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Shooting For Truth

The phrase "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work sets you free) appears at the entrance to Dachau and other Nazi concentration camps. Automatik, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Sven Hoppe / AP. Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Adam Skolnick | Longreads | August 2018 | 9 minutes (2,415 words)

“Every feature film is, in some ways, a lie,” said director Chris Weitz as he sipped his fourth double espresso. We were on set of Operation Finale, huddled under a tent next to acclaimed Spanish cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, and the specific lie up for debate was whether to turn a sunset scene into sunrise. That switch triggered some hand-wringing because moviemaking is an attempt to capture a scramble of moments, and if the look of one is altered, because, say, Oscar Isaac is still being primped in wardrobe as precious light fades from the sky, there are ripple effects, which can torpedo narrative flow and make even a true story feel false.

Whether or not the man Isaac was playing, Peter Malkin, actually landed at Ezeiza International Airport at dawn or dusk when he arrived in Buenos Aires in 1960 to help hunt down fugitive Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann, is beside the point. What matters is that Malkin’s arrival and all the moments thereafter feel real because this is a true story, one with urgent modern relevance. Plus, for Weitz this project is personal.

Chris Weitz, director of Operation Finale (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

If he missed an opportunity to shoot the scene as planned, the production schedule would be shredded, money wasted from an already stretched budget, and that matters because this is not the kind of movie studios like to make anymore. The 48-year-old director credits MGM for investing in an entertaining movie about a serious topic (read: there are no flying robots), but he’d declined to shoot in Budapest, which would have saved cash, preferring the authenticity of Buenos Aires — and now this.

¿Qué estamos esperando?” Aguirresarobe asked nobody in particular. Weitz was wondering the same thing. It was 6:42 p.m. and the sky was darkening, but despite the pressure and his caffeine load, Weitz projected an aura of calm on his bustling bilingual set.


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“Every day you’re making a movie it sort of gravitates toward a clusterfuck,” Weitz reasoned as he rolled up the sleeves of his pin-striped button down. “You just have to surf it.” Scattered all around us were a range of cherry vintage vehicles (a Citroën, two DeSotos, and a few Di Tellas, Argentina’s endemic automotive brand) and more than 50 extras dressed in mid-century period attire. All of it — the dusky light, the location, the costumes, the stakes — produced a magical quality as if we were in the eye of a Fellini or Kurosawa dream sequence.

We’d met up earlier that morning at Weitz’s rented house in Buenos Aires’ hip Palermo district, with its trendy restaurants, corner cafés, and cobbled streets, hopped in his chauffeured Camry, and drove an hour out of town to set, during which time I peppered him with questions about his 20-year career. Weitz has imagined almost every movie genre starting with the iconic coming-of-age sex comedy, American Pie, which he produced and directed with his brother Paul. Their follow-up, About A Boy (they cowrote and codirected), placed them among the best screenwriters of their generation and garnered an Oscar nomination. Since then he’s directed fantasy popcorn (New Moon) and channeled his inner Star Wars geek to cowrite a smash hit franchise spin-off in Rogue One. In between he published three young-adult novels in a post-apocalyptic trilogy, and contemplated ditching Hollywood “to do something a bit more useful,” he said. Makes sense for a man who sits on the board of Homeboy Industries and is a sucker for the radical inclusiveness of Burning Man, where he met his wife, Mercedes Martinez. This was his first turn at the helm of a major studio movie in six years.

As soon as we arrived on the Argentine air force base doubling as Ezeiza, he was whisked away by production designer David Brisbin (Drugstore Cowboy, New Moon) and prop master Ellen Freund (Mad Men) to approve the throwback terminal and control tower. A bit later he was greeted by the base’s real-life commandant, distinguished in his flight suit, who invited him to a pig roast the following evening. His invitation sounded more like an order, but in each instance Weitz was gracious and unflappable, because, when it comes to making movies, he has seen it all.

‘Every feature film is, in some ways, a lie,’ said director Chris Weitz as he sipped his fourth double espresso.

Weitz was raised around the business. His grandfather Paul Kohner was a prominent agent and producer who married Mexican-born actress Lupita Tovar. Their daughter, Susan, Weitz’s mother, also became an actress, who won two Golden Globes and was nominated for an Oscar for the 1959 film Imitation of Life. The brothers Weitz grew up in New York City, but visited their grandparents in L.A. often. That meant attending sprawling Bel Air dinners with scions of Old Hollywood, John Huston and Ingmar Bergman among them, but the reason MGM’s Jonathan Glickman hired Weitz for Operation Finale was because of his father’s history.

John Weitz was 10 when Adolf Hitler was declared Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Part of a wealthy Jewish family, he was sent from Berlin to St. Paul’s School in London, where he would stay until 1938 when the rest of his family finally fled Nazi Germany. Together they made their way to the United States. Weitz joined the army in 1943, and as a well-educated native German speaker, matriculated into the Office for Strategic Services (OSS), a predecessor to the CIA. In late April 1945, John Weitz was part of the team that liberated Dachau, the notorious death camp, and became one of the first Allied soldiers to see the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand. He shared what he witnessed with a few close friends in a series of letters, but he never told his grisly war stories to his sons.

