Wholphin No. 1
The debut issue of Wholphin includes Spike Jonze’s revealing, and never publicly screened, portrait of Al Gore, made during the election campaign of 1999; an excerpt from David O. Russell’s controversial film on U.S. soldiers in Iraq; Miguel Arteta and Miranda July’s beautiful short Are You The Favorite Person Of Anybody?; a bewildered Selma Blair’s eventful visit to the gynecologist; a Turkish sitcom resubtitled by several notable writers; some rare 1970s Iranian animation which was smuggled out of the country; a Dutch artist singing classic rock backward; and a sudden and unexplained appearance by David Byrne.
13 films. 155 minutes
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
LINER NOTES
AL GORE DOCUMENTARY
Directed by Spike Jonze
Q: Can you tell the story of being asked to make this movie?
SPIKE JONES: This campaign manager named Carter Eskew called me up and asked me if I would be interested in coming up with some campaign commercials. I’d never really been involved in politics at all, but I was starting to think about politics more and was wanting to participate. But I had a hard time deciding what kind of commercial to make because I realized, like the rest of the country, I didn’t really know who Al Gore was. So I suggested that what I could offer would be to simply go down and get my impressions of Al Gore. And I just went with my video camera by myself, and just tried to gather, in a small unobtrusive way, a sort of video portrait- a day in the life, just to get to know who he is.
Q: I think that no matter what party you belong to, whether you are Republican, Democrat, anything, you look at the film and you think that this is somebody who is an honorable guy, a good guy, a guy who’s obviously a family man and whose family loves him. You get this really complete picture of the guy.
SJ: Yeah. As I said, I didn’t know anything about him and I went in just wanting to know who he is, and by the end of the day I felt that they were a really solid family and I really liked them. I think that Al and Tipper have to be good people and good parents to have created a family that’s so solid. They look out for each other, and you can feel it. I mean, it’s really obvious when you’re around a dysfunctional family and it’s also obvious when you’re around a really functional family.
Q: So you just spent one day with them? You started in Carthage, Tennessee?
SJ: Yeah, I went down there to Tennessee and it was supposed to be just an afternoon. I guess he had liked my movie Being John Malkovich and so from that had? I don’t know why he gave me this sort of access. It was very intimate and personal in terms of letting a cameraman into your home, but I guess that after the afternoon, they felt comfortable with me, so they invited me to go on their vacation. They were leaving that day to go to North Carolina, so in the middle of the afternoon the helicopters came and landed in the Tennessee farmhouse and we went to the army base and got on Air Force Two and flew to North Carolina.
Q: Is there any special clearance you need for Air Force Two?
SJ: No.
Q: No search, no cavity…
SJ: No, I guess the security guys were just like, “Oh, he’s with the Vice President.” And then we got into North Carolina in time to go swimming in the ocean and it wa incredible. It was just supposed to be a few hours but it was this whole day.
Q: You have, I think, probably the only footage anywhere of Al Gore bodysurfing. And this movie overall presents a picture of Gore that we really didn’t see anywhere else. Was the movie ever shown anywhere?
SJ: It was shown at the Democratic Convention in LA I thin it was shown in the afternoon.
Q: Was it broadcast on TV? Was that part of the original plan?
SJ: It wasn’t ever broadcast, no. There was some talk of broadcasting it, but that didn’t get too far. Nightline asked me to come on and show it, but I didn’t know if I’d be articulate talking about it.
Q: Everyone who’s seen this movie thinks it humanizes Gore in precisely the way he needed to be humanized. He got tagged as being cold and robotic, and this film shows him to be warm, very genuine, passionate even. There are a lot of people who think that if this had been shown on primetime, it could have really made a difference in the election.
SJ: I wonder. I don’t know, really. I like Harold and Maude.
ARE YOU THE FAVORITE PERSON OF ANYBODY?
Directed by Miguel Artera, Written by Miranda July
MIRANDA JULY: What happened was this: I had just finished shooting Me and You, and was waiting for my editor to finish the first rough assembly so I could begin editing. In the meantime I felt like I was in so deep with this movie stuff that I was never going to write another short story ever again. But then I wrote these three dialogues, and even though they weren’t too substantial, I felt relieved that I had produced something somewhat literary. I read them to Miguel, and he said, “I want to shoot it this weekend.” I read them through and saw that I had indeed written something more like a script than a short story. Miguel called up Mike White and John C. Reilly, and Chuy Chavez was still in town, shooting a documentary. He lived in Mexico City and was the DP on my movie and two of Miguel’s previous movies. All these casting choices were Miguel’s, and I thought they were really smart. I was especially excited to see Chuy act after working so intensely with him as a DP. Miguel also cast me and I was thrilled at the prospect of just being an actress, after writing, directing, and acting in Me and You. I remember walking away from John C. Reilly at the end of my scene and wondering if I was off camera yet. But no one yelled cut and I said to myself, “I’m just an actress, I’m gonna keep on walking until someone tells me to stop.” I walked practically to the next neighborhood before anyone noticed I was gone. And when my scene was done, I left, which was a great feeling. A few months later I saw the finished thing and realized that it was perhaps slightly crazy to have made a short movie during my one week off. But it turned out okay.
