Hope in the Water: "The Fish in the Sea" (Intuitive Content, Minnesota Film and Television, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, June 19) my husband Charles and I put on a couple of science shows on KPBS, including the first part of a three-part miniseries called Hope in the Water. This part was called “The Fish in the Sea” and was co-produced by José Andrés, superstar chef and restaurateur who founded World Central Kitchen to make food available to victims of emergencies, both natural and man-made; and Baratunde Thurston, an African-American filmmaker and occasional MS-NBC host. (I just did a search for him on my GoogleDocs files and came up only with a reference for my journal entry on November 14, 2020, which included a rant about him saying that people who heard the phrase “defund the police” and assumed it literally meant what the words mean – get rid of the police – suffered from a “lack of imagination.” That’s not how political slogans are supposed to work!) I was watching it not long after I’d watched a YouTube video claiming that the world’s supply of arable land is shrinking even as the human population inexorably rises, and this will lead to major food shortages as it becomes harder and harder to feed the world’s people with land-based food alone. So the world will become more dependent on the oceans for its food supply even as the oceans themselves are under assault from human-caused climate change, particularly global warming.

“The Fish in the Sea” consisted of three stories illustrating just how different people in communities around the world are working to maintain the seas as viable food sources for humans despite the relentless overfishing of habitats by commercial fishing companies. The first, and to my mind the most inspiring, was the tale of COAST, a group of fishermen on the Arran Islands off the coast of Scotland, who worked to combat the overfishing of their home waters. They were inspired by a similar group in New Zealand who succeeded in lobbying the New Zealand government to set aside parts of the country’s coastal waters as “no-take zones” in which the fish populations would have a chance to recover. The activists sent regular petitions to the British and Scottish governments (Scotland has an autonomous parliament, something like a U.S. state legislature) to set up a “no-take zone” and got exactly nowhere until they started to organize and came up with a colorful name, which stands for “Community of Arran Seabed Trust.” What made their crisis particularly dire was the fact that, having already depleted the population of free-swimming fish, the big corporations turned to dredging the ocean floor for scallops and other mollusks. This destroyed what was left of the ocean bed and drove away the few remaining fish, who had nowhere safe to spawn. After 15 years COAST finally got their “no-take zone” established and it was a huge success; both fish and scallop populations recovered big-time and independent fishermen with small boats once again had a chance to catch enough fish for their own survival, and then some.

The second – the one in which Andrés and Thurston were personally involved – was off the coast of Puerto Rico, where they came to the rescue of shrimp fishermen whose catch was falling rapidly by teaching them to fish for squid. The show gave a greatly detailed account of just how you do that: it involves an elaborate system of buoys, lines and baited hooks. The first voyage on which Andrés and Thurston went out was interrupted by a storm, which forced the crew not only to abandon their attempts to catch squid but to pull up their elaborate equipment and head back to port. But later they succeeded, and the show demonstrated not only how you catch squid but how you eat them as well: you cut their meat into long filets, bread them and deep-fry them the way you would with more normal seafood like halibut or cod. The third segment took place in Hawai’i and also dealt with a “no-take zone,” though in an inland fresh-water lake instead of the coastline. The stories on “The Fish in the Sea” offered all too rare opportunities for optimism about the future of Earth as a suitable habitat for humans despite the enormous power of governments and private corporations to block any sensible solutions to environmental crises in favor of the “burn, baby, burn” and “drill, baby, drill” policies advanced by the major energy companies and the former (and probably future) President who just demanded a $1 billion bribe from them to help re-elect him so he can complete the total destruction of the world’s environment he began in his first term.

NOVA: "Alaskan Dinosaurs" (WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next PBS science-themed show was a NOVA episode from 2022 called “Alaskan Dinosaurs.” The story really began in 1961, when a geologist leading an excavation party in Alaska’s North Slope (the coldest part of what’s already America’s coldest state) for an oil company spotted fossilized remains of what turned out to be bones from previously unknown dinosaur species. This sparked a major controversy in the paleontological community because it had been previously assumed that dinosaurs were giant reptiles, who like today’s reptiles were cold-blooded and therefore couldn’t last an ultra-cold climate like Alaska’s, especially in the wintertime. The show followed a team of paleontologists exploring the North Slope wilderness in the depths of winter on an ultra-strict time schedule dictated by the inexorable progress of the area’s climate to colder and colder temperatures and 24-hour nightfall. Their strategy was to cut up the layers of sediment that had covered up where the bones were first discovered in 1961, ship them back to warmer and more hospitable climes farther south and analyze them at leisure. One particularly hot-looking man interviewed in the program was science writer Riley Black, who attracted me with the purple shock in his shoulder-length hair, the body art on his forearms and the stud earrings. At first the paleontologists leading the study thought that the dinosaurs had migrated to warmer areas and spent the winters there, but fragments of baby dinosaur teeth forced them to conclude that these species of dinosaurs took too long for their young to mature to be capable of migrating in herds. Instead they had figured out how to do what modern-day bears and other mammals do to make it through the winter: they had learned to burrow and spend the winter hibernating.