“When I think about it now,” Weitz said of his father, “it’s quite likely that he had some kind of PTSD. He never slept very well. He was tightly wrapped.”

After retiring from a successful career in New York fashion, John Weitz began writing biographies of Nazis, including one of the Minister of Economics under Hitler, Hjalmar Schacht, as if Nazism was a riddle he was still trying to solve. When Chris returned home for the summers while earning his degree at Cambridge, he was dispatched to the main branch of the New York Public Library to help with research. That meant poring over giant leather-bound catalogs in search of obscure German diplomatic histories. He’d frequently return to his father’s study with photocopies of entire books in hand.

In late April 1945, John Weitz was part of the team that liberated Dachau, the notorious death camp, and became one of the first Allied soldiers to see the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand.

“He was fascinated with how the upper classes in Germany made accommodations and kind of allowed or justified Nazis to themselves,” Weitz said, “having first mocked everything about it.” Still, his father never showed his scars from Dachau. It wasn’t until 2014, 12 years after his death, that Weitz received a copy of a letter signed by his father, dated May 5, 1945. It details a descent into an unfathomable waking nightmare.

Prisoners are milling around everywhere, the way they looked cannot be described … starved, beaten, scarred … They showed me the horrors… The gas chamber… the label over the door says in bitter irony “Brausebad”… cement walls and floors, little barred windows knee high… and eighteen nozzles in the ceiling… and next door the “control room” … where the SS men used to turn on the hot water then turn off the hot water and turn on the gas… and then the hundred or so… would choke to death, scraping their hands bloody on the cruel cement walls… tens of thousands died here… it can be smelled from hundreds of yards away… the stink of death …

Pull a thread from any of the tragic stories discovered at Dachau and it leads to Adolf Eichmann. He planned the logistics first for the mass deportation of Jews, then their herding into urban ghettos across Europe, and finally transporting them like abused livestock by train to concentration camps. Because of his meticulous design, at least 11 million people were murdered with brutal efficiency while he lived out the war like a gilded robber baron in stolen luxury.

Pull a thread from any of the tragic stories discovered at Dachau and it leads to Adolf Eichmann…Because of his meticulous design, at least 11 million people were murdered with brutal efficiency while he lived out the war like a gilded robber baron in stolen luxury.

Within weeks of reading his father’s letters for the first time, Weitz received the Operation Finale script from Glickman, who calls the movie “a riveting thriller” about Israel’s daring operation to capture Eichmann in 1960. Weitz knew the history. In the chaos that followed allied victory, some of the worst war criminals slipped free, including Eichmann, who escaped from a POW camp before he could be identified. Penniless and on the run, he worked as a lumberjack then a chicken farmer before connecting to an underground railroad for war criminals run by Nazi sympathizers within the Catholic Church. It was a cabal of priests that wrangled him a Red Cross passport — the same document Holocaust survivors depended upon — and, with the help of former SS-affiliated Argentinians, facilitated his escape from Italy to Argentina, where he built a life as Ricardo Klement and eventually sent for his family. It wasn’t until the daughter of a Holocaust survivor started dating his son, who still carried the Eichmann name, that his presence would register on the radar of Israel’s national intelligence agency, Mossad.

The original script, a debut written by 28-year-old Brit Matthew Orton, was terrific, and Weitz guided rewrites that would make it even better. Eichmann could have had an inner Hannibal Lecter quality, but Orton and Weitz resisted this interpretation. “That’s very juicy stuff, but I wanted him to be less of a villain so that he could end up more of a threat,” Weitz said. “Humanize him, and he becomes even worse.” That tracks historically, too. By the time Mossad agents found him, Eichmann was living the ordinary life of a factory foreman on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, hidden in plain sight.

In a fascinating bit of casting, Weitz tapped Sir Ben Kingsley to play Eichmann, which offers the Oscar winner, who brought Itzhak Stern to life in Schindler’s List, a chance to explore the Holocaust from the wrong side of history. Soon after, Oscar Isaac came on board as a Mossad agent who is haunted by his family’s death at the hands of Nazis. One week into shooting, Weitz shared the Dachau letter with his cast.

Originally slated for production in 2016, the schedule shifted to 2017 to accommodate Isaac, and an old story found modern relevance thanks to Brexit, Trump’s election, and a widening acceptance of racist, authoritarian thought. There was Charlottesville, of course, and Trump’s reaction to the tiki torch bearers who managed to be shocking, yet easy to dismiss in their buffoonery, making them even more dangerous. After all, how many steps is it from Charlottesville, Virginia, to Warsaw, Poland, where 60,000 angry people, including thousands of skinheads and Nazis took over the streets last November. And how different is the Trump administration — which championed a horrifying and brutal family separation policy for illegal immigrants that was widely condemned as child abuse (at least 528 children remain separated from their deported parents, and one toddler who was taken into ICE custody on the border has died) — from the coalition government in Austria, which includes leaders of their radical right Freedom Party, or Viktor Orban’s government in Hungary, which has consolidated power by demonizing Muslim immigrants and refugees. Are we just as bad? Are we worse? How much worse might we soon become?

