vox managers] are also in jeopardy. Yes, Jen should have no problem finding another job with her expertise, but it would do me good to hear that the ball dropped on them too. I predicted this would happen from the first day I worked at [MBS/]Vox. If the economy remains flat, the pharmaceutical companies are not going to be spending half a million dollars to find out why people like those pocket packs of [L]isterine! [Actually, with the Listerine PocketPaks work (see my July 5 entry, “Start of a Biopsy (this won’t hurt a bit)”), this specific question wasn’t asked, due to the key parameters of the type of investigation that was done, whose transcripts we QC’d. But the satirical intent of his remark isn’t too hard to understand.] Or what it is that they feel: pain, numbness, aggravation, stiffness, etc…[typical symptom criteria used in research that we QC’d that backed a range of product accounts, and which weren’t so outlandish in the context of our work]. When you come right down to it, the work we do at Vox is really a bunch of bull….
“Aren’t you glad you sent me that email? Right now, you’re either getting depressed or having a good laugh. I hope it’s the latter.” He signed off to Zdovox with friendly remarks.
I know August and September 2003 were pretty busy for me in unusual ways: there was a stretch of a couple weeks’ work, through Horizon, at the CommonHealth division of Quantum. And I had my hands full, especially in September, with my support-group business with “Betty,” regarding whom and other people I wrote the memoir A College Try that Courted Trouble—the end of September was when she had her restraining-order hearing against her husband, for which I was a witness, that was a colorful climax to my involvement with her (and to the memoir).
It was September 28, the day before the hearing, in the morning that I sent a probing e-mail to Jen, “Any news on when we temps’ll be back?” This was the only content, between salutation and signoff. This was attached to a September 15 e-mail I’d previously sent to Jen in which I did some small talk she never responded to, “Did you see ‘Cabin Fever’? I could possibly see it. I saw ‘Matchstick Men’ this past weekend. Pretty good. I saw [an MBS manager] and [another MBS manager] at different times at Quantum/Xchange within the past few weeks when I was there.”
Jen’s response, on September 29 in the early afternoon:
“Greg,
“We’ve had a change in our relationship with Horizon so you’ll need to contact them directly about future work with us.
“Thanks,
“Jen.”
This was the first time MBS’s wholesale change of relations with Horizon was fully noted to me, by anyone. I surprises me that I skimmed along through that, as I recall, sadness-tinged summer from early August through mid-September apparently harboring some hope I’d be back at MBS/Vox.
I probably shared this news with Sqodox—not sure if I forwarded Jen’s e-mail or otherwise reflected its content.
Sqodox e-mailed me on October 3, a few days after September 29:
“I talked with Susan [surname; manager at Horizon] on Wednesday. She told me about the parent company [of MBS/Vox—and he meant, as the “parent,” CommonHealth] losing a contract and about someone quitting MBS [I assume this means Marta]. I told her that was all old news…losing the [general medical indication] med contract [this I didn’t know about; I don’t even know what division of CommonHealth had lost such a contract, or whether he meant MBS/Vox’s losing this] and that young blonde model [Marta] leaving VOX [sic]. She then told me that (and I think this turns out to be MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR) a problem is that there are negotiations going on regarding how much Horizon is going to pay Vox [I think he was momentarily mistaken; the likely original arrangement is that Vox was supposed to pay Horizon], because the blonde model [Marta] left rather quickly after being hired. That MIGHT be what’s holding Vox up from hiring us back as temps, or for that matter hiring any of us on a permanent basis [I think it was a foregone conclusion that this latter possibility was not at all likely, and it was fine by me].”
He talked about personal items after.
We had some exchange about the Horizon-MBS wrangling. It seems to me as I deal with this stuff that possibly Sqodox’s remark “how much Horizon is going to pay Vox” reflected some portion of all these negotiations, that MBS/Vox demanded that Horizon pay back some of the lump-sum money that contractually MBS was supposed to pay for the privilege of hiring the young woman who quickly quit. I think it was in the midst of this e-mail discussion that I held to my view that Horizon wasn’t simply all about making lump-sum amounts for temps being hired full-time, but that they could make just as much from having temps strung along for many months….
Sqodox said in an October 7 e-mail,
“What I’m getting at is that Vox might be thinking: ‘Why should we pay Horizon 10K [I don’t know if the lump sum was this high] for a chick who ended up only working with us for a month?’
“I know that [Marta] didn’t get anything extra for being hired, but Horizon did. Vox might feel that it is not their fault that the employee left so soon after being hired; rather, it was Horizon’s fault for not screening their candidates [thoroughly] so that something like this wouldn’t happen [his summary of MBS’s beef is, to me, reasonable from MBS’s perspective; but on the other hand, I would point out that Horizon could easily have not been able to guarantee that such a new hire wouldn’t quit as Marta did, and as I recall, the precipitating reason was that she had a car accident]. I think it’s just tough luck for Vox and they should move on and forget about it. [This is a reasonable enough point, but I don’t know if there was more to the situation—which Sqodox innocently didn’t know about—that led to the apparent intransigence of the negotiations between MBS and Horizon.]
“In any event, we remain without anything ‘on the Horizon’ with Vox…”
Looking back, I would say it was quite a foregone conclusion by this point that MBS wouldn’t have us back through Horizon again, however I interpreted the situation at the time. In fact, after I did some brief work at another division of CommonHealth sometime in the late winter of 2004, I don’t think CommonHealth used Horizon Graphics again, because Horizon went dormant by about April 2004. (One of the owners retreated, with I would presume some amount of office property, to his home in Montclair , after the office had been located in Boonton , N.J. , for many years; the company number rang at the Montclair
In view of the developments I ran into with CommonHealth later, some no later than April-June 2004, this 2003 MBS/Vox stuff seems like a fairly innocent time. But one thing that seems relevant to ask, and is certainly inspired by much else I have observed of CommonHealth’s use of placement agencies (as well as that by other medical-media firms), why use these placement agencies at all, if you get into a sticky situation of trying to reverse paying a lump sum for a permanent hire who suddenly quits?
But of course, I am in the process of answering this question in unambiguous terms. (See my July 9 entry, “What is editing? Part 2 of 2: Is medical editing a blind alley? [BETA].”)
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