Digital Media Journey Business Card

This semester I have been taking a class called Digital Media Portfolio. One of the projects was to design a business card. It took me almost three months to develop this card. The early iterations were before I had a web site, and  there was a confusing array of URL's and icons over the card. I hope to make a series of six or seven cards...the front side identical but with a different photo on the back.

Web Site Now Up and Running

Over the past several weeks I have been designing the web site digitalmediajourney.com. The web site not only has lots of photos, embedded videos, slide shows, there is also a page about the Countryside Hills Subdivision common ground that has been under restoration for over 10 years. The invasive plants,  especially bush honeysuckle, have been removed and replaced with native plants. The project is a little over 1.6 acres and now is an Ozark borderland woodland. The link to the restoration will give you a better understanding about this ecosystem. About 40 dogwoods in a small area will bloom this spring. The photos should be spectacular.

The web site also links my photos on Flickr, Videos on YouTube, and this blog. If you have a chance check out digitalmediajourney.com.

Film Class Posters

Attempting to Boost Enrollment

I designed a series of posters for Rob Hahn who teaches film studies and production at Saint Louis Community College. The Hitchcock class is scheduled for the Spring 2014 semester. Minimum enrollment requirements have become more strict over the past year. The class on the Western that I wanted to take last year was cancelled because of low enrollment. He wants to teach the Western next spring but is doubtful it can meet the enrollment requirement. The text I wrote for the poster explains that the course will be more than the just the old Westerns. The design of the posters is meant to be bold and simple because they have to compete with the clutter of posters on the hallway bulletin boards. I have tried to pattern the posters after the simple hierarchy of the old Marlboro billboards which had two words, Marlboro Country, and an image.

To see the complete set of the Hitchcock posters on my web site click here.

Fixing Old Photos

I took this photo the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 1976, with Kodachrome film. The coral and loading platform are in the Panhandle, near Amarillo.

Here is the original scan of the 32 year old deteriorated Kodachrome slide. I used this slide in a 2 projector slide show. The projectors were connected with a lap dissolve unit. For about 10 years the slide was frequently being exposed to the hot projector lamp. Fortunately slide shows with projectors fell out of style, and the slide was able go dormant in the carosel tray.





This is the way I corected the image in 2008 after I took my first photo editing class. About two years later I was able to see that thre was a bluish cast in the image.










Here is the way I corrected the image in 2010. I've been told the image would be more aesthetically pleasing if I removed the storage tanks in the background  I consider this a historical photo and I am against that type of photo editing.

Some Photo-editing Projects

I've looked through my image files and thought I would upload a few projects I did in photo-editing classes that I have taken during the summer semesters at Saint Louis Community College.


Original Image. Winslow, Arizona
 

Pictorialism Project, Summer 2011
 

Vintage Travel Poster Project, Summer 2010

 



Collage Project, Summer 2013

 

Creative Portrait Project, Summer 2010


 

Photo-editing Class 2013 – Pictorialism Project

I started with this image I took in Phoenix, Arizona. The instructor wanted the lamp post removed. It was quite a job rebuilding the porch, especially the spindles that were behind the post. The front porch was too dark.

Shamrock, Texas

This is one of my favorite buildings to photograph. It is on Route 66 In Shamrock, Texas.

I tried some different techniques to make the image look old.

Stereotypical Behaviors and Images in Smoke Signals

Smoke Signals, released in 1998, was the first widely distributed film by a major studio that was made by and starred Native Americans. The characters are not the stereotypes of Indians that Hollywood portrayed during the previous century. They are complex individuals living in a modern world struggling to deal with their past and present problems. Stereotypical images of Indians are directly confronted and recontextualized, usually with humor. Lines from Western films are repeated and words changed for a comedic effect. The more the viewer is familiar with Native American culture, reservations, and the images of Indians in Westerns, the more he or she can appreciate what screenwriter Sherman Alexei has achieved in Smoke Signals. However, it is the stereotypical patterns of verbal and physical abuse by Victor Joseph, the lead character played by Adam Beach, which may not be as obvious.

Victor makes a trip from the Coeur d’Alene reservation, in Idaho, to Phoenix where his abusive alcoholic father who had abandoned him as a child, has recently died. The real life experiences of Alexie and Beach are the source of the detailed realism of Victor’s dialogue and accurate portrayal of anger and abusive behavior. Alexie as an infant underwent an operation for hydrocephaly. He was in poor health, had seizures, and was teased for his round shaped head. His father was an alcoholic who left home periodically. Alexie also is an alcoholic who is currently sober. Adam Beach was eight years old when his pregnant mother was killed by a drunk driver. Two months later Beach’s father drowned. As a teenager, he lived with his aunt and uncle in Winnipeg, and was a gang member. 

During the initial 16 minutes of the film, before the trip starts, sufficient but purposely incomplete information is given by flashbacks. Victor’s anger, dysfunctional communicational skills and abusive behavior to people he considers weak, are revealed. A fire at a bicentennial house party killed Thomas’ parents. Thomas was thrown from the burning house and caught by Arnold Joseph, Victor’s father. A present day scene shows Victor at a basketball practice starting to lose his temper when he claims a player wearing a blue T shirt fouled him. The other player denied it but then backed down despite being taller and more muscular than Victor. There is a flashback to a younger Victor threatening to again beat up the considerably smaller Thomas because he said Victor’s father will never return home. The film returns to the present day basketball practice with Victor leading a chant with the basketball as a percussive instrument. The physically larger player in the blue jersey shows how weak and subordinate he is when he smiles and obsequiously seeks Victor’s opinion on who the best Indian basketball player was. Another flashback shows a young Victor with his father who is drinking. He hits the child when Victor accidentally spills a bottle of beer.

The film shifts to present time. Victor doesn’t have enough money to get to Phoenix. Thomas offers to help with the money he has in a glass canning jar but with the stipulation that Victor must take him on the trip. Victor is verbally abusive when he refuses the offer and tells him to buy a car or get a woman. Victor’s mother tells him she can’t make the best fry bread without the help of others. Victor decides to take Thomas’ offer, but with three conditions. He “can’t wear that stupid suit. And secondly I don’t want you telling me a million of your damn stories. And third, were going right there and coming right back.”

