The Lemon Grove Incident (KPBS, 1985)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, January 19) KPBS celebrated the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday with a couple of unusual TV shows that made a more appropriate commemoration, at least to my mind, than the four National Basketball Association games in a row NBC was running. The first was The Lemon Grove Incident, a 1985 hour-long TV-movie actually produced by KPBS itself under the supervision of the late Gloria Penner. It dealt with a little-known backwater of San Diego County history: a lawsuit filed against the Lemon Grove school district in 1930 after the school board voted to build a separate and decidedly unequal elementary school for the schoolchildren of Mexican descent. At the time Mexican-American children were just a shade over half of the total enrollment of the Lemon Grove school district, and the all-white school board voted in secret (they held the meeting at the private home of one of the members) to set up a converted barn as a “school” for the Mexican kids. This came at a time when the Great Depression was creating a major anti-immigrant backlash and the Hoover Administration was calling for mass deportations of Mexicans and other Latinos on the ground that they were taking jobs away from deserving white Americans. (Plus ça change, plus ça même chose.) Like the Eisenhower administration’s “Operation Wetback” of 1953-54 and the Trump anti-immigrant campaign of today, the Hoover sweeps targeted anyone who looked brown or spoke English either haltingly or with an accent, without regard as to whether they were undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, naturalized citizens, or U.S.-born citizens. Apparently the deportation campaign was also assisted by the government of Mexico (which was then under the leadership of one of the country’s most corrupt politicians, Plutarco Elías Calles), in hopes that Mexican farmworkers returning home after stints in the U.S. would have learned American agricultural techniques they could pass on to local growers.

The Mexicans in Lemon Grove had mostly settled in and around Olive Avenue and worked in the lemon and orange orchards that gave the town its name. It’s not entirely clear why the drive to segregate the Mexican students in Lemon Grove took the racist form it did, but it was pushed by the local Chamber of Commerce, whose leaders thought that the presence of a large Mexican community would interfere with their attempts to market Lemon Grove as a desirable place for white people. It was also based on the belief that the presence of Mexican kids in the classroom was harming the education of white children because the Mexicans didn’t speak English well and the teachers had to explain their lessons over and over so the predominantly Spanish-speaking children would understand them. Actually, a lot of the Mexican children were proficient in English and certainly knew it well enough to be able to learn in it (another racist stereotype that refuses to die). The Lemon Grove school board planned to do this in secret, without any advance notice to the Mexican-American parents, and present it as a fait accompli when the new school year started in January 1931. That plan was blown by the school principal, Jerome Green (played in the re-enactments by Donald Browning), who started a public survey to determine just what the Mexican parents would think of having to send their kids to a separate and decidedly unequal school. The first parent presented with Green’s survey, Juan González (played by local Mexican artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña), literally tore it up.

On January 5, 1931, Green, under orders from the school board, made the children at Lemon Grove Elementary form two lines and sent the Mexican children to the new “school,” which their parents derisively called La Caballeriza (“The Barn”). There’s one chilling scene in the film that shows the local whites were willing to use the same intimidation tactics regularly employed by white Southerners to stop civil-rights actions: a widow who’s supporting herself and her two children on county relief payments is told by a local truant officer that she will lose that income if she keeps her kids out of school. She asks, “What do you have to do with the county?” – obviously she was aware that the Lemon Grove School District and the County of San Diego were separate entities – but the man tells her, “Word gets around.” The Mexican parents, under the leadership of Gonzålez and Roberto Alvarez, sought a meeting with the Mexican consul in San Diego, who put them in touch with a local attorney named Fred Noon (John Mathers), who agreed to file a lawsuit on their behalf. The film alternates between re-enactments of the trial scenes and fresh interviews with some of the people involved, including Robert Alvarez, Jr., who (probably because of an accident of alphabetization) got to be the first plaintiff in the case. It’s a lucky thing that this film was made in 1985, when many of the original participants were still alive and available for interviews.

Amazingly, the Mexican plaintiffs in Lemon Grove actually won the case – the first time in U.S. history a lawsuit challenging segregation in education had resulted in a legal verdict against it – though at least part of the judge’s ruling is wince-inducing today. He said in his opinion that Mexicans were “of the Caucasian race” and therefore the California laws permitting the segregation of African-American, Asian-American and Native American children didn’t apply to them. A lot of people don’t realize that there was a time in the history of American racism that Mexicans and other Latinos were considered “white.” It’s how Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were allowed to marry in 1940 despite California’s anti-miscegenation law because they were both “white.” I remember doing research in the early 1990’s on San Diego Gay rights activist Nicole Murray Ramirez in which I and my fellow researcher uncovered his birth certificate, which listed both him and his parents as “white” even though his parents had both been born in Mexico. This explained the long-standing rumor that he was appropriating a Latino identity that wasn’t his; though he actually is Latino, it’s likely a lot of people had got the idea from his birth certificate that he was “white” because that’s what it said on the form. The Lemon Grove school board decided not to appeal their loss in court, partly because the Chamber of Commerce withdrew their financial support on the ground that the suit had already damaged Lemon Grove’s reputation and it would be best for the community if they let the controversy die out. But they got their revenge against Principal Green by firing him when his teaching contract expired.

