Non-Fiction Bestsellers, Often Unimpressive

Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City is going to come in for renewed attention now that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio have committed to the movie version. The book has been in "development hell" for a decade, but Scorsese / DiCaprio is a high-profile - albeit somewhat predictable - outcome. Although why Scorsese thinks that DiCaprio is the right actor for every role that has ever been written is simply beyond me.

Something else I don't get is the esteem in which this book is held. Sure, it's a reasonably compelling read. But the book cannot be categorized fairly as non-fiction, because Larson constantly cheats - which is to say, makes stuff up, including dialogue and descriptions of his characters' thought processes. He goes freely into their minds on no warrant. How could one respect the author's journalistic or historical integrity? He takes the easy way out time and again.

Besides that, the yoking together of the "Devil" and "White City" themes is forced and awkward, reading on every page as if Larson is straining for the bestseller he eventually got.

It is a low form of endeavor altogether, and has had a baleful effect on other narrative non-fiction writers. Michael Capuzzo's Close to Shore: The Terrifying Shark Attacks of 1916, although worth reading, is a much worse book for Larson's palpable influence, as are many others. One can practically hear the literary agents and publishers at the authors' elbows, commanding them to sex it up.
 
There is a kind of social capital to be had from reading this sort of non-fiction bestseller because others will have read them or at least heard of them. But there is an enormous variability in their quality.

Another badly overrated item that is forthcoming as a movie (James Gray / Charlie Hunnam) is David Grann's The Lost City of Z. There are no new revelations in this book, and the significance of the story is not clear. Percy Fawcett's 1925 expedition into the Amazon was an old-fashioned, underfunded, under-equipped fiasco with an unscientific goal. The "lost city" theory was unworthy of a man of intelligence, but fits in perfectly, as Grann does admit, with Fawcett's spurious spiritualism. So to me this came across more as a tale of stupidity than a tale of bravery.

There is a frisson of uneasiness to be had from the notion of the jungle swallowing so many explorers, both Fawcett's party and many of the subsequent expeditions that tried to find him. But as a functional modern magazine writer, Grann brings no sense of poetry or awe to the narrative. The chapters that describe his own adventures are especially blah and reveal him as an inadequate researcher. He gets all worked up over seeing a supposedly inaccessible document that was already available in English translation and that you or I could have found. He offers a very sketchy summary in his last chapter of some interesting modern scholarship concerning the Amazon region which seems meant to vindicate poor Fawcett, and to justify Grann's own superfluous trek into the jungle, but it does not accomplish either task convincingly, and so brings the book to a flat conclusion.

"The Ballad of John and Yoko"

Bill Crider posted this as a "Song of the Day" at his blog, and I couldn't resist commenting, because I have thought about this song a lot:

For such a charming and funny song, "The Ballad of John and Yoko" actually posed a challenge to pop singer-songwriters that has not been much taken up: to dash off songs as quick commentaries on what is going on right this minute. Doing this well would require keen observational and verbal skills, as well as ready access to catchy and functional tunes that can frame the lyrics (so perhaps it simply takes too much talent!). The notion of newsy songs is related (as Lennon's title indicates) to the ballad tradition, which has had some continuing relevance in folk music, Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" perhaps being the best-known example; and also to Tom Lehrer and Mark Russell-style satiric political songs. But I'm not aware of anyone out there doing quite what Lennon did here.

Acting...It's Not for Sissies (Nicole Comer)

Although Entertainment Tonight and pre-awards red carpet shows would have you believe otherwise, acting really isn't that glamorous a profession. At any given time, the rewards of fame and money that many associate with acting are flowing to at most a couple of hundred individuals, among countless thousands who are plying the craft. (Of course, you can substitute the words music, writing, sports, and quite a few others for "acting" in that sentence; it truly has become a "winner take all" world.) Worse, nothing, not even an Academy Award, guarantees continued placement in that group. If you don't believe me, take a gander at the complete IMDB credits of Faye Dunaway.

And yet, for those that love their art and can't imagine doing anything else, "working actor" is a proud, realistic, and honorable badge. Nicole Comer's delightful book is aimed at that population, and those who would join it. You'll have to get your starshine fix somewhere else.

Comer has been in the trenches for a good while, as a performer, coach, staffing agent, and, inevitably, odd-jobber. Along the way, she has developed a keen sense of how acting works as a business, especially in Los Angeles (and it could fairly be said that this guide is L.A.-centric). She has gathered her insights, anecdotes, scar tissue, and sass into this short, non-nonsense book that bypasses discussion of acting technique (she assumes you have other sources for that) for a penetrating look at how to optimize your chances for survival in a difficult industry.