I like to think part of the reason “alt-right,” nationalist ideas are thriving today is that somehow the idea of Nazism has been sanitized of its horrors, and that too many have forgotten — or were miseducated in the first place — about what the Nazi flag represents. A similar Nazi resurgence swept Europe, particularly Germany, in 1960, when Israel sent Mossad agents to Buenos Aires to kidnap Eichmann to put him on trial in the promised land. Back then, Germany hadn’t yet tuned their education system toward truth and reconciliation. Cleansed of blood, denial was comforting. The thrill of nationalism, nourishing. If Eichmann was offered a fair trial, the theory went, with the opportunity to defend himself, hard evidence could be displayed, witnesses would testify, and the entire truth about the Holocaust could be laid bare before a worldwide televised audience.

I like to think part of the reason “alt-right,” nationalist ideas are thriving today is that somehow the idea of Nazism has been sanitized of its horrors, and that too many have forgotten — or were miseducated in the first place — about what the Nazi flag represents.

“There is a line in the movie when Eichmann says, ‘Your lawyers and your lying press will frame me,’” Weitz said. “That very phrase is propped up in ‘alt-right’ circles today because if you attack the sources of information you attack the notion of truth itself, and if you destroy those sources you have the right to impose your will.”

Weitz has no illusions that his film, which includes a depiction of that trial, will influence policy or stem the tide of nationalism, as if it’s 1960 all over again. His focus has always been to tell an entertaining and suspenseful tale. “What’s cool about this story,” Weitz said, “is the [good guys] don’t have guns. Their job was to get him out alive.”

Of course, first they had to find him, and that meant a sunset — or perhaps sunrise — arrival at an exotic airport for Peter Malkin. Just before 7 p.m., Isaac appeared on set looking every bit the movie star, and the cameras rolled. By 7:10 p.m., after a couple of hiccups there was just enough light for one more take, and Isaac delivered. Though the scene was utilitarian — he’s getting picked up curbside — and is more an orchestration of extras and camera movements, he found the tension in his rival agent in the driver’s seat. “Avi sent you?” Isaac asked, annoyed. The camera held for a long beat, and the entire set exhaled.

“OK, OK, OK,” Weitz said, “We live.”

***

Adam Skolnick is an author and journalist living in Los Angeles.

Operation Finale stars Oscar Isaac, Ben Kingsley, and Mélanie Laurent, and is in theaters on August 29, 2018.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler

Boo: A Reading List About Ghosts

red, green, blue, and orange pac-man ghosts painted on a gray wall, with bright green grass on the ground
Photo by Jason Whitaker via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories (and some of her friends’ favorites, too). 

Tonight the subject is…ghosts. (Cue “WoooOOOOOOOOOOOooooo” sound effect.) Ghost stories seem to point to a reality beyond our own — or, at the very least, to an expanded understanding of what exactly this plane of existence encompasses. And from a philosophical perspective, I’m half Mulder and half Scully, which means I can find deep spiritual fulfillment from things that I’m 100% sure are total bullshit.

I was raised in rural western New Jersey, right across the Delaware River from the beautiful farmlands and forests of eastern Pennsylvania. Both sides of the river are dotted with 17th and 18th century homes and outbuildings, and many people speak of ghosts as matter of factly as my old neighbors in New Mexico speak of aliens: Maybe they hadn’t personally seen one, but their cousin sure did, and he wasn’t nuts. I’ve never seen a ghost, but I, too, have met many reasonably rational people who report ghost stories. I had a friend whose mother, a salt-of-the-earth woman with common sense and a practical nature, told me with no tongue in cheek about the ghost that lived in their farmhouse.

“I think it’s a little boy,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I get that sense. He’ll leave cabinet doors open. I can feel when he’s in the room and when he isn’t. When we first bought the house, I sensed him here. I could hear him rattling around in the basement. After the cabinet doors thing kept happening, I said out loud, ‘Hey, we don’t mean you any harm. We are going to fix some things in the house but we aren’t going to mess anything up or tear anything down.’”

She said she felt things were very nice after that, and that he still did the cabinet thing sometimes and she would say “Hello!” out loud when he did. “Maybe he’s lonely,” she said. “He’s mischievous but not mean.”