Q: Why do you make films?
MIGUEL ARTERA: Because I’m a blunt person with blunt thoughts and staging actors within a frame is the only way I know to capture a little subtlety.
Q: Why did you want to make this film?
MA: I love Miranda’s writing. She told me that as a girl, when strangers passed her by in the street, she would picture herself as that person and then ask herself, in that stranger’s voice, “Am I someone’s favorite person?” This script is gorgeous because it makes you wonder, what is your story? What is the quality of the relationships that define you? After years of having my head up my ass, due to living and working in LA these questions were a welcome gift.
Q: In Chuck and Buck You presented a beautiful, yet fairly disturbing portrait of someone (Chuck) being someone else’s (Buck) favorite person. Is it a good thing to be someone’s favorite person?
MA: Sure. And then usually that person wants to be with you in order to create another person that might become their next favorite. It can be just another person in themselves they are looking for, someone they hope to like better. If an actual baby comes, what are your chances of remaining number one? Sometimes even your pet can steal your title.
Q: True. Is it good to have a favorite person?
MA: Yep, but it would be better if we never said it out loud.
Q: Yeah. Who is your favorite person?
MA: My favorite person is married and lives in Brooklyn.
Q: How long did it take to set up the shoot? Did you do any rehearsals? Did you send John C. Reilly and Mike White the script or did they just wing it?
MA: Miranda wrote it on a Saturday morning and we shot it the next Tuesday. I faxed the dialogue to the actors on Sunday. They said their lines word for word, except for Mike White who kept forgetting to say “My girlfriend might like one.”
Q: Miranda says that after her scene, when she walked out of frame, no one yelled cut so she just kept walking into the next neighborhood. Why didn’t you yell cut?
MA: I knew this could be the last time I directed her, so I didn’t want to yell cut.
Q: That makes sense.
THE WRITER
Directed by Carson Mell
Q: Why do you make films?
CARSON MELL: For fun and profit.
Q: What? You make money from short films?
CM: There’s been no money so far, but I have faith that the profit is forthcoming.
Q: Where did the inspiration for this film come from?
CM: In the case of The Writer, I wanted to draw some monsters, but not just have them sit around on my drawing board.
Q: I don’t believe you.
CM: Well, things really got rolling when I found the drawing of the manlion with the sex kitten secretary in a friend’s old yearbook. Trying to imagine the person that came up with something that subtly twisted was really the genesis of the character.
Q: So you were interested in wretched lives of pathetic writers as a child?
CM: Subconsciously, I believe all children are.
Q: Hmm. One thing I like about The Writer is the rhythm of the animation. Do you think about rhythm when you work? What is most important to you? The look, the sound, the rhythm? Something else?
CM: When I’m editing, rhythm is always on of my main concerns. I play with the pauses and the length of things for a long time. Often cutting gout individual words. As far as the individual elements that make up film, I think they are all of equal importance, though some are harder than others and inherently get more attention.
Q: How long did The Writer take to make? Is it easy to tackle these projects a bit at a time or do you need a big chunk of time to devote yourself exclusively to the piece?
CM: I probably put a hundred or so hours into The Writer, scattered over several months. I like working on things in big chunks of time just because film is so labor-intensive, but it’s always nice to have a side project to play around with when you’re burned out on the other.
Q: What’s on now?
CM: My cousin, Grant Falardeau, and I just finished our first feature film and are looking for distribution. It’s the first of four films about a family and it’s called RODERICK: A Story in 12 Parts. Each movie tells three sequential stories, and all together they tell one epic story of the Roderick family. Aside from that I’m constantly working on a bunch of short films, cartoons, and other fun things for a DVD miniseries called Minotaur, of which I’m going to put out a couple issues a year.
SOLDIER’S PAY
Directed by David O. Russell
Q: Can you tell us the bigger picture here—did these people come to you with this story knowing you had an interest in the subject? It’s the strangest thing ever, the way life imitated art.
DAVID O. RUSSELL: I was finishing Huckabees and that’s why it’s all just straight-talking heads—we
did it all in a month. They were going to re-release Three Kings in theaters because of the war, and on DVD as a special edition, and they asked if we had any omitted scenes that we could use to advertise this re-release. I said no, but I said that I could do a little documentary, I could interview some veterans who are returning about their experience. So they gave us $200,000 and me and my friends did it while just running around interviewing. And then we heard about these guys who had stolen this money and my brother-in-law, who is a private investigator, found him where he was hiding out in Georgia. He’s just broke and has no money.
Q: Matt Novak?
