Classic Mr NYC

Recently I re-watched the Coen Brothers' great 2013 movie Inside Llewyn Davis. Oh, how I love this flick!

My original post was an examination of why this is a great NYC movie. (It still is, by the way.) But what I didn't fully appreciate at the time was and is how radical, how subversive, how daring this movie is; how it completely shatters all conventions and norms of storytelling -- it does all the things you're not supposed to do in a movie, it thumbs its nose at "the rules" of a conventional plot and character development, but it does it so seamlessly, so straightforwardly, that you don't notice.

In short, Inside Llewyn Davis is about a folk singer whose career is going nowhere fast. In fact, this is a story about failure. That's it. It's not a tragedy -- Llewyn doesn't die, doesn't go to jail, doesn't lose everything (because he has almost nothing to begin with), doesn't gain the world only to lose his soul, etc. etc., cliche, cliche. No. It's just about a guy who tries and fails, who attempts to succeed and doesn't. He's an honest failure but a failure nonetheless. He doesn't go anywhere, his future is empty. The end.

Why? Because he's a bad guy? Not really. He's not a great guy (he bangs other guy's wives and has a temper problem) but, when he does wrong, he tries to make it right. So he's flawed but not irredeemable. Is he untalented? Not at all, in fact, he's a beautiful singer -- but he's not GREAT. His fate is sealed not because he does anything wrong but because, as he's told by a music producer at one point, there's just not "a lot of money here."

This is one of the only movies, only stories, I've seen that's about how and why people fail. About how random and how unpredictable failure and success is -- and how failure happens just because you fall a little short. We see this in elections all the time -- a few votes short here and there, and dreams of a political career, of public service, are dashed (often permanently so). Score just a little bit below the "mean" or whatever it is on a standardized test, and forget about getting into college or grad school, with all the career implications that implies. This movie shows how careers and lives are forever altered -- often shattered -- just because the powers that be, the umpires of life, the "means", the beancounters, the scorekeepers, the gatekeepers to the future, find you wanting and ... slam the gate. 

This doesn't happen because you're a bad person or a good person. It happens just because something, like money or a few votes or a few points or something, "isn't here."

I've been there. You've been there. We've all been there. And where are our movies? Inside Llewyn Davis is one of the precious few.

And does Llewyn learn anything from his failure? Does he grow as a person? Does he, as the storytelling Gods tell us he's supposed to, "arc." No! Why would he? It's not his character flaws that lead to his failure. His failure happens ... just because ...

You should read this article from a few years ago that brillantly sums up this movie and its message -- or lack thereof -- about failure. 

At the very end of the movie, Llewyn plays his final set at a nightclub and then walks off and the next act is a guy named Bob Dylan. Llewyn goes into an alley and gets beaten up. And this is the point -- one will go onto make music history and win the Nobel Prize while the other ... well, we don't know what happens to him in the long run. We check out on Llewyn at this point. After all, he's a failure, he has no future, he's destined to be forgotten, so we take our leave. 

This is what failure, ultimately, is -- nothing. A void. A blank page. An empty space. A non-memory. Nada zilch zero. 

And that's why this is probably the best movie about failure ever made.

Let's Talk About Failure, Baby

Happy New Year! This is when we make resolutions and forge plans to achieve great success in the coming twelve months. That's why, contrarian that I am, this first post of 2021 will be about failure.

After the 2020 we all had, can you blame me?

I love stories about failure. They prove that the universe is a random, weird, mostly cruel, sometimes kind, totally unpredictable place. I'm a connoiseur of the genre. 

Let's paraphrase Leo Tolstoy who wrote that all happy families are basically the same while all unhappy families are unhappy in unique and different ways. So it is with success and failure: all roads to success are basically the same and straightforward (the idea, the struggle, the setback, the breakthrough, the triumph) but the roads to failure are much more bizarre and interesting.

I've chronicles my share of failure stories on here over the years -- this blog being perhaps a prime example of failure.

So here's another one: the story of a musical version of Frankenstein that premiered exactly 40 years ago today -- and closed after one night. Hopes were high that this show, the most expensive musical of all time at the time, would start 1981 on Broadway with a creative and financial bang. Instead, it failed -- the reviews were terrible, there was no advance box office sales, it was a disaster by every metric. The producers saw that this show had no future except red ink and empty seats so they killed it that night. Interestingly, this show had a notable cast (some of whom were fired before the show actually played its one offiicial show) including future Oscar-winner Dianne Wiest, the late great David Dukes (not to be confused with the white supremicist), and a guy named William Converse-Roberts who would go on to be the ex-husband on The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd. The creators would go on to have decent careers but no big Broadways triumphs. But on the night of January 4, 1981, a month after John Lennon's murder and Ronald Reagan's inaugeration, the future for everyone on the show looked dark.

But even though this showed was a bad flop, it makes for a great -- and successful -- story.

P.S. The whole horror genre has had a lousy history on Broadway. Whereasa it's a staple of the movies, theater audiences aren't interested. Fascinating how a whole genre can work in one medium but not in another. 

