Well, that was fun. I must say you folks have a very rich and varied range of knowledge. Let me say just a word about what led me to raise the question. As you probably know if you have been reading this blog, there was a time in my life when I worked very hard to learn to play the viola. For eight years, I took a 90 minute lesson every week and practiced an hour a day. As a result of all this work, I became a pretty amateur fair violist. That is to say, I was nowhere near as good as a professional violist sitting in the last chair of the viola section of a small regional professional orchestra. The sheer amount of work day after day, month after month, year after year that is required to achieve the sort of command of the piano or the violin or the viola that professional musicians exhibit is something that non-musicians I suspect do not quite understand. When I watch Yo-Yo Ma leaning back and playing the cello as though he were listening to it rather than actually playing it, I have some sense of what it took for him to reach that point and I am in awe.
By comparison, it is my impression that it takes relatively
little work to become a good film actor, although obviously some people are
much better at it than others. Hence, it does not surprise me that the children
of quite successful film actors sometimes themselves become successful film
actors. I should imagine it takes a good deal more work than that to become a
first-class plumber although I have never done any plumbing so I do not really
know.
55 comments:
I agree with you.
My son got the equivalent of a BA in classical guitar and then an MA in musical composition and it takes a lot of work and practice. His maternal grandmother played violin in the Chilean Symphony Orchestra and spent most of her free time practicing: having lived with her for a while, I'm a witness to that.
I've known a few actors and actresses and there's not so much discipline involved. Good looks count in an acting career and have no importance in classical music, although they do in pop music.
I’d say that it takes relatively little work in terms of craft to become a famous actor, if you’re in a position to do so (whether by family or otherwise). The amount of public relations necessary is a different fish.
On the other hand, becoming a good actor is certainly a matter of training and discipline. There’s a difference between Cate Blanchett’s ability and Heather Locklear’s ability, and in part it’s because Blanchett has worked at it. It’s just that film is in large part a popular medium so there’s more room for success with relatively little talent, unlike classical music.
In making this assessment, one should distinguish between film actors and theater actors. An actor’s performance on film is subject to editing, camera angles, number of takes, etc. However, a theater actor repeats the same performance night after night, and many have said that they feel a need to bring something fresh to each performance, so that it does not become repetitive and stale. Even many film actors started out in the theatre, e.g., Laurence Olivier, Brando (starred in the theater production of Streetcar Named Desire), Kirk Douglas (starred as the original Larry McMurtry in the theater production of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest), Hepburn (starred in the theater production of The Philadelphia Story and several Shakespeare productions), Jessica Tandy (the original Blanche Dubois). The honing of their skills as theater actors is not just a matter of good looks and publicity.
I wouldn’t downplay what it takes to be a good actor. It amounts to convincing an audience that you’re somebody you aren’t. Think of the many roles Meryl Streep has played. I once saw a talk show (maybe Johnny Carson; I don’t remember) where the guests were Alex Karras, the retired NFL player who did several movies, Jessica Tandy, and Hume Cronyn. Karras was a natural comedian and cast as such, perhaps most famously being a cowboy passing gas in Blazing Saddles. When asked about his transition from football to acting, he said that it was easy: all you need to do is be yourself. At that, Tandy and Cronyn almost jumped out of their chairs while telling him that he didn’t know what he was talking about.
For sure, there are great actors and actresses, for example, Cate Blanchett mentioned above, in Blue Jasmin or Marlon Brandon or Al Pacino.
However, just take a glance at Barneboim playing Beethoven. From memory, never missing a note and with just the right emotional emphasis. The level of discipline and mental organization is difficult to imagine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccyHT1sFmsg
s.w
Good point.
One more point (on topic) if I may.
Most of us act a role from time to time, certainly in job interviews, in social situations, when teaching classes, etc. Most or many of us are capable of playing a number of fairly clearly defined roles: the jovial host, the authoritative expert,
the kindly neighbor, with the required fake smile or lack of smile.
However, how many of us can imagine playing a Beethoven sonata for 30 minutes from memory as Barenboim does? For those who are not familiar with Beethoven sonata 32 it's not a piece you can sing along to or tap your foot to because each note is unexpected, yet follows perfectly and logically from the previous note.
So while very few of us are capable of acting with Brando's ability, most of us know how to act a little in a daily life, so we can capture more or less what he is up to.