DR: Matt Novak. So we just found him and flew him to LA and got his story. I think what’s interesting about the story is it just raises all kinds of weird questions about the war, like those marines who just got blown up because they didn’t have enough armor to protect their truck and all these guys who don’t have vests. Their lives are on the line and they don’t feel as though they have enough to protect themselves, and then they see Halliburton contractors getting paid tons of money, and they want to get something for themselves. Those were sort of the ideas I was thinking about at the time of Three Kings.
Q: Was Three Kings based on any event that you know of—was it based on things you know or heard?
DR: I had read a lot about crazy looting by the Iraqis in Kuwait and by Americans who came in afterwards and found all kinds of things.
Q: Did that stir anything in you, being able to see that real life is always stranger than what you can write?
DR: What I do learn from that is that you can intuit and very often your intuitions are true, that what you pick up about a situation turns out to be true. That never ceases to surprise me.
Q: Well, just as Spike was hired to make this documentary about Gore, if you were hired to help balance the power in Washington, what sort of things would you…
DR: You mean to get somebody elected that I like, that sort of thing? Yeah, I would love to cast that person. I really liked Howard Dean and I really thought he got a raw deal with that scream. I think there’s somebody who speaks from their gut and is very personable and who’s not afraid of Eleanor Roosevelt liberalism. I’m just an old Eleanor Roosevelt liberal. I’m happy to pay my taxes and I want my society to take care of everybody, as much as they can—I think that makes it better for everybody. So, I would love to find that guy, and you get these Bob Foreheads coming up and—
Q: Bob Forehead?
DR: You remember Bob Forehead? He was a cartoon, like the guys with the square heads. They have a way of talking that makes my brain turn off the moment they open their mouths. Al Gore, I like Al Gore, I voted for Al Gore, but he opens his mouth… Now he says he would do it differently, as a Harry Truman-type guy or a TR-type guy, which Bush has done. I met him at the chairman of Warner Brothers’s house in ’99—he didn’t even have the nomination yet—and I told him I was editing a movie that would question his father’s legacy in Iraq. He kind of looked freaked out for a second and then he said, “Well, I guess I’m going to have to go back to Iraq and finish it up.” So he already had that in mind, but I don’t think that’s a secret by now—I think that’s pretty open.
Q: He said this to you at a party in LA? He keeps his plans pretty close to the vest, huh? “Hey, you by the pool there!” That’s amazing.
DR: But, you know, he’s very personable. Clinton said the same thing about him—he said, “Do not underestimate this guy, because he connects with people.” When you meet him personally, he just has a feel for people—that’s why I’d love to cast that guy. Al Gore’s daughter said it in Spike’s
documentary: Gore’s from another era, and I regret that our political culture is not more friendly to him, because I don’t mind that he was dorky—I don’t care. And I didn’t care that Kerry was dorky. I didn’t really like Kerry, Kerry turned me off, but I didn’t care because I liked the things that he was going to do. As a person I would never really want to hang out with him and I thought he was pretentious and all that, but I didn’t care. Unfortunately, we have to elect a guy who you want to have a beer with.
Q: Could you have made Kerry? Do you think Kerry could have…
DR: No way.
GRIMM’S TALES 2: DEATH OF THE HEN
Directed by Brian Dewan
Q: Tell us about this filmstrip.
BRIAN DEWAN: The story is a very old folktale. The Grimms’ collection was called Household Tales. I’ve made four of them, but I’m going to do more.
Q: What is the moral of the story? Why the rock?
BD: The story doesn’t concern itself with instructing you, but it chronicles a flurry of activity, mostly futile, until at last each of the animals (and the stone, the straw and the coal) meet their demise, leaving no one to mourn.
Q: Do you approach the creative process of making films differently than you do the process of making songs? Which is easier?
BD: They’re different, of course, but I wouldn’t say one was harder or easier than the other. Making a filmstrip is a bigger project than a song—you don’t have to draw any pictures when you write a song.
Q: Says you.
THE BIG EMPTY
Directed by Directed by J. Lisa Chang and Newton Thomas Siegel
Produced by Daniel Dubiecki
Adapted from the story “The Specialist” by Alison Smith, which appeared in McSweeney’s No. 11.
Q: Were you surprised when Tom and Lisa wanted to adapt “The Specialist”?
ALISON SMITH: Actually, I always saw it as a claymation short. This never happened to me before, but when I first conceived of the story, the entire cast came to me in claymation—the oversized red mouths; the flat, pink faces. There is a mythic quality to the story. There is something impossible about it. After all, on page six, a man falls inside our heroine’s vagina only to find a frozen tundra. Not even in my imagination could I envision the story in flesh and blood. But Miss Chang, clearly the braver of the two of us, has sallied forth and done just that.
Q: When did you first hear about “The Specialist”? Did someone recommend it, or did you happen upon it by chance?