As they walk to the bus stop, Thelma and Lucy offer them a ride in a car that is being driven backwards. Sophisticated critics might use Vladimir Lenin’s thesis, and interpret Lucy’s car that has only one functioning gear, as sometimes it is necessary to step backwards before going forward. More simplistically the analogy could be the frog in the well jumping up two steps and falling back one step. The frog gets out, but it is a long arduous struggle. Others might have the interpretation that the reservation system doesn’t work. Or simply it could be a stereotypical image that vehicles on the reservation are in a perpetual state of disrepair and this is a filmic interpretation of the sarcastic statement that affluence on the reservation is two cars on blocks in front of a HUD trailer.

Thelma brings up another stereotype when she asks Thomas to trade something for the ride. “We’re Indian’s remember? We barter.” Thomas, who is still wearing his suit, starts to tell one his many stories about Victor’s dad. Victor can’t enforce his rule of no stories because he is outnumbered by the two women who are enjoying the story. Victor reins in his abusive behavior to a slight rolling back of his head in disapproval. The women don’t have physical power, but Victor knows their real power is that they would probably bad mouth him all over the rez. When they ask Victor if it was a true story about his dad, Victor has the opportunity to say that Thomas is “full of shit,” rather than attack the story directly. The audience knows that Thomas’ stories are part truths. When he described the bicentennial house party, he said in voice over, “I mean every Indian in the world was there.” His stories are fascinating. His first story in the film gives the  information  about the fire, his memory of flying in later stories, and the metaphor “that some children are pillars of flame that burn everything they touch, and some… are pillars of ash that fall apart if you touch them.” Thelma validates Thomas as a storyteller and says “I think that is a fine example of the oral tradition.” Thelma’s comment is Alexie’s quick jab at salvage ethnography. She knows that Indians have been telling stories for thousands of years but she sarcastically uses the modern academic label. Thelma and Lucy are an Indian version of the female road buddies Thelma and Louise (1991).

Victor and Thomas are the only passengers who board the bus. When they walk down the aisle the camera records the expressions of the other passengers staring at the two Indians. Several quick close up shots show the driver’s hand pulling the door lever, the door closing, the gear shift lever going into position, and the tires starting to turn. These shots would seem more appropriate for a racing car movie or a chase scene, rather than for a bus on a two lane black top. As the bus pulls away, the words “Evergreen Stage Lines” are visible on the side of the bus. Unlike the stage that took the white man through dangerous and unsettled territory, this stage will take Victor and Thomas off the reservation and into the foreign country that Thelma and Lucy told them they needed vaccinations for. The close ups are reminiscent of stagecoaches in films, with the skilled driver adjusting the reins, the horses responding, and the wagon wheels turning. Like the classic film Stagecoach (1939), there will be conflict between people who usually try to avoid each other but are now brought together by the confines of the stagecoach.

The woman in the seat across the aisle is stretching with her leg above her head. Thomas says that he has to ask her something and Victor tells him not to. Thomas starts to talk to her and Victor shows his disapproval with a sigh and then puts his head back and closes his eyes. When she says to Thomas, “Nice suit,” Victor needs to discredit her and save face since he had called it a stupid suit. She rambles on about how she was an alternate for the 1980 Olympics, but Jimmy Carter took away her opportunity.*  Thomas comments how her loss gives her something in common with Indians. Victor has sized her up as weak and that she will be an easy target. He pretends to wake up and then asks her a series of questions about being an alternate. Her affirmative responses verify her weakness and Victor tells her that she has nothing to complain about and to be quiet. Almost on the verge of tears, she moves to a different seat.

^* The United States boycotted the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow because the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.       

In the confines of the bus the gymnast’s abrupt moving to another seat is not without risk. An abuser, with a short fuse before becoming violent, can interpret her behavior as disrespectful and the level of anger escalates. Her moving away can be especially dangerous with an abuser who has been abandoned by a loved one. The abuser stalks her to the new location on the bus; it gets ugly, and out comes a weapon. Shelters for battered women are acutely aware of this danger and carefully plan a safe exit for the victim. The basketball player in the blue T shirt understood that to quickly stop Victor’s rising anger, giving him the basketball was all that was necessary to make Victor think he was correct about the foul. A simple nod of agreement from the gymnast would have allowed her to change seats at a calmer time, perhaps at the next bus station or on a different bus. Film historians would probably ignore this sociological issue of the scene and would invoke the hegemonic image of the bellicose warriors burning down the farmhouse and running the white settlers off their homestead.

Thomas challenges Victor’s behavior and says she was nice. Like many clever abusive people, Victor knows it is more effective to tear apart Thomas’ opinion of the gymnast than to justify his own behavior. He quickly lectures Thomas on how she is a liar, how naïve Thomas is for trusting people, and that he needs to grow up. He lets Thomas know how important his advice is because people will rob him blind if he is not watching. Then he mockingly asks him if he still has his piggy bank.

Three flashbacks, that give details about Victor and his father, occur in succession on the bus. The start and end of each flashback is visually connected to present time to maintain clarity. The first flashback is at night when Victor starts to fall asleep and covers his face with a blanket. Arnold Joseph is drunk at an outdoor party and demanding that Victor tell him who his favorite Indian is. He responds with “Nobody” which makes his father angry. His mother shields him with a hug and moves him away from her husband. Arnold Joseph’s anger rises as he demands to know who his son’s favorite Indian is. She pleads with Victor to tell his Dad that he “didn’t mean it.” His father’s drinking and physical abuse has resulted in Victor hating all Indians, including himself, and he responds with “Nobody, nobody, nobody.” Thomas starts to tell a story about Victor’s dad while the image of young Victor is still seen on the screen. Cutting to the present time, Victor and Thomas are eating in a restaurant at a bus stop, as Thomas continues his story. The screen image changes to Arnold Joseph and Thomas at a bridge over the Spokane Falls, while Victor continues his story as a voice-over. The second flashback ends back at the restaurant with Thomas finishing his story. Victor, angry that he has “heard this story a thousand times” walks away from the table. There is a cut to an image of a young Victor in the mirror of his parent’s bed room. The third flashback shows an angry young Victor smashing his father’s beer bottles, his father hitting his mother, his father leaving, Victor running after his father’s pickup, and Victor beating up Thomas when Thomas tells him his Dad isn’t coming back. The flashback ends with a young Victor running after the bus and a present day Victor looking out the bus window. In film theory jargon Victor’s flashbacks are called enacting. Thomas’ flashback is recounting when Victor and Thomas are seen on screen in the restaurant. When the screen image shifts from the restaurant to the past, and Thomas is still telling his story, the label is enacted recounting.