Atlanta Symphony and Ebenezer Baptist Church: Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Concert (Georgia Film Commission, Georgia Public Television, filmed January 20, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Lemon Grove Incident on Monday, January 19, KPBS showed a year-old concert from Atlanta, Georgia held at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had actually been pastor. Of course the current campus of Ebenezer Baptist is far newer, more modern, and more elaborate than the one at which Dr. King ministered! The concert was co-sponsored by Ebenezer Baptist and the Atlanta Symphony and took place on January 20, 2025 – ironically the day at which slimeball racist Donald J. Trump returned to the Presidency as well as the official date of the 2025 King Day holiday. The concert was led by a highly energetic Black conductor, Jonathan Taylor Rush, and began with an O.K. performance of the so-called “Negro National Anthem,” J. Rosamond Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It’s long irritated he that this lame piece of music has somehow become the African-American go-to song instead of a work by Duke Ellington, one of Black America’s true musical geniuses, but we seem to be stuck with it. The version was performed by the Atlanta Symphony and a mixed-race choir blended from the Atlanta Symphony’s and Ebenezer Church’s own ones. Then came brief speeches from Raphael Warnock, who in addition to being a U.S. Senator from Georgia is also the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist and therefore has Dr. King’s old job; and the orchestra’s (white, female) executive director, Jennifer Barlamont. After that came a quite remarkable sequence of compositions by young African-Americans, two of whom, Joel Thompson and Carlos Simon, were interviewed on screen. Thompson said that he’d originally been asked to set Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to music, but he’d decided that the speech was already so “musical” he’d have nothing to add to it. Instead, he composed a tone poem called An Act of Resistance which summed up Dr. King’s life’s work and message in purely instrumental terms.

Carlos Simon’s piece was “Lively,” the first movement of a suite he calls Amen! He said the work was inspired by his own childhood in the Pentecostal Church, where his father was a minister and his mother a trombone player. Accordingly he scored the work for three trombones plus orchestra, much the way Duke Ellington had written a hot trombone solo for Lawrence Brown in his song “Goin’ Up” from the 1943 musical film Cabin in the Sky. Simon used the three trombones much the way Ellington had used Brown: to represent a Black minister preaching an ecstatic sermon. During his interview Simon wore a shirt that read, “You Must Be Born Again” – a slogan that’s become associated with a far different sort of Christianity than Dr. King’s. Then came Gregory Porter, who in the online sources for the concert is listed as a jazz singer. He’s considerably more than that: he’s basically a dramatic performer whose music mixes classical, jazz, soul, and rap. Porter’s two pieces on the program, “1960-What?” and “Take Me to the Alley,” celebrated the explosion of the civil-rights movement on white America’s consciousness and King’s Jesus-like instinct to reach out precisely to the poorest and most marginalized people in the community. There was a bit of geographic confusion in “1960-What?,” since the song referenced Dr. King’s assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, but Porter also drew on John Lee Hooker’s famous blues ballad “Motor City Burning” and thus located at least part of his song in Detroit. After another brief speech, this one by Ebenezer Baptist’s minister of music, Patrice Turner, the concert continued with two movements of a suite by Margaret Bonds called The Montgomery Variations, after the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama that lasted over a year and sparked Dr. King’s emergence as a major civil-rights leader nationwide. Like Carlos Simon’s piece, Margaret Bonds’s was good enough to make me want to hear the whole work sometime (record companies, are you listening?). Then there was a piece by Scott O. Cumberbatch called “Praise the Lord.”

Afterwards gospel singer Tamika Patton came out for a version of Thomas A. Dorsey’s classic “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” which was Dr. King’s favorite song: Mahalia Jackson (who’d been instrumental in Dr. King’s most famous speech; at the 1963 March on Washington he’d been in the middle of a long, ponderous oration on the history of Southern racism and Mahalla hollered in his ear, “Give ’em the dream, Martin! Give ’em the dream!”) sang it at King’s funeral in 1968 and Aretha Franklin sang it at Mahalia Jackson’s funeral in 1972. Oddly, Patton sped up the tempo in mid-song for a gospel-rock version before slowing it down again, though when she was singing at Dorsey’s original tempo her version approached the eloquence of Mahalia’s and Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s. The next song was Alma Basel Androzzo’s “If I Can Help Somebody,” also known as “My Living Shall Not Be in Vain,” sung by Timothy Miller. Miller was officially listed as a tenor but his voice sounded more like a baritone, or even a bass-baritone, to me, and I thought it had the plangent power of the great 1930’s and 1940’s Black ballad singers like Paul Robeson and Jules Bledsoe. After that came the one misfire of the night: a rather nondescript gospel song by Kurt Carr called “For Every Mountain” that the church’s music director, Patrice Turner, made the mistake of singing herself. She started at the piano but gradually stood up and furiously went into full-blown belt mode on the song, launching high notes like heat-seeking missiles but only rarely on a recognizable pitch. I found myself thinking, “This is what Ethel Merman would have sounded like if she’d been Black.” Fortunately the concert closed with a chorus-and-orchestra arrangement of “We Shall Overcome,” arranged by Uree Brown; it took a while for the melody to emerge from Brown’s rich orchestral textures, but soon enough the choir joined in and luckily the tech people had enough skill the singers’ rendition of the familiar melody rose over Brown’s dense orchestral textures. A number of pieces ended rather abruptly because the producers were rather over-aware of audience applause and tried to edit it out crudely. But overall I was quite impressed by the concert and particularly liked the big orchestral works; indeed, I hope recordings get made of the entire multi-movement pieces Amen! and The Montgomery Variations.