A word on memorization. For a professional musician, or even a good amateur, memorization is not that difficult once you really know the piece. What wd impress me about the Barenboim performance (which I haven't looked at) is the playing itself, not the memorization. (I played the flute seriously through college, so I've had experience w memorizing, albeit admittedly not for piano.) Memorizing a piece of music is probably roughly in the same ballpark as a theater actor memorizing a role. An actor memorizing the title role of Hamlet or King Lear is roughly the same kind of thing as a musician memorizing a concerto.
I'm a little surprised at the relative lack of respect for acting in this thread. First-rate stage acting is difficult w a capital D. There are plenty of competent professional actors, but the number of really first-rate stage actors (who also did or do movies) is not that large.
P.s. I also think first-rate movie acting is not as easy as it might seem. The really good movie actors make it look easy, but I don't think it is -- though good acting on the stage is more difficult.
LFC,
I wholeheartedly agree with your comments about stage and cinema actors. Regarding cinema, people do not appreciate that during closeups, the camera is positioned extremely close to the actors, which causes stress. Under this stress, they have to remember their lines and continue to portray their character in a convincing manner. This is a lot harder than it looks.
Well I don’t know about ‘great’ but the are certainly ‘good’ philosophers who are the sons or daughters of other philosophers.
Frank Jackson is the son of Camo Jackson (the latter a student of Wittgenstein’s )
[I know Frank fairly well but I never met his father]
Elizabeth Harman is the daughter of Gilbert Harman
S Kate Devitt (Philosopher/cognitive scientist) is the daughter of Michael Devitt
[I know them both]
It says in Bernard Gert’s obituary that all of his children, including his son- and daughter-in-law, are professional philosophers, one of them being Joshua Gert whose book Normative Bedrock I have reviewed.
I think the philosopher Russell Marcus is the grandson of Ruth Barcan Marcus.
Jane Heal (mental simulation) is the daughter of William and Martha Kneale (authors of that great work, The Development of Logic)
David Coady (an ally of mine in the conspiracy theory wars) is the son of C.A.J. Coady (whose pioneering book on Testimony I have reviewed). Tony and David write about related topics (you could describe them both as social epistemologists) and have interesting, intelligent but distinct opinions, and some people, who write about them both, seem to be pussyfooting around the fact that they are father and son. They themselves are totally unembarrassed by this and seem to be proud of one another.
Two generations of Boyce Gibsons successively occupied what is now the Boyce Gibson chair of philosophy at Melbourne.
A K Stout, professor of philosophy at Sydney for many years, was the son of G F Stout, one of Bertrand Russell’s teachers. Somewhere or other Russell tells the tale of walking with G F and his then-young son A K. They inadvertently trespassed into a field containing an unrestrained bull. ‘And now father’ said the the 8-year-old AK ‘I suppose your afraidness is coming on’.
It is perhaps worth remarking that many of the leading philosophers of the early modern period were lifelong bachelors – Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant – and therefore had no sons or daughters to succeed them. In this they differed from some of the great composers of the same period, as for example the polyphiloprogenitive J S Bach with his brood of composer sons. Hume did have a nephew who was a distinguished academic, David Hume the younger, but he was a legal scholar not a philosopher. [Wikipedia: David Hume, Baron Hume of Ninewells FRSE (1757–1838) was a British advocate, judge and legal scholar, whose work on Scots criminal law and Scots private law has had a deep and continuing influence. He is referred to as Baron Hume to distinguish him from his uncle, David Hume the philosopher]
Now it may be that dynasties of distinguished actors are more common that dynasties of distinguished philosophers, but that is not to say that there are no such things.
I may be one of only very few (former) plumbers among the professor's readers, so: in my experience plumbers usually follow the apprentice-->journeyman-->master model of training, with someone becoming a 'master' after 5 years or so (there were wide variations here). Plumbing a new building is pretty easy. The skill comes much more in remodeling, with difficulties in access, having to deal with old pipes rusted solid, figuring out the least intrusive way of getting at the pipes, and trouble-shooting. Plumbers used to marvel that I did electrical work, as the electrician's code book was 5 times as thick as the plumber's. I was a professional cabinet-maker for many years, which required much more knowledge and skilled hands than plumbing. Here's the analogy for you music-making academics: Sheet-rocking = playing the kazoo = college administrator; plumbing = playing the viola = acting; cabinet-making = second violin = publishing in academic journals; furniture-making = first violin = writing important works of political philosophy like In Defense of Anarchism or The Poverty of Liberalism.