As Victor emerges from chasing his dad’s pickup truck and running after the bus, Thomas annoys him by asking what he remembers about his father. Victor doesn’t respond so Thomas starts a story about Arnold Joseph at a fry bread eating contest. Victims will frequently try to endear themselves to the abuser by demonstrating that they have a close attachment to details in the abuser’s life. Thomas doesn’t quite get it that Victor gets angry when someone else has closeness and positive recollections of an abusive father who abandoned him. Thomas lashes out with “I don’t know what you’re talking about half the time. Why is that?” Demanding the victim answer a question about why the abuser is unhappy or disappointed about their behavior is another common tactic to weaken the victim. When Thomas shows his weakness by answering “I don’t know,” Victor starts a barrage about what’s wrong with Thomas’s behavior. Thomas has the same on the verge of tears look that the gymnast had. Victor attacks his weakened victim with, “Don’t you know how to be a real Indian?” A defeated Thomas responds, “I guess not.” Victor then goes into “rescue the helpless damsel in distress mode” and benevolently says “I’ll guess I’ll have to teach you then.” Thomas smiles approvingly that he is going to get this “makeover.” Victor immediately becomes an abusive teacher when he tells him, “First of all quit grinning like an idiot.” Even Thomas’s stoic look is wrong and Victor demonstrates a correct warrior look. To Victor this is very important because, “White people will run all over you if you don’t look mean.”

At the next bus stop Thomas fulfills Victor’s other requirements and sheds the suit and lets his hair be free flowing. Thomas carries the transformation a bit over the top with a “Frybread Power” T-shirt and a military style canteen on his hip. The bus driver, annoyed that Thomas has kept the bus waiting, shakes his head in disapproval. Victor smiles approvingly at his pupil. Abusers know how to keep control on their victim by withholding and rationing love, compliments, or approval.

Their seats are taken are taken by two men who are stereotyped by their clothes as redneck and cowboy. Redneck, the physically dominant one of the duo, is seated in the aisle seat and does the talking. His ball cap is in camouflage brown with the words “My Gun Cleaning Hat” on the front. Thomas uses his best social skills to tell them, “Excuse me those are our seats.” The redneck answers with terse speech and mannerisms similar to John Wayne, “You mean these were your seats.” Victor uses an aggressive style and comes closer to the man and says, “No. That’s not what he means.” The response is, “Now listen up. These are our seats now. And there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it.” Each time the camera cuts to redneck, the sidekick is seen with a felt cowboy hat that is sitting on his ears and almost on his eyebrows. He periodically has a smirk on his face to show approval for his partner. They are more accurately John Wayne and a Walter Brennan type sidekick. The encounter is at a temporary stalemate when he says, “So why don’t you and super Injun there, find yourselves someplace else to have a pow-wow. OK?”  Victor doesn’t move and stares at John Wayne. The confrontation ends when the bus driver is heard off screen saying, “Come on you all boys, just sit down so we can all…{voice fades}. Victor then backs down. Some days there just are too many white men.

Critical film scholars might argue that the John Wayne type character would be more authentic if he wore a cowboy hat. Others would claim that a Western hat would make him too much of a caricature. The simple truth is that the high back seats on the bus make it is very difficult to wear a Western hat because the back brim hits the seat. It’s even more difficult in newer vehicles with the safety head cradle projecting above the seat. The iconic image of the cowboy wearing a Western hat and driving a pickup truck is each year becoming less common. The sidekick with the oversized Western hat has to lean forward from the seat in each shot. The scene plays so well because the nonchalant and flat affect of the John Wayne character is enhanced as he rolls his head back in the seat and closes his eyes feigning sleep.

They get their bags from the rack over their seats and go to the back of the bus. The background music is the Native American a cappella female trio Ulali, and their interpretation of Garryowen. Custer made the song the Regimental Air of his 7th Calvary and had it played before battles. It has been used in numerous Westerns, including the Custer biopic They Died with their Boots On (1941), Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), during a forced march of woman and children over a snow covered trail in The Searchers (1956), and during Custer’s Battle of the Little Bighorn in Little Big Man (1970). Victor and Thomas’ land or seats have been taken and they have to gather their belongings and relocate. Neither Thomas’s diplomacy nor Victor’s warrior posturing were effective in preventing the appropriation of their seats.  Young students who see the film as part of a social issues class, associate the scene with the Civil Rights Movement and segregation on buses. This is understandable since Native American history and the American Indian Movement have not received as much attention. In the film, the announcer of KREZ, the tribal radio station located in a trailer, is played by John Trudell. During the United Indians of All Tribes' occupation of Alcatraz, Trudell set up a radio station on the island and had a show called Radio Free Alcatraz. But that was almost half a century ago and probably few young viewers are aware of this real life connection to the actor.

They sit down in their new seats and Victor is staring in anger at their lost seats. Thomas is either too naïve or doesn’t care that his remark,” I guess your warrior look doesn’t work every time,” will be interpreted by Victor that he is being challenged. His anger level rises. He raises his hand and barks out, “Shut up Thomas.” Thomas says “the cowboys always win.” Victor negates Thomas’s statement, but that doesn’t deter Thomas from talking about Tom Mix and John Wayne. Victor again demonstrates the same tactic he used on Thomas about the gymnast. He shifts the conversation to teaching Thomas what is wrong and abnormal about John Wayne, who according to Victor never showed his teeth in his movies. Pounding his hand on the arm rest, Victor starts a powwow style chant about John Wayne’s teeth. The annoyed passengers look at the back of the bus. The relocation of the Indians to their new territory didn’t end the white man’s problems. At the back of the bus is an uprising. The words “are they false are they real? Are they plastic are they steel?” challenges the veracity of the hero and the stereotypical notion that in the movies it was the Indians who were the stoics who never smiled. The chant continues off-screen, performed by the Eaglebear Singers, as the bus arrives in Phoenix.