America 250: George III's Failure

I'm fascinated by stories of failure. As a failure myself, it's so much more interesting than success. That's why I read books and watch documentaries about movies that flopped, about wars that went wrong, about various other things that went awry. Somewhere along the way someone made a decision or decisions that seemed correct at the time -- but that turned out instead to be really wrong. Failure is about the intersection of intent with human falibility, about the clash between dreams and reality. 

I'm a fan of failure. 

Therefore, as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, I'd like to share these hilarious clips from the 1994 movie The Madness of King George where George III mourns the "paradise lost" that was "the colonies." Of course two decades later the musical Hamilton would have a more comic take on George III's defeat -- but after 250 years, we won't "be back."

Michael Cimino, RIP

When did you last get excited by a movie? When was the last time a movie came out that made you want to see it - again and again and again?

I remember in the 1990s when Pulp Fiction hit theaters - it was so exciting, such daring filmmaking, such thrilling storytelling, that I went to see it four times in the theaters. Back then, movies seem to matter to people, personally, and they seemed to be important cultural touchstones as well. Movies were, dare I say it, important. They mattered. They lived.

Today? Movies suck - or mostly suck. These days, TV shows have the cultural edge that movies once enjoyed. For the most part, movies now are either one of two things: huge, cynical, money-hungry enterprises (think of the proliferation of "franchises" and the unending number of sequels) or calculated "Oscar-bait", movies designed to win awards and make some money but are otherwise forgettable. Movies don't excite anymore. They don't live inside us or the culture. The artistry of film making isn't moving forward, taking strides. It's stuck. And that's sad.

So how did we get here? It took a long time. While movies were burning up the culture in the 1970s through the 1990s, the seeds of their downfall were being planting at the same time, namely the era of blockbusters and sequels, along with the upwards spiral of production costs. But most of all came the huge costs of failure. When movies fail, they not only lose money but can destroy careers.

In 1978, a director named Michael Cimino made a movie called The Deer Hunter, about working class men and women who's lives are shattered by the Vietnam war. The movie was a huge success - it made lots of money and won several Oscars, including Best Picture. Two years later, Cimino produced his follow-up, Heaven's Gate, about 19th century land wars in the American West. This movie failed catastrophically, so much so that the studio that financed it went under. 

It was the first time that a movie's failure actually did something so devastating. Needless to say, the studios reacted accordingly. In the decades that followed, movies became increasingly "safer" so as not to offend audiences and critics. That's not to say, in the ensuing decades, that there still haven't been other huge failures as well as other exciting movies (like Pulp Fiction). But over time, safeness won over daring. The deary cinematic landscape we live in today is largely due to the failure of Heaven's Gate -- a movie that tried every bit to be as good as The Deer Hunter but wasn't.

Michael Cimino died last week, and his professional trajectory tells us a lot about the culture we live in today. After his once promising career was derailed, Cimino only directed a small number of movies, most of which critics and audiences ignored. This was, and is, a shame. A daring director was largely sidelined because of this (certainly huge) failure and the art of film, I think, suffered as a result.

Movies matter less now because directors are increasingly not the voices of their own films. When was the last time you saw a movie and really felt like you saw art being created? Yes, such film "auteurs" like Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, and the Coen Brothers are still making movies - but for how much longer? And when they're gone, who will replace them? I have no idea. There seem to be no young auteurs on the horizon.

When you watch both The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate, putting aside both movies' virtues and flaws, what strikes you about them is that these are stories being told by a great directorial voice; that you are watching someone's singular vision spring to life; that these are movies that do what only movies can do best: tell a story through moving images, the director as storyteller. Like a painter using paints and brushes, like a writer using words and a pen, like a sculptor using stones and chisel, this is a director using camera and film to tell a story and imprint an artistic style on your consciousness. Cimino didn't need special effects, he didn't need clever dialogue, he didn't need fancy editing, he didn't need any visual or storytelling tricks - he was amazingly confident in the way that he simply pointed and moved the camera, coreographing his scenes with such skill, that his vision came across so strongly that you were left with an impression that lasted long after these movies were over. 

Having seen both films, I remember them - the storytelling is unconventional, the performances are bold, the camera work is thrilling and confident, a master clearly at work. Ask yourself this: when was the last time you saw movie where you felt like this? Probably a long time.

And as good as television is these days, it will never have the cinematic visual power of the movies. Television is still mostly a writer's medium with the director serving as the writer's handmaiden. That's fine! But movies are first and last a director's medium, and they are at their most powerful when the director's voice rings loudly.

In many ways, Cimino both exemplified everything that used to be great about movie making and was also indirectly responsible for its decline. His ego, apparently, got in the way of his work. But now that he has passed on, it's important to remember that filmmakers like him used to reign supreme in our culture and that hopefully, one day, movies will live again.

PS. You must read Final Cut by Steven Bach, generally considered the best book ever written about the movie business, which chronicles the turbulent history of Heaven's Gate. It paints Cimino in a very unflattering light but, after reading it, you'll understand how movies are what they are today. You can find the documentary based on the book at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyeOmPMHRYg.