Marc,
If you want to compare acting with a live performance of music such as that of Barenboim, you should take theater as your example.
In filming a script if the actor is nervous, they can shoot the scene again, they can change the camera angle, they can use filters, etc. If he or she forgets their lines, they can take a break while he or she memorizes them again.
In a studio recording of classical music they can record some part of the work again, but the video I linked to is of a live performance.
Charles Pigden: Descartes had a daughter, but she died at about four years old. And Hegel had a son long before he stopped being a bachelor.
John Rapko,
Plumber, cabinet-maker, AND philosopher of aesthetics! My regard for you has increased ten-fold!
P.S.: Ludwig Wittgenstein was also an accomplished furniture designer and maker, an accomplishment he was more proud of than his philosophical investigations.
Marc--I was also a carpenter for my first 5 or so years in the building trades. I also did a fair amount of sheetrocking and mudding. Full disclosure: I sucked as a painter and only rarely did it. One time I showed up for work at 8 am with my nose in Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason, and the boss (himself likewise a renegade academic in philosophy) said: "Rapko, most people have no business in college, but maybe you should go back."
I am very impressed. All the handiwork around my house is done by my wife.
John Rapko,
It is a fascinating journey.
Did you come from a working class background or did you end up working in construction because you dropped out of a middle class academic career path?
If that's too personal a question or reality is much more complicated, feel free to not respond.
The Scarlatti’s—Allessandro and his son Domenico—are another great (baroque) musical composer family. And, SW, your son is a classical guitarist, so he must know about the contemporary Romero family of great classical/flamenco Spanish guitarists: I think that there are four of them—father and three sons.
s. wallerstein--
I'll give you the full utterly fascinating story when I visit you in Chile. Briefly: my mother came from a long line of farmers and laborers; my father from desperately poor Ukrainian immigrants and textile mill workers. They worked very hard and simultaneously rode the post-War U.S. economic boom into the middle class by 1970. I was (lovingly) instilled with the attitude that education was terribly important, and at about the age of 8 I began my life-long activity of reading my way through libraries. I despised college from the first second, and dropped out almost immediately in order to spend my time reading, while supporting myself as a dishwasher, and then finding a bottom-of-the-ladder job with a bunch of anarchist/communist guys in the building trades. Over two years I learned carpentry, electrical, and sheetrocking, then worked as a plumber, and finally for a decade as a cabinet-maker. At some point I decided I wanted something different, so went back to college (having dropped out four times over 12 years), then immediately went to graduate school etc. Almost all of my closest friends (men and women) work or have worked in the building trades.--I often think about a wisecrack from the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, from whom I took a couple of classes. Feyerabend would say: "Here I am in Berkeley California, a professor driving around in a car. How did this catastrophe happen?"
John Rapko,
Thanks. Your visit is very welcome.
No one yet has mentioned the French composers Maurice Jarre and his son Jean-Michel Jarre. Maurice was a prolific composer of film soundtracks. I have been a fan of Jean-Michel's works since the early 1980s. A good introduction to his work would be the 1986 composition "Rendez-Vous." Very heavy on the synthesizers but imagine it as a full on orchestra performance.
-- Jim
regression toward the mean ...
s. wallerstein: Good looks count in an acting career and have no importance in classical music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9crd3QyeT4
I think that actors and musicians, as they are contrasted here, cannot be compared with each other. Just because we are used to calling musicians and actors "artists", for example, doesn't mean that their real work is comparable.
It simply takes a lot more to bring an individual actor to the point where he can inspire his audience. Even in the Hamlet monologues, it takes a whole ensemble, including direction, set design, lighting, to reach perhaps the only point where the meaning of these monologues can unfold.
In Lucino Visconti's adaptation of the novel "Il Gattopardo" there is a very short monologue spoken by Burt Lancaster as the Prince of Salina. The monologue, which is actually a failed dialogue, begins with the words, "We were the salt of the earth...". The whole scene, the music, the lighting, the camera angles and the magnificent Lancaster manage to compress in a few intense moments all the tragedy of a cultural epochal break into this brief moment.