The Love Light (Mary Pickford Corporation, United Artists, 1920, released 1921)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, January 18) my husband Charles and I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies’s “Silent Sunday Showcase,” hosted by Jacqueline Stewart (an African-American woman whose presence on TCM is welcome proof that you don’t have to be either white or male to be a film geek), called The Love Light. It was filmed in 1920, though not released until 1921, and was a co-production between two powerful and influential Hollywood women: Mary Pickford, producer and star; and Frances Marion, director and writer. Charles and I had watched it together before off a videotape I’d recorded from TCM when the film was in an earlier stage of restoration: the current print runs about 100 minutes (the previous restoration was 89) and was pieced together from a partially decomposed print in the U.S. and another print preserved in Europe. (Silent films were frequently shot in duplicate: one negative for the U.S. and one for Europe and the rest of the world. Also, the European versions contained just one frame of each intertitle so the English titles could easily be removed and replaced with titles in the language of the country where that version was to be released.) Pickford and Marion were such good friends that when they both got married in 1920 – Pickford to Douglas Fairbanks and Marion to actor Fred Thomson – they honeymooned together in Italy, where Pickford and Marion heard a true-life story which became the basis for this film. The Love Light is set just before, during, and just after World War I (or “The Great War,” as it was usually called before there was a World War II) and it begins as a bucolic, pastoral comedy set in a small village on the Italian coastline just before the war begins. Angela Carlotti (Mary Pickford) is a farm girl and keeper of the local lighthouse who lives with her parents and two brothers, Antonio (Jean De Briac) and Mario (Eddie Phillips). Angelo is a hard worker; Mario is a cut-up who in one of the film’s most remarkable scenes is such a contortionist he’s able literally to wrap himself around a chair. There are some quite good, charming scenes as well as some gags that suggest Mary Pickford was, in her subtle way, potentially one of the screen’s great comediennes.

There are also scenes with a local couple, Pietro (Alberto Pisco) and Maria (Evelyn Duomo), whom Angela adopts as role models for the sort of happiness she hopes to have some day with a man. And there’s a man named Giovanni (Raymond Bloomer) who has an unrequited crush on Angela and literally serenades her from afar. (It’s a testament to Frances Marion’s skill as a filmmaker that we get the point without sound.) Then the war starts and Antonio, Mario, Giovanni, and Pietro all set off to fight. Angela rescues a fleeing man named Joseph (Fred Thomson) who passes himself off as an American who got left behind when his ship set off to sea again after a particularly rambunctious leave in Genoa. (Remember that in World War I, unlike World War II, the U.S. and Italy were on the same side.) Angela is working as a lighthouse keeper, and Joseph, who has married her secretly (the local priest, Father Lorenzo – played by a quite distinguished-looking elderly actor regrettably unidentified on imdb.com – officiates the ceremony and is the only person in the town besides Angela and Joseph who know it’s taken place), implores her to demonstrate her love by flashing a signal from the lighthouse at midnight using Morse code for the letters “I LOVE YOU.” What neither she nor we know quite yet is that Joseph isn’t an American, but a German, and the real reason he wanted Angela to flash the lighthouse signal was to let a German submarine know that an Italian ship carrying wounded soldiers was about to dock nearby so they could sink it. Already Angela was reeling from the death of her brother Antonio in combat, and she really freaks out when she realizes that her brother Mario was on the troop ship the Germans sank, thanks to her signal, so in effect she’s responsible for his death. The townspeople chase Joseph and he falls to his death off a cliff, but Angela soon learns that she is pregnant with Joseph’s child.

The shock of her responsibility for Mario’s death sends her spiraling into a nervous breakdown, though the routine of caring for her baby, a daughter, gradually brings her back to sanity. The next complication arises when Maria, already grieving from the death of Pietro in combat, loses the baby son they had together. Maria hatches a plot to grab Angela’s baby by persuading the nuns who seem to run the village’s whole health care system that Angela’s too crazy to be entrusted with a child, so they should take the baby away from her and give it to Maria. Maria’s sufficiently off the deep end herself that she treats the baby as if it were her long-lost son and doesn’t seem to notice the gender difference. When Angela comes home and notices her baby gone, she starts putting two and two together. Maria is so determined to keep Angela’s baby that she and Tony (Georges Regas, just about the only person in this film besides Pickford who lasted into the sound era, albeit mostly as a character villain) plot an escape to Genoa, only they sail into a huge storm which acts as a deus ex machina. Ultimately their boat is shipwrecked, and Angela literally burns down her own house because the lighthouse fails on the precise night it’s most needed as a beacon. Tony and Maria are both killed in the shipwreck, but the baby survives and Angela stages an heroic rescue of her daughter. The film ends with yet another deus ex machina in the form of Angela’s old friend Giovanni (ya remember Giovanni?) turns up, alive but blinded from the war. Giovanni declares his love for Angela, who tells him that she will be his eyes from then on, and this weirdly co-dependent relationship is what passes for a happy ending.