NEWTON THOMAS SIEGEL: At first, our obsession with reading McSweeney’s seemed to put a real damper on our romantic life, as we read each volume in bed. However, this detour in our sex life proved to have a silver lining when, late one night, I read “The Specialist,” handed the book to Lisa, and said, “We have to make this into a film—read it.”
Q: Why the name change from The Specialist to The Big Empty? Both titles are titles of other features, right?
J. LISA CHANG: The impetus for the name change grew from our view that the film is the story of Alice and her ache, not her relationship with the Specialist. She is the one who makes the greatest emotional and spiritual journey. And, after all, it is her vagina, not his.
NTS: We had heard of the feature The Specialist, but didn’t find out about the other Big Empty until it was too late. But isn’t there enough emptiness to go around?
Q: Let’s talk about props for a minute.
NTS: Well, like all stories, this one began in the womb. Therein lay the problem. Where do you get a first-class vagina? Especially one that is large enough to film in. We knew this would take some careful investigation. While directing one of the first episodes of the TV series House, I had a fellow named Andrew Clement make me some prosthetic babies. They were incredible, so I asked him how he was with a vagina. He said, “No complaints so far.” That was good enough for us, so we went to work. It had to be big enough to fit a lens, but small enough that the scale looked natural when the doctor put the speculum in. When Andrew had finished, I had to go pick it up from his workshop. It was a truly fabulous vagina. I thanked him, but he said I really had to thank everyone, because this was one vagina they all had a hand in.
Q: Why aren’t there more high-quality adaptations of short stories? I’m not sure what I’m asking here, but I want to get your thoughts on the form and what attracts you to it.
NTS: I’m not sure there aren’t a lot of high-quality adaptations made, but if not, that’s a shame. It seems for someone to get off their ass and drive to the cinema, they gotta get at least two hours of kicks, so that’s where the money is, that’s where the prestige is. But why does a film have to be that length? A lot of the things we see don’t have the intelligence or vision to warrant robbing that much time of a viewer’s life.
THE HOUSE IN THE MIDDLE
Presented by the National Clean Up, Paint Up, Fix Up Bureau in 1954
Before President Carter created the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) by executive order in 1979, the only government agency focused on presenting a message of racially-tinged
class insensitivity in times of need was the Department of Civil Defense. Your horror, shock, and rage at the country’s inability to help tax-paying citizens prepare for natural or man-made disaster will not be calmed by this film. But it is funny. For more context, read the following interview with Laura McEnaney, an Associate Professor of History at Whittier College in Whittier, California, and the author of Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties.
Q: Okay. Let’s discuss the connection between civil defense efforts in the ’50s and today.
LAURA McENANEY: It is fascinating to see the parallels between the propaganda offered by the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) and our own Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The FCDA in the 1950s wanted citizens to make peace with the bomb—that is, it wanted us to accept the fact that atomic diplomacy was the centerpiece of American foreign policy, and that the attendant risk (a possible devastating attack on our cities) was the price we would have to pay. The FCDA’s whole purpose was to help us adapt to this new reality and to build a supportive political and popular culture around the possibility of nuclear war. The FCDA tried to project an aura of order and rationality to its efforts—to suggest that nuclear war was not an insurmountable problem if we used technological know-how and voluntarism—two of the hallmarks of our “American way of life.” The House in the Middle conveys that message: if citizens use house paints (chemicals) mixed with personal initiative and neighborhood voluntarism, we can get our homes and communities clean enough to repel nuclear war’s most damaging effects. If you look at other civil defense films from the period, you’ll see the same message: some blend of a simple technology (American ingenuity) with voluntarism (the American “can-do” spirit) could enable ordinary people to meet this nuclear-age challenge. When we watch this film now, we are shocked by the audacity and silliness of the message, and we should be. When I show my students civil defense films from the era, they are alternately horrified and amused by them. They marvel that people could actually believe such things. Frankly, it’s not clear how many people actually did believe the government’s message then, but we have lots of evidence to suggest that there was palpable nuclear fear for citizens who lived through this era. Now we find ourselves in another period in which a seemingly unknown and unpredictable threat could find us in our homes or workplaces, and we have a high degree of anxiety without very much information. Into that breach comes the DHS’s message that plastic sheeting and duct tape can save us. If you look at the DHS’s “Ready America” website, you will find cartoon diagrams that teach us how to set up rudimentary shelter, stock water and food, etc. These look
strikingly similar to the FCDA’s material. It appears that our government has not advanced very far from its House in the Middle days. In fact, the DHS used to have a diagram on its website that showed a cartoon figure using the well-known “duck and cover” pose—this time under a computer desk! The juxtaposition of this antiquated nuclear-age maneuver with an ultra-modern desktop computer might have proven too embarrassing for our homeland security efforts, because the DHS has now removed this image from its website.