Is the book just for aspiring actors, then? Far from it, actually. I think that anyone is who is trying to freelance or build a solo service business in any field would benefit strongly from what Comer shares here. The book takes less than two hours to read and is a heck of a lot of fun besides, so it is an excellent investment.

As it happens, beyond being a film critic myself since my college days - I made part of my living at it in my 20s, imagine - I have other connections to the Los Angeles film and television scene. A college friend has worked as an entertainment reporter there, and my sister, who has a bachelor's degree in drama and a master's degree in television, has spent many years in casting and production. Through them and their connections I have heard a lot about the ups and downs of the business. And Nicole Comer is exactly right, it is not for the faint-hearted. 

Comer has solid brass-tacks advice on such issues as finding your acting niche (you can't expand beyond your niche until you have one), having headshots done (a very thorough chapter), joining the Screen Actor's Guild, working with agents and talent managers, attending workshops (an extremely valuable activity), keeping up with the TV world (viewing every series becomes part of your work), and navigating "pilot season." Just about everything she says chimes with discussions I have had with my sister, and both have wickedly funny stories about the jerks one encounters in the industry (along with surprisingly many solid, grounded individuals).

I think the only bone of contention between their points of view would involve Los Angeles theater, specifically non-Equity productions. Comer is kind of down on the idea of involving oneself too heavily in this world, suggesting that daytime theater rehearsals impair an actor's ability to take auditions for film, television, and commercials, and that industry types don't much attend non-Equity shows, so the chances of being seen and appreciated are few.

My sister, who has worked extensively as a stage manager on non-Equity shows, would demur. She tells me that she can almost always re-arrange rehearsal work around an actor's audition needs, and that industry types indeed show up at the performances with great frequency, in part because there are usually at least a couple of experienced television actors in the cast of any given show. She has been surprised by who she has seen in audiences. 

Well, great minds don't always agree. But Nicole Comer is never doctrinaire about any of the opinions she expresses; she is explicit about the fact that she is coaching from the perspective of what she has seen and experienced herself, and Your Mileage May Vary. You actors out there would do well to avail yourselves of what she has to offer. As a freelance writer, I learned from it too.  

The Noir Western: Darkness on the Range, 1943-1962 (David Meuel)

Even though the literature on film noir continues to grow at a dizzying pace, there is still some virgin territory to be claimed. David Meuel's The Noir Western: Darkness on the Range, 1943-1962 would appear to be the first book-length treatment of its subject (I say "appears to be" because such assertions have a way of being disproven later). The concept of noir westerns as a subset of "off-genre noirs" goes back a long way, and has been discussed in sections of books (such as Alain Silver et al.'s Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, which first appeared in 1979) and in articles (such as Michael Shepler's 2008 "Sagebrush Noir: The Western as 'Social Problem" Film," which oddly goes unmentioned by Meuel). But it has long merited fuller treatment, and Meuel's well-written, engaging study is an excellent start on that. There will certainly be more books on the subject ahead.

Discussions of film noir can easily bog down in definitional disputes, which even though I am a participant at one of the best noir discussion boards, The Blackboard, I try to steer clear of. Although "film noir" was first used as a descriptor in France in the late 1940s, it was not a recognized term in the United States until the early 1970s. Therefore, as one of our finest noir scholars James Naremore has pointed out, it is "a concept that was generated ex post facto." No director or screenwriter of the "classic noir period" (fairly close to Meuel's defined dates of 1943 to 1962) would have known at the time that noir films were what they were making. It was inevitable that complete consensus on the use of the term would never be reached, and it has not been; as Naremore states, "no writer has been able to find the category's necessary and sufficient characteristics." The edges of the phenomenon are blurry even if the core is not.

In dealing with a branch of off-genre noir, David Meuel is necessarily operating at the edges, where disputes about what is in and what is out are potentially the most bruising. I'm not going to worry it. He has chosen 21 films by 11 directors to concentrate on, while identifying another 50 relevant movies in an appendix. His arguments on behalf of the inclusion of the 21 films are reasonably persuasive without amounting to a "Meuel test" for what constitutes a noir western. Thematic complexity, psychological depth, visual style, and bleakness of outlook all figure into his analysis, but in differing proportions with respect to each title and director.

When you look at it that way, the scope of the noir western could be construed very broadly. Any double fan of noir and westerns, and there are many, will readily think of some titles that Meuel has not listed - Joseph Kane's Ride the Man Down or Don Siegel's The Duel at Silver Creek, for instance (both 1952). In fact, it is harder to exclude many 1946-1960 Westerns from consideration than it is to include them. If one combs carefully through any of the numerous printed iterations of Phil Hardy's indispensable work on the Western, many of the descriptions of obscure A-/B+ Westerns spring off the page as meriting viewing and additional research in connection with this theme. And no one, as far as I am aware, has even started working on the noir strain in television Westerns.