This also begged the question of what did the herbivorous (vegetarian) dinosaurs eat once the native trees shed their leaves for the winter. A researcher named Karen Chin from the University of Colorado at Boulder came up with an intriguing answer based on her study of coprolite. “Coprolite” is essentially science-speak for “fossilized dinosaur shit,” and what she found in the Alaskan dino-dung was remnants of lignite. Lignite is the stuff wood is made out of, and she theorized that the dinosaurs spent their winters (when they weren’t hibernating) eating rotting bits of dead trees and extracting protein from the insects who were living in, colonizing and also eating the dead trees. (So these types of dinosaurs weren’t totally vegetarian, at least not in the human sense.) “Alaskan Dinosaurs” was an unusually interesting nature documentary and NOVA episode that touches on the revolution in dinosaur thinking over the last 50 years or so. Until then dinosaurs had been assumed to be scaled-up versions of modern-day reptiles (like lizards or snakes) – the word “dinosaur” comes from the Greek for “terrible lizard” – but the more recent thinking is that dinosaurs were more like warm-blooded birds than cold-blooded reptiles. The people behind this show even argued that these dinosaurs probably had skin coverings that looked and acted more like feathers than scales and fulfilled the same function bird feathers do: to help keep the animals warm. Of course we have no idea what dinosaurs really looked like because our only evidence of their existence is fossilized bones, from which we have to make hopefully educated guesses about the appearance of their skins.

Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution, part 1: "Rock the Boat" (BBC, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, June 18) KPBS showed a couple of TV specials dealing with cultural themes even though the first one was about a phenomenon that I really didn’t like when it was actually happening. It was the first episode in a three-part mini-series called Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution. I didn’t like disco music when it was at its peak of popularity in the late 1970’s, and mostly I still don’t, though it actually sounds pretty good especially by comparison with the so-called “electronic dance music” (EDM) style of today that derived from it. I remember I spent a term of my time at San Francisco State University living in a dorm (more just to have the experience than anything else), and during those months in the first half of 1978 the Saturday Night Fever album was literally inescapable. Just about everybody in that dorm seemed to own a copy of it, and I liked the Bee Gees’ songs from the film and The Trammps’ “Disco Inferno” (a great song with a real sense of drama) but hated or at least was unimpressed by everything else on the album. (I had just come off a year of listening to almost nothing but classical music, and not surprisingly the track on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack that most irritated me was “A Fifth of Beethoven,” Walter Murphy’s disco-ized rewrite of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.) The show, directed by Grace Chapman, basically presented disco as a form of social rebellion by previously marginalized people, particularly African-Americans and Gay men. It presents a potted history of the origins of the Queer rights movement and the social and cultural ferment of the 1960’s that gave rise to it, including the seemingly endless Viet Nam War and the big peace protests that drew heavy-duty reactions from the police.

This first episode, “Rock the Boat” (after one of the early disco hits by a group called the Hues Corporation), depicted disco as an inherently revolutionary music and culture (since the club scene it generated was as much a part of the social phenomenon as the music itself; the word “discothéque” had been coined in the 1960’s and it simply meant a dance venue in which the music was supplied by records instead of a live band) and hinted at the way disco’s adherents would defend it against its detractors later in the 1970’s. If you didn’t like disco, you were told, it was because you were racist and/or homophobic. At the time there were plenty of laws discriminating against Queer people; not only was sex between two partners of the same sex illegal in virtually all the U.S. (the first state to get rid of the anti-sodomy laws was Illinois in 1961, and they did it by mistake; they were doing a revision of the state’s criminal code and they simply inadvertently left out the anti-Gay law), it was illegal for two people of the same sex to dance together in public. It was also illegal to cross-dress in public; the law in New York City was you have to have at least three items of gender-appropriate clothing on at all times, and one woman who was doing shows as a male impersonator was forced by police to strip because they demanded to see she was wearing women’s underwear under her male suit. The person who figured out how to get around all this was a man named David Mancuso, who opened a private club called The Loft in 1972. Since it was a privately owned space (his own home, in fact) and you had to have an invitation to enter, the police couldn’t enter without Mancuso’s permission and therefore men were allowed to dance with and touch other men, and women allowed to dance with and touch other women.