Like my friend’s mother, I was raised Roman Catholic. My relationship with the religion today is tenuous at best — I dislike corruption and mass sexual assault in any internationally franchised corporate entity, whether or not they get nonprofit status due to centuries of political influence — but I give credit to my loving Irish-Catholic father for teaching me an important lesson about belief. (My father, it must be stated, is also not a fan of homophobia, financial misappropriation, abuse, or incense.) Along with giant curly hair, he passed on to me a nearly prayerful awe for science. But his approach to spiritual belief — and belief in spirits — is deeply respectful, more so than my own. He said, “I think it would be arrogant to assume we know everything about this world and if other worlds exist. We don’t know what happens after we die. Maybe elements of energy or what we call a soul do stick around. And I do believe people who say they’ve seen things. Whether or not they were real ghosts, I can’t say.”

My religious background and the relatively open-minded attitude of my parents also influenced my curiosity about telekinesis, astral projection, astrology, clairvoyance, and the bestselling Time-Life “Mysteries of the Unknown” books. It certainly vaulted me in the general direction of witchcraft. Though I am a member of no religion and have a healthy skepticism about many things, I retain the desire for spiritual fulfillment and a connection with the divine. I also like ritual; I recently paid someone a couple hundred bucks to do a healing ceremony with me in a beautiful old house in Los Angeles. (It involved tarot, prayer, and creating a spell bag. I got to write down a list of things and then set that list on fire. It was great! Ten out of ten, would recommend.)

There are many genres of paranormal tale, and I believe the greatest of these is the ghost story. Do we see the people who’ve died before us? Is this simply wishful thinking? And if it is wishful thinking, why do some people report terrifying apparitions none of us would ever wish to see? Is this a collective human tendency to hallucination, or mental illness, or are ghosts really real? I don’t know, but I do know I’ve gotten to read some very good stuff on the subject.

1.  “Why Do People Believe in Ghosts?” (Tiffanie Wen, The Atlantic, September 2014)

Wen leads with three anecdotes about women who believe they may have captured images of ghosts via iPhone camera. Wen herself is one of these examples, and she does a medium-deep dive into why folks in our modern world still believe in specters and ghouls.

Recent surveys have shown that a significant portion of the population believes in ghosts, leading some scholars to conclude that we are witnessing a revival of paranormal beliefs in Western society. A Harris poll from last year found that 42 percent of Americans say they believe in ghosts. The percentage is similar in the U.K., where 52 percent of respondents indicated that they believed in ghosts in a recent poll.

Wen cites examples from Asia and mainland Europe, and consults scholars and scientists to figure it all out. By the end of the article, I came to the conclusion that there’s simply something wrong with the iPhone camera and the way it captures images, and that it was probably something notorious asshole Steve Jobs knew about and couldn’t fix.

2. “Ghosts Definitely Don’t Exist Because Otherwise The Large Hadron Collider Would Have Found Them, Claims Brian Cox.” (Andrew Griffin, The Independent, February 2017, suggested by Kara Hansen)

The headline alone is hilarious. Before reading this article I had no idea who Brian Cox was, but his photo told me this dude was wild, because he is giving us “deeply-moisturized Mads Mikkelsen on a casual science journey” realness. I’d also heard of the Large Hadron Collider, probably on an episode of Big Bang Theory or in an article I skimmed, but I didn’t know what the hell it was either. Now I do!

The LHC is the biggest particle accelerator ever built. It is includes a huge ring of superconducting magnets and accelerators that fling particles around, sending them into each other at such speed that they can be used to understand some of the most fundamental properties of the universe. In doing so, scientists can find out how elementary particles interact and behave, and understand how they work to compose the world that we see around us.

Sounds dope. What does all this have to do with ghosts? Well, Brian Cox, who is a TV-friendly professor at the University of Manchester, thinks the LHC would’ve seen a ghost if ghosts were real. It hasn’t, so ghosts are not real. Also important: Cox has a Beatles haircut, very on-brand for Manchester. And he was in a band, much like my friend Brian, who is a physicist but also half of the hilarious band Ninja Sex Party. Maybe they hang out.

Oh, Cox also has a podcast called the Infinite Monkey Cage, with which I plan to become obsessed. So he said some smart-sounding thing about all this on his show, and fellow TV-friendly scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson was all, “Friggin’ excuse me?” Except what he actually said was, “If I understand what you just declared, you just asserted that CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, disproved the existence of ghosts.” And Cox was like, “Yes.” Anyway, I’m going to become a Brian Cox fan, probably.

3. “The 10 Best Ghost Stories” (Lauren Oliver, Publishers Weekly, October 2014)

Lauren Oliver seems like a really neat person. She’s also a talented author. And while my columns here are reading lists and I don’t usually link to other lists, I’ll make an exception here. Oliver collects her favorite ghost stories, and I’m terribly embarrassed to say I’ve read none of them. I’ve certainly seen Kubrick’s screen adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, and I know it has key differences from the book. And I’ve seen any number of film, stage, and TV versions of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Anyway, I’ve got to get my shit together and check out all of her recommendations before I myself am dust and ashes, at which point I’ll pass on to my next life, or stick around this plane as a lingering ghost, or simply be dead and gone. Regardless of what happens, I doubt I’ll have much time to read.