PPS. Cimino was a New Yorker, originally from Long Island, but he got his start working in advertising in NYC in the Mad Men era of the 1960s.

Are New Yorkers Allergic to Failure?

This item from New York magazine makes a persuasive case: Why Us?
New Yorkers’ excess of recession depression.

Failure is a part of life -- sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes you're lucky, sometimes you ain't. You always play to win but sometimes you get out-played or there are other events beyond your control that cause you to lose. Such is life. Sucks to lose, great to win, but you can't always get what you want ...

Yet there is something in the NYC DNA that finds failure ... unacceptable. Like it's something to be ashamed of. Like it's akin to child molestation or something. I've known lots of people -- you know, these super Type A folks -- who, whenever things don't go their way or they fall short in some way, feel like they're bad people, like they're somehow morally deficient. Failure is a badge of shame for a lot of New Yorkers.

But it shouldn't be!

Now I'm plenty Type A, as neurotic as the next person, but I recognize that sometimes I'm gonna fail ... but if I keep working hard, more often than not, I'll succeed. I've won, I've lost, I've won and lost again and again and again ... the key is not to be bitter about your failures or to get too arrogant about your successes, and should always just get up to fight another day.

... and you might just find you get what you need.

Remembering "Teddy & Alice"

I recently watched the 1955 movie The Night of the Hunter, a gothic thriller directed by the great actor Charles Laughton, about a psycho preacher terrorizing two kids. At the time of its release it was a critical and commercial failure but, since then, it has come to be regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made -- and highly influential on directors like David Lynch, Spike Lee, and the Coen Brothers.

This year also marks the 50th anniversary of the Stephen Sondheim musical Follies. Produced between his signature hits Company in 1970 and A Little Night Music in 1973, Follies was an odd and unconventional show about old-school entertainers reflecting on their broken lives. It was so unusual that, at the time, the critics hated it and audiences ignored it. But, in the intervening fifty years, Follies it has come to be seen as a classic, a proud entry in the Sondheim canon, with some brilliant songs like "I'm Still Here."

Sometimes something or someone is a failure in its or the person's time but becomes a great success later on. (Hopefully this blog will enjoy that same trajectory!)

This unusual fate has not befallen the Broadway musical Teddy & Alice. Produced in late 1987, it ran for two months before closing, an utter failure. Unlike some shows -- i.e. Chicago -- that failed in its original run but then was restaged to great success decades later, Teddy & Alice has never been revived on Broadway and remains totally forgotten.

So the ever-contrarian Mr NYC is going to remember it.

Recently I was strolling through Times Square and passed by the Minskoff Theater. I strained to remember that I saw a show there once, a long time ago, but couldn't remember it and then ... LIGHT BULB. I remembered the show! Teddy & Alice! It's a silly musical about President Theodore Roosevelt and his wild daughter Alice. The songs were adapted from John Philip Sousa and most of them are, well, forgettable. I don't really remember anything about the show itself but I remember that I saw it for two reasons: 1) A kid in my class was in it, playing one of Teddy's many children. He was telling everyone the show was about to close, and the tickets were super cheap, so my mom got two tickets and we went the night before it cloesd. 2) It was the first time I had ever heard of President Teddy Roosevelt and my impression of him was actually formed by this show. 

While the show itself was forgettable, the star of it was not -- Teddy was played by Len Cariou, a veteran stage and TV actor who was in the original run of Sweeney Todd. These days he's best known for being on the show Blue Bloods that's been running for about a decade. He was amazing as Teddy, he carried the show brilliantly, and it's too bad that he never got the recognition for it that he deserved. 

I doubt that Teddy & Alice will ever be revived -- it's one of those shows that came and went so quickly, that failed so quietly, that was not a "notorious" or controversial failure (like the musical version of Carrie that closed after one night), that it's just slipped out of the collective Broadway memory. So, in a way, having seen the show, puts me in a small and select circle of people who had an experience that was unique, a brief moment in time, and that will never be repeated. 

"Heaven's Gate" @ 40

Forty years ago today one of the most infamous movie reviews in American history appeared in The New York Times. It was written by Vincent Canby, the most respected movie critic in America, and he was reviewing the new movie Heaven's Gate by director Michael Cimino. Cimino's previous film, The Deer Hunter, had won the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director the year before. Heaven's Gate had just had its premiere in NYC the night before, and this movie and review were much anticipated.

And movie history changed.

Canby wrote: "'Heaven's Gate' ... fails so completely that you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of 'The Deer Hunter', and the Devil has just come around to collect ... an unqualified disaster."

Ouch. 

United Artists, the studio that had financed and produced this movie, cancelled its scheduled wide-release in December. Cimino went back to the editing room, cutting down his nearly four-hour disaster into a two-and-a-half less-of-a-disaster. It was released in April, 1981 and earned about $1.5 million against a roughly $40 million-plus budget. It was the biggest failure in American history at the time -- and United Artists was sold to MGM and effectively ceased to exist. 