At the same time Black rhythm-and-blues and soul music were evolving in ways that emphasized strong, danceable beats – in fact, initially the devotées of disco didn’t call the music disco, they called it “danceable R&B” – and the key figures in that evolution were the production team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, who formed a record label called Philadelphia International (after the city where they were based) and combined strong rhythms with soaring string orchestras. One instrumental (pardon the pun) figure in creating their sound was their session drummer, Earl Young, who worked out a rhythm pattern consisting of a nearly metronomic four-beats-to-the-bar pounding on the bass drum and an equally insistent matching figure on the hi-hat cymbals. Young is still alive and he demonstrated that rhythm on his drum set for the program. Oddly, not all the music heard here is disco; the first song we hear is actually “Aquarius” from the musical Hair, used to depict the political and social ferment of the late 1960’s, and we get bits of great pre-disco soul classics like Marvin Gaye’s acknowledged masterpiece “What’s Goin’ On” and Lynn White’s woefully unacknowledged “Part-Time Love.” (Lynn White was one of the great might-have-beens of soul music; she was a protégée of Willie Mitchell, who discovered and produced Al Green, and while “female Al Green” would serve as a capsule description, her hauntingly smoky soul voice literally sounds like no one else’s. Alas, she quit the music business in the early 1990’s and disappeared after that.)

One of the key turning points in the evolution of disco from soul came from an obscure African singer-saxophonist named Manu Dibango, who in 1972 made a record called “Soul Makossa” for a tiny label in his native Cameroon. A New York record store imported a stock of copies of “Soul Makossa,” and before long word of mouth spread about this great new song and they sold out. Atlantic Records picked up the U.S. rights and released it (they put it out so fast that my copy had the labels reversed so the B-side, “Lily,” was labeled “Soul Makossa” and vice versa). Dibango’s catchy little jam became a major hit and its beginning – Dibango chanting “Ma-ma-ko, ma-ma-sa, ma-ko-ma-ko-sa” – was an iconic sound in early disco and was “sampled” by Michael Jackson for “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” the opening track of his mega-hit album Thriller a decade later. Other key records in establishing disco as a separate genre were “Girl, You Need a Change of Mind” by former Temptations co-lead singer Eddie Kendricks (a favorite at David Mancuso’s Loft parties) and “Rock Your Baby” by George McCrae, who was interviewed for the program and recalled getting a call from James Brown personally inviting him to be Brown’s opening act. This program ends just as the disco craze is getting underway and well before I became aware of it (though I did buy the “Soul Makossa” single in 1973 and quite enjoyed its fusion of African and African-American music styles), and it’s going to be followed by two more episodes, “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” (billed with the slogan, “As disco conquers the mainstream, it turns Black women and Gay men into icons”) and “Stayin’ Alive” (billed as, “By the end of the 1970’s, disco seemed untouchable. But it was about to face a violent backlash that almost destroyed it.”)

Some of the anti-disco backlash really did get silly, and other parts of it did indeed have racist and homophobic components, but you didn’t have to hate Black or Queer people to hate disco: Gay journalist John Lauritsen called it “soulless noise.” Incidentally, one of the most fascinating people interviewed for this show was music critic Vince Aletti, who wrote the first article in Rolling Stone about the nascent disco scene. I remember Aletti as being by far the most sensitive and intellectually interesting critic at the short-lived magazine Creem, an attempt at an edgier competitor to Rolling Stone, and I particularly remember two pieces he did for Creem. One was a review of the Rolling Stones’ album Exile on Main Street that summed up my own feelings about that sprawling record (it was a double album and I thought it would have been much better with sides one and three coupled as a single LP), and the other was his own coming-out story as a Gay man. As ubiquitous as coming-out stories later became, that was the first one I ever read!

American Masters: "Groucho and Cavett" (Cavalier Films, Daphne Productions, American Masters Films, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the “Rock the Boat” episode of Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution, I then watched another PBS program, an American Masters show called “Groucho and Cavett.” Not surprisingly, previous episodes of American Masters had profiled the Marx Brothers as a group and Groucho Marx individually. The Marx Brothers had a fascinating virtual comeback in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, after two of the main three were dead (Chico died in 1961 and Harpo in 1964) but Groucho carried on the flame and made public appearances, including a nationwide tour in 1972 which my brother Chris and I got to see. Rebellious young people in the late 1960’s rediscovered the Marx Brothers in general and their masterpiece, Duck Soup (1933) – a brutal satire on war, politics and dictatorships at a time when Hitler had just taken power in Germany (in his autobiography Harpo recalled listening to Hitler’s speeches during breaks in filming Duck Soup; no doubt the Marxes understood Hitler’s German because it was close enough to Yiddish, which the Marxes had grown up speaking as the sons of Jewish immigrants, and Harpo was angry enough at Hitler he had his off-stage name legally changed from Adolph to Arthur) and a commercial flop that nearly sank the Marxes’ career – in particular. Groucho Marx and Dick Cavett first crossed paths in 1960, when Groucho was a frequent guest on Jack Paar’s The Tonight Show (Paar was the host between Steve Allen, who originated it, and Johnny Carson), and of course Groucho couldn’t resist making the obvious pun on Paar’s name: “Are you above Paar or below Paar?” – and Cavett was one of Paar’s writers. Later, when Paar abruptly quit the show in 1962 and NBC had to think of some way to keep the show going before Carson was free of his other commitments, they thought of having a rotating series of guest hosts – and Groucho was one of them.

