It's Time For Vote-by-Mail to be Universal

One of the many concerns that have emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic has been elections and their integrity. America is in the middle of an election year with a general election scheduled for November. Wisconsin held in-person voting this week for their Primary, going against the advice of public health officials during a time when social distancing should be paramount. Hopefully, we will have seen the worst of this pandemic by November, but the problem will not have disappeared. Besides, there are many reasons for going to a Vote-by-Mail system beyond the current public health concerns. 

Ohio took the drastic step of postponing their March Primary and has been encouraging voters to vote by mail. I received mine today as I've done in previous elections. Here are some advantages.

1) Avoid Election Day Lines - There's a sense of civic ritual of going into vote that's been highly valued in American history. But waiting in lines for hours on end on a weekday seems absurd in this day and age. It's too easy NOT TO VOTE under a system like this (speaking from personal experience). Getting a ballot by mail will bypass the obstacle of "election day."

2) Research the Candidates - There's no pressure with home voting either. You can do your own vetting of the candidates and come to a deliberate decision (as opposed to rushed one). The prominent positions get all the attention, but local positions are critical and all candidates should be vetted online.

3) Paper Ballot - A return to paper voting would alleviate technology concerns. We know hostile countries have tried to hack into American elections. So taking technology out of the equation would help ensure the integrity of the system and put those hackers out of business.

4) It's safer for all citizens - Public health concerns aside, voting by mail would make it easier for senior citizens to vote. Working families with busy schedules would not have to worry about getting to the polls in time. 

5) Bi-Partisan Support - Despite statements by the President and some Republicans who fear voting by mail would favor Democrats since it would mean higher turnouts, there's little evidence to support the claim. As a NY Times article points out, there's actually widespread support in both parties for Vote-by-Mail. In fact, many Democrats have concerns about minority turnout if election goes to all mail, although the Times article never explains why. Republican officials here in Ohio have encouraged all mail voting - so evidence points to bi-partisan support.

6) Allows Elections to be Extended - Why not extend voting by a month, allowing everybody an equal chance to vote without scrambling at the last minute. Doing it all in one day always seems like a recipe for disaster as we saw in 2000 with Bush v Gore. 

7) Curb Voter Suppression - Unfortunately voter suppression is on the rise. America has a long history of preventing African-Americans and other minorities from voting. Legislation during the Civil Rights era in the 1950s and 1960s was designed to stop literacy tests and poll taxes, common practices in the Jim Crow South to suppress the black vote. Recently, voter ID laws have been used to deny American citizens the right to vote. Without a picture ID, you can be denied your vote on election days. Limits on registration drives have also cut into turnout. These practices are anti-democratic and must be called out and stopped.

An informed citizenry is the lifeblood of democracy, mail-by-vote would allow for more and better informed voting. Not only is it critical every American have the right to vote, but the assurance their vote will be counted. Citizens voting from the comfort of their homes or designated locations will improve turnout and the health of democracy. So, stay at home and vote!

When SNL Made Star Trek Hip

With Star Trek: Picard generating a lot of enthusiasm this week it's a reminder the 50+ year franchise continues to flourish. But things easily could've went the other way. Airing for three seasons on NBC from 1966-69, the show was unceremoniously canceled due to low ratings. But a passionate fan base organized conventions and the show grew its audience after leaving the airwaves through syndication reruns. Star Trek officially resumed with the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979, launching a popular film franchise and several spin-off television shows. 

Saturday Night Live premiered in the fall of 1975 and instantly changed the landscape of television. The irreverent satire by the post-60s generation hit a cultural nerve. The first season is especially fascinating to watch as the show found its identity. An episode with Paul Simon was mostly music performance. Jim Henson presented a more adult oriented version of the Muppets each week and Albert Brooks contributed a short film for each episode. But the sketches became the centerpiece. Chevy Chase stood above the rest of the cast and by May of 1976 SNL was a pop culture phenomenon. 

Entitled "The Last Voyage of the Starship Enterprise" and written by Michael O'Donoghue the sketch ran a marathon 12 minutes. The date was May 29, 1976. A tour de force of performance and satire, it would poke fun at the acting style of Star Trek and ratings obsessed network executives. John Belushi portrayed Captain Kirk, nailing Shatner's speech cadence and physicality. Chase played Spock and Dan Aykroyd as McCoy.