Q: The message I’m getting from this film sounds vaguely familiar…
LM: The House in the Middle epitomizes the government’s efforts in the 1950s to shift responsibility for nuclear survival to the individual and family. When the government in the late 1940s and early 1950s was trying to structure a national civil defense program, it encountered two obstacles. The first was a fairly healthy suspicion of military power. Civilian leaders did not want to concentrate too much power in the military to govern cities after an attack. In fact, the creation of civil defense raised larger and complex political questions about the military’s power in a democracy. Policymakers pondered what “national security” would actually mean on the ground: military rule of civilian life or civilian control of a strong military? Even though this was a period of an ever more bellicose Cold War diplomacy, there was a surprisingly energetic critique of the military’s reach. Truman and Ike, elected officials, and a range of security planners all worried about the possibility of civil defense morphing into military rule. The second obstacle was a widespread antipathy to “big government.” There were conservative anti-welfare impulses in this early planning period (connected to the attacks on the New Deal) that convinced national leaders that any federally financed and managed effort to protect the civilian population would too closely resemble Soviet-style bureaucracy—which they saw as dangerous and tyrannical. Thus, the protracted debate in the 1950s about how to shelter people from attack became a Cold War welfare debate in which public shelters were criticized as “communistic” (federally financed) while private family shelters were celebrated as uniquely American (private ownership). These dilemmas of control and funding were resolved by privatizing and popularizing civil defense. Elected officials and FCDA planners came up with what they called “self-help defense,” a system in which American citizens shouldered the burden for protecting their homes and communities from attack. “Self-help” defense was touted as the practical solution for a large, diverse, and widely dispersed citizenry. But “self-help” also had a powerful cultural meaning in the midst of a Cold War: it showed the superiority of a society of autonomous, property-owning individuals who had the capacity and choice to shelter themselves. Family bomb shelters, for
example, were a kind of cultural shrine to free enterprise (privately purchased), consumerism (one could decorate it to fit family tastes), and family privacy (nuclear family togetherness). The House in the Middle reinforces this notion that citizens will survive nuclear war in their single-family homes that they, themselves, have maintained. The narrator essentially shames the viewer into personal responsibility for survival: “Is this your house?” The film says civil defense is “everyone’s responsibility,” with no mention of the federal government’s role in protecting its citizenry. Fast forward to Hurricane Katrina, and what we see unfolding now in New Orleans is a debate among local, state, and federal officials about the division of labor for disaster response—a debate not unlike that which played out in the 1950s around nuclear preparedness and response. President Bush’s speech on primetime television was the start of a national conversation about the role and reach of the federal government in helping New Orleans recover. The themes of military control, welfare spending, and the expansion of government are all emerging in this early stage of policy discussions. It’s not clear yet how many of Bush’s proposals will actually yield self-help recovery approaches, but if his “ownership society” mantra suggests any patterns, New Orleans citizens may be hearing many “clean it up yourself” messages, a la The House in the Middle.
Q: The big question is, did the film work? Did paint sales skyrocket? Did people run out and start cleaning up their neighborhoods?
LM: There is no way to tell whether these films were effective in stimulating paint sales and yard clean-ups. One could, I supposed, track paint sales from this period, but how do we understand such a statistic: was the rise in home repair-related sales a result of nuclear fear, suburbanization, or popular pressures and genuine interest in single-family home improvement? All of the FCDA’s plans were hypotheticals, and they were never, thankfully, put to the test. But I do know that the FCDA was constantly frustrated with its inability to assess if its propaganda efforts were, in fact, having an effect. Planners within the agency pondered incessantly whether their preachments were actually changing people’s behavior. Throughout the 1950s, they relied on the most sophisticated social science methodologies that existed to track, measure, and coach behaviors in response to disaster and crisis, and none of these gave them the reassurances they sought. Efforts in the early Eisenhower administration to promote urban evacuations, for example, met with repeated resistance by urbanites to leave their cities on a practice run. The Ad Council advertised an evacuation kit, and along with the FCDA, it tried to “condition” the public of the need for “disciplined” evacuations through regular drills. These efforts received press attention, some participation by first-responders and citizen volunteers, but mostly, every practice evacuation confirmed that human behavior was a variable that defied the FDCA’s rational calculations and planning. In the end, planners had no idea if evacuations or any other self-help defense maneuvers would actually work. The FCDA was dissolved by the late 1950s, with its functions absorbed into a number of other agencies well into the 1980s. Not surprisingly, Reagan’s civil defense planners had no more success in measuring and predicting human behavior in reaction to an attack than their predecessors did in the 1950s. What I’ve learned from my research is that Americans did not embrace civil defense with the zeal hoped for by the FCDA. Public interest in civil defense was sporadic and fickle. Citizens, in general, were ambivalent about the bomb and about their own responsibilities in the nuclear age. I think planners were able to raise people’s consciousness about the bomb—that is, to create more fear—but they were not successful in changing people’s behavior. It’s important to acknowledge, though, that this resistance among citizens to build shelters or practice evacuations did not represent a repudiation of Cold War preparedness. Indeed, a lackluster civil defense effort should not be read as a kind of referendum on the entirety of Cold War militarization. I think that postwar citizens were private pacifists and public
militarists. That is, they refused to transform their private living spaces (building shelters, for example) into military bunkers, but they tolerated a much higher degree of militarization outside. Rather than reorganizing their domestic space to accommodate national security priorities, they endorsed an arms buildup that they could fund as taxpayers. So, their rejection of self-help was hardly a no-confidence vote on the whole notion of national preparedness and security.