The moment when Glenn Gould takes a seat in front of his grand piano on a much too low stool to bring the well-tempered piano to life with his endlessly long fingers, then three things are gathered there: the composition by Bach, the piano and Glenn Gould.
Eric,
Let me correct myself: good looks count everywhere. Probably, being good-looking will help a surgeon and a concert pianist in their career.
However, female concert pianists are not side-lined from their career if they are over 50, have a few wrinkles and have gained a couple of pounds as female actors are in Hollywood.
Young talentless female concert pianists are not given star roles because they have perfect bodies as young female actors are in Hollywood and male actors in some cases.
John Rapko,
That is an amazing biography. You should write a memoir. In all seriousness, I believe it would make a tremendous, inspiring movie script, ala Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, but from a liberal, progressive perspective.
A lot of specious cinema generalizations flying around here like horsefeathers. Not every movie star was/is a photogenic matinee idol. On the male side, you had James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Lionel Barrymore, Broderick Crawford, and today, Danny Devito, Ryan Gosling. Sure, there were and are many female sex symbols, but you also had actresses who made it on their talent, not their looks, e.g,, Ida Lupino, Gloria Grahame, Mercedes McCambridge, and today, Frances McDormand, Kathy Bates.
Eric,
Yes, very slender fingers and gams.
I’m also a former tradesman. I’d say that I meet the old definition, jack of all trades, master of none. I’m a competent framer, plumber, plasterer, electrician, tiler, finish carpenter, and painter (this last I also enjoy least) … without being really good at any of these things. Finish carpentry is the most enjoyable.
So I could build myself an entire house, but the whole thing would probably end up looking just a little … rushed, let’s say. But leave your glasses off and it wouldn’t look bad at all. While I feel guilty about my lack of excellence, a few years ago I happened to find out that C. Wright Mills was a big believer in this kind of DIY-ism. So now I can think to myself, “my hackiness has an intellectual pedigree”.
The missing ingredient for “excellence” here is “time”; all you need to do is take your time, but of course time is the one thing you feel you don’t have. The more time spent, the more you feel it ought to have been FINISHED ALREADY! On my last project I simply took my time … it did come out excellently (as was noted by a legit tradesman), but I was in a state of pure despair by the end.
Per professor Wolff’s speculation on plumbing-vs-fiddling-vs-acting, were I sent to Hell (or Pennsylvania) and given an eternity in which to practice the guitar, or the violin, or any instrument at all, I doubt that I would ever show any improvement. An eternity and I’d still be a one-chord moron. But now I wonder, could I pick up the rudiments of acting? Acting class beckons …
To Fritz Poebel
You are, of course correct, but even the errant bachelors did not have *that* many children. Descartes' daughter (poor girl) died young and Hegel had only one extramarital son. So far as we know, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Locke and Kant had no children. So my contrast between the likes of Bach and the likes of Leibniz still stands. One reason that the philosophers of that era – unlike some of the philosophers of more recent times – did not have philosopher sons or daughters to succeed them is that many of them did not have any sons or daughters at all.
Musicians versus screen-actors
On the other topic, I have a brother who is a subprofessional musician in London (good enough to be a professional musician elsewhere) the sort of person who gets invited to join orchestras composed of distinguished semi-retired musicians. (He is also businessman and a software engineer and is the author of several academic papers on operations research.) I have a son who is a writer/director/actor, with an indie film award to his credit as best actor from the Pacific [He has also won awards as a director] And I have to say that the amount of effort, dedication and practice required to be a proficient musician is a lot more than the effort and dedication required to be an award-winning indie screen actor. I know to my cost how much work it took my brother to become the musician he is, as I had to listen to him practicing endless sonatas by Tellemann when we were both teenagers, giving me a lifelong aversion to that composer. As a screen actor my son is much more reliant on natural talent and – yes – good looks. [This not to say that my son is not hardworking and dedicated – he is. He can scarcely contemplate a view without thinking about how to frame it as a shot. But the hard graft goes into perfecting his skills as a director, camera-man, film-maker, writer and teacher. He spends a lot less time and effort – though not, of course, none! – perfecting himself as an actor.]