The Love Light got mixed reviews at the time; a print ad in the Urbana Daily Democrat called the film “a thing so exquisite, so rich in detail, so full of human pathos and lovely comedy, that we do not hesitate to recommend it to our patrons as the greatest success in Miss Pickford’s remarkable career.” A more objective reviewer, Burns Mantle, wrote in Photoplay, “The Love Light is a poor picture in the sense of being quite unworthy of the star's talents. The story is developed without reasonable logic and filmed with only the value of the pictures in mind. The Love Light's one value to my mind is that it takes the nation's sweetheart out of curls and short frocks and makes a woman of her.” That last was a sore point with Mary Pickford, who when The Love Light was made was 28 years old and was getting royally tired of playing children on screen. In 1925 she desperately published an appeal in a movie magazine asking her fans what roles she should play from then on, and got exactly the opposite response from the one she was hoping for. One woman fan even wrote in and said something along the lines of, “It gives me great pleasure to see you portraying a child even though I know you are an adult woman.” When Charles and I first saw The Love Light in an earlier stage of the film’s restoration, my reaction was that if I hadn’t known that the director and the writer were the same person, I would have given the director credit for taming the unreasonable melodramatics of the script. This time around I liked the film considerably better; it could be used as a model for three-act structure by teachers of courses for aspiring screenwriters, and its understated but unmistakable anti-war message is communicated powerfully. This was a time when hundreds of thousands of Americans were convinced that our entry into World War I had been a mistake foisted on us by British propaganda, and films like The Love Light (even though it was a box-office disappointment on its initial release and Frances Marion got to make only two more films as director, though she’d be strongly in demand as a writer and would win back-to-back Academy Awards for screenwriting for The Big House, 1930; and The Champ, 1931) make it clear the source behind the isolationism that gripped so much of the American population it bedeviled President Franklin Roosevelt between 1939 and 1941, as he saw the imminent threat from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan but was at his wit’s end trying to figure out how to drag a recalcitrant America into the next world war.

I Was a Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story (Amazon MGM Studios, Carmel Media Capital, JarCo Entertainment, MGM Television, Safier Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, January 17) I watched a couple of movies on Lifetime that were both at least ostensibly based on true stories: I Was a Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story and I Am Mary Jo Buttafuoco. I remember both of those stories as tabloid fodder (and, in the case of Courtney Stodden’s, Internet fodder as well) when they happened but didn’t go overboard on either of them. I had expected the movie about Courtney Stodden (Holly J. Barrett) – an aspiring singer, model, and actress who at 16 fell in love with and ultimately married a 51-year-old actor named Doug Hutchison (Doug Savant) – to be the more interesting of the two, but it was less so, despite good work from director D’Angela Proctor (a Black woman whom imdb.com describes as “a rare entertainment professional that can easily transition between both the creative and business sides of media”), writer Kim Barker, and a generally good cast of whom Maggie Lawson as Courtney’s mother Krista stood out. I also made the mistake of looking up both Courtney Stodden and Mary Jo Buttafuoco on Wikipedia and finding out details about both their stories, especially Courtney’s, that would have made more interesting movies than the ones we got. I was struck by the fact that Courtney Stodden was referred to as “they” and “them” on her Wikipedia page, which was explained thusly in a footnote: “Stodden uses both she/her and they/them pronouns. This article uses they/them for consistency.” Courtney Stodden identifies as Bisexual and also as gender non-binary, aspects of her life I wish had been depicted in the film. But with herself as narrator and her current husband, producer and director Jared Safier, listed as one of the producers, I could see why they didn’t go to those places in her life even if Lifetime would have been willing to take the plunge, which they probably weren’t. The film that actually did get made remodeled Courtney Stodden’s story into a cautionary tale addressed to teenage girls to be wary of predatory older men.