4. “The Truth About The Paranormal” (David Robson, BBC, October 2014, suggested by Kara Hansen)

Robson opens with an anecdote about a naked Winston Churchill encountering the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. I am here for any and all naked Churchill stories, and to put it in the lede is a bold and brave move, so probably this article should get whatever the British Pulitzer is called. (It should be called the Bareass Churchill.)

His supposed contact with the supernatural puts Churchill in illustrious company. Arthur Conan Doyle spoke to ghosts through mediums, while Alan Turing believed in telepathy. Three men who were all known for their razor-sharp thinking, yet couldn’t stop themselves from believing in the impossible. You may well join them. According to recent surveys, as many as three quarters of Americans believe in the paranormal, in some form, while nearly one in five claim to have actually seen a ghost.

Read on for information on damage to visual processing centers in the right hemisphere of the brain, symptoms of epilepsy, and other reasons you might think you’ve seen a ghost when you haven’t. Turns out sometimes your brain tries to fill in missing information when, for example, you catch a glimpse of something unidentifiable in low light. Also turns out there are no more Churchill naked tales in this article, but you should still read it.

5. “The Spookiest Ghost Stories From All 50 States” (Mental Floss, October 2017)

There are so many delightful stories here. I’m highlighting one from Connecticut, our nation’s dullest state, as a reward for being a nice place to stop for a pee at the many Dunkin’ Donuts shops between Boston and New York.

In 1970, famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren were called to combat the spirit of “Annabelle,” a demonic presence attached to a giant Raggedy Ann doll. For weeks the doll had thoroughly freaked out its owner, Donna, moving from room to room, leaving handwritten notes, and even attacking a friend who suggested Donna get rid of the doll, choking him in his sleep. Finally, a priest exorcised the doll and the Warrens locked it away in a special case designed to check its malevolent influence. But even that wasn’t enough to save one brash visitor to the Warrens’ museum, who reportedly taunted the doll and died in a motorcycle crash on his way home.

* * *

In high school, my mom and her sister threw a party when their mom was away. My football-playing, pot-smoking, drag-racing (not in the RuPaul way, sadly), respectful-of-ghost-believers dad (remember him?) showed up with his giant cloud of curly red hair and found her Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy dolls, and proceeded to arrange them into a coital tableau to make his dumbass football bro friends laugh. My mom was enraged and embarrassed because she was trying to impress some guy and my dad was stealing focus. The point is, adolescent boys are gross and my mom wouldn’t go out with my dad for another year.

I’d tie it back into spectral ghosts but I keep picturing Raggedy Ann humping Raggedy Andy at a hormonal teen house party in Bound Brook, New Jersey in 1973 and now I’m snort-laughing on a flight to Dallas. Because for me, the most compelling part of ghost stories will always be the tales of who we used to be. Pantomime doll sex is just a bonus.

* * *

Sara Benincasa is a stand-up comedian, actress, college speaker on mental health awareness, and the author of Real Artists Have Day JobsDC TripGreat, and Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom. She also wrote a very silly joke book called Tim Kaine Is Your Nice Dad. Recent roles include “Corporate” on Comedy Central, “Bill Nye Saves The World” on Netflix, “The Jim Gaffigan Show” on TVLand and critically-acclaimed short film “The Focus Group,” which she also wrote.

Editor: Michelle Weber

The Blue Ridge Country King

AP Photo/Steve Helber

John Lingan | Homeplace: A Southern Town, A Country Legend, and The Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk| Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | July 2018 | 21 minutes (5,796 words)

Sure, there’s a quick way to the Troubadour Bar & Lounge: starting from Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, population 624, you simply turn onto Route 38/3, Johnson’s Mill Road, and head up into the Blue Ridge. Swing along pendulous mountain curves that ease past wide grass fields, up through dense tunnels of pin oak and pine. Take it slow at the one-lane wooden bridge and again at the hairpin turn by the vaunting power-line interchange. Past the cemetery, with its green-tinted graves so old that the names and dates are just half-disappeared scars. Then on through the final hypnotic stretch of forest, still on a roller-coaster incline that demands another inch down on the gas just as you might be compelled to slow up and address your lord.

Again, that’s the quick way, only 20 or so minutes of alert mountain driving. But if you aren’t coming from Berkeley Springs — if you’re coming from Capon Bridge, Gerrardstown, Hedgesville, Paw Paw, or any of the dozens of other panhandle towns too small for maps — then it’s even longer. Then it’s all woods, up and down hills with no visible end, past spray-painted houses made of plywood and exposed Tyvek. Look out for smeared snakes and exploded deer, and prepare for shaky trips across metal bridges high above the Potomac’s minor branches. Down below, to the boys swimming in T-shirts and waterproof shoes, your car’s faraway rumble might as well be distant thunder. Read more…

Great Reviews Of Movies I Have Never Seen: A Reading List

In a movie theater, rows of red velvet chairs sitting empty in front of a blank screen.
Image by hashi photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories (and some of her friends’ favorites, too). 