Rapko on plumbing
And, on the plumbing thing, I think John Rapko is right about where the real skill lies. My grandfather was a plumber for part of his working life and he could just look at a building and SEE where the pipes had to be and SEE where the water had to flow. When he lost this ability as the result of incipient dementia brought on by a series of small strokes he was absolutely devastated. [Whilst trying to fix something he turned on the wrong tap and flooded his own house. It was a terrible day. I hope to God that nothing like that ever happens to me.]
After an early retirement (yea) I did some pools, ponds, landscaping out of an interest. Can do design, electrical, plumbing, framing, forming, re-bar, finishing. Nothing that involves much drywall or much finish carpentry. Built the small cabin I currently live in plus outbuildings and a greenhouse. Drove the same car for thirty years - two transmissions, three engines - did the rebuilds myself.
Glenn Gould, the Canadian pianist known for his extravagant interpretations of J.Bach, was the child of a very musical family. His mother was an excellent pianist. Her family name was Grieg and she was related to the composer Edvard Grieg. His father played the violin as an amateur.
So it is probable that he heard the sounds of Bach sonatas already in the womb. At the age of 3, his mother began to teach him to read music. Whether his extremely long fingers were an accident of evolution or prenatal influence played a role can hardly be clarified.
In any case, the training of musical exelence seems to be much longer and more intensive than is necessary for other professions.
I play chess since early youth and online for almost 20 years. I must confess, my game is getting a bit worse from year to year. :)
Charles Pigden touches on an issue that I’ve always found curious: actors and actresses are ubiquitous in our strange society—they’re literally everywhere all the time, on TV, in the media, and so on—and yet I’ve never met one IRL (“in real life”); in that way they’re as elusive as the snow leopard.
(I did see Kate Hudson whizz by me once on a crowded sidewalk in San Francisco, but she had her charisma turned off: she was wearing nondescript clothes, a hat and sunglasses and walking fast. She was clearly “off-duty”. I only recognized her just as she was passing me, and she was much, much smaller than she appears on screen.)
These people serve some kind of function that would seem to be important, very important, but how do we characterize that function, exactly? I’m tempted to classify them as a species of supernatural beings, akin to the gods and goddesses that your pagan-in-the-(Roman)-street would have been familiar with, beings that are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.
On the other hand, movies, celebrity, the culture industry, the whole schmear, is so utterly silly it’s impossible to take any of it seriously … but of course I felt exactly the same way about the Roman Catholic church as a 10-year-old.
(Now that I think of it, I remember reading that a new god had been introduced into the Hindu pantheon just a few years ago, as a direct result of a Bollywood movie.)
A brief observation: if one has learned music as a youth then one has had their brain structurally altered in ways not immediately apparent but profoundly important. One can read music and a script, but the former requires a deep understanding of a code while the latter simply requires reading one's native language and noting the authors/directors instruction as to how the part should be performed.
If you consider a score to a classical number or a Count Basie tune: the score involves numerous lines each representing an instrument, some with multiple parts. Then the complexity becomes somewhat mind bending as one has to understand the structural relationships of all of this both in time and theoretically (melodic and chord structure, how they progress and resolve over time, etc.).
I assume that painting, sculpting, and creative writing are equally complex activities but I don't think acting is in the same category.
By the way, first, Adam noted the length of Gould's fingers and I would add that Professor Longhair had huge hands as well, and secondly Mongo's (Alex Karas') best scene is knocking out the horse with one punch.
Going back to father child pairs: kinda long dead but, Sigmund and Anna Freud. Someone mentioned Lucien. Anna did a training analysis with her father and she was an accomplished child analyst and theorist
Christopher,
I totally agree but I'm afraid we are dinosaurs.
Well John it seems odd to say so but you must have led a sheltered life. I have met PLENTY of actors IRL, most obviously my son Guy and his childhood friend and creative partner Harley. (They run a filmmaking outfit together called Pigville productions.) One of my philosopher colleagues was a professional actor in a former life , one of our star students in Philosophy at Otago is an actress in Auckland (starring, inter alia, in my son's second feature, Older). A friend of mine who is Professor of Maori studies has a daughter of who is a part-time actor and has also collaborated with my son, in a TV series (they co-wrote it). And since I have worked as an extra (on my son's first feature) I got to meet quite a few actors on set. Now most of the actors that I know reasonably well are not full time, having other strings to their bow, but I believe that this is fairly common in the acting trade, as indeed it is in the arts generally. The only award-winning poet that I know personally worked part-time as a departmental administrator in the Philosophy Department at Otago and had another career as a pyrotechnician for a series of famous rock bands. And that star student of ours who is an actress and voice-actor in Auckland and who starred in my son's second feature? She's also a post-production producer and is on the board for Bowel Cancer New Zealand. Conclusion: You may very well know more actors than you are aware of – it is just that you may not know them AS actors. There is a difference between not having met many actors and not having met any Big Stars. But then, you probably haven't met many Big Star musicians either.