Groucho and Cavett became friends over time, and when Cavett was hired by ABC to start his own talk show in 1968 to compete with Carson’s The Tonight Show on NBC, Groucho frequently appeared on his show as a guest. The earlier episodes of The Dick Cavett Show were “wiped” by ABC – that is, they erased the videotapes of them so they could reuse the tape – though clips of them survive via a fan who had a reel-to-reel home videotape recorder. Much of the one-man show Groucho did in 1972 was preserved in bits and pieces on the Cavett programs, including songs like “Show Me a Rose” and Irving Berlin’s anti-war song from 1914, “Stay Down Here Where You Belong,” in which the Devil exhorts his son not to ascend to Earth because all the young men are too busy killing each other to care about the difference between right and wrong. Groucho told Cavett that Irving Berlin had offered him $100 for every time he made a public appearance and didn’t perform the song. Groucho was full of oddball anecdotes, including one about his father, tailor Sam Marx. (In honor of their dad, the Marx Brothers inserted at least one joke about clothes or tailoring in all of their movies.) He said Sam Marx was the worst tailor ever; he wouldn’t bother to measure his clients, and if you ordered a Sam Marx suit you might get back something with radically different pants legs and without any buttons. Groucho also talked about Chico Marx’s gambling addiction; he recalled that one of Sam Marx’s clients had complained that the suit he got delivered hadn’t come with pants, and it turned out Chico had been assigned to deliver it, but had hocked the pants on the way to pay off a gambling debt. According to Groucho, the main reason the Marx Brothers kept making movies as long as they did (they made their first released movie, The Cocoanuts, in 1929 and their last as a team, Love Happy – featuring the young Marilyn Monroe in a bit role – in 1949) was to help Chico pay off his gambling debts. (It didn’t get told here, but one of the most famous Marx Brothers anecdotes was Chico making a side bet with one of the extras on the final horse race in the film A Day at the Races – and placing his money on the horse the script specifically said would lose.)

One point Cavett made about Groucho was that he was a huge fan of Gilbert and Sullivan, and frequently performed songs in the Gilbert and Sullivan patter style – and the show includes a tantalizing clip of Groucho actually performing in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. It was The Mikado, produced for TV by NBC in 1960, and Groucho played the Lord High Executioner; there’s a great clip here of Groucho performing the song “I’ve Got a Little List” and that whets my appetite to see the whole program. The show featured interviews with two other long-lived comedy legends, George Burns and Woody Allen, as well as an archival clip featuring lyricist E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, who wrote songs with Harold Arlen for The Wizard of Oz and the Marx Brothers’ film At the Circus. Harburg and his collaborator, composer Harold Arlen, had had to sign a two-film deal with MGM to get to do The Wizard of Oz, and At the Circus was the other film. But as well as doing terrible romantic ballads like “Two Blind Loves” and “Step Up and Take a Bow” for the film’s romantic leads, Kenny Baker and Florence Rice, Arlen and Harburg yielded to Groucho’s demand for a Gilbert and Sullivan-style patter song and came up with “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady.” In Harburg’s clip he recalled that because of the Motion Picture Production Code Administration, they had to add a third chorus to the song in which they had Lydia marry an admiral so the movie censors wouldn’t object to lines like, “When her muscles start relaxin’/Up the hill comes Andrew Jackson.”

There’s also a great gag scene from a Cavett show between Groucho and Truman Capote – Capote complains that he’s under a heavy tax burden because he’s single and Groucho offers to marry him – which of course plays quite differently now that same-sex marriage is (at least for now) the law of the land and we know for sure that Capote was Gay (though that wasn’t exactly the world’s biggest secret during his lifetime). Groucho Marx remains one of America’s funniest and most legendary comedians, even though he came to a sad end; his family filed suit against him to break up his professional and possibly personal relationship with his 20-something secretary, Erin Fleming, and won. Erin Fleming warned the court that if she were forced to separate from Groucho, he would lose the will to live and would die – and he did on August 19, 1977 (a bad year for celebrity deaths: it was also the year Charlie Chaplin, Bing Crosby, Maria Callas and Elvis Presley died).