I will admit upfront that I haven’t seen as many films as I feel I should. I’ve written one, an adaptation of my third book, DC Trip. It was scary to contemplate: I thought, “I haven’t seen enough films to write a film.” And then someone pointed out that the average male aspiring screenwriter would never let that stop him, and I figured this was correct.

I realized — and this is applicable for any job, really — I shouldn’t negotiate from a place of “I’m so lucky anyone would consider me for such a gig.” I should negotiate from a place of “Hell yeah, I can knock this out of the park and I deserve this gig! I will learn what I need to learn, ask questions, do the work, and figure it out as I go along. And I will do a very good job.” And I started watching more films, because while you learn a lot by doing, you also learn a lot by watching. Plus, if you want to do something for a living, it’s only respectful to your art form of choice to, you know, actually study it.

Conveniently enough, I also recently got sober, which means I’ve got more time on my hands now that I don’t spend one to two days a week functioning at the intellectual level of a toaster oven. Did you know that if you replace alcohol with water, you’ll sleep better at night and have a superior command of syntax in the morning? True facts, my friends. You’ll also have to deal with a bunch of stuff you were ignoring, like credit card debt and emotional scars, but you can escape that temporarily at your local movieplex!

Read more…

Remembrance of Folks Past: A Reading List of the Stories We Tell

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories. 

In “The Depth of Animal Grief,” Carl Safina writes, “A researcher once played a recording of an elephant who had died. The sound was coming from a speaker hidden in a thicket. The family went wild calling, looking all around. The dead elephant’s daughter called for days afterward. The researchers never again did such a thing.”

How do we remember our dead? We hold funerals. We engage in rituals that celebrate a life and symbolize its worth. We build monuments — headstones, perhaps, or statues. And we do something else, something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. To crib a line from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s tiny little off-off-off-Broadway theatrical experiment “Hamilton”: “Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?”

Who lives? We do.

Who dies? They do — as shall we.

And who tells your story? The living. And while we are among the living, it is our job (if we so choose) to tell the stories of those who’ve gone. I’ve been thinking (and writing) about death and endings rather often of late. Here are some lovely examples of obituaries and tributes, some chosen by me, some chosen by helpful friends.

1. “Anthony Bourdain and the Power of Telling the Truth” (Helen Rosner, The New Yorker, June 2018)

Helen was my editor when I did this death-focused piece about TGI Fridays for Eater. She’s consistently edited James Beard Award nominees and winners, and she’s been a nominee herself. Her piece about her pal Tony is beautiful. She gives a more-than-well-deserved mention to his longtime creative collaborator, Laurie Woolever. And boy, does Rosner ever land the dismount. What. A. Kicker.

2. “Remembering Mr. Rogers, a true-life ‘helper’ when the world still needs one” (Anthony Breznican, Entertainment Weekly, May 2017)

I met Anthony Breznican — a gifted writer who regularly creates illuminating stories about entertainment and entertainers — after we spent 15 minutes chatting at a mutual friend’s barbecue, comparing his luminous Italian-American wife’s family funeral practices to those of my own clan. It was around the time his wonderful Twitter thread tribute to Fred Rogers went viral.

In college in Pittsburgh in 2001, Breznican was going through a hard time. This essay, based on the tweets, tells his story of running into Fred Rogers on campus. Here’s a snippet of what happened at what Breznican thought would be the end of a brief, polite exchange.

That’s when I blurted in a kind of rambling gush that I’d stumbled on the show again recently, at a time when I truly needed it. He listened there in the doorway. When I ran out of words, I just said, “So … thanks for that. Again.”

Mr. Rogers nodded. He looked down, and let the door close again. He undid his scarf and motioned to the window, where he sat down on the ledge.

This is what set Mr. Rogers apart. No one else would’ve done this. No one.

He said, “Do you want to tell me what was upsetting you?”

The rest is more than worth your time, neighbor.

3. “Colonel Michael Singleton” (The Telegraph, January 2003), suggested by Neil Gaiman

I ventured through the thickest wood, o’er hills and across rickety wooden spans under which dwell only the very sexiest bridge trolls (they have never heard of the internet and will eat you if you try to explain it) to climb a talking tree atop a mountain and whisper a single word into the ether: “Gaiman.”

This, as most people know, is the only way to contact Neil Gaiman. He then sent a fox riding an owl riding an elephant riding a second, extremely annoyed fox, all of them inside a hot air balloon basket, and they appeared after two days (during which time I had to urinate on the talking tree, who had some pretty colorful thoughts to share about that), and then the owl opened its mouth and dropped a piece of paper, which had the URL for this obituary on it. I borrowed the tree’s iPhone to read it and boy, did we smile!