Courtney Stodden was born in Tacoma but when she was still a child the family moved to Ocean Shores, Washington. Courtney was bullied at school by fellow students jealous of her beauty – she matured early, at least physically – and her mom Krista got her into modeling and entered her in beauty pageants to the distaste of Alex Stodden (Drew Waters), her dad. At age 16 Courtney was tired of being dragged by her mother from one beauty pageant to another, and she was easy prey for Doug Hutchison, who lived in L.A. and offered acting classes. Doug zeroed in on Courtney and they e-mailed each other regularly, with Doug inviting Courtney to visit him in L.A. and Krista resisting letting her daughter go that far from home alone. The two differ on just who contacted whom first – Courtney insists that Doug e-mailed her first while Doug says Courtney reached out to him, with her mother’s advance approval – but eventually Courtney went to L.A. with Krista. Their first meeting was a jolt because he looked much older than he had online; Doug had played the old trick of using a decades-old head shot on his online profile to make himself look younger than he was. Doug also claimed to have a lot of contacts in both the music and movie businesses which he could use on behalf of Courtney to help her career, but instead of actually using them (if they even existed, which with scumbags like this is always a question), he got super-jealous, insisted that she be a stay-at-home wife, and go out only when he told her to. What’s more, the scandalous publicity surrounding the May-December marriage, the paparazzi that effectively assaulted them (one of the cleverest aspects of D’Angela Proctor’s direction is the way she depicts the paparazzi as swarms of human locusts descending on Our Heroine), and the hostility engendered by Doug wedding his “Star Girl,” as he rather creepily nicknamed her, kills what was left of his career stone dead. Doug also pressures Courtney to fire her mother Krista as her manager and let him do it instead – though Courtney’s entertainment career is nil at that point.

When Doug gets Courtney pregnant he’s sure this is a comeback ticket for them; he contracts with a “reality” TV producer to do a show about the impending pregnancy, the birth and the first years of the new child’s life. But when Courtney has a miscarriage, the deal is suddenly canceled. Courtney is shown over-indulging on both alcohol and pills to handle the strains of the marriage (there’s a great scene in which she drinks champagne out of the bottle to cope with the wedding night, and a grim post-mortem in which she’s glad to see blood on the sheets as proof she was a virgin until her first night with Doug – both Courtney and her parents were committed Christians who regarded premarital sex as a horrible sin). Doug and Courtney officially separate, but she keeps living in a guest house on his property until, bereft of any current income, they’re forced to give up the house and move to an apartment. Inexplicably (and Courtney admits as much in her voice-over narration, delivered by the real Courtney Stodden as she is today and depicted in cut-in scenes that give this movie the air of an audio-visual instruction film for high schools) they remarry on their fifth anniversary before finally breaking up for good in 2020. Stodden announced her engagement to entrepreneur Chris Sheng in 2021 but they broke up in 2023, and she married her current husband, Jared Safier, in 2024.

She’s also pursued her music career, both under her real name and as “Ember.” I was curious to hear her sing and see if she’s any good or not, so I found a YouTube post of “Pleasure” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4qdcdDzJEY&list=RDC4qdcdDzJEY&start_radio=1. The video presents her as a stereotypical “bad girl” with a lot of men around her, including a long-haired, bearded, scruffy biker type whom she chains to a gas-station pump in an engaging bit of BDSM fantasizing. Her voice? Oh, it’s the standard-issue dance-diva coo that’s become a major music template since Madonna hit it big in the 1980’s, not great but serviceable for that sort of song. Her biggest affection in the video is reserved for the animal she’s holding, reflecting her status as an animal-rights vegetarian, another counter-cultural aspect of her real life that wasn’t depicted in the Lifetime movie and should have been. I Was a Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story comes off as a standard-issue morality play – the lesson is, “Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be victims of sexual predators” – but it could have been so much more, and I for one would have liked to see it told from both Courtney’s and Doug’s points of view, Rashomon-style.

I Am Mary Jo Buttafuoco (Studio TF1 America, CMW Valley Productions, Champlain Media, Lifetime, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The second movie I watched on Lifetime January 17, I Am Mary Jo Buttafuoco, was actually better than I Was a Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story, mainly because its director, Heather Hawthorn Doyle (a white Canadian woman described on imdb.com as someone who “has made a name for herself as being a strong story-based director who brings her passion for creating beautiful visuals and grounded performances to every project”), and writer, Gregg McBride (who after I Am Mary Jo Buttafuoco made his major-studio feature-film debut with a horror movie called Six Till Midnight), were far more alive to the moral complexities of their story than their opposite numbers on the Courtney Stodden film. Like Courtney Stodden, Mary Jo Buttafuoco appears on screen in interview segments narrating the story, and she’s far less attractively photographed (by Diego Lozano) than Stodden was, but the very hard-edged plainness with which her scenes were shot underscores both the lingering physical damage she’s had to live with from “The Incident” (as it’s darkly referred to in McBride’s script) and the psychological destruction it wreaked on her. Mary Joe Buttafuoco (Chloe Lanier), nèe Connery, was a high-school student when she met and fell for Joey Buttafuoco (Dillon Casey). She was attracted by his boyish charm, but unfortunately he never grew up – in the script it’s called “Peter Pan Syndrome” – and didn’t see any particular reason why just being married shouldn’t stop him from staying out all hours of the night, drinking, partying, and womanizing. Eventually he ends up having an affair with Amy Fisher (Maddy Hillis), a 16-year-old who got nicknamed the “Long Island Lolita” (all this happens in the Long Island village of Massapequa, a souvenir of the weird part of American history where we were simultaneously massacring the Native Americans and appropriating their place names) and comes off here like a classic film noir femme fatale.