 Many of the signs of Victor’s abusive behavior are revealed by Victor’s reactions while other characters are advancing the story with dialogue. Film excels in this quality of simultaneous action. In a stage play, most of the audience is too far from the stage to see the subtle nuances of facial expression. In literature words are read sequentially and the simultaneous description of two actions is not possible. Some writers are extremely skillful in knowing how long it takes the reader’s brain to process the images of their words and how long the mental image can be maintained. With good writing the reader can experience a sensation of events occurring simultaneously. Storytellers for thousands of years have been very effective in allowing listeners to create simultaneous images. Anyone who has had to struggle through a lecture by an instructor who is talking too fast, giving out too much information and jumping from one seemingly unrelated event to another, can attest to this phenomenon in reverse. For many students, the pace is too fast to get any meaningful notes and the only solution is to stop trying to keep up processing the information and simply make a list of the topics that were superficially rattled off. The topics and incidents can easily be looked up after the lecture. In the world of literature, stage, and theater this can translate to financial disaster.

From the bus station in Phoenix they walk to Arnold Joseph’s trailer. Thomas annoys Victor by repeatedly asking him when they will get there. The walk to the trailer is a forced march. Twice Victor throws Thomas’s canteen into the scrub. Thomas says “We’ve been walking a long time,” and then transitions into a discourse about how Columbus showed up and “we had to walk away from that beach… Then Custer showed up… and we got to keep on walking… Then old Harry Truman drops the bomb… and we got to keep on walking somewhere.” The Truman reference is to the post war testing of atomic bombs at the Nevada Test Site on Shoshone lands. Viewers familiar with the Sonoran Desert around Phoenix recognize that the scene was not filmed in a location that remotely looks accurate. The silvery species of sagebrush are indicative of the higher elevation and colder climate of the Great Basin Desert. Westerns are frequently filmed in locations that are wrong for the locations in the story. Just as Indians in the past have been stereotypically cast as the same type, why shouldn’t all deserts be the same?

In Suzy’s trailer Victor’s abusive behavior to Thomas is attenuated. Abusers usually act better when they are in public, especially when someone new is present. Thomas tells a story about Victor’s mother’s fry bread. Victor again has to listen because Suzy is enjoying the story. Suzy says that it was a good story. When she asks if it was a true story, Victor again has the opportunity to limit his attack to Thomas’s veracity.  The story shifts away from Victor and Thomas’ relationship, and moves to the relationship between Victor’s dad and Suzy. Through a series of flashbacks Suzy tells Victor about his dad. Victor’s anger increases because now it is Suzy who is  telling  him positive stories about his father. Victor becomes verbally abusive after she tries she tries to coax Victor to go into his Dad’s trailer to take home some of his belongings. “Who the hell are you anyway? You tell me all these stories about my father and I don’t even know if they’re true.” Suzy gets into a direct confrontation with Victor when she says, “I Know more about him than you do.” Victor yells back, “You don’t know anything.” Suzy breaks the stalemate and tells Victor how his father, holding a sparkler when he was drunk, caused the fire that killed Thomas’s parents. Suzy tells him that his father didn’t abandon him but ran back into the fire looking for his son, talked about the fire every day, and wanted to return home. Victor finds in his father’s wallet a photo of the family, with the word “home” written on the back. Victor starts to cut his hair as his father did after the fire. On the bus trip Victor had demanded that Thomas get rid of his braided hair and free it because “an Indian man ain’t nothing without his hair.”     

They drive back to the reservation in Victor’s dad‘s pickup truck. Another story from Thomas about his dad starts a verbal confrontation. This time Thomas doesn’t back down. He tells Victor how he has been moping around the reservation for 10 years, has no job, and hurts his mother worse than his dad did. Victor swerves his father’s pickup truck off the road to avoid a wrecked car with a drunk driver and two passengers. Victor starts to run the twenty miles to the next town for help. He has a flashback of the burning house and Suzy’s voice over saying that his father did one good thing when he ran back into the burning house looking for his son. During her voice over the Image changes to a young Victor running to stop his father from leaving. The flashback continues with Victor’s father’s voice and the image of his father holding a basketball. “Everything in the world can fit in this ball. It’s not about magic. It’s about faith.” Victor, clutching his side that was injured when the pickup went off the road, continues to run for help and then collapses. The screen image is his father on the bridge in Spokane. The father’s image dissolves into a construction worker extending a hand to help Victor off the pavement.

This early stage of healing of the wound with the father who disappeared has not restructured the way Victor treats Thomas. He still displays the same dysfunctional communication style when he berates Thomas about the way he is pushing the wheelchair he is in. He gives Thomas a lecture why he shouldn’t complain about one small wreck and mentions Lester Falls Apart’s yearly wrecks. This is another example of Sherman Alexie’s tightly woven script. The audience is familiar with Lester and his unique name from the traffic reports at the beginning of the film. The scene at the sheriff’s office confronts the stereotype of Indians and alcohol. The drunk driver’s sworn statement was that it was Victor who was drunk and that Victor physically assaulted him. Victor is unable to control his frustration even when up against the sheriff. He displays the same aggressive impulsive response he used with the weak basketball player. He tells the Sheriff, “That’s bullshit.” Tom Skerritt, who played the humane and efficient sheriff married to the town doctor on the TV series Picket Fences, which ran a few years before this movie, has a similar role in Smoke Signals. He simply and unemotionally says, “Well that Kind of language isn’t necessary, Victor.”  He tells the sheriff that he doesn’t drink and has never had a drop of alcohol in his life. The sheriff’s reply reflects his preconceived notion about Indians and alcohol. “Just what kind of Injun are you exactly?”  Addressing the “exactly”, Victor responds, “I’m Coeur d’ Alene.” The sheriff promptly releases them after reading them a statement by one of the woman passengers.

When they arrive at the reservation Victor abandons his hostile communication and gives Thomas a portion of his father’s ashes. They talk about what each one plans to do with the ashes. Thomas asks Victor if he knew why his dad really left. Victor quietly responds, “He didn’t mean to.” These are the same words that Victor’s father said when Thomas’ grandmother told him that he” did a good thing” after he caught Thomas. Thomas smiles at Victor revealing that he knew Victor’s father started the fire that killed his parents.