One movie had brought down an entire studio. Like 9/11 or the Trump Presidency or COVID-19, something unthinkable had become quite real.  

Cimino's career nose-dived after this -- he only made four small movies afterwards and then nothing at all before his death in 2016. His career was one of the quickest rises and falls of anyone in the history of movies. Over the years many people related to this movie -- either directly or indirectly -- have shared their memories of this unprecedented flop. It premiered in NYC on November 18th, 1980, and has become perhaps the most infamous movie premiere ever -- a party no one wanted to go to, a party everyone hated, a party that quickly turned into a kind of funeral. It was like being at the election night event for a losing candidate -- a candidate losing big. 

Of course, in the forty years since, many other films have come and gone that failed bigger than Heaven's Gate. But this movie remains the most expensive failure in history -- it took down a studio, one started by, amongst others, Charlie Chaplin. 

What's also sad is that Heaven's Gate had the potential to be a truly great movie -- another Godfather, another Chinatown, another Gone with the Wind. It was a revisionist anti-Western, a re-examination of America's founding myths of the West being this vast welcoming space where immigrants to roam free and realize their dreams. The film, based very loosely on Wyoming history, was about how, in the late 19th century, immigrants were murdered by wealthy cattle barons who resented and feared immigrants' enchroachments on their land (sound familiar?). These murders were, apparently, sanctioned by the Federal Government and President Benjamin Harrison. It was an American genocide, and all perfectly legal. Sadly the movie's notorious production and failure overwhelmed any interest in its plot or the history behind it -- and, instead, it was derided as American history's most expensive "minor footnote."

The movie also became a footnote in Hollywood history, a not-so-gentle reminder that no one controls  or has the final say over history -- any kind of history. 

If you want to more of Mr NYC's Michael Cimino/Heaven's Gate coverage, go here.

Memo from NYC

"There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre" - Kurt Vonnegut

I have never known anyone in my life who committed suicide. In this, I consider myself fortunate. But now I feel like I live in a country that chose to kill itself -- and I have no idea what to say. I have no idea what to say about a country that chooses to massacre its own ideals and decency. To paraphrase Mr. Vonnegut, there's nothing intelligent to say about the hideous decision to make Donald Trump, a product of NYC no less, the 45th President of the United States -- because there was nothing intelligent about it at all. 

These are dark days in America. 

Let me get straight to the point: Trump only won this election through the Electoral College but he lost the popular vote. That means the majority of Americans, however slight, DO NOT want him to be president (bless them all). Yet this monster slipped through because several states in the Midwest hammered by de-industrialization chose to believe Trump's big lie that he will restore manufacturing jobs in the USA.

He won't. He can't.

The global economy, despite his promises to his followers, is here to stay. Technology as much as trade deals is responsible for the disappearance of those great old well-earning, little-skilled and no-education needed factory jobs. Hillary Clinton and the other GOP candidates for president didn't promise to bring back these jobs because they knew it was impossible. But like the great con man he is, Trump promised to deliver something that he knows he can't. He sold these angry, desperate people snake oil and they bought it because they didn't see any alternative. 

That's our failure, that's American society's failure. We didn't give them an alternative, we didn't provide them with any other hope, so they fell for this con man's promises. What else did they have? America has failed so many of its people for so long that they chose to make the most dangerous decision in its history. It took decades for us to get to this point. Hopefully it won't take quite so long for America to rid itself fully of the stench of the Trump presidency and re-gain admission to the decency of the world community.

It'll be interesting to see in four years when Trump's (hopefully only) term will end. Will those great manufacturing jobs have come back? What about all the other stuff he promises? Will he have built that "big beautiful wall" between the USA and Mexico -- and gotten Mexico to pay for it? Will he really deport more than 10 million "illegal" immigrants? Will he really cut taxes, beef up the military, and build our infrastructure while maintaining fiscal discipline? If he does, then he will have succeeded -- at least on the terms he and his supporters litigated this election on. But if he doesn't, then he's a failure. 

And I think he'll fail. He'll fail because he was never serious about succeeding in the first place -- he just wanted to get the presidency and did so by selling snake oil to the masses. In four years, he'll be president and they'll still have nothing except broken promises. But actually, they won't even be broken promises because, as I said, they're promises that Donald the con man never intended to honor. How can a man who has no honor actually honor anything? In short, he'll be a bad president because he's a bad man.
      

That said, it was heartening to see here in NYC and around the country that many Americans aren't taking this nightmare lying down. They're on the streets, protesting. The resistance starts now and let's keep it going until he's president no more. 

NYC's Worst Bro-mance

Currently the greatest country in the world is being stunk up by Donald Trump, a wannabe presidential Lone Ranger, and his bizarro Tonto/lawyer, the former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani. They seem to be having American history's most destructive bro-mance -- a criminal president being aided by a pathetic has-been henchman.

How did this happen? How the hell did we get here?