So Meuel is a pioneer, and all that ultimately matters is whether he is a good pioneer, which he manifestly is. He found the spot-on publisher for this sort of material, McFarland, which has long specialized in offering the findings of independent scholars in popular culture, whose work is many cuts above mere fan writing, but generally more accessible and less jargon-ridden than the books that university presses put out. (Many such volumes are invaluable, but may present more of a challenge to the uninitiated.)

Well before the tag "noir" was applied to Westerns, the sort of movies that Meuel discusses were called adult, psychological, serious, and literary Westerns, and later, as we headed into the Sixties and Seventies, revisionist Westerns. An equally good description for some of them would be "arthouse Westerns"; in fact, a book parallel to Meuel's and covering many of the same films could be written that minimized references to noir and concentrated on how the arthouse attitude came to shape a genre one might think would be immune to it. I have a soft spot for many of the more extreme arthouse Westerns that Meuel resists a little bit - Anthony Mann's The Furies, William Wellman's Track of the Cat, Delmer Daves' Jubal - although he does very well by Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident, one of the very first arthouse Westerns. Somehow John Ford always escapes being labeled "arthouse," despite the obvious fact that every single last thing in his films, every frame, is intensely considered.

The shift to more "adult" Westerns involved a number of directors, among whom Anthony Mann has received his just due, and Delmer Daves definitely has not. Meuel has a fine feel for the different personalities and strategies of these directors and honors all of them, who in addition to Mann, Ford, Wellman, and Daves include Budd Boetticher and Sam Fuller (long cult favorites), Raoul Walsh (not one bit inferior to the more celebrated Howard Hawks), Robert Wise (a supreme craftsman), Henry King, Allan Dwan, and Andre De Toth.

In short, this is a highly worthy addition to the film buff's bookshelf.
 

Tuesday's Overlooked Television: Bourbon Street Beat

Bourbon Street Beat, which only ran during the 1959-1960 television season, was the least successful of the four linked Warner Brothers detective series produced around that time. The other three are 77 Sunset Strip (6 seasons, 1958-1964), Hawaiian Eye (4 seasons, 1959-1963), and Surfside 6 (2 seasons, 1960-1962). Despite the supposed geographic diversity of the shows – New Orleans, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Miami – all were actually shot on the same California back lot. This made “cross-overs” a snap, and they were frequent! A few years later, this sort of everywhere-nowhere studio shooting would have seemed dated, as detective shows branched out (to their benefit, I think) on location: Hawaii Five-O, The Streets of San Francisco, Kojak.

All of the Warner Brothers quartet initially featured pairs or trios of handsome detectives, as well as glamour chick female employees; “colorful” sidekicks appeared on a couple of the shows, most famously Edd “Kookie” Byrnes of 77 Sunset Strip. When Bourbon Street sounded its last Beat, its lead character, Richard Long’s Rex Randolph, moved over to 77 Sunset Strip, while Van Williams’s Kenny Madison joined the youthful brigade on the new Surfside 6. (Later, after Surfside 6 met its own demise, its star Troy Donahue, in a different character, joined the cast of 77 Sunset Strip.)

Left behind in New Orleans was Andrew Duggan’s Cal Calhoun, who rejoined the regular police force from whence he came and was later featured in a 1962 77 Sunset Strip episode in which Efrem Zimbalist Jr.’s Stu Bailey visits New Orleans. Duggan also guested five other times on 77 Sunset Strip in five different roles; watching a heavy dose of these series is absolutely guaranteed to provoke déjà vu! (Plots are also recycled between the shows.)

The episode “Wall of Silence” starts in “Luzon Village” in Louisiana Bayou Country where, improbably, a sizable group of refugees from an unspecified Communist country in the Balkans have been relocated. They talk in anxious whispers because they are being collectively blackmailed by someone who knows their dark secret! – the secret is just as improbable, although I won’t spoil your pleasure by revealing it. One brave soul played by the ubiquitous character actor Jay Novello takes a journey to the Big Easy to hire a private detective to get them out of this mess. He pays Rex Randolph’s secretary a retainer, but immediately gets cold feet and takes off because Rex can get back to the office from a nearby joint (the Absinthe House!) where he’s romancing one of his no-doubt many gals. This particular sweetie is talking marriage a little aggressively, which makes Rex happy for the interruption.