Another real life connection In Smoke Signals is that the KREZ announcer, John Trudell lost his wife who was pregnant, his three children, and his mother-in-law in a house fire on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Nevada. To this day Trudell is convinced it was arson because of their activism. His wife was working for tribal water rights and was in conflict with state, federal, and local officials, and special interest groups of ranchers and the water recreation industry.  

The film has a structure similar to classical Hollywood detective films where the plot withholds information during the crime portion of the story and then incrementally provides information during the investigational part of the story. Late in the film, Suzy provides information about motive and why Arnold Joseph left. It’s not until Thomas reveals that he knew Arnold Joseph started the fire, is the story completed. The film ends with Thomas going in his house and his grandmother asking “Tell me what will happen.”  Thomas closes his eyes and starts a recounting of “How do we forgive our fathers,” a poem by Dick Lourie. An aerial view follows a river downstream and ends at the bridge by the Spokane Falls. Thomas’ recounting temporarily stops and there is an enacting of Victor scattering the ashes. Ulali’s Wah Jhi Le Yihm plays as background music. It’s not a “throwing things away when they have no more use,” as Victor had told Thomas. Victor is waving his hands above his head in a symbolic gesture of finally letting go of the past that has haunted him for most of his life.

The ability of Thomas to predict the future adds an element of magical realism to the film. Thomas’ magical ability is revealed early in the movie when Victor asks him how he knew that his father had died. Alexie veils this power of Thomas to keep the film grounded in the realm of physical reality. Thomas answered Victor’s question:

                      I heard it on the wind.
                      I heard it from the birds.
                      I felt it in the sunlight.
                      And your mother was just in here crying.

Viewers not familiar with Native American culture would interpret these lines as a parody on the stereotype of the medicine man. Those familiar with traditional healers would understand how the lines refer to the shaman as being able to transcend different realities. Earlier in the film, Thomas and his grandmother had finished a silent prayer before starting their evening meal. There was a knock at the door, and they smile and almost giggle at each other. Most viewers think they are simply acting silly. Those more familiar with traditional cultures realize that they know it is Victor at the door and he is coming to accept Thomas’s help to get to Phoenix. During the trip Victor is condescending and hostile about this ability of Thomas, and says, “Why can’t you have a normal conversation? You’re always trying to sound like some damn medicine man or something.”  By reserving the overt act of Thomas predicting the future, to the end of the film, viewers do not have to contend with any magical elements during the story.     

Getting back to a physical reality, Victor’s years of acquired dysfunctional communication patterns will be there to surface at times of tension and stress. There is the increased risk of him repeating this pattern in the future with spousal and child abuse. The availability of mental health programs, group counseling, and classes to acquire assertive but non-aggressive ways to communicate are not readily available on rural reservations. Even with availability, reimbursement by government and third parties is limited and will not cover the years that are necessary to acquire these skills.

Movies rarely deal with the struggle that will occur after the happy ending. In the typical romance film, after a long second act of obstacles that keep the couple apart, they are united and the film ends. There is no mention of the years of work ahead to maintain a marriage or relationship. War movies end with the victory and rarely with the hard work of establishing a new order. Real life is not as simple as the mythical Phoenix rising from the ashes of its dead parent. Nor is it as simple that the ashes, brought from the city of Phoenix, will free Victor from the past. Perhaps Sherman Alexie will make a future film with an older Victor and his son.

Victor and Thomas on their walk to Suzy's trailer.

Live Television Drama from New York, the Broadway stage, and Hollywood: An Interaction of Cultures in the Post War Years.




Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand in the live telecast of Marty in 1953.

During the early years of television almost all network broadcasting was from New York. A significant portion of prime time programs were live dramas. They were anthology series, where each broadcast had different actors and an unrelated story. Because there was no coaxial cable to the West Coast for a live simultaneous broadcast, a movie camera with 16mm black and white film was placed in front of a monitor. The film was developed and then shipped to the west coast for broadcasting a week later. Unfortunately, many of these kinescopes are lost or have deteriorated beyond the possibility of restoration. The directors in this new medium usually had theater experience and no film experience. Actors from Broadway, Off Broadway and a large pool of aspiring actors provided an almost endless supply of talent. They became so successful that they were later able to go to Hollywood to direct or star in films, and bypass the rigid hierarchy of the studio system. There were some like the director, Elia Kazan who went directly from the theater to Hollywood. While not the immediate cause of the demise of the studio system, this influx from New York to Hollywood further weakened the studio and increased the power of the actors’ agent.        

Counting only “Philco ­– Goodyear Televisionn Playhouse” and later “Goodyear Playhouse” Delbert Mann directed 108 live television anthology dramas for these two series. (1) No other director came close to this number. In his memoirs, he vividly describes his experience:

Live television combined the techniques of film and theatre in a new and special way. Use of cameras and microphones was comparable to film, but the rehearsal and playing of a script was much more closely related to theatre.  A production was rehearsed, then played in continuity, without film's ability to stop and repeat over and over again. It was performed and transmitted live. The pressures generated by this potential for disaster were unbelievable. The errors were there for all to see. This was more than balanced, I believe, by the special nature of a live show. I am convinced that the pressure led the actors to a supercharge of energy and electricity (call it "panic") in which the audience participated. There was awareness on the part of every viewer that what was being seen was happening at that moment. Mistakes could and would be made. An actor who forgot a line was helpless and totally exposed until someone threw him a rescuing line and he could find himself, or until he could pull himself together enough to ad lib his way back into the scene. It was trapeze work without a net. Catastrophe of monumental proportions was never far away. The audience knew this. They gasped when it happened, empathized, and then breathed a sigh of relief when it was over. That sense of the individual viewer in the audience participating in the event is missing in television today and has been, I fear, forever lost. (2)        

In the early years of live anthology series, television sets were expensive and not found in many homes. Movie tickets were more affordable. Mann describes how this economic factor influenced programming. “Television had a tremendous appeal in those primitive days. It was new and it was exciting. Actors became identifiable overnight, and were items of discussion the next day after a show. "Did you see so-and-so last night?" was heard often on the commuter trains into Manhattan. Programming was tailored for an audience that was upper and upper middle class, those who could afford this rather expensive luxury. They were essentially urban, theatrically oriented and experienced, reasonably sophisticated and rather homogeneous.”(3)