I will say this too. Just as trying to do a decent job when singing karaoke gives you a whole new respect for popular music so participating, even in a small way, in the making of a movie gives you a whole new respect for the film industry. Producing a decent movie (let alone a great one) requires the input of a great deal of hard work and a great deal of talent from a great many people, not least the writers.
There's actually been some discussion about this issue in the culture lately, in the form of the "nepo baby" discourse. Here's an article featuring Jamie Lee Curtis:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/jamie-lee-curtis-nepo-baby-debate-advantages-1235287111/
If you want to meet actors/actresses, you have to o skiing in Utah.
I saw Janet Leigh, Jamie Lee Curtis’s mother, for the first time in 1961, at the age of 13 (the year after she made the iconic shower scene in Psycho, which I did not see for many years later) in The Last of the Vikings, with my father. She co-starred with Tony Curtis (born Bernard Schwartz) as his love interest. I remember it well, for Kirk Douglas’s acrobatics dancing on the oars of a Viking ship; for the scene of the hawk attacking Kirk Douglas’s face; and for the scene in which Ernest Borgnine jumps into a pit of wolves with a sword in his hand, shouting “Odin!” But, most memorably for me at that age, was a scandalous scene in which Leigh and Curtis are in a rowboat escaping from the Vikings, and she complains that she cannot row because her dress is too tight. Curtis reaches over and rips the back of her dress open, saying, “Now you can row,” or words to that effect. I was stunned, seeing Janet Leigh’s bare back. When Leigh and Curtis starred together in that movie, they had already been married for 10 years.
In response to John Pillette and Charles Pigden, I have encountered a number of actors IRL. From a young age, I have often considered Harvard Square to be the center of our earthly universe. Here are some of the reasons why.
One of my favorite encounters was with Mira Sorvino (hey, another parent/child combo). Mira attended Harvard when I worked in Harvard Square part-time at a film developing shop while attending UMass Amherst. As was customary for those attending Harvard for Arts and Humanities, some students would obtain part time-jobs at any one of the prestigious architecture firms in the Square. I can't remember if Mira worked for Aga Khan or Moshe Safdie, but she would bring in rolls of slide film of architectural models for developing. We had some brief, but nice, conversations.
My second favorite encounter was with Bob Hoskins. He lodged in a Cambridge hotel while filming the locally produced movie "Mermaids." He used our shop to process his 35mm snapshot photos. I would go out of my way to wait on him because I liked him as an actor. Near the end of his filming stint, he dropped in to buy a camera. He sought me out to ask what I would recommend that he purchase. We spent about 45 minutes testing out some of the high-end Nikon, Pentax, and Olympus cameras. On my recommendation, he settled on a Pentax. After the purchase, he said, "Hey, you are a smart guy -- what are you doing working here?" My reply was, "Well, I am working my way through college. And, I like the people I happen to meet here." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a $100 bill which he gave to me. "This is to help you get through college."
My third favorite encounter was with Billy Bragg. Not an actor, but a musician. I spent my Sundays at an all-volunteer Marxist bookstore. One day Billy Bragg was in town for a concert and dropped into the store. He liked our Irish section (James Connolly, et al) and we wound up having a great conversation.
There are others, but I think these are the top three.
-- Jim
Sorry if I am late to the party with this, but amongst classical music conductors Paavo Jarvi is the son of Neeme Jarvi.
In fact, my very first job out of college was working at a talent management agency in Santa Monica, in which position I got to listen to a number of these characters when they talked on the phone to their managers, but somehow this didn’t seem like “meeting them IRL”. If it was like anything, I suppose it would be like eavesdropping on their psychoanalysis.