By the bye, all the Warner P.I. shows, and many similar series of the era such as Checkmate, Follow the Sun, and The Brothers Brannagan, are united in their espousal of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy lifestyle, clearly demonstrating, although not saying in so many words, that marriage is for squares and losers. Our heroes may seem gallant, but when it comes to women, they subscribe to the old “4F” philosophy – find ‘em, feel ‘em…you know.

Back to our story: Naturally a curious Rex goes nosing around Luzon Village, and naturally he runs into the “wall of silence,” getting told to hoof it out of town if he knows what’s good for him – a familiar drill. For this, the local color portion of our program, the bayou set is actually not bad. (Luzon Village is supposed to be on Barataria Bay, which is about 40 miles due south of New Orleans on the Gulf Coast.)

Soon the plot thickens with a murder-made-to-look-like-a-suicide (chance for a noir visual) and the deaf-mute boy who discovers the body (and who turns out to be a significant little chap in several ways). To resolve the mystery, Rex has to rely on the rest of the manpower in his office and, in a clever bit of sleuthing by partner Cal Calhoun (this must be the Alliterative Detective Agency!), the almighty reach of the United States Postal Service.

Louisiana-based swamp noir inevitably plays off the “alien” quality of the Cajun subculture – rural, non-terrestrial, closed off, presumably inbred, and not even linguistically English. Walter Hill’s tense, underrated film Southern Comfort is a key example. (Of course, as with any dramatic use of stereotyping, this runs a considerable risk of insensitivity.) In this episode, that trope is slightly underplayed – although the chief villain still turns out to be a Cajun, his opposite number, the village hero, is also Cajun, and neither is too exaggeratedly ethnic. Instead, the ethnic strangeness is largely displaced onto the transplanted Balkans (who might have been more at home in terrain like Minnesota’s or Maine’s, perhaps?).

All in all, an entertaining hour of television. For me, one of the chief appeals of this particular era of the private investigator is the Playboy swankiness I mentioned – in Bourbon Street Beat, Richard Long’s Rex Randolph is smart, suave, dapper, has a fab bachelor pad, and an office next door to a jazz club. I mean what could be better, right? My favorite scene here has Rex comparing the merits of slivovitz, raki, ouzo, and absinthe –it’s a tough job but someone has to do it. Forties P.I.s often lived pretty ascetically, but from the mid-Fifties through the late Sixties, their lifestyle turned consumerist, and frankly looks a lot more fun. I take Ralph Meeker’s Mike Hammer to be a pivot point with that, as in other ways. The TV detectives of the time kept Hammer’s cool stuff, but forewent the atom bombs. They are without desperation either internally or externally provoked – therefore, I would say that they have moved beyond noir.

How I Rank the Republicans' Chances

Right this minute...

1. Jeb Bush - On the strength of his name and the fundraising capacity that goes with it. It's certainly not anything else he brings to the table.

2. Marco Rubio - He's young, he's handsome, he's articulate, he's Hispanic, he held his own nicely in the debate. A "gifted politician," as one Democratic commentator put it.

3. Carly Fiorina - Coming out of nowhere, she absolutely killed the junior varsity debate and was the toast of the night in general.

4. Rand Paul - He is NOT running a particularly good campaign. But he is interesting and distinctive. No shot at a VP slot though, unlike Rubio and Fiorina.

5. Donald Trump - The wild card. I may have him too low or too high, who knows. I think the debate hurt him.

6. Scott Walker - Totally lackluster, too bland for a national campaign, made no impact during the debate whatsoever. He would be a credible VP possibility, except SO boring. A much less telegenic Paul Ryan.

7. Chris Christie - His combativeness simply will not wear well over the long haul, and he has more negative baggage than almost any of the 17. He will not be anyone's VP pick. His star has really faded.

8. Ted Cruz - He can't keep up with Trump in the crazy department, and hell, that's his strong suit.

9. John Kasich - This year's Tim Pawlenty.

10. Mike Huckabee - I used to think, well, at least he has a sense of humor. But what an embarrassment the man has become.

11. Ben Carson - He is not disgracing himself, which is something.

12. Rick Perry - Didn't do too badly in the J.V. debate, but has a long history of stupid.

13. Bobby Jindal - Also OK in the J.V., but for some reason I cannot take him seriously. Is it superficial of me to note that, like Walker, he lacks the handsomeness a male candidate in this day and age needs? It probably IS superficial, but it's also probably true.

14. Rick Santorum - I assume he wants to maintain his visibility for reasons other than thinking he has a genuine shot at the candidacy.