The sketch begins with Enterprise being chased by a Chrysler Imperial. The ship starts to lose power and gets boarded by an NBC executive played by Eilliot Gould (a regular host in the early years). He there to announce the cancellation of Star Trek due to low ratings, although his kids love the show. Spock's attempts to apply the Vulcan nerve pinch and fails. As they begin to tear down the set the cast gives up and leaves. Kirk is told he has an offer from a margarine company and concludes the sketch by saying, "except for one television network, we have found intelligence everywhere in the galaxy."

Apparently the dress rehearsal went badly. Chase resented Belushi for being the central figure in the sketch (mirroring the Shatner/Nimoy rivalry). But the live performance went well and everyone was happy with it. As the years went by it was consistently ranked as one of the best sketches in SNL's history.

The sketch also hit the zeitgeist: people wanted more Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry and former cast members both praised SNL and it helped insure the franchise would continue. At the same it was one of Belushi's finest moments on the show - creating a breakthrough moment in pop culture.

Mediums in Flux: Narrative Evolution in TV and Film

The proliferation of long form TV has not only revolutionized how we consume media over the past decade, but also the way we process narrative. While there have been countless think pieces on how television has usurped cinema as the ideal form of storytelling, I'm not sure if one is better than the other is the relevant question. Adrian Martin's 2019 article in Cineaste "The Challenge of Narrative: Storytelling Mutation between Television and Cinema" does a brilliant job of explaining these radical and not so radical innovations in narrative storytelling. It appears inevitable we've reached a tipping point, in the next decade our sense of narrative will continue to evolve. 

Martin introduces the idea of squeezing and stretching narratives. For example, an adaptation of a novel will rarely be a page for page visual transcription, but a distillation of key themes and characters. The essence must be squeezed out for the visual format of cinema. Rosemary's Baby, the 1968 Roman Polanski version, works perfectly at two hours. A four hour 2014 mini-series drained the power from the story. There are many other examples. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining used the Stephen King novel as a starting point, but made a film of his own vision. The more faithful 1997 TV version illustrates the limitations of the TV medium - lower budgets and boxy staging.

Conversely, a stretched narrative will extend the three act structure. For example GLOW, the Netflix series about women's professional wrestling set in the 1980s. The entire first season is devoted to getting the team together, which would typically be the first act of a feature film. Why not do a ten hour origin story? Or jump around in time within a known larger narrative, such as Better Call Saul. Stretching out these concepts can be risky, but when done right can be an enriching experience.

When a movie packs too much plot it can spiral into incoherence. The 1981 Sidney Lumet film Prince of the City crammed so much story and plot into its two and a half hour running time, I could not help thinking a mini-series would've better served the story. For any epic novel the possibilities in the modern TV format are limitless. In the hands of a master filmmaker and a first rate cast, Park Chan-wook's 2018 version of John le Carre's The Little Drummer Girl being an example, television can display its narrative possibilities.

There's also been a push back to long form TV. A taut 90 minute movie made in the classical style, thinking John Carpenter or Howard Hawks, can be very satisfying. Short and dense, every frame and moment adds to the unfolding story. A serialized television show cannot replicate the contained experience of a movie. Even if a movie fails, it's two hours of your life. A lackluster TV season will suck up 10-12 hours. Is it worth the time?

The past few years I've been going through The Rockford Files (74-80), a famous episodic detective show. There's a comfort in the show's lo-fi ambiance often shot at dimly lit 70s bars, sunny beach sides, and rustic dockyards. Like most 70s network TV, each episode introduces a conflict and by the end everything gets resolved. Previous episodes are rarely referenced. While the episodic approach has its limits, there's also something liberating, a sort of defiance against the idea of time moving forward. A great episode will be fondly remembered, but a serialized show is more about the overarching narrative, not the specific experience of an episode.

I don't think it's a matter if TV or movies being better, but a matter of expectations. The character driven/anti-hero style of New Hollywood movies is now the province of television from shows like Breaking Bad or Fleabag. With movies relying more on super blockbusters to keep box office numbers up and people going to theaters, the predictions of a crash Spielberg and Lucas predicted in 2013 could happen in the next decade. With Disney approaching monopoly status, movies are becoming more of a producer's medium at the expense of directors. Many promising directors have found a place in television, but within the confines of the series, while their independent projects go unmade. 

Established filmmakers have also migrated to television. Martin Scorsese's The Irishmen  had to go through Netflix. The long awaited Orson Welles film The Other Side of the Wind also became available through Netflix. The fact that Knives Out, a hit film with a middle budget and an A-list cast, can still be a hit is more the exception than the rule these days. A movie will always be a singular experience - unique and maybe in the long run more powerful.