The 77th Annual Tony Awards (American Theatre Wing, White Cherry Entertainment, CBS-TV, aired June 16, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 16) my husband Charles and I watched the 77th annual Tony Awards – the “Antoinette Perry Awards,” to use the full name (which almost no one ever does), after a pioneering actress and director (among other things, she helmed the premiere production of Preston Sturges’ Strictly Dishonorable on Broadway in 1929) who founded the American Theatre Wing in the early 1940’s. The American Theatre Wing operated the Stage Door Canteen to provide entertainment for servicemembers visiting New York City on their way to ship out to fight in World War II – the rule was the entertainers used the back door and the audience was strictly limited to, as the sign said, “Service Men Only” (one wonders what happened if any WAC’s or WAVES’s showed up) – and the organization that gives out the Tony Awards still has that name. The 77th annual Tony Awards were the usual lumbering beast most awards shows are, and as usual the highlights were the performances from the nominees for Best Musical. The Tony Awards are divided into “Plays” and “Musicals” – as if a musical isn’t also a play! – and for some reason David Adjmi’s Stereophonic was considered a “Play” rather than a “Musical” even though not only is it about music (it’s about a fictitious rock band based on Fleetwood Mac recording an album obviously meant to be Rumours), the actors playing the band members were auditioned not only for their acting ability but their musical skills as well. (They had to be able to play their instruments on stage.)

Stereophonic had an original score by Will Butler, former member of the indie rock band Arcade Fire (he left in 2022 on apparently amicable terms), and given that Arcade Fire was led by Will Butler’s brother Win Butler and featured Win’s wife, Régine Chassagne, Will was no doubt no stranger to the internal tensions of a band featuring both familial and romantic (or formerly romantic) partners. (One thing I hadn’t known until this morning was that the Butlers’ maternal grandfather was swing guitarist and bandleader Alvino Rey.) The show was hosted for the third year in a row by Ariana DuBose, and it featured so many African-Americans as presenters and awardees, one got the impression there’d been a quiet Black takeover of Broadway. Stereophonic won the award for Best Play and Will Brill won for Best Featured (i.e., “supporting”) Actor in a Play. Stereophonic also won for Best Direction (Daniel Aukin), Best Scenic Design (David Zinn), though all he had to do was build a set representing a recording studio (much the way Gandhi won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design, which had a lot of rival costume designers sniping, “Just how hard is it to design a loincloth?”) and Best Sound Design (Ryan Rumery). The Best Musical award went to The Outsiders, based on Sue Hinton’s 1967 young-adult novel of the same name about class-driven conflicts between two sets of teenagers, the “Greasers” and the “Soc’s” (pronounced “Soshes”), in mid-1960’s Tulsa, Oklahoma. Hinton published it as “S. E. Hinton” to conceal her true gender (like D. C. Fontana and J. K. Rowling), and the original publication made a big deal of the fact that it was “written by a teenager.” (Hinton was 16 when she wrote The Outsiders and she was in the audience last night as a heavy-set older woman.)

This was something of a disappointment for me since there were other musical nominees that seemed more interesting, including Water for Elephants (about characters who literally run away from home to join the circus); Hell’s Kitchen (based on songs by Alicia Keys and telling the story of her own teen years in Manhattan in the 1990’s); and the one I’d most like to see, Illinoise. Illinoise was represented on the telecast by a quite beautiful dance number featuring two couples, one straight and one Gay – and the Gay couple was a Black man and a white man. Illinoise won for Best Choreography (Justin Peck) and Water for Elephants didn’t win any awards, though the excerpt from it, “The Road Don’t Make You Young,” was one of the most powerful songs all night. Hell’s Kitchen won for Maleah Joi Moon as Best Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical and Kecia Lewis for Best Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical. The Outsiders also won for Dayna Taymor’s direction (she’s the daughter of Julie Taymor, who directed one of Broadway’s most legendary flops, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark), though the number performed from it last night was a gang fight staged as a dance number that led me to joke, “Well, somebody has seen West Side Story.” It also won Best Lighting Design of a Musical for Brian MacDevitt and Hana S. Kim. A musical version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby won just one award – Linda Cho for Best Costume Design of a Musical – and because it wasn’t nominated for Best Musical it didn’t get a performance excerpt. That’s a real pity since I’ve loved that story since I read it in high school, and Gatsby made its Broadway debut in 1926 (just a year after Fitzgerald’s novel came out) in an adaptation by Owen Davis that starred James Rennie as Gatsby and was a major hit.