In NYC, for decades, Trump was a goofy real estate guy and media character, Giuliani a respected "law and order" prosecutor and mayor. It was hard to think, back then, that they would transmogrify into a neo-fascist buddy horror show, threatening to undermine our democracy and national security, pushing us to the brink of the biggest Constitutional crises since Watergate. Oh no. It seemed unimaginable just a few short years ago.

But here we are, and America is reaping the foul whirlwind. You should read this massive article that explores the Donald/Rudy tango, going back decades. The truth is that they were never particularly close and never really liked each other very much. However, at this perilous moment, they seem to need each other -- Trump thinks Rudy will save him from impeachment and historical disgrace, and Rudy is just happy that Trump is giving him a great last gasp of relevance, keeping him in the public eye. 

Politics is a cruel business which is why so few decent people get into it. You have to fight like hell to get elected to office and, once you do, work like a dog just to keep it. All the while you have people actively conspiring to get you thrown out, you have the press breaking your balls, you have to spend lots of time raising money, and it's very hard to actually get anything in government done -- it's just part of the job. And what's worse is that once you do leave office, for whatever reason, you immediately become irrelevant, a nothing. As the saying goes, all political careers end in failure. 

So this whole nightmare with Trump and Rudy is about two old guys who have been around forever, who understand that their time on the public stage is coming to and end, fighting like hell to stave off irrelevancy, to ward off the inevitable failure. They are drowning, gasping men, trying not to get swallowed by the tides of time and history.

And it all started here in NYC more 40 years ago.

By the way, there's currently a proposal in Albany to end what's called fusion voting (candidates runing for office on multiple party lines). Without fusion voting, Rudy would never have even become mayor more than a quarter century ago. We are always living in interesting times. 

Florida = Rudy's Retirement

Dear Rudy aka Mr 9/11,

So sorry (not really) about your failure in the primaries. I guess shamelessly exploiting one's attachment to an American tragedy isn't quite the political goldmine it once was, even if it has been and will remain to be (depressingly enough) a financial windfall.

Being a hero for one day (even if a lot of the problems stemmed from your own negligence, like putting the OEM in the friggin' World Trade Center fer chrissakes) doesn't quite cut it when you're up against a man who suffered brutal torture for five years in Vietnam, never once flinching, and has dedicated his entire life to the well-being of our nation. As I said yesterday, you're no TR, nor are you John McCain. Not even close. Not even a LITTLE BIT close.

Oh, I know, I know, even if you're not so much of a hero, you're still "the man who cleaned up NYC." Even though crime began to fall under Mayor Dinkins - who hired lots more police? Even though it was really Bill Bratton who instituted things like CompStat and "broken windows" policing (and who, when he got the proper credit, you had fired and replaced with such great leaders as Howard Safir and Bernie Kerik)? Even though it was Clinton policies that led to NYC's incredible economic boom? Yes, take the credit. Never stopped you before.

Do you also take the credit for your campaign's utter and disastrous failure? "The path to the nomination is in Florida," you thought. "I'll get all these New York retirees to vote for me and that'll give me momentum into Super Tuesday!" Since when do a bunch of rich Early Bird Specialers make Presidents? My theory: you didn't want to campaign in colder states like Michigan and South Carolina, so you went to Florida for January where it's warm.

I've heard first-hand accounts of how when you were the USDA that there were people in your office who's sole job was to get you in the papers each day. How will you now handle being yesterday's news? Not to mention that this marks the SECOND time you've dropped out of a race where one of your opponents might have been Hillary Clinton. She's a tougher broad than you, even when you're in drag!

Well, I guess it's back home to Park Avenue and the Hamptons, you friend to the working stiff. This marks the last time Mr NYC will ever write anything about you. You love attention more than anything else. Well, you will no longer get it here.

And how long will it be until there's a FOURTH Mrs. G?

Ed Koch On Giuliani's Florida Loss: "The Beast Is Dead"

For Giuliani, a Dizzying Free-Fall

Did Robert Moses Destroy the Amazon (Campus)?

The real culprit, according to those in the know, for the failure of Amazon to build a new campus in NYC, is someone who has been dead for almost 40 years -- that's right, our friend, our buddy, our pal, Robert Moses.

Why?

Well, from the 1920s until the 1960s, the "master builder" rammed highways around the city and state, and built other projects in a totally irresponsible manner, wrecking neighborhoods and disposessing their residents. In the name of "progress", he warped this city to his car-centric, anti-poor priorities, underfunding public transit in the process, and basically ignoring the concerns of the communities he affected. Remember, this is the guy who wanted to destroy Soho and Greenwich Village by putting a highway through it -- that was stopped by Jane Jacobs, and NYC vowed never to let something so awful ever possibly happen again. 

By the time he left power in 1968, NYC was suffering a Robert Moses PTSD and new laws were enacted, including the little-known but extremely powerful public utilities committee, to prevent another Moses from building things in this city it didn't want, didn't need, and that would change it forever -- for the worse.