Over the past few years I've neglected TV probably because I'm too impatient to get into too many shows. I believe in the 2020s entertainment will increasingly shift into the television format or maybe evolve into something else entirely. More interactive, or possibly a fragmentation that will make entertainment even more insular. Either way, we're in a transformative era.

Work Cited

Martin, Adrian. "The Challenge of Narrative: Storytelling Mutation between Television and Cinema." Cineaste: Summer 2019 Vol. XLIV, No. 3. 

Counterfeit Woodstock

Counterfeit Woodstock

I was too young to recall the day Oswald got shot on live TV,

but I’ll never forget the frigid Monday night 17 years later.

A lot of dreams were killed that night, many other things too

Four kids from Ohio made it to the wake, carried there as if on a string.

Jeffrey remarked it felt like the last movie, the last rock and roll show,

the last waltz before doomsday all rolled into one.

Allison spotted Bill Murray smoking a cigarette.

Will thought of Zapata’s army gathering one last time.

Then it began to snow. And everyone sang.

T-Rex (Puttin' Out the Good Vibes)

Steven Spielberg's America by Frederick Wasser
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A well written but slight overview of Spielberg's films up to 2008. Wasser places Spielberg's filmography within the context of the shifting sociological and political landscape of 20th Century America. The overarching narrative traces Spielberg's beginnings in television and rapid rise in Hollywood with the release of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Influenced by New Hollywood style of the 1970s, Wasser argues Spielberg's mainstream tastes paved the way for his domination of pop culture during the 1980s. While his suburban epics and action adventures with Indiana Jones appeared to be in sync with the zeitgeist of Reagan's America, Wasser traces a growing political awareness in Spielberg's work. By engaging with history in The Color Purple, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan , and Munich he's asking audiences to reexamine the past and present. His sci-fi films Minority Report and War of the Worlds dealt with a post 9/11 world. My main criticism with the book is that all these films deserve much deeper analysis beyond historical context (even that seems short on depth). Some of Wasser's conclusions appear superficial, stuck between Spielberg's naysayers and proselytizers. For example, Wasser contends Schindler's List appealed to audiences because it celebrated capitalism? Too much Fredric Jameson for my taste. At the same he champions Minority Report as a modern masterpiece, which I would agree. Overall a good overview of Spielberg's long and fascinating career and a good starting point for identifying some key themes and motifs, but lacking in razor sharp analysis.


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Book Review: The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay by Harlan Ellison

Often considered the greatest episode on the original Star Trek series, "The City on the Edge of Forever" by Harlan Ellison also fomented decades of acrimony over the heavily revised script that aired on April 6, 1967. Ellison's original script was altered at the behest of Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry who did not consider it Star Trek enough. Ellison disavowed the episode in countless interviews over the years. His original script that earned a Hugo Award. The book includes the full original teleplay.

Ellison's 60+ page introduction attempts to set the record straight. Admittedly petty at times, Ellison wants to call out every falsehood about the creation of the episode, most of his vitriol is aimed at Roddenberry who often took credit for "saving" Ellison's unfilmable script.

The episode that aired focuses upon "The Guardians", ancient beings who oversee a time portal on the fringes of the universe. After a McCoy accidentally took some amphetamines he crosses one of the portals and changes history for the worse. Kirk and Spock also enter the portal and find themselves in the 1930s, trying to save their timeline. They meet Edith Keeler, a charismatic young woman who proselytizes for world peace. Kirk falls in love with Edith, but also learns that she has a certain fate planned for her that cannot be changed or there will be dire consequences for the future. The episode concludes with Kirk tragically standing aside as Edith dies to preserve the timeline.

A great episode full of great themes and inspired acting from the cast, one may wonder: What was Ellison so upset about?

First of all the teleplay is far more richer in theme and tone. Ambitious for 1960s episodic television, the script reads like a feature film. The original story involved drug dealing on the Enterprise and a more epic journey back to 1930 with some intriguing minor characters. Secondly, Ellison's dialogue is moving and philosophical. Not only a melancholy love story with Kirk and Edith, but also features some great dialogue between Kirk and Spock.

The script also explores the influence of individuals upon history, courageous sacrifices made by the nameless who were never recognized, and even on the ultimate nature and fate and humanity. All these are expressed through Eliison's eloquent language.

It's tempting to hope someday the script will be made as originally intended. Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto would be ideal to play Spock and Kirk, but that will probably never happen. It's such a Kirk/Spock centered story, it would have be made at the expense of other cast members. Still, it would be a cool movie.

The book also includes some extra revisions Ellison made and some reminiscences from the participants. A compelling read for Star Trek fans, but also for writers interested in writing for the small and big screen.