Amy is constantly crashing her car and bringing it into Joey’s auto body shop for repair, and on one visit she makes a brazen sexual come-on which he instantly falls for. Joey can’t do anything about Amy because her well-to-do dad is a major customer at the shop, but Amy wants to marry him and Joey keeps telling her that he’s already married and isn’t interested in divorcing his wife for her. So Amy decides that she’ll just have to kill Mary Jo so she and Joey can be together at long last. At first she recruits a drop-dead gorgeous young man named Steven Sleeman (Indy Lesage), a waiter at a diner she frequents, offering him the promise of sex if he’ll use his rifle and knock off the inconvenient Mary Jo. Amy shows up at the Buttafuoco home with Steven, rifle in hand, waiting outside, but he either can’t or won’t get a clear shot at Mary Jo without potentially hitting Amy as well. Ultimately he tells Amy he’s not cut out for murder, and Amy coldly brushes him off, saying that by refusing to kill on her demand he’s forfeited any possibility of getting to have sex with her. The next henchman she recruits is Peter Guagenti (who’s depicted in the film but not listed on imdb.com) because he has a gun he’s willing to sell her and she’s already decided to murder Mary Jo herself. She comes to Mary Jo’s home on May 19, 1992, posing as a fictitious older sister named “Anne Marie,” and shoots Mary Jo in the face. Fortunately for Mary Jo, the bullet lodges in her jaw, permanently paralyzing one side of her face and costing her the ability to smile as well as rendering her partially deaf, but luckily still alive – though she suffers so much pain and has to undergo so many surgeries one could readily understand why she might have wished she’d just died.

Weirdly, Mary Jo refuses to believe that her husband had a sexual affair with Amy Fisher – indeed, it took her so long to realize he’d gone extra-relational on her that she titled her autobiography Getting It Through My Thick Skull: Why I Stayed, What I Learned, and What Millions of People Involved with Sociopaths Need to Know – until he takes a vacation to Los Angeles and is arrested for solicitation while he’s out there. Like Courtney Stodden, she becomes both an alcoholic and a pill addict to dull the pain, both physical and psychological, of her existence. One of the most powerful and moving subplots of this movie is the presence of her and Joey’s two children, Paul and Jessica. (Alas, the imdb.com page on the film doesn’t list the actors who play Paul, either as a child or an adult, and lists only Amara Sanoy as playing the adult Jessica.) The surprising growth of her children into reasonably sane adulthoods – it’s eventually revealed that Paul is maintaining a “guarded” relationship with his father while Jessica has cut ties with him completely – gives us a healthy subplot to contrast with the madness at the root of the story. Certainly Joey Buttafuoco reminded me a great deal of Donald Trump, especially in his unwillingness to admit to anything wrong and his blaming all his problems on other people; and when Mary Jo expressed her frustration at all the public sympathy for Amy Fisher as a fellow victim, it reminded me of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s recent statement on the killing of Renée Good by an out-of-control Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis that the Trump administration is literally investigating everyone in the case (including Walz himself, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and Good’s partner Becca) except Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed her.

Ultimately, at the behest of her rehab counselor, Mary Jo forgives Amy Fisher for attempting to kill her and even testifies on her behalf at her parole hearing. (The real relations between Mary Jo Buttafuoco and Amy Fisher were considerably more fraught than that, including a series of tense segments on Entertainment Tonight and The Insider in which the two appeared together and Amy later said, “I have no sympathy for Mary Jo.”) Overall I Am Mary Jo Buttafuoco is quite powerful and well-staged drama, and one of its best aspects is how it shows that ordinary people can be trapped in the same media machine that manipulates and exploits them as celebrities are. Within a few months of the attack at least three separate TV-movies were made about the case, and there’s one scene in the film in which Mary Jo watches as one of the film crews shoots a re-enactment of the assault on her – and she collapses as she watches it. Many celebrity journalists defend their aggressive attack-dog tactics by saying that anyone who pursues a career in the public eye and seeks fame is choosing to put up with this – but this and many other tabloid-fodder stories show how readily people who never wanted fame and certainly never wanted to be physically attacked to get it end up receiving the same rough treatment as the major stars.

Death in Paradise: Season 14, episode 2 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, aired February 26, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, January 16) I had a bit of a disaster movie-wise: I had ordered a DVD from Amazon.com of the 1955 classic French thriller Les Diaboliques, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and starring Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot as the two women in the life of a French schoolteacher; two of these people are in cahoots to murder the other, but Clouzot, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Jérôme Géronimi based on a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac called Celle qui n'était plus (The One Who Was No More), saved until the very last minute revealing who the murderers were and who the victim was. (Boileau and Narcejac also wrote a novel called D’Entre les Morts – From Amongst the Dead, which later became the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In fact the writers deliberately created that novel with the idea of selling the screen rights to Hitchcock, and when the three met Hitchcock was amused at how skilfully they had constructed their story to pique his interest.) Alas, the DVD I’d bought of Les Diaboliques from Amazon.com was a bootleg from something called “Starry Nights Video” and it was in French with no subtitles. (Since then I’ve searched YouTube for Les Diaboliques and found both a subtitled print and one dubbed in English. Maybe later.) So my husband Charles and I gave up on it, watched YouTube videos (including Thursday night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live monologue and a Techmoan report on a new Philips-branded combination record and CD player to which he gave an awful review because for some reason the current licensee of the Philips brand name put in circuitry that shuts off the audio when the signal gets soft, even if the track is still going on), and ultimately turned the TV back on at 10 p.m. for a Death in Paradise episode.