Arthur Penn directed live anthology series such as “Gulf Playhouse,” “The Philco – Goodyear Television Playhouse,” and “Goodyear Playhouse,” in the early 1950’s before he went to Hollywood to direct memorable films such as The Miracle Worker (1957), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Alice’s Restaurant (1969), and Little Big Man (1970). He had similar comments about television broadcasting in the early post war years:

Here was television that was a relatively new medium, so that nobody was really terribly concerned (nobody being the advertising agencies or the sponsors).They weren't terribly concerned about what was going on the air because not enough people were watching it to make it economically worthwhile. So, for Philco on our program and Westinghouse on Studio One, it was kind of institutional advertising rather than really selling products because there weren’t enough people who had television sets during this period. So here we are, at least two big shows coming out of New York ... actually there were more, and there was Kraft, Robert Montgomery Presents ... so there were a bunch of dramas. There was a drama every night on television, one network or another. Philco had the unique opportunity, because it was on Sunday night, to have access to all the wonderful actors who were acting on Broadway. In those days Broadway was dark Sunday night, universally, and what we had were all these actors who were trapped in hit plays who wanted desperately to do something else to keep their lives from turning into a totally automatic life. So we had these spectacular, wonderful people like Kim Stanley, who I think was playing in Picnic, Henry Fonda... all those people were playing on Broadway, but Philco had access to them uniquely because we were a Sunday night show. (4)

The interaction between Broadway and television would continue with the variety shows. Ed Sullivan on his Toast of the Town, on October 18, 1953, showcased a scene from Tea House of the August Moon with John Forsythe, Paul Ford, and David Wayne. The actors were in their costumes and there was a facsimile of the Broadway set. The Ed Sullivan Show presented more  musicals than dramas. On March 27, 1955 he featured performers who had been in the musical Oklahoma. John Raitt and Florence Henderson sang “People Will Say We're In Love.” Barbara Cook did "Many a New Day" with a dance ensemble. Celeste Holm, who originated the role of Ado Annie sang "I Cain't Say No."  Sullivan’s Show was also on a Sunday night, giving him access to performers while their shows were still on a Broadway run. The Best of Broadway Musicals - Original Cast Performances from The Ed Sullivan Show was released on DVD in 2003. Recordings of the Ed Sullivan Show, available in archives such as the Paley Center for Media in New York and Beverly Hills, provide the only visual record for many performances of the cast in musicals of this era.

Arthur Penn, who started directing live television drama in 1953 with Gulf Playhouse, described his recollections about screen writers in Hollywood:

 

What I think that those of us who had worked in television brought was a respect for the writing. For the ability for a scene to stand on its own terms because the writing was good. And that was way out of the Hollywood tradition. In those days the writer was treated with contempt in Hollywood. When we came along, I think we came along with these good writers. We were joined at the hip with a whole generation of fine dramatic writers. (5)

 

This was not the first wave of writers to leave New York and go to Hollywood. When silent films were replaced with “talkies”, script writers were suddenly needed. How the screenwriter was credited gives an insight to how film and stage regarded the writer differently. For Broadway and Off Broadway dramas, the writer’s name usually appeared with the title on the marquee, the Playbill, and print advertising. The director would be listed towards the bottom of the posters and inside the Playbill, usually after the brief biographies of the actors. Live television dramas continued the practice of crediting the writer with the title. In films the screenwriter was buried deep in the opening credits. There was the exception for films adapted from a book by a well-known author and for musicals. Cimarron (1960) has the title card “Edna Ferber’s Cimarron.” Oklahoma (1955) opens with “Rodgers and Hammerstein Present Oklahoma.” However the screenwriters for Oklahoma are listed considerably later. For playwrights it could take quite a while to achieve such status. For the films A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Suddenly Last Summer (1959), Tennessee Williams is listed after all the actors in the opening credits. In The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961), Vivien Leigh is credited first and then on the next title card is Williams’ name above the title. However in Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), the titling is “Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Presents Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth.” As Hollywood introduced wider screen formats to counter the competition from the narrow television set, the name of the new technology was showcased. In South Pacific (1958), immediately after the title, appeared “Produced in Todd AO”. Marilyn Monroe had her name appear before the title in Bus Stop (1956). But “20th Century Fox Presents a CinemaScope Picture”, with the word CinemaScope in large letters in its unique font style, came before Monroe’s name. The new technologies were featured in a number performed by Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in the MGM musical Silk Stockings (1957). Charisse sings, “If you want to get the crowd to come around, you’ve got to have glorious Technicolor, breath taking CinemaScope, and stereophonic sound.” A strong reverberation is applied to the words “stereophonic sound” and also when Fred Astaire lets the piano cover slam shut. They lament how previous famous scenes are now not adequate and they continue to sing the various color processes and screen formats. The film was an adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name, which was an adaptation of the MGM film Ninotchka (1939).

Delbert Mann described his experience with Paddy Chayefsky, the writer for Marty (TV 1953, film 1955):

Paddy Chayefsky and I worked well together. He was from the Bronx. I was from Tennessee. His stories were all about the Bronx, about his background, his mother, himself, his friends. I didn't really understand or dig all the jargon of the Bronxese, the male bonding situation that takes place on street corners there and all that "Marty" deals with. I needed  Paddy, who was there at all the rehearsals, to fill me in on what the  background  and feeling was, and  why somebody  would say such  a thing,  and  what  the  whole atmosphere of  the  situation  was. So we worked very closely together. I did understand the human   nature of the story, the relationships, the people aspect of it. Paddy was unique in being able to write of his own experience in his own lingo. It gives the effect of being realistic dialogue. It isn't at all. It's very stylized, but the feeling is that it is realistic.

Paddy had done about four or five shows with a New York background, and he was very fearful of getting labeled as the Jewish, Bronx writer, able to tell no other stories. Deliberately he changed the ethnic background of the story and picked Italian, just to get away from that label. Well, of course it was a fine choice because the relationships are exactly the same. The family situations are the same. The family aspirations are the ... Paddy was writing about a universal situation. So people in Kansas City could respond to it just as people in the Bronx did. (6)

Paddy insisted that I come along to direct it because he wanted somebody to help protect his baby against the Hollywood Philistines that would do him in. This was my first chance at a film. I came out here with Paddy. We went to work. We wanted to do just an expanded version of the television show. Harold [producer, Harold Hecht] wanted the same emotional reaction, the same kind of response, but he wanted a different picture. He did not want the same cast. He did not want the exact same story, just a repeat of the television show expanded  to double the length, because he felt people  would not pay to go to see it on a big screen, when they had  just seen it on television for free a year before.”