Q: Personally, do you have an opinion as to how civil defense might best be implemented? Should we bother demanding that at least a few of our tax dollars go towards providing citizens with so-called safety nets, or does bureaucracy always lead to waste and ruin?
LM: I am not an expert on disaster preparedness or domestic security. I can only offer some concerns that a good understanding of our history can generate. First, since 9/11, there has been an expectation that cities organize the first defenses against an attack. But big-city mayors in the last few years have argued they do not have the funding to do this. The Bush administration has asked cities to take on incredible security responsibilities without giving them the funds for good implementation. This is a classic case of the unfunded mandate, and Hurricane Katrina’s damage has exposed this problem yet again. In the 1950s, mayors from large cities asked repeatedly for more funds for civil defense, and they were frustrated when FCDA planners told them that federal help was merely for back-up. It is clear that first responders can be incredibly effective in disaster recovery—
whether it’s a terrorist attack or a natural disaster—but it’s not clear that our federal government is willing to offer the funds to train, equip, and support them. Second, the ineffectiveness of FEMA in New Orleans exposed a variety of problems in the way the DHS was being run, but I think there is a larger issue that needs some consideration. Most of the functions of a civil defense effort are what we would call welfare—providing food, shelter, medical care, and psychological support. Placing FEMA in the DHS has militarized what is essentially welfare work. Yes, response and recovery are part of our public safety, but placing the functions of FEMA into the DHS seems to have diverted the focus from good social service preparations and provision to a more militarized focus on security screening and checkpoints. What we need to consider is what we risk when we put agencies like FEMA into agencies whose mission and mode are quite different. Have we changed the political culture and priorities of FEMA—and thus diminished its effectiveness—by placing it into a larger agency that is less about human welfare and recovery and more about national security and law enforcement?
THE DELICIOUS
Directed by Scott Prendergast
Q: Why do you make films?
SCOTT PRENDERGAST: Honestly, because I want to dress up in crazy costumes and act like a weirdo.
Q: What was the inspiration for The Delicious?
SP: At some point I had the idea of a man standing in front of a mirror in a red suit making strange gestures and sounds. I liked the idea that this bizarre but basically harmless behavior was destroying his marriage. And I liked his sad wife having to deal with it.
Q: Why the scissors?
SP: Because the scissors are a part of it.
Q: Fine. How was the shoot?
SP: It was eight billion degrees (Fahrenheit) in Brooklyn when we shot this film. By the end the red suit was disgusting. I built the walk-in closet out of cardboard in my kitchen. The red and yellow suits were custom made by a fashion student. We asked her to design them as if they were for middleaged overweight women in the 1970s. Also, the confused authorities kicked us out of Prospect Park, twice, while we were filming the end.
Q: We had a good talk once about the painful process of writing scripts. Tell me how you finally learned to write a script.
SP: I learned through horrible, miserable, repeated failure. In trying to write a feature script, I thought I could just sit down and write out the idea I had in my head for a few months—which worked for me when writing short films. But I was horribly, miserably mistaken. I wrote my first feature script without any plan—just sat down and wrote. And although the characters and atmosphere were good, the plot was awful and went nowhere. It was so confusing, and seemed so tricky. I was convinced that I was a failure and would never be able to write a feature script. After much hand-wringing, I decided to screw all the crappy “Hollywood” advice I’d been given, and to write a feature for me to direct and act in. This time I spent one full month just outlining the film—something I had never done in any kind of writing, something that I thought would kill all of the fun. I went every day for a month to the public library and sat in a private study cubicle and came up with scenes for the feature, then fastidiously scratched them onto 3×5 cards and worked them into a large outline. I had promised myself that I would not write a word until I knew the plot in its entirety and had a rock-solid ending. And, although I hadn’t studied screenwriting or read the books, I did know the rule of 30-60-90, which was also very helpful. In the end, planning ahead did not kill the fun of writing; actually, the structure gave me more freedom. The script (KABLUEY) worked—and finally, I had done it. I wept, and donated $50 to the library.
MALEK KHORSHID
Iranian Animation Directed by Ali Akbar Sadeghi
This is another film someone sent us. It is animation from Iran and it is beautiful. The tape we received listed the director’s name as Ali Akbar Sadeghi. We looked him up and sawhe was one of the top Iranian artists and filmmakers working in the 1970s during the “golden age of Iranian animation,” at Kanoon, a state-sponsored organization for the “intellectual development of children and young adults.” We are pleased to show his work here.