The one guy who had the most “established talent” (as they say) had a very calm and soothing avuncular manner. He wore a suit and tie, he was from the Midwest, he was about 45 years old, he could have been cast in a movie as “very-square-but-good-guy-in-the-end-law-firm-senior-partner”. Managing involves a lot of handholding of the talent on the phone … his only tell was that he would be drawing heavily on a cigarette when he talked (very calmly) to the talent on the phone (yes, this was THAT long ago). I mean he was smoking these like a condemned man. I thought to myself, “this job is killing this guy”.
I only read the Frankfurters after college and it was interesting to read all about “the culture industry” after working in the culture industry itself. One job I had was to maintain a database that tracked the various “projects” that were floating around town, and I was surprised to learn that for every movie that gets made there are three other identical movies that almost got made. It’s like a game of chicken. Remember when there were TWO Choderlos de Laclos adaptations released the same year? That was this game of movie chicken gone wrong.
John Pillette and others,
You often seem to be talking past each other.
John Pillette is criticizing Hollywood and the culture industry, while Charles Pidgen is taking about independent film-makers in New Zealand, who no one could claim are part of the what Adorno and Horkheimer (the Frankfurters) call "the cultural industry".
The same thing occurred when we discussed movies previously here. I was and still am very critical of Hollywood, but at times my enthusiasm led me to make broad statements about movies and I was justly corrected by those who pointed out that many movies are independent productions without any ties to Hollywood and the culture industry.
John Pillette,
Re Choderlos de Laclos adaptations: the one I remember starred John Malkovich [yikes! I had to dig deep in the memory banks for the last name], Glenn Close, and Keanu Reeves.
Whoever cast that movie hit a home run, imo.
That was the Stephen Frears one, it did boffo worldwide gross for an arthouse flick! It also happened to be a really good movie. You left out (panting slightly here) Michelle Pfeiffer AND Uma Thurman ... hubba hubba (2x).
Milos Forman did the other one ("Valmont") and it sank like a stone. But that one also had a good cast: Annette Bening, Colin Firth, Meg Tilly and Fairuza Balk. I never saw it (but then again, nobody else did, either).
I suppose now we all have to watch both back-to-back and figure out why one was universally hated and the other was universally adored ...
Thanks for the info on the Milos Forman one. (No way am I paying to stream these two movies back-to-back btw.)
Yes, I definitely should not have left out Michelle Pfeiffer. (I don't really remember Uma Thurman in it all that well. It was a *long* time ago. She has a distinctive persona though.)
To S Wallerstein
The culture industry is the culture industry whether its Auckland or Hollywood (and it is worth remembering that some very big blockbuster movies were made in Aotearoa/New Zealand, most notably Peter Jackson's 'Lord the Rings') My son isn't indie by choice. He is emphatically NOT an arthouse director. (You can see his second feature 'Older' on Netflix: It’s a romcom, a good one I hope, but not in any way an exercise in genre-subversion or statement-making. He really isn’t into that kind of thing ) He would LOVE to to get a contract as a writer/director with one of the big studios.
On Dangerous Liaisons
I teach a ‘Why Be Moral?‘ course in which we address the issue via a critical analysis of great works of literature, among the Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons. It’s a reading have course with several Platonic dialogues, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, two Dostoevsky novels, four Shakespeare plays and a Jane Austen’s Persuasion, and I tell my students that it is okay to keep up by watching a good movie or TV dramatisation if they are not writing an essay on the work in question. Here are my comments on the Frears’ version and on Cruel Intentions, which retains the basic plot but transposes it into late nineties New York I think this is so good that I offer my students the option of ‘compare and contrast’ question discussing the directorial choices of Frears and Kumble respectively.
Choderlos de Laclos; Dangerous Liaisons, (1988) Warner Brothers, Movie
Director: Stephen Frears
Screenplay: Christopher Hampton
Starring: Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, Swoosie Kurtz, Mildred Natwick, Peter Capaldi, Keanu Reeves and Uma Thurman.
This is an excellent adaptation and very true to the book. I have got some quibbles but they are few and far between. Those accustomed to Uma Thurman as the kick-ass swordswoman of Kill Bill should see her as Cecile. Well, let’s get one quibble out of the way. Madame de Merteuil is arrogant and manipulative but she pretends to be girlish and sentimental. Glenn Close gives us the reality without the pretence. In particular she tells one of her lovers that they will both get on a great deal better if he tries not to sound like the latest romantic novel. This is what she would think but it isn’t what she would say. Part of the tragedy of Madame de Merteuil, is that she is condemned to live a life of pretence and can only reveal her true self to a very select few. In this version her true self is too freely on display.