The show was about the murder of a contestant on Island Warrior, a Survivor knock-off being filmed on the island of Saint-Marie, Honoré or whatever the fictionalized locale of this series is. (It’s actually shot on the real-life Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, and the Guadeloupe film board is listed as a co-producer – which seems curious given that the show depicts the island as a hotbed of murderers. That would seem more likely to discourage than encourage tourism.) Anyway, the front-runner in the Island Warrior contest, Jonny Feldon (Simon Lennon – any relation? Not as far as I can tell from the bare-bones “biography” on imdb.com), is mysteriously stabbed in the middle of a zip-line descent. He’s visibly O.K. when he starts the descent, then he’s hidden from view by some branches, and when he comes into sight again he’s dead. This was the second episode of the 14th season and it picked up some of the story threads from its immediate predecessor, notably the decision of Detective Inspector Marvin Watson (Don Gilet) to relocate to London, which has been delayed partly because of his renewed interest in investigating the mysterious, supposedly accidental death of his mother, and also because his would-be replacement was murdered in episode 1. The latest replacement for the job of low man on the police totem pole is Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah), a thoroughly repulsive comic-relief character who proves a) that they didn’t break the mold after they made Frank McHugh and b) that they can pour black plastic into it.

Watson has signed a three-month contract to continue working on the island with Police Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington), who received word in the immediately preceding episode that he’s being laid off but in this one seems to be continuing without any worries. Watson and the other police – including Darlene Curtis (Ginny Holder) and Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson), both of whom were anxious to see Watson go and are visibly disappointed they still have to work with him – identify four suspects whose whereabouts during Jonny’s descent can’t be verified. They are the show’s obnoxious producer, Rick Mayhew (Adam James); Chaz Simons (Bhavna Limbachia), the runner-up whom Mayhew had bribed with an amount equal to the prize money to throw the contest in Jonny’s favor; Mayhew’s assistant and show runner, Lisa Bulmer (Sofia Oxenham), who claims to have invented the concept of Island Warrior in the first place and been screwed out of the royalties, and who was having an affair with Jonny during the filming; and Dale Buckingham (David Avery), the show’s cinematographer. Dale had a hopeless crush on Lisa and got flamingly jealous of Jonny when he seduced her (though Lisa maintained that she didn’t care about Jonny one way or the other but was just seeking derogatory information about the show, which she wanted to sabotage to ensure that it never aired and Mayhew therefore didn’t profit from his theft of her idea). At first he flew a camera-equipped drone into Jonny’s bedroom and video-recorded him and Lisa having sex with each other. Then, when that didn’t work to break them up, he decided [spoiler alert!] to kill Jonny with one of those insanely complicated murder methods beloved of thriller writers and just as beloved, for exactly the opposite reason, by real-life homicide detectives. (Raymond Chandler said that the real homicide detectkves he’d interviewed told him that the easiest murders to solve were the ones in which the killer had planned an elaborate mechanism to cover up the crime, and the hardest were the ones in which killer and victim had been buddy-buddies until 20 seconds or so before one killed the other.)

My husband Charles correctly guessed Dale as the murderer but missed both his method and his motive. He stabbed Jonny not with a knife but with a particularly strong sort of pin used to make the show’s costumes. The pin is made of a remarkable metal (adamantium, maybe?) that even when refined to the width of a pin can penetrate human flesh. Dale stabbed Jonny with it before the descent started, and after Jonny (who on a previous scene in the program had injured his back so severely he was on major doses of painkillers and jammed the lethal pin into himself even farther as he tied his back brace) did his fatal plunge Dale dropped a knife in front of one of the trees Jonny passed as he was going down so both his colleagues on the Island Warrior crew and the police would think the knife was the murder weapon. His motive was jealousy over Jonny for having made it with Lisa when Dale desperately wanted her but was too shy to approach her honestly. Meanwhile, DI Watson is going through the effects of his late mother (ya remember Watson’s late mother?) and discovers a reggae record of a rather funereal song she particularly liked.This suggests (at least to me) that her death might have been a suicide, since one of the reasons Watson is so sure her death wasn’t an accident (as the authorities ruled it) was that she was too experienced a sailor to go out on the ocean in a serious storm. This Death in Paradise episode was mixed; Don Gilet got a few genuinely emotional moments but I certainly could have done without Shaquille Ali-Yebuah’s so-called “comic relief.” And of course I liked the implied critique of the major amounts of artifice and deception that go into so-called “reality” TV shows! I remember when the Los Angeles Times published an article about a threatened strike of reality-show writers, and I joked that it told you all you needed to know about the basic falsity of the genre that a job called “reality-show writer” exists.