TATLI HAYAT (“THE SWEET LIFE”)
Rescripted Turkish Sitcom, with scripts by Jack Pendarvis, Brian Reich, Rodney Rothman, A.G. Pasquella and Brian Evenson
This Turkish sitcom came to us in the mail in an unmarked package from Istanbul. We don’t speak Turkish and couldn’t get anyone from the UN Turkish consulate to call us back, so perhaps it is not actually the Turkish Jeffersons. But it is amazing television. We had it transcribed, and sent it out to some talented writers who, using their alchemical powers, manufactured a series of new plots and dialogue so we could watch the episode again and again and enjoy a new plot every time. The alternative subtitle tracks were provided by Brian Evenson, Jack Pendarvis, Rodney Rothman, Brian Reich, and A.G. Pasquella, respectively. (Note: No offense whatsoever is intended by the writers towards the actors, the Turkish people, Germans, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, fans of Gilmore Girls, or any other group.)
STAIRWAY AT ST. PAUL
Directed by Jeroen Offerman
JEROEN OFFERMAN: My parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses and so I had a very strict Christian upbringing. There was a suspicion of rock and pop music, and some music, Led Zeppelin in particular, was branded downright evil. The rumor was that if you played “Stairway to Heaven” in reverse you could hear messages that would urge you to follow the devil’s path. Supposedly even if you listened to the music in a normal manner you would subconsciously pick up these messages and act accordingly. In my early teens, I destroyed some music that I thought I shouldn’t listen to or have at home. “Stairway to Heaven” was a difficult one for my friends and me. We thought the song and the lyrics were so utterly beautiful and yet we couldn’t listen to it out of fear of what could happen to us if we did. That’s the tension I felt by listening to this record: a teenage attraction to something dangerously beautiful. I am still intrigued how these myths are created and the effect they can have. So I started to learn to sing the song and its lyrics in reverse. After three months the job was done. I went up to the steps outside Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London and performed it for an audience of confused passers-by, pigeons, and a video camera. Back home I reversed the tape and put a karaoke track underneath.
THE GREAT ESCAPE
Directed by Jeroen Offerman
JEROEN OFFERMAN: “The Great Escape” is about a man who is given the chance to change his life expectations for good and who seizes that opportunity without hesitation when the moment is there. For me this work has a lot to do with Romantic landscape paintings and then especially those from Caspar David Friedrich, who painted The Wanderer above the Sea of Mist. The video is some contemporary version of a Romantic painting, complete with a Repousse figure that these works often have. But my painting also refers to sciencefiction films in which extraterrestrials come to earth to save mankind from its own destruction, like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind‚ or The Day the Earth Stood Still. This video was made with a sense of intuition and some luck. I just happened to be at the right place on the right time with my camera when this event happened.
FILMMAKER BIOS
Miguel Arteta
Miguel Arteta (born 1965 in San Juan, Puerto Rico) is an American director of film and television, best known for his independent film Chuck & Buck (2000). Born to a Peruvian father and Spanish mother, Arteta grew up all over Latin America due to his father’s itinerant existence as a Chrysler auto parts salesman. He went to high school in Costa Rica, but was expelled, and went to live with his sister in Boston, Massachusetts, where he learned filmmaking. He then attended Harvard University’s documentary program, but wanted to do more than just documentaries, so he left for Wesleyan University, where he met future collaborators Matthew Greenfield and Mike White. After graduating in 1989, his student film Every Day is a Beautiful Day won a Student Academy Award, which got him a job as a second assistant camera to Jonathan Demme on Cousin Bobby. Demme then recommended him to the American Film Institute, and Arteta received his M.F.A. there in 1993. His first feature film, Star Maps, which he wrote and directed, came in 1997, making its debut at the Sundance Film Festival. It was a critical hit, receiving five Independent Spirit Award nominations, including Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay. He then turned to directing television shows, helming episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, Freaks and Geeks, and Six Feet Under. Arteta then on to win an 2001 Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature Under $500,000 for Chuck & Buck, which teamed him up with his fellow Wesleyan alumni Greenfield (producer) and White (screenwriter and star). The trio worked together once more on 2002’s The Good Girl, starring Jennifer Aniston. Miguel’s current project is called Date School, a romantic comedy starring Owen Wilson, due out in 2006.
J. Lisa Chang and Newton Thomas Sigel
The Big Empty marks the first collaboration of the husband and wife directing and writing team of J. Lisa Chang and Newton Thomas Sigel. With a budget of $50,000, they shot for seven days in locations around Los Angeles, including the Soap Talk set at the ABC Prospect Studios and the E.R. set on the Warner Brothers lot. The film was completed on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, 2005.