Cruel Intentions, (1998) Columbia Pictures,
Director: Roger Kumble
Screenplay: Roger Kumble
Starring: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Reese Witherspoon, and Selma Blair, Christine Baranski, Swoosie Kurz.
This a radical reimagining of Laclos’ original novel set in New York in the late nineties. It has a wonderful soundtrack and Kumble does a terrific job of bringing the story up-to-date. Highly recommended. Sarah Michelle Gellar is particularly good. One gripe: Cecile is decidedly dim and naive but she ought to be sexy. Selma Blair lets the dimness and the naivety trump the sexiness. Uma Thurman in the corresponding role does not make that mistake.
Charles Pigden,
Thanks.
I'm vaguely friends (we're both very good friends of the same friend in common) with the Chilean film director Cristian Sanchez, who by political and artistic choice is definitely not a member of the culture industry, and I had imagined that your son is in some sense like him.
Sanchez has a Wikipedia article in English, I discover. I know that he has been a visiting professor at Stanford and at other U.S. universities. He's made a living out of being alternative, although he's not rich in any sense of the term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristi%C3%A1n_S%C3%A1nchez_(director)
Don’t leave me hanging here! What’s the answer? Why be moral? Or maybe I should phrase it this way: “Why be ‘moral’?”
To John Pillette on the 'Why Be Moral?' Question
There is no intellectually compelling answer to this question. That is, there are *reasons* to commit to a humane and moderately egalitarian morality but you cannot show that an amoralist or an ubermensch or one of Nielsen's 's classist immoralists is making a *mistake*. You can show that lives of amoralists are liable – note *liable* – to be empty; ditto the lives of supposed 'Great men' who think that they are entitled to 'step over' the moral constraints that are binding on the little people. Thus there are decided drawbacks to NOT being moral (that is, NOT being committed to a humane and egalitarian ethic). But there are no knock-down arguments for virtue of the kind that Plato – rather ridiculously – believed himself to have invented. Thus I end up endorsing something like Hume's conclusion at EMP 9.2:SBN 282-284, that there is no arguing the sensible knave out of his knavery, absent a change of heart. But it's worse than Hume thinks. For Hume *injustice* is the only vice that it makes sense to indulge from a self-interested point of view., since the sociable virtues bring their own rewards in the form of popularity and the sociable vices bring their own punishment in the form of dislike and disapprobation. I argue, via an appeal to common sense and the novels of Jane Austen, that social status and class power can effectively insulate people from the supposedly adverse consequences of their sociable vices. Lady Catherine de Burgh may be an arrogant, condescending, snobbish bitch, but wealth and social status ensure that she will never want for sycophants (such as the smarmy Mr Collins) who are willing to make up to her for the sake of material and social gain. The same is true of Mrs Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility and the absent Mrs Churchill in Emma. For more on this see my (2012) essay ‘A Sensible Knave? Hume, Jane Austen and Mr Elliot’ Journal of Intellectual History, 22.3, 465-480.
Charles Pidgen,
Very interesting and convincing what you say above. I agree.
Well, I'm going to say "I disagree (probably)!", but that's only because I'm afraid of the ghost of Robert Maynard Hutchins appearing at the foot of my bed early tomorrow morning.
W/r/t the Lady Catherine phenomenon, recent history throws up so many examples, one can't possibly keep count. But aesthetically speaking my personal favorite may well be Hans Rausing, who went from "depraved ghoul" to "London's most eligible bachelor" in the amount of time it took him to fly to the Betty Ford Clinic and back.
But of course this sort of thing tends not to happen here in meritocratic America, thank God (who, as we all know, is white, lower-middle-class and Protestant).
I'll read "A Sensible Knave" tonight.
Why be moral?
Because being moral, like being just, is its own reward of inestimable value, beyond anything which material success can offer.
Tonight, on PBS Great Performances in Detroit, they broadcast “Remember This,’ the story of Jan Karski, a professor at Georgetown University, who, at the age of 28, living in Poland, witnessed the Holocaust and reported it to leaders in Great Britain and the United States, disproving their later claims that they did not know. David Strathairn portrays Jan Karski in this poignant tour de force. You can watch it at the link below.
https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/great-performances/episodes/remember-w3zfol
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