Colonel Michael Singleton ran a boys’ prep school and was of the philosophy that young men “should be neither cosseted nor cowed,” which is as great a recipe for raising a decent human as ever I’ve heard. I’m not 100 percent on board with all the Colonel’s methods, but I admire his sense of politeness: “Knocked unconscious during action in Holland, he was saved only when a family emerged from a farmhouse cellar to drag him inside. In peacetime he returned to thank them and was delighted to be reunited with the field glasses which he had mislaid in the blast.” He was also wounded three times in battle. Later, he was appointed a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth.

There’s a lot more, but not too much, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

4. “The most awful kind of grief. The most beautiful memories. So long, son.” (Chris Erskine, Los Angeles Times, March 2018), suggested by Carrie Seim

My friend Carrie is a journalist who has been writing for years about all sorts of things; since journalists read a lot, I figured she’d be able to suggest a powerful example of this type of writing. And she sure did. I can’t imagine writing something like this, and yet I can, just a little bit, because writers write through pain. It’s one way that can help. Sometimes it exacerbates the agony but usually it helps – sometimes because our words end up helping someone else, who tells us so. That’s the greatest honor a writer can claim, I think.

5. “Eloquent Barbara Jordan: A Great Spirit Has Left US” (Molly Ivins for Creators Syndicate, January 1996)

“Barbara Jordan, whose name was so often preceded by the words “the first black woman to . . . ” that they seemed like a permanent title, died last Wednesday in Austin. A great spirit is gone.”

Hell of a lede. But then, it’s Ivins, who specialized in ledes, kickers, and everything in between. She catalogues Jordan’s magnificent life of public service, sure, but she also gives us personal gems:

Jordan’s presence was so strikingly magisterial that only her good friends knew how much fun she could be in informal situations. Before multiple sclerosis crippled her hands, she loved to play guitar, and she loved to sing to the end of her life. Jordan singing “The St. James Infirmary Blues” was just a show-stopper.

Barbara Jordan was the first black person from the South elected to Congress since Reconstruction. But she was a lot more than her resume, and Ivins gives us a glimpse at Barbara Jordan, musician and friend.

6. “Molly Ivins, 62; humorist who targeted her wit at the powerful” (Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times, February 2007)

I love Molly Ivins — not personally, as I’m sad to say I never met her. But when I was a teenager in the late ‘90s, her work furthered my love affair with political humor, a love that began when I was a mere kid reading my grandparents’ Art Buchwald books. Here’s Elaine Woo on the final days of Molly Ivins:

In her last weeks, she devoted her waning energy to what she called “an old-fashioned newspaper campaign” against President Bush’s plan to escalate the Iraq war. “We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders,” she wrote in her last column two weeks ago. “And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.”

What would Ivins have to say today about the Trump administration’s policy of ripping families apart at the border? I have a feeling that, with some small edits, it would look much like what she wrote above.

I miss her, I miss her, I miss her.

* * *

Sara Benincasa is a stand-up comedian, actress, college speaker on mental health awareness, and the author of Real Artists Have Day JobsDC TripGreat, and Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom. She also wrote a very silly joke book called Tim Kaine Is Your Nice Dad. Recent roles include “Corporate” on Comedy Central, “Bill Nye Saves The World” on Netflix, “The Jim Gaffigan Show” on TVLand and critically-acclaimed short film “The Focus Group”, which she also wrote.

Editor: Michelle Weber

The New, Improved, Empathic Sarah Silverman

Sarah Silverman speaks onstage during Hulu Upfront 2018 at The Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden on May 2, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for Hulu)

Comedian Sarah Silverman — known for racist bits and language that were a regular part of her act — is rejecting her controversial, adversarial past to embrace empathy. In this profile of Silverman at GQ, Drew Magary attempts to cleanse his own “calcified soul” with her new brand of compassion.

I am not as willing as Silverman to forgive Middle America for Trump. There are limits to my empathy. I am on the more shrill end of the liberal spectrum: the guy who bitches every time The New York Times ventures out into Trump country to talk to REAL FOLK, the way Silverman occasionally does on her own show. I fume that it’s always incumbent on blue-state America to reach out to red-state America, and not the other way around. I delight in conservatives showing their asses online. I have given up on trying to politely convince the most conservative members of my own family that they are wrong, and try to steer the conversation toward, like, clouds instead. I am, in other words, hardened, perhaps even more so than the rednecks Silverman is aiming to convert.

Silverman can see this, and what she desperately wants people to know is that finding out you’re wrong about something won’t kill you.

When I first started comedy, my male comic friends would say, ‘You have to focus on making the men laugh. The women only laugh if their date laughs.’ It’s something I actually accepted as an 18-year-old comedian. It took a while for me to say, That’s fucking insane. We’re all complicit in this fucked-up society; it’s just that men actually, truly benefited from it and women didn’t.”