The result, today, is that it's practically impossible to build anything big in NYC as mayors and governors have learned to rue. It took 45 years to build three subway stops on the East Side, after all! You might call this an "overcorrection". 

So whether you were for or against the Amazon deal, this situation proves that NYC today is living in Robert Moses legacy -- in the city he shaped and in the reaction to that -- and his form of progress from yesterday makes progress today all the harder.

Review: "Chess"

Well this is certainly a Mr NYC first: I'm reviewing a current Broadway show that I had previously blogged about as being a historical curiosity relegated to the  distant past.

I'm talking of course about Chess, the messy and failed 1988 musical that has been revived to massive success on Broadway. In 2021 I wrote a lot about how its various problems and controversies doomed it almost 40 years ago, and I mused about whether any producers might have the courage to rework and revive it. 

And they did!

Perhaps Mr NYC played a small part on this? (Who knows, only that I was ahead of my time.) So here's my review of the revival:

Set in 1979, the plot involves two brilliant chess masters, American Freddie and Soviet Russian Anatoly, who are set to compete in Milan. The match is heavy with Cold War politics, and the CIA and the KGB want Freddie to lose the match so that the Russians will be willing to engage in the Salt II Nuclear Talks. Freddie doesn't want to do this, obviously. Caught between them in Florence, Freddie's lover whom he mistreats and who, through various personal and political events, moves over to Anatoly -- who then defects to England with Florence, leaving his wife and children behind. Eventually, four years later, they all come together at another chess match in Bangkok -- the all of their fates intertwine and explode. 

This version of Chess has a new book that simplifies and clarifies the story. Some of the songs have been put in a more logical order that does a better job of pushing the narrative story. As for the story itself, it still doesn't really work as being quite as compelling as it aims to be, and the characters are a bit two-dimensional. That said, it never lags and you're never bored. Not at all! It's massively entertaining.

Chess is both helped and hindered by a narrator who explains all of the action and the historical context of the show. Because this version is being staged almost 40 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, it is therefore presented in a "once upon a time ..." fashion which gives the audience more perspective -- something obviously not possible in 1988. So that was good. Unfortunately the narrator tells a lot of dumb, corny, jokes that gives the show some humor (it's otherwise pretty heavy) but that is tonally dissonant with the rest of the story. 

However, the songs are amazing, and the production is brilliantly staged.

Lea Michele, as Florence, is beyond great -- she is a true Broadway star, the best of her generation, and her version of "Nobody's Side" is so hot, so on fire, it nearly burns the theater down. Aaron Tveit as Freddie and Nicholas Christopher as Anatoly are also great, incredible singers and actors who play these tortured geniuses struggling to survive. The rest of the supporting cast is strong and I must give a shout-out especially the ensemble which is on stage for the entire show and sings and dances throughout, performing many complicated numbers. They are the heart of this show and are wonderful.

So see Chess for a good time, a piece of fun Broadway theater -- a reminder that yesterday's failure can be tomorrow's triumph. 

Oh Those New York Politicians ...

Wow! What a lousy year to be a New York politician!

2008 will go down in history as the year New York's political leadership officially became a big joke. And it ain't even half over yet! First Rudy's presidential campaign went to Florida to die. Then Eliot Spitzer got down with a hooker and his governorship went down with her.

As soon as Eliot left, our new governor admitted to running around on his wife ad nausem.

That should have been enough -- more than enough. But wait! There's more!

Now, within the last two days, Hillary Clinton's campaign is over and everyone wants her to quit and she should quit but she won't quite and now a Staten Island congressman has been busted for drunk driving and fathering an illegitimate kid!!!

Oy vey. Madone. When will it end? All this nonsense and failure is enough to make this New Yorker nostalgic for Mario Cuomo and Ed Koch -- heck even Al D'Amato and George Pataki will do.

Al Smith, FDR, Daniel Patrick Moynahan, and Nelson Rockefeller must be spinning in their graves (and even though Nelson died in 1979 while shtupping his secretary, at least he had the decency to wait until he was out of office).

Let's just hope that Chuck Schumer and Mike Bloomberg aren't being naughty. We can't take much more of this.

Gotta Love New Yorkers

Most news is "news" because it's bad news so, during this holiday season, it's heartwarming to read stories like this one -- about a non-profit group that saves leftover food from NYC restaurants and supermarkets and literally delivers it to homeless shelters and food kitchens. 

At first, when I read this story, my cynicism was activated: oh great, another story of a tech start-up that's "doing good" by scraping literal crumbs off the table for the poor, yet another example of our weak social safety net being substituted by a well-intentioned but inadequately resourced charity, yet glaring another example of our broader societal failure to take care of the least amongst us. 

The failures of our collective societal action remains but, as I kept reading this story, my cynicism gave way to admiration. There really is a lot of food waste everywhere, it's basically an unavoidable problem, so the fact that these people are transforming leftovers into literal meals for the destitute -- and doing it with great speed and efficiency -- is an amazing thing. 