Paddy being Paddy always had more input into his shows than any other writer. He always had the great good sense never, never, never to speak directly to the actor. An actor would ask him a question in rehearsal, and he'd say, "Ask Del," so that the director's relation with the actor was always very clear. But he would have a lot to say about how a scene was playing, how an actor was doing. We'd get together after a scene was done and talk about it. But it was between us. I depended a great deal on him, and certainly for Hollywood it was a revelation to have Paddy on the set of Marty. The production manager, the assistant director, the cameraman were rather bemused by this forceful person on the set making suggestions.”(7)

Sidney Lumet who directed Network (1976), a melodrama about television network news, also had Chayefsky on the set so he could make changes to the script after he heard the actors say the lines. In the commentary in the DVD released for the thirtieth anniversary of the film, Lumet recalls, “One of the things that Paddy did, knowing the field so well, having written for so much of it, is that he knew every television dramatic cliché and used every one of them in the discussions of television. He left nothing out.”(8)

Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty is a butcher in the Bronx who lives with his Italian immigrant mother. He is socially awkward and repeatedly describes himself as a “fat, ugly, little guy.” His mother, relatives and friends are constantly asking him why he isn’t married. One Saturday night he goes to the Waverly Ballroom and meets Clara, a school teacher who has been ditched by a blind date because she is a “dog.”  They find comfort and relate to each other. Marty’s mother doesn’t want him to see her again because she doesn’t want to be alone. The next day Marty and his friends are back in the bar seated at a table discussing all the places they can go that night to find some “action.” They try persuading Marty not to call her because she looks fifty years old and is a “dog.” The telecast ends with Marty calling Clara and closing the phone booth door on his friend.

Nancy Marchand, who played Clara was six feet tall had prominent angular facial bones. She was taller than Marty, played by Rod Steiger. In the film version which is about 40 minutes longer than the telecast, Nancy Blair was shorter than Ernest Borgnine. She had the beauty that Nancy Marchand lacked. She definitely is not the dog as the other characters describe her.  Her interaction with Marty is expanded by scenes in a coffee shop after the dance. She is very encouraging about Marty following his dream to buy the butcher shop from his boss who wants to move to California and be with his children. The scenes before and after the coffee shop were shot on location in the Bronx and provide a documentary realism of this  vibrant  working class area in the early post war years. The tracking shots of Marty and Clara walking at night in front of stores that provided the back lighting are not possible in a stage production.

The ballroom set for the television version was narrowly wedged between the sets for the bar and the butcher shop. There was only room for one camera. The dance sequence was shot in one long continuous take of about four minutes. The actors danced and then turned to the camera for their speaking parts or their reactions. Mann thought this was so successful that he repeated it in the movie. Other dancers periodically come between the couple and the camera to add realism. The “what you want to do tonight” scene is a long continuous take of Marty and his friend Angie in a bar bantering about all the places they can go that night. The bar set was also too small for more than one camera. It is a tight shot of the two actors sitting on the same side of a table with a newspaper unfolded between them. The little movement in the scene comes from posture changes in their heads and arms. In the movie that scene was also one continuous take, but the movement in the frame is from Marty turning the pages of the newspaper that is in front of him. Today long continuous takes of a conversation with a static camera are arguably nonexistent. But cutting to different angles can be anti-realistic. An observer watching two people at another table having a conversation sees them from only one direction. Reverse camera angles of 180 degrees were not used in live television drama because the second camera would be visible. The cameras were obliquely placed in a V pattern.

Delbert Mann felt that the early success he had directing Marty stereotyped him. “Through my film career which began with Marty–that was the first film that I ever did. I soon became typed as a small budget, black and white, shoot them in New York, kind of director–and struggled very hard to break away from those intimate kinds of stories, which were the first ones that I did for theatrical film.”(9)

New York stage and live television actors didn’t have the same fan status as many film stars had. Well known Hollywood stars lived in residential and secluded areas with very little pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk, if there was a sidewalk. New York stage and live anthology television actors lived in apartment buildings or small hotels. If they lived on an uptown street, they had to walk to the avenue to get a taxi or subway. It wasn’t the life style of Norma Desmond and her chauffer Max Von Mayerling in Sunset Boulevard (1950). Rod Steiger described his experience the day after Marty aired. “The next day I took a walk down the street and truck drivers were yelling ‘Hi Ya Marty.’ And I went into a store, somebody said, “Marty. How are you?” Betsy Palmer, who played Marty’s cousin said, “People always stopped you on the street. The garbage man you always see a lot, [said] ‘Hey Betsy. I saw you on Television last night.’[And I answered.] “I’m glad. Did you like it?”(10)               

No Time for Sergeants had an unusual life cycle. It was first a best-selling novel in 1954 and then adapted into a one hour live television play with Andy Griffith for the United States Steel Hour on March 15, 1955. Later that year it opened with Griffith on Broadway for almost a two year run. In 1958 it was released as a motion picture starring Griffith and most of the original Broadway cast. In 1964 it became a television series without Griffith and ran only one season. The film shows its stage roots in the scene where Griffith is frustrating the psychiatrist at the Processing Center. The two characters are loosely framed with a static camera with long continuous takes and just a few reaction shots. One of the monologues of Griffith talking to the audience, occurred in the film when he explains how they went to gunnery school and were assigned to obsolete aircraft. In the movie and Broadway version Don Knotts briefly appeared as the corporal who administers the manual dexterity test to Griffith. He becomes totally exasperated when Griffith bends the two sliding rings apart. The duo would appear together for eight seasons as Sheriff Andy Taylor and Deputy Barney Fife on the Andy Griffith Show. However in the television series Griffith would be the straight man.