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It Isn’t That Shocking

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Leslie Kendall Dye | Longreads | May 2018 | 22 minutes (6,055 words)

 

It is a truth not nearly enough disseminated — despite all the discussion about depression and the recourses for those who suffer from it — that electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) can work. I had it six times in the basement of Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City in 2003 when I was 27 years old.

I’d awakened the morning before my first treatment in my mother’s apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. I remember staring into the mirror, mute. My mother said: “You look haunted.” What was my mother seeing? I remember seeing “it” too. My face was cradled in my hands, as though they held up its sagging contents. I looked captive, as though I were staring from behind prison bars.

For the previous six months, I had been unresponsive to a host of psychotropic drugs called in as a breakwater against a tidal wave of morbid depression. Who had I been? The details: I was a college graduate who had been a child actor. I was a chatty and expressive person, prone to melancholy moods but capable of romantic enthusiasm for life. I had been, simply, a human being, before illness descended and set off deterioration. Now, I was a clump of raw nerve endings.

It’s an old story. Much like prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, depression, I often think, is the world’s oldest ailment. But old or not, it is my story too.

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The Tether Between Two Worlds: An Interview with Sergio De La Pava

Tobias Carroll | Longreads | May 2018 | 18 minutes (4,881 words)

Lost Empress addresses the injustice of mass incarceration, plays with the possibility of parallel universes, and uses arena football as a metaphor for how the revolution is unforeseeable. Welcome to the world — or should I say worlds — of Sergio De La Pava, whose fiction certainly doesn’t lack for a sense of scope.

His debut, A Naked Singularity, followed a young, incredibly successful public defender through a personal and professional collapse, weaving in a heist narrative and moments of absurdist comedy, moving from harrowing scenes of inequality to suspenseful setpieces and back again. Initially self-published before being reissued by the University of Chicago Press (which also released his second novel, Personae), A Naked Singluarity would go on to win the prestigious PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize — an award also won by Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and Paul Harding’s Tinkers.

In De La Pava’s fiction, grand ideas and societal tragedies coexist with a brisk narrative voice and an irreverent worldview. Lost Empress alternates between two seemingly unconnected stories: Nina Gill, a genius football strategist, suddenly becomes the owner of an indoor football team in Paterson, New Jersey, during an unexpected pause in the NFL season; meanwhile, Nuno DeAngeles, imprisoned at Rikers Island, ponders his earlier crimes and romantic connections, and his plans for the future. Within this sprawling narrative, De La Pava tells the secret history of a Salvador Dalí painting, discusses Cambodian politics in the late 20th century, and muses about why the NFL’s labor market is uniquely exploitative of American athletes.

Improbably in our age of hyper-specialization, De La Pava, like the hero of A Naked Singularity, is a public defender in Manhattan, where he handles 70 to 80 cases at a time. He recently wrote an impassioned op-ed calling for reform of New York’s discovery laws. His interests are obviously wide-ranging, and our conversation touched on the cultural history of Paterson, what we hate about rich people, the multiverse, and more.

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How Vietnam Shaped Robert S. Mueller

Robert S. Mueller (Photo by Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

Despite sharing a privileged upbringing and education, the paths of Donald Trump and Robert Mueller diverged sharply during the Vietnam War. While Trump deferred the draft five times to enter his father’s real estate business, Mueller received a Bronze Star with a distinction for valor for his active role in combat during some of the most intense fighting in the conflict.

At Wired, Garrett M. Graff reports on how serving in Vietnam instilled a discipline and relentlessness in Robert S. Mueller that underpins his approach to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Today, the face-off between Special Counsel Robert Mueller and President Donald Trump stands out, amid the black comedy of Trump’s Washington, as an epic tale of diverging American elites: a story of two men—born just two years apart, raised in similar wealthy backgrounds in Northeastern cities, both deeply influenced by their fathers, both star prep school athletes, both Ivy League educated—who now find themselves playing very different roles in a riveting national drama about political corruption and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The two men have lived their lives in pursuit of almost diametrically opposed goals—Mueller a life of patrician public service, Trump a life of private profit.

This first in-depth account of his year at war is based on multiple interviews with Mueller about his time in combat—conducted before he became special counsel—as well as hundreds of pages of once-classified Marine combat records, official accounts of Marine engagements, and the first-ever interviews with eight Marines who served alongside Mueller in 1968 and 1969. They provide the best new window we have into the mind of the man leading the Russia investigation.

Decades later, Mueller would tell me that nothing he ever confronted in his career was as challenging as leading men in combat and watching them be cut down. “You see a lot, and every day after is a blessing,” he told me in 2008. The memory of Mutter’s Ridge put everything, even terror investigations and showdowns with the Bush White House, into perspective. “A lot is going to come your way, but it’s not going to be the same intensity.”

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A Remarkable Child

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Daniel Rafinejad | Longreads | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,503 words)

My friend Sam makes experimental films I do not understand. Sam is an artist; I like Doritos.

Sam is tall, a little cross-eyed. He’s earnest but also contrarian and snobby. He acts like he’s the