15. Lindsey Graham - Why?

16. George Pataki - Why?

17. Jim Gilmore - Why, oh why?

I think the most solid team that the GOP could put up against Hillary would be Rubio-Fiorina. Appeal to youth, women, Latinos - hitting the Dems where they're strong. Rubio would look majorly vigorous next to the increasingly grandmotherly Clinton. He could pull off an upset, while Jeb would just put everyone to sleep.

My guess is that Hillary is rightly looking very hard at Martin O'Malley for her VP. I think he would be a superb pick. He and Fiorina debating would be something else. I hope that happens.

I Am Lion (Mambo Banda II)

Independent and self-publishing can easily encompass a category of "outsider literature," akin to outsider art and music in that it does not follow the usual rules. Mambo Banda II's magical realist allegorical political thriller I Am Lion qualifies as outsider literature in that sense, although it is probably also drawing on African narrative traditions that may only seem unusual from a different cultural perspective.

The outsider feeling of the text is magnified, though, because of its rough-hewn quality. Not to put too fine a point on it, the book could use a copy-editor! A professional editor would catch the misspellings, tidy up the frequent run-on sentences, and eliminate some worse problems (like a couple of patches of formatting instructions that somehow got dumped into the narrative on pages 151 and 189).

There can be a question, of course, as to when persistent "errors" become part of a style. Controversy formed around the novels of the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola (1920-1997) - was his "broken English" a reinforcement of Western stereotypes about uneducated Africans, or was it merely vernacular? (The debate has swung in favor of the second viewpoint.) Undoubtedly Mambo Banda's prose does reflect local African uses of English which should not be entirely edited away in favor of a smoother and more banal product. For example, this run-on sentence is fairly effective because it conveys a sense of motion:

Aaron tried the elevator but it was out of service, he used the stairs, slowly he ascended up the unforgiving stairs.

But I do think that the text could be tweaked in unobtrusive ways that would encourage more readers to engage with it.

And what is it exactly that they will be engaging with? The story opens with a homeless man named Lion who does not remember his past. The context is an unspecified African geography (Portuguese and Arabic are spoken as well as English) where Pathos City and Solemn Island are in sight of each other, but jurisdictionally separate albeit desperately tangled. Lion will find himself involved in a Machiavellian fever-dream of revolution, terror, bureaucracy, assassination, political marriage, street gang activity, and boring conference presentations, and the deeper in he goes the more he will recover of the lost parts of his own journey.

Imagination is not lacking here, and neither is narrative drive. Even when the story became dauntingly convoluted or went off on sidetracks (such as a passage with a ghostly guide that seems to have parachuted in from Dickens' A Christmas Carol, or an overly detailed description of a fistfight), I turned pages speedily. I cannot say that I was entirely satisfied at the finish - there were too many nagging loose ends. (Where did you go, Princess Deborah?) But the book was undoubtedly a trip.

So do I recommend I Am Lion? That's a tough call. It's clearly not for everyone. I believe it would benefit not just from the copy-editing I mentioned, but from one further general overhaul to clarify parts of the story that are more confusing and ungrounded than they need to be. Some confusion is atmospheric; too much is trying.

Mambo Banda's vivid descriptive prose is generally a highlight of the reading experience:

The moon cast a fatigued radiance, making it difficult to see anything. It was absolutely silent with the exception of a seething noise in the background, relenting and unending. Different smells filled the air, but one scent dominated, the smell of rotting mangos. Dawn approached and slowly relieved the night of its duty. The darkness began to vanish, slowly revealing the true nature of the place. The seething background sound continued even after the night faded away.

Now, that is imperfect - for one thing, he means "relentless" (or "unrelenting"), not "relenting." But "the smell of rotting mangos" is nicely specific; the notion that, if radiance helps us to see, "fatigued radiance" might prevent us from seeing, is intriguing; and "slowly relieved the night of the duty" is an excellent turn of phrase. These are the opening words of the novel, and they unquestionably got me interested. 

But sometimes when Banda is just trying to push the story forward, the language gets flat-footed:

One fateful morning everything changed; an unpredictable set of events would rip Salim's world apart.

The dialogue, which is the primary way we "know" the characters, lacks differentiation and can be stilted in effect. I found myself able to live with that, but I do think the people in the story, Lion aside, could be fleshed out more fully in ways other than their spoken language. I don't really have mental pictures of them.

So-o-o-o - the book has substance and urgency, but is not (yet) everything it could be. I could recommend a revised and corrected version more confidently. For now, I Am Lion is for the adventurous reader who does not mind carrying a machete into the jungle territory of literature.

I Am Lion