If only we could get this kind of ingenuity into our government, and if only our society and policies were this generous, our country and our world would be a better place. At least here in NYC we're giving it an admirable try, one saved meal at a time.

The name of the organization is Rescuing Leftover Cuisine and here's a talk the founder gave at Google earlier this year. 

Review: "Year of the Dragon" (1985)

The subject of immigration has been a political hot topic for years, decades, now. It's a paradox: America is a country built by immigrants, almost all of us are the children of immigrants, and yet most of this country hates immigrants. 

America is a contradictory country if there ever was one.

But a lot of the war of American immigration comes between those whose families have been here for years, decades, or centuries and more recent arrivals. For a lot of people, the old immigrants (i.e. them or their families, usually white) were great but the new ones (usually not white) ... not so much.

One of my favorite movies about the clash between the Old World and the New, between the nativist Whites and non-White arrivals, is the 1985 crime flick Year of the Dragon that came out in the summer of 1985, forty friggin' years ago. 

It's a tight, fast-paced crime thriller about an out-of-control NYC cop named Stanley White (played amazingly by Mickey Rourke at the height of his 1980's movie career) who is determined to take down the Chinatown gangs, the Triads. The Triads are at war with the Italian mob, the Thai mobs, as well as each other. The main crime boss Stanley is trying to bust is a young, handsome, very smart guy named Joy Tai (played really well by John Lone). 

The problem is that Stanley is being thwarted by his bosses in the police department who are willing to look the other way as long as they get their bribes. Into the mix comes a young, gorgeous, Asian-American TV reporter (played by an ex-model named Arianne) who wants to help Stanley bust the gangs, free the slave labor that the crime bosses exploit, and make Chinatown a crime-free, honest place. (In their first meeting he tells her, "You're a helluva lot sexier than those other broads on the other channels." Sweet man.)

See, Stanley is a tough, politically-incorrect, totally honest, incorruptible cop who doesn't care how the Chinese did things in the old country, or how they ignore law enforcement -- no, he's gonna make them follow the law like everyone else, "even the Polacks." What evolves is a cool story about how personalities, violence, greed, and an overwhelming passion for culture and justice make NYC (and America) a wild place. I won't give it away but the ending chase scene is classic. Quentin Tarantino himself said it's one of his favorite scenes in all of cinema, and that Year of the Dragon is one of his personal favorites. 

Mickey Rourke is great in this movie, a really fun, blazing talent. It's a shame that his movie career became so hit or miss (mostly miss) after this but his perfomance is a reminder of what a talent he is. John Lone was also great in this movie, and shortly after that he starred in the 1987 Best Picture Oscar-winner The Last Emperor because of his performance in this movie. The only sore point is Arianne - she really can't act and she didn't have much a movie career after this. Even the director said afterwards about her performance "I tried ..." But all of the other actors are good, and 

Year of the Dragon was the first movie that director Michael Cimino made after the historic debacle of Heaven's Gate in 1980. Cimino's first movie, the 1974 Clint Eastwood crime caper Thunderbolt & Lightfoot had made Cimino a notable director but then his 1978 operatic Vietnam masterpiece The Deer Hunter made him an Oscar-winning, big-time director. But his attempt to make another epic masterpiece with the Western Heaven's Gate was such an overlong, ponderous and financial failure that he didn't make another movie until this one in 1985 -- and it was a return to form, in a way, back to the taught crime movie that started his career. And interestingly, even though this movie really captures Manhattan's Chinatown well, you really feel and small the streets when you watch it, it was actually all shot on a soundstage in North Carolina!

Cimino was an intriguing figure -- a director of both great talent and great sloppiness. I've blogged about his bizarre life and career many times over the years but when he hit -- like with Thunderbolt, Deer Hunter and Year of the Dragon, he hit the bullseye. 

Even though this movie came out forty years ago, I think it's more relevant than ever. Watch the whole thing below and let me know what you think!

No More Rubber Rooms

It's hard to believe but for years New York City Public School teachers who were suspended from teaching and awaiting disciplinary hearings were sent to so-called "rubber rooms." These were places where they sat all day, did nothing -- and got paid for it. (As far as I know these rooms weren't literally padded like Supermax prison cells but the tedium of being in them every day was apparently the same).

The teachers exiled to them were often accused of incompetence, sometimes of gross misbehavior, but ,whatever their alleged infraction, union rules made it impossible to fire them. Instead, they had to wait ... and wait ... and wait ... and wait, sometimes for years in these rooms, until they finally got their hearings. Meanwhile they earned their salary and full benefits, costing the taxpayers around $30 million a year. Think of that? $30 million to pay people to do nada.

This is ending. Today the Bloomberg administration announced that the rubber rooms will be no more; instead these teachers will be assigned clerical or other non-classroom jobs. So finally we taxpayers will be paying these semi-laid off teachers to do something productive and stop wasting money. Sounds like a good idea.

These rubber rooms sound almost like these terrorist detention camps: the people in them are basically being warehoused. Some of them clearly should be there while others ... well ... it's not so clear if their imprisonment is really legally justified. They're in limbo.