Daniel Dubiecki and Jason Blumenfeld bravely took on the task of producing the film. Daniel’s extensive short film credits include the award-winning films Gulp, In God We Trust and Consent. Most recently he produced the feature film Thank You For Smoking starring Aaron Eckhart, Katie Holmes, William H. Macy, Sam Elliott, and Robert Duvall. In addition to producing The Big Empty, Jason Blumenfeld served as the film’s assistant director and vagina wrangler.
Section Eight, Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney’s production company, executive produced the short film, although the entire budget was self-financed out of the director’s pockets. George Clooney’s support and enthusiasm for the project was especially instrumental in realizing the film. The directors would also like to single out executive producer Erika Armin’s heroic contributions.
Brian Dewan
Brian Dewan has been making filmstrips since 1986, screening them at the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, the Musuem of Fine Arts in Boston, the Sundance Channel, and MTV Europe. Two CDs of songs featuring electric zither, autoharp and keyboard accompaniment are in print: Brian Dewan Tells The Story and The Operating Theater. He has accompanied silent films at Lincoln Center, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the Cinema Arts Center. Visit www.dewanatron.comto view and hear hand-crafted analog electronic music instruments built by collaborating cousins Leon Dewan and Brian Dewan. Dewan has also designed artwork for Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and David Byrne’s Uh-Oh.
The House in the Middle
Atomic tests at the Nevada Proving Grounds (later the Nevada Test Site) show effects on well-kept homes, homes filled with trash and combustibles, and homes painted with reflective white paint. Asserts that cleanliness is an essential part of civil defense preparedness and that it increased survivability. Selected for the 2002 National Film Registry of “artistically, culturally, and socially significant” films.
Spike Jonze
Spike Jonze is a good man.
Miranda July is a filmmaker, performing artist, and writer. Her videos, performances, and web-based projects have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and in the 2002 and 2004 Whitney Biennials. Her fiction has been printed in the Paris Review, Harper’s, and the New Yorker. In 2005, she wrote, directed, and starred in her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know. She is currently at work on her second film.
Carson Mell
After twenty-two years in his native Arizona, Carson Mell moved to Los Angeles in 2002 to be closer to his cousin and film collaborator Grant Falardeau. He currently lives in Hollywood and shares a studio under a Chinese Restaurant in Old Town Pasadena. You can see more of his work at www.carsonmell.com
Jeroen Offerman
Jeroen Offerman is a Dutch artist working and living in London, UK and Berlin, Germany. Works are conceptual and often of a performative nature. Materials and media used range from living plants, to flies and birds, video, music, dubplates, sculpture, computers and installations. Offerman received a BA in Fine Art at Akademie St. Joost, Breda, NL and an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London, UK. Most notably, his video “The Stairway at St.Paul’s” won several awards at International Short Film Festivals all over the world and was voted one of the best media artworks of 2003 by New York’s The Village Voice.
Jack Pendarvis
Jack Pendarvis lives in Bayou La Batre, Alabama. He is a contributing author to Blue Moon Cafe and a Pushcart Prize winner. He recently released a debut collection of short stories, The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure.
Scott Prendergast
Scott Prendergast wrote for MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch for two years. He was also the host of HBO’s Backpack program. Prendergast was trained as a comedy improviser and sketch writer at the Groundlings Theater in Los Angeles. His one-man, all-improv show, UNman, ran for two years in New York City.
Prendergast was raised in Portland, Oregon, attended Columbia University in New York City, and currently resides nowhere. He is an Eagle Scout, a disgraced MENSA member and heir to the Heath candy bar legacy (but not the fortune.)
Brian Reich
Brian is a comedy writer who has worked for Conan O’Brian, Just Shoot Me, and with Robert Schmigel. He recently participated in a “Yo Mamma” Joke competition and although he did not win the obviously rigged contest, feels he put up a good showing.
Rodney Rothman
Rodney Rothman: _Rodney is a former head writer for the Late Show with David Letterman, and was a writer and supervising producer for the television show Undeclared. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, the Best American Nonrequired Reading, the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and Men’s Journal.
David O. Russell
David O. Russell’s first feature, Spanking the Monkey, premiered at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Audience Award. The film also earned Russell Independent Spirit Awards for Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay. 1996 saw the release of Russell’s acclaimed comedy Flirting with Disaster, which appeared on more than 30 critics’ Top Ten lists and garnered Independent Spirit Award nominations for Russell for Best Director and Best Screenplay. Three Kings was named to more than 100 critics’ Top Ten lists when it was released in 1999. Amongst the many accolades received, the Boston Critics Association awarded the film Best Feature and Russell Best Director. Russell was also nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay. His most recent feature, I Heart Huckabees won best independent film at the 2005 Golden Trailer Awards.
Ali Akbar Sadeghi
Ali Akbar Sadeghi was born in Tehran in 1937. He gained admission to the College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, in 1958 after graduating from high school. Upon his graduation from college, he was commissioned by the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults to make a few animation films. He has been involved with various other artistic activities, including book illustration, poster production, graphic design and film production, but his main field has been painting.