Jeffrey Hayden directed episodes of Philco Television Playhouse from 1954–1955  before going to Hollywood for a 40-plus year career directing episodic television. In an interview he compared the difference between casting in Hollywood and New York:

In the theater the director does cast for the most part his actors, and so when we came into live television, the same thing carried over. We had casting people helping  us, and  we had  producers  consulting  with us, and when  you  work with someone like Fred Coe,  as Delbert  did and I did, naturally their input was greatly valued because they were in some cases some great producers, who could be very helpful. But the prerogative of casting the actor was with the director. When I came to California and started doing episodic television, the same was true because so many of us came from New York. There was a whole wave that moved West, and this was the nature of our work, you know, a director casts his actors. Well, over the years that has been somewhat eroded by the system, the system being that in episodic television you have a producer or as it happens a half dozen producers on any given series and they are mostly writers because of the nature of the medium. They're writer-producers, and they are on the show from the beginning of the season to the end of the season. They have more continuity than the director who comes in and does just one or two or three episodes in any given season. Of course, that has changed too. (11) 

In the United States, the founder of method acting in might have been Lee Strasberg when he co-founded the Group Theater in New York City in 1931. But it was the director Elia Kazan, at the Actors Studio, that opened in 1947 in New York, who brought a generation of new actors trained in the “method” to Hollywood. Method actors identified with the character, search for psychological motives, and reproduced the character with their own emotions that were recalled from their own experiences. There was no one method. Each teacher had their own interpretation of the Stanislavski System. Kazan’s reputation as a Broadway director enabled him to bypass the studio based apprenticeship system and direct his first film A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) that was adapted from the 1943 novel with the same name. Most of the film looks like a stage play shot from a camera in the center mezzanine except for some shots on the stairwell and a crane shot that pans around the tenement courtyard and ends on Peggy Ann Garner sitting on the fire escape. This stage look to Kazan’s films could still be seen in his social issues films Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and Pinky (1949). His noir Panic in the Streets (1950) displays his acquired cinematic style with wide panning shots along streets and train tracks and a memorable chase scene along the New Orleans waterfront that is a long take with a 360 degree panning shot.

Geraldine Page was one of the early method actors who performed off Broadway and on Broadway in the early 1950’s.  She was selected to play opposite John Wayne in the western Hondo (1953) when Kathryn Hepburn was not available and other choices wanted too high a salary. Many considered her too introspective for a western especially as she was developing a reputation of playing “neurotic” women. Michael Pate, who played Chief Vittorio, recalled a conversation with Geraldine Page after she arrived for filming. “Later on she said to me, a day or so later, ‘I’d like to rehearse with you.’ And I said ‘Miss Page, look, I’m from Hollywood. We don’t rehearse that way. We prepare and we bring our stuff on the set. Then we see what the director wants us to do, and then [we] get on with the job of acting and putting it on film. (12) Geraldine Page’s facial expressions, body movements, and vocal inflections that mirror her emotions, are a marked contrast to Wayne’s studio system acting. Method acting was not enthusiastically accepted by old school directors, especially when the actor might ask “What’s my motivation for the character?” Some never accepted the method despite the influx of talent from the Actor’s Studio and the popularity of method actors such as Marlon Brando, Montgomery Cliff and James Dean.

Lumet described how in Network (1976) he introduced William Holden to rehearsing a scene as it is done in the theater:

Holden did not have any theater background and had heard that I rehearsed, but he had never really done it before. And when I rehearsed it’s not just going over the script and talking about characters. I actually stage it like in the theater. He said it was one of the best times in his life, because all of a sudden he felt like a real actor and hadn’t been treated that way in the early part of his career. The sense of pleasure that you can get from contact with the people you’re going to be working with over a long period of time is reinforced completely by the rehearsal time. (13)     

The post war dominance of New York television broadcasting was soon challenged. In November 1952, CBS Television City opened in Los Angeles. The premier of Playhouse 90, on October 4, 1956, opened with the announcer saying, “Live from Television City in Hollywood, Studio 90.”  The “90” referenced the duration of the show. Previous live anthology feature dramas were an hour long. The viewer was now going to have an experience more like a stage drama. Producers and directors from New York, including Arthur Penn, John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, George Roy Hill, and Fred Coe went to do shows at Playhouse 90. Writers such as Ted Mosel and Horton Foote also worked at Playhouse 90. In the spring of 1956, Ampex Corporation demonstrated a magnetic tape system that had no apparent loss of quality from the live broadcast. By 1957, Playhouse 90 and other anthology series were taping. The audience probably didn’t care that the TV drama was not live. Nostalgic interviews and oral histories taken decades later discuss the excitement and stress on the actors who were performing live, and how they coped with mistakes, forgotten lines, or the performance that was running longer than the allotted time. They felt the audience thrived on this knowledge. The expression itself, “Golden Age of Television” influences these testimonies and tempts the celebrities to reminisce and exaggerate.

What’s not an exaggeration is the effect that the Westerns had on anthology drama shows. Gunsmoke first aired in September 1955. By 1959, there were about 40 Westerns, over 25 during prime time, and during one week a peak of eight were in the top ten. Anthology dramas were not the only casualties of the Westerns. The comedians also suffered. The Westerns fell out of favor and were replaced with the television variety show. The variety shows appealed to an older audience and were replaced with series in which the characters and plot continuously evolved, such as Dallas, Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere. Live anthology television is gone but generations of viewers for the past 38 seasons have been able to turn on their sets and hear “Live from New York it’s Saturday night.”

                                                                      Notes

1  A tabulation of all the television dramas directed by Delbert Mann can be found at Internet Movie Database (IMDb). http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0542720/

2  Mann, Delbert. Looking Back at Live Television and Other Matters (Los Angeles: A Directors Guild of America Publication, 1998) p.7.

3  Mann. P.7.

4  Kindem, Gorham. The live television generation of Hollywood film directors: interviews with seven directors (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 1994)  pp 31–32.   

5  Kindem. p.51.

6   Kindem. pp. 54–55.

7  Kindem. p. 59.

8  Sidney Lumet director’s commentary Network (1976). Two Disc Special Edition, Turner Entertainment Co. 2006.

9  Delbert Mann director’s commentary for Marty (television 1953), The Golden Age of Television.Criterion Collection, 2009.

10   Interviews. Bonus Material for Marty (television 1953), The Golden Age of Television. Criterion Collection, 2009.

11   Kindem. p.35.

12  Hondo(1953) Special collector’s edition. The Making of Hondo. Paramount Home Entertainment.2005.  

13   Sidney Lumet director’s commentary, Network (1976). Two Disc Special Edition, Turner Entertainment Co. 2006