Archived Writing

<< back to the search results

Surface detail, and deep substance

Thursday, February 21, 2008

DATELINE: LOS ANGELES, California – So it’s been one whole week back at work for film and TV writers, a return accompanied by some bizarre stories circulating around this often weird town.

Some scribes simply can’t remember, it’s being said - and even written in reputable press outlets - what plots they were working on when the Writers’ Guild of America went on strike back in November. To name but one group, the creators (is that the right word?) of NCIS, the naval-themed crime show from CBS, have been quoted as experiencing such memory-loss … as if it matters greatly.

 

It’s a nice jokey line (especially among writers) but it strains credulity a bit in these days of digital creativity, and especially of the phenomenon that digerati sometimes label “non-ephemerality” – or what you might even call, more simply: immortality.

 

Jeffrey Cole, Director of the University of Southern California’s well-regarded Center for the Digital Future, spoke yesterday at the Integrated Media Association’s annual conference, which I’m attending, and he pointed out that Andy Warhol was completely wrong in assuming a key future measurement would be “fifteen minutes of fame” – it’s actually fifteen megabytes, said Cole, and as every blogging, social-networking teenager knows … that will last forever. Everything online is in some way saved, or at least retrievable. Like it or not – nothing is ever lost.

 

More significantly, for LA’s single-industry community, The Oscars ® are not lost! They are indeed saved. You can now almost palpably sense the relief here, once strikers can no longer cast any gloom over the telecasting of the city’s annual Self-Congratulation Fest.  Hollywood Boulevard is already closed to traffic as the logistics for the show get under way. The polls closed Tuesday (and of course I don’t mean in Wisconsin, Hawaii and Washington State) and the count will be completed tomorrow.

 

As ever (or as for the last 74 years, anyway) that count is in the secluded and supposedly secure hands of accountants PriceWaterhouseCoopers – and for the most recent Awards, that’s meant Brad Oltmanns and Rick Rosas, partners in the firm’s Los Angeles office (seen above left at last year’s ceremony – Oltmanns is far left). They’re the public face, at least, of the operation. Ten other PWC staffers are involved as well, but these two senior guys are the only ones who know the results between the count's ending (entirely a hand-count, incidentally - and maybe thankfully so) and Sunday’s on-air opening of “the envelope, please”.

 

Product placement, and well-publicized credits for big-name dress and accessories designers, are inescapably part of the Oscar shebang, and so it has this year emerged - from no other more reliable source than Oltmanns and Rosas themselves - that their critical accessory, the fine, serious-looking leather briefcases in which they convey the final results into the Kodak Theater, are made by Longchamp of Paris. 

 

But to date no showbiz correspondent along the red carpet has stuck a microphone under their noses to ask who are they wearing.  And shamefacedly I have to admit that despite my once-hardened chops as an investigative reporter, I’ve spent three days here without discovering who designs the accountants’ fabulous retro-looking tux suits.

 

 

 

**DISCUSSION OF THIS COLUMN IS AIRED WEEKLY BY WHDD - ROBIN HOOD RADIO**

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST by clicking HERE

 

 

I KNOW THAT, AT THE HEART OF IT, IT MUST BE THE WRITING - whatever the contributions from other disciplines - but I sometimes remain mind-numbingly baffled when some great instance of the performing arts suddenly, simply, overwhelms me.

 

I can feel like a complete naïf, asking the unanswerable:  “How did that just happen?”

 

It happened for me with the newest iteration of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George (new to the US, at least – after being developed three years ago in London’s old industrial, riverside district of Southwark by the wonderfully-titled Chocolate Factory Productions) which opens officially tonight back on my hometown’s old Broadway.

 

This staging is less lavish than the 1984 New York original, which I never saw, is said to have been. But I was taken to my transfixed state of weepy incomprehension by the soaring climax of Act One. In retrospect I can, if tentatively, ascribe the scene’s transformational effect to a fusion of visually enticing trompes l’oeil (digitally produced, and very neat indeed) … the daring investment of poignant character into unknown figures from a well-loved painting … and the interplay of plangent melody and insistent recitative with some oh-so trenchant but simple lyrics. All that … plus the indefinable magic of confident, mysterious artistry. 

 

Lead actor/singers Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell (above right) both come from the British production, courtesy of the sometimes (but not here) hard-to-placate Actors’ Equity of America. (Russell, however, was not the original English actress to play Dot, the aptly named girlfriend and model for pointillism’s progenitor Georges Seurat. Her predecessor in the role, Anna Jane Casey, exited - a bit like her stage character - after she became pregnant.)

 

Just to pick on one detail - which the media-geek in me can’t help doing, and which I acknowledge runs counter to the show’s holistic impact  -  the animation of Seurat’s charcoal sketches, pending the eventual emergence in full color of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, beats any celluloid Disney attempt to blend live action with cartoons. That's especially true during a demanding song that Evans performs along with two sketchy dogs, one yappy, one lazy).

 

It’s no surprise after seeing that, to learn that director Sam Buntrock, while he once was an assistant director at London’s innovative Donmar Warehouse theatre, also worked - for a lot more money, I imagine - as a commercial animator.

 

 

 

IT’S TIME TO SAY IT. I AGREE WITH GEORGE W BUSH. The still-president gave out an incisive media critique this week, early in his five-nation tour through Africa, saying that the frequent stereotyping of that continent in the press is wrong, because it constantly conveys the image of a continent that consists only of “conflict and failure”.

 

This was said partly to account for his not showing up personally in any currently troubled country (though Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was, to be fair, dispatched to Kenya) but it does contain an essential truth about the media’s generally negative focus. The continent is after all is made up of 54 countries – many which are peacefully progressing, if not universally easefully.

 

However, it remains an irresistible thought that those attributes, “conflict and failure”, coming out of a pair of Bush lips, of all places, could better be applied a lot closer to home.