The winner for Best Revival of a Musical was for Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, the last show on which he collaborated with director Hal Prince. It premiered in 1981 and was a dismal flop, as the George S. Kaufman play it was based on had been in 1934. That was generally attributed to its unusual structure; though the story was a standard-issue romantic triangle, it was told backwards, with the characters starting out middle-aged and disillusioned and ending up in their young, idealistic years. There were various attempts to tweak it, both before and after Sondheim’s death in 2021, and the current version became a surprise hit and won Best Revival, Best Leading Actor in a Musical for Jonathan Groff (who surprised no one by announcing that his work in theatre had given him the courage to come out as Gay at 23, 14 years ago) and Best Featured Actor in a Musical for Daniel “Harry Potter” Radcliffe. (Radcliffe introduced his wife and child when he accepted his award; the fact that he’s old enough to have a wife and child is yet another sign of how old I am.) It also won Best Orchestration for Sondheim’s original collaborator, Jonathan Tunick. I suspect the awards for Merrily We Roll Along were largely due to the fact that with Sondheim dead there aren’t going to be any new musicals from him, so the Tony voters grabbed their likely last chance to give him one final honor. I was sorry to see Merrily We Roll Along win for Best Revival of a Musical because I suspect that honor should have gone to Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, which did win for Tom Scutt’s scenic design.

The show’s overall concept was to give the audience the impression that they were entering a real cabaret, not just an on-stage representation of one, and it featured Eddie Redmayne in Joel Grey’s old role as the M.C. in a quite good rendition of the opening number. I was a bit put off when they introduced Sally Bowles as a blonde, if only because I’ve got so used to seeing her as Liza Minnelli in the Louise Brooks-style black bob. (Minnelli got the idea for that hairdo from her dad, Vincente Minnelli; she was originally going to make herself resemble Marlene Dietrich but dad suggested she look for someone else from early-1930’s Germany.) The award for Best Revival of a Play went to something called Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, yet another African-American themed drama that, according to its Wikipedia page, “follows the dysfunctional Lafayette family as they return to a decaying plantation mansion in Arkansas to battle over their recently deceased father's inheritance. Soon after the discovery of a relic buried deep in the recess of their family’s past, decades of resentment burst through centuries of historical sin.” Appropriate also won Best Actress in a Leading Role in a Play for Sarah Paulson, and Best Lighting Design of a Play for Jane Cox. Though it was officially designated a revival, its original production was recent enough (2011) author Branden Jacobs-Jenkins was there last night. The Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play went to Jeremy Strong for Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 drama An Enemy of the People, about a doctor who warns the authorities of his town that the supposedly healing waters of their hot spring are dangerously polluted. Naturally Strong couldn’t help but note the modern-day parallels in his acceptance speech; though the awards show almost totally avoided major political statements, there were enough veiled hints as to where this artistic community in particular stands on the great social conflicts of the day.

The Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play went to Kara Young for yet another Black-themed play, awkwardly titled Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch (I don’t know if that subtitle was part of Ossie Davis’s 1961 original play or it was added for the current revival), and the Best Costume Design of a Play went to Dede Ayite for still another Black play, Jaja’s African Hair Braiding. (She and the other woman who accepted were both adorned with magnificently braided hair, so they practiced what they preached.) Shaina Taub won two awards for her musical Suffs (short for “suffragists” or “suffragettes”), Best Book and Best Original Score (I was a bit disappointed by the latter because I’d have liked to see it go to Will Butler for Stereophonic), and the big number from Suffs, “Keep Marching,” was introduced by, of all people, Hillary Clinton. (Yes, that Hillary Clinton, looking almost mummified.) I was annoyed that “Keep Marching” featured a woman in a wheelchair – a modern-day wheelchair instead of the kind that would have existed in the era of women’s struggle for the vote, with the big wheels in front. The “In Memoriam” segment was introduced by, of all people, Brooke Shields, and accompanied by Nicole Schertzinger’s magnificent performance of “What I Did for Love” from A Chorus Line. There was also a nice medley of songs from the latest revival of the stage version of The Who’s rock opera Tommy, introduced by its composer, Pete Townshend, himself. Townshend accompanied on acoustic guitar and said before the medley that Tommy was about “parenting – good parenting and bad parenting.” This led me to joke, “Just what is there in Tommy that shows good parenting?” The show rather petered out when they gave Best Musical to The Outsiders and didn’t end with a big final production number the way the Grammy Awards usually do, but it was O.K. entertainment and the numbers from Illinoise and Water for Elephants were truly exalting.