Last year the veteran journalist Steven Brill did a long story for The New Yorker about the teachers who populate[d] these rubber rooms. It paints a fascinating picture of why unions are good things overall (protecting workers from exploitation, abuse, firing women for getting pregnant, etc.) but how certain union rules can lead to unproductive waste (like rubber rooms). And it's also clear from this article that some these teachers are either just lousy or unfit to educated students.

Sometimes I have to wonder, however, if these rubber rooms were being used for less than noble purposes. Clearly sending teachers there was a form of psychological gamesmanship: the Department of Ed. wanted to make them so unpleasant and boring that hopefully the teachers would just quit. (WNYC did a great story today about life in the rubber rooms.) But the thing that really disturbed me was how teachers who had been teaching for years and years were suddenly declared "incompetent" and banished into these gulags.

Really? A teacher is told that she's doing a fine job for years and then, all of a sudden, is told "Oh, you're no good. Get out." It's odd. Makes no sense. It seems to me that if someone is being told that they're doing a job well for years and then, all of a sudden, they're told that they're a failure and need to leave ... well, something else is going on. I think this is about forcing out older teachers who have accrued high salaries and pensions so that the city doesn't have to pay as much. It's also about, as these stories suggest, new principals who come in, decide they don't like certain teachers, and then suddenly say they're "incompetent" and force them out.

Oh, but that would be being cynical now wouldn't it? And of course the Bloomberg administration never does anything that would make a New Yorker think it would do something sleazy? But at least the rubber rooms are no more ... and that's probably a step in the right direction.

Remembering Mercedes de Acosta

Many years ago Howard Stern was interviewing movie icon Warren Beatty and got right to the point: "You make great movies," the King of All Media told the legendary Hollywood actor/director/Lothario, "if you didn't bang all those broads ... we'd talk about the movies, but the broads get in the way." (Then Stern told Beatty something about smelling his hand and the interview was over.)

Howard spoke the truth.

No matter how great a film icon Mr. Beatty is, no matter how many great movies he's directed and starred in, he'll best be remembered for his other great "productions": Natalie Wood, Joan Collins, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, Madonna, and many others. 

So was the case of Mercedes de Acosta.

Born in NYC in 1893 to affluent Cuban immigrants, Mercedes was a playwright, poet, and novelist. Her career trajectory was a little less Warren Beatty and a little more Llewyn Davis -- professionally, she was a failure, her work forgotten, her career unsuccessful. But she's remembered nonetheless. Why? Well, personally, she had some very successful "productions": Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead, and many others.

Even though she married a man, Mercedes was a notorious, unashamed lesbian at a time when this could literally land you in jail. She made lovemaking into an art form, her skills became as legendary as any movie or work of literature. Most of all, she had a boundless, rapacious spirit. Mercedes was someone the world wanted to classify one way -- a boring married lady who did nothing -- and she refused to stay in her lane. Instead, she travelled the world, wrote prolifically, and seduced many women. She's probably best remembered for the quote: "I can get any woman away from any man." 

Fearless! 

Mercedes lived the life she wanted, even if it didn't always bring her happiness. (Maybe the "broads" got in the way of her having a more successful career but, honestly, I'd rather be remembered for "productions" like Mercedes de Acosta and Warren Beatty than any play or movie.) Sadly, Mercedes died in poverty in 1968, taking her legendary skills into the afterlife. In many ways, her life was sad but she was brave, she was courageous, and -- if sometimes a little fearless and irresponsible -- she lived her truth until the end.

How many of us can say that?

So We Beat On ... "Gatsby" turns 100

One hundred years ago today, the third, relatively short, novel by F. Scott Fitzgeral. Titled The Great Gatsby, it got mixed reviews, sold poorly, and was generally viewed a failure.

Now, a full century later, its regarded by critics and generations of readers as one of the greatest novels ever written, and the greatest American novel of the 20th century.

The American dream -- its unending allure and its many dangers -- that the novel explores and lays bare, remains essential, more relevant than ever before. 

The green light still shines bright. And tonight, the lights of the Empire State Building will turn green. 

I've written a lot about Gatsby over the years so I won't rehash it here. But I always go back to this book, always re-read it, because the of the haunting final line: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Walter Cronkite RIP

It's No One's Fault

Believe it or not but New York State does not have no-fault divorce. Instead, when couples split, they must either be legally separated for a year or one party must accept blame for the marriage's failure (hence the divorce must be someone's "fault"). Most states already have no-fault but our beloved Empire State still has a rather archaic, almost Victorian view of marriage.

Fortunately this appears to be ending. The Assembly just passed a law for no-fault divorce and its prospects look in the State Senate and the Governor appears willing to sign it. There is, believe it or not, still some opposition. The Catholic Church is opposed to no-fault on moral grounds and women's rights advocates believe it gives poor women less leverage in their divorce proceedings.

But it's probably a good thing that the law's set to change. Divorce is obviously a sad, awful situation and creating circumstances where couples can more easily end their marriages and move on is for the best.