The Kate: Delbert McClinton and the Self-Made Band (Connecticut Public Television, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next show on PBS after Death in Paradise was an episode of The Kate, a music show which is much like the local Live at the Belly Up except it’s from clear over at the other end of the U.S. (the Katharine Hepburn Memorial Center in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, the Great Kate’s home town). The star was Delbert McClinton, an old-time musician who’s equally at home in blues, country, and pop-rock. The show was filmed on August 20, 2019 and featured McClinton with a mostly all-white, all-male band, though one of the horn players was a Black male trumpeter, Quentin Ware (who played much of the set with a plunger mute) and the other was a white woman, Dale Robbins, who played tenor saxophone. I was amused that her instrument’s keys were the regulation brass but the body was black, which made me suspect it was a plastic sax (though the only two plastic saxes I’ve seen photos of, played by Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman, were both white). Born in 1940 in Lubbock, Texas (also Buddy Holly’s home town), McClinton is a major veteran who recorded his first important record in 1962, as a harmonica player on Bruce Channel’s hit “Hey, Baby.” McClinton remembered being on a British tour with Channel in 1962 in which The Beatles were one of the opening acts, and he gave John Lennon pointers on how to play blues on the harmonica. (The Beatles covered “Hey, Baby” during their club dates at the Cavern in Liverpool, and years later Ringo Starr recorded it on his last truly great album, Ringo’s Rotogravure, on Atlantic in 1976, the final album on which all four Beatles contributed new songs.) Even before he hooked up with Channel, McClinton had played in a bar band called the Straitjackets who had played backup for Rice Miller (the second “Sonny Boy Williamson”), Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Jimmy Reed. In 1965 he formed a band variously called the Ron-Dels and Rondells with Ronnie Kelly and Billy Wade Sanders, who had a chart hit called “If You Really Want Me To, I’ll Go.”

He played this gig with the Self-Made Men, a band he formed in the late 2010’s that included, besides Ware and Robbins, guitarists Bob Britt and James Pennebaker, keyboard player Kevin McKendree (though for most of the set his electronic instrument was set to sound like an ordinary blues piano), bassist Mike Joyce and drummer Jack Bruno. McClinton has the raspy, well-worn voice typical of veteran blues singers, but that didn’t bother me because he used it with genuine power and soul. He opened with “Mr. Smith,” the lead-off track from his then-current album Tall, Dark, and Handsome, and for the second song he did a piece called “Lulu’s Back in Town.” That was also the title of a hit from the 1930’s which Nat “King” Cole covered in the 1950’s (though it was a sign of the times that he had to change the original lyric, “All my blondes and brunettes,” to “All my Harlem coquettes” because it wouldn’t have been acceptable to suggest that a Black man like Cole was dating blondes), but the one McClinton did was an original that not only was not the 1930’s song but had the opposite message. The one in the 1930’s was, “Great! At last! Lulu’s back in town!” The one in McClintock’s version was, “Oh, shit, that bitch Lulu is back again!” Then, after a couple more blues numbers, “Gotta Get It Worked On” and “Blues as Blues Can Get,” McClinton shifted to the more country-ish side of his style with “Oughta Know,” “Two More Bottles of Wine,” and “Why Me?” After that McClinton was shown in an interstitial interview segment (blessedly the makers of The Kate are sparing with these bits, doing only one per show instead of the constant interruptions we get on Live at the Belly Up with the musicians jabbering away) telling how much he loves Mexico. He has a house there and frequently goes there when he has to write songs for a new album because there he can work without the distractions that afflict him on this side of the border. Then he did a nice song in the Tex-Mex style called “Gone to Mexico.”

After that McClinton sang “Let’s Get Down Like We Used To” and a John Hiatt cover called “Have a Little Faith in Me.” McClinton’s next song was a soul cover of “Shakey Ground,” originally recorded by The Temptations in 1975 (and co-written by Eddle Hazel, who also played guitar on The Temptations’ recording and later was in George Clinton’s Parliament/Funkadelic crew: Clinton’s two bands recorded for different labels but were the same people except Parliament had a horn section and Funkadelic didn’t). McClinton closed his show with “Givin’ It Up for Your Love” and a relatively quiet lament called “Every Time I Roll the Dice.” McClinton’s music, which he called “rock ‘n’ roll for adults,” is first-rate and a lot of fun, and I noticed that he did 13 songs. I’ve noted writing about Live at the Belly Up episodes that you can tell a lot about a band by the number of songs they get into the one-hour time slot – particularly whether they’re a tight, relatively disciplined pop act or do a lot of jamming, which means they play fewer but longer songs in the slot. At 13 songs, McClinton’s set list was towards the more disciplined end – a bit surprising for a blues band – though he did do some loose things along the way, especially with his two lead guitar players. McClinton doesn’t play any instrument besides harmonica, but he doesn’t have to; his chops on the mouth organ are still quite good. Overall this was a fun presentation and a worthy way for my husband Charles and I to send off our evening!