Wolf Lowry (Kay-Bee Pictures, Triangle, 1917)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 16), after the telecast of the 77th annual Tony Awards, my husband Charles and I watched a fascinating triptych of silent films originally re-released in 2022 as a DVD by the Film Preservation Associates. They were all Westerns and two of them, the feature Wolf Lowry and the two-reel short Bad Buck of Santa Ynez, starred William S. Hart. Hart is one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of American silent film; though he was born in New York City in 1864 he spent a good number of his teenage years in the West (the Dakota Territory). Later he returned to New York and became a stage actor, playing the villain Messala in the original 1899 stage version of Ben-Hur (and repeating the role in an unauthorized 1907 film of the chariot-race sequence, which was suppressed when the producers of the stage version sued for plagiarism and won, thereby establishing the principle that if you wanted to make a movie of a copyrighted work, you had to license the rights first). Hart became a movie actor at the unlikely age of 49 when he saw a Western in 1913 and was appalled at how inaccurate it was. He soon achieved stardom in a series of downbeat melodramas in which his character frequently started out as a villain and achieved nobility, usually (as here) through his involvement with a woman. Hart was also one of those stars of the teen years who gradually lost popularity in the 1920’s as younger audiences in particular lost patience with the intensely moralistic attitudes of his films. He was particularly jealous of Tom Mix because, while Hart had played multi-dimensional characters with both good and evil aspects, Mix was a Western superhero – the “good good man,” as film historian Arthur Knight put it, compared to Hart’s “good bad man.” Yet the two joined forces in 1929 to carry the coffin at the funeral of real-life Western hero Wyatt Earp.

Hart retired from films after making his epic Tumbleweeds (1925), directed by King Baggot, and made only one more movie – a cameo appearance as himself in King Vidor’s marvelous romantic comedy about Hollywood, Show People, starring Marion Davies (who’s damned good!) and William Haines. Hart retired to a ranch in Riverdale, California and lived there until his death in 1946, though in the late 1930’s he recorded a narration for a reissue of Tumbleweeds. I wasn’t sure what to expect of Wolf Lowry but what I got was a masterpiece, directed by William S. Hart himself (though the official credits list someone else, both imdb.com and Turner Classic Movies host Jacqueline Stewart named Hart as the director and I suspect “Walter Brisbane,” or whatever the name on the credits was, was a pseudonym) from a script by Lambert Hillyer and Charles T. Dazey. Hillyer would later become a director himself and rack up some quite interesting credits, including The Invisible Ray and Dracula’s Daughter (both 1936, the last two horror films made by Universal while Carl Laemmle Sr. and Jr. still controlled the studio) and the 1943 Batman serial, one of the two best serials ever made. (1934’s The Return of Chandu is the other.) Hart was a protégé of Thomas H. Ince, who more than any other individual created the job of studio head of production; though he directed films himself (notably a 1916 anti-war epic called Civilization, which like D. W. Griffith’s similarly themed Intolerance was a box-office disaster), he saw himself more as a producer and he built the largest movie studio in Hollywood, a lot at Culver City that became MGM’s headquarters during the classic era and is now owned by Sony.

In 1915 Ince arranged a merger between himself and two of the other most successful producers in the business, D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett, to form a company called Triangle, which co-produced Wolf Lowry with Hart’s own company, Kay-Bee Pictures. Unfortunately, Triangle lasted only three years and the founders went their separate ways after that, while the catalog of their films was sold. Wolf Lowry survived mainly in a 28 mm print issued by one of Triangle’s successor companies and sold to Pathé, but this was severely edited by the new owners, so important sequences, especially the film’s ending, had to be reconstructed from a technically inferior 35 mm version. Nonetheless, Wolf Lowry survives in good enough condition to establish itself as one of the major works of the period, and Hart as a quite good and innovative director who’d learned from Griffith how to make a film that actually holds up as movie drama instead of just a photographed stage play. The title character of Wolf Lowry (his real name is Tom but he’s been nicknamed “Wolf” because he’s so tough) is a cattle rancher who’s fiercely protective of his land – of which he needs a lot because in the opening we get a good look at the sheer size of his herds. In the opening scene we see him run off a white-haired man who’s built a cabin on Wolf’s land and tried to set up a homestead there. The man goes to the film’s principal villain, land speculator Buck Fanning (Aaron Edwards), to demand a refund on the claim. Buck in turn resells it to a young pioneer woman, Mary Davis (Margery Wilson), who carries a photo of a man named Owen Thorpe (William Fairbanks, though billed as “Carl Ullman” obviously to avoid confusion with Douglas Fairbanks). Wolf notices smoke coming from the chimney in that cabin, rides out to investigate, and is predictably surprised that the claim jumper is – gasp! – a woman! He’s immediately smitten with her, and he decides to ride out to the cabin every night and essentially stalk her.

One night he sees Buck Fanning enter the cabin and try to rape Mary; Wolf breaks in and rescues her but in the process he’s shot in the chest and Mary has to nurse him back to health while he recovers from the wound. (Though afflicted with some quick cuts I’m sure were introduced by others whose hands the negative passed through after Triangle went out of business, the rape scene is still quite powerful, shot in a semi-dark chiaroscuro effect that anticipates film noir not only decades before noir became a “thing” but two years before the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the German movie that established that kind of chiaroscuro effect as “German lighting.”) Proximity works its magic on Wolf and he proposes marriage to Mary, who accepts only because she thinks Owen, her previous boyfriend, is dead. When he turns up alive in the community and Buck Fanning gives him a job, Mary lies to Wolf and says he’s her half-brother. Only she starts having guilt feelings about marrying Wolf when she’s still in love with Owen. On the day Wolf and Mary are scheduled to get married, Wolf catches Mary and Owen in a decidedly non-sibling appropriate embrace. He catches on and, in a sequence that surprisingly anticipates the ending of Casablanca a quarter-century early, announces that the wedding will go ahead as planned but with Owen instead of himself as the groom. Wolf makes out a piece of paper which at first I thought would be a deed to the part of his property Mary had staked out, but it turns out it’s a deed to the entire ranch. Wolf gives this to Owen and Mary as a wedding present and announces that he’s off to Alaska to join the latest gold rush (which would date the setting of this movie as the late 1890’s or early 1900’s).

Flash-forward a year later (in the part of the movie that got deleted along the way and had to be reconstructed from a technically inferior print) and Owen and Mary have had their first child, a son they’ve named Tom in honor of Wolf’s real name. They get a letter from Wolf saying he’s struck gold in Alaska and is making more money than he knows what to do with, but then Hart cuts to Wolf’s real existence: alone and dirt-poor in a wilderness cabin surrounded by bears. (One wonders who Hart’s “bear wrangler” was.) Wolf Lowry is an amazing movie, especially for its time, and stunningly well-acted. Hart’s own close-ups strikingly anticipate Gary Cooper (indeed I found myself wishing there’d been a mid-1930’s remake with Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck), and though there’s a scene with Owen in which Margery Wilson sails over-the-top and indulges in the kind of arms-waving overacting most people who’ve never seen a silent film start-to-finish before think they were all acted like, for the most part she’s amazingly subtle and can communicate volumes with just tiny changes in posture or facial expression. (One wonders why she didn’t have more of a career; aside from an experimental TV movie in 1939 she didn’t work again in films after The Offenders, a contemporary crime movie, in 1924 even though she lived until 1986.)

Bad Buck of Santa Ynez (Kay-Bee Pictures, Mutual, 1915)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, instead of giving us a respite after Wolf Lowry so we could let what we’d just seen sink in, Turner Classic Movies followed it immediately with the two other movies on the Film Preservation Associates DVD: Bad Buck of Santa Ynez (1915), also with William S. Hart (as both star and director); and The Sheriff's Baby (1913). Co-produced by Hart’s Kay-Bee Pictures and Mutual, Bad Buck of Santa Ynez stars Hart as “Bad” Buck Peters, who takes a Robin Hood-esque delight in tormenting the local sheriff (Bob Kortman). The sheriff is sufficiently alarmed he organizes a posse to get Buck “dead or alive – preferably dead,” and Buck not surprisingly flees the gang of armed men out to deliver him to the sheriff in one of those states. Only midway through the movie he comes on a youngish woman (Fanny Midgley) and her daughter (Thelma Salter). He says they’re welcome to stay in his cabin as long as they want to but he will have to leave. Then the child goes outside to play and is bitten by a rattlesnake (director Hart gives us a closeup of its tail so we know it’s a rattlesnake even though it’s a silent film). Buck comes upon the girl and tries to save her by sucking the venom out of her leg, but soon realizes she’s beyond what he can do. He rides into town to fetch the only available doctor in miles and brings him back to the cabin even though this means near-certain capture and likely death at the hands of the posse. Buck successfully summons the doctor, who successfully keeps the girl alive, but he’s wounded in the process and dies in the end – one of only four times Hart’s character died out of his over 70 films. (Surviving whatever perils the writers throw at them is a hallmark of Western stars; John Wayne made over 150 films and only died on screen seven times, including his last film, The Shootist, made when he was terminally ill with cancer for real and everyone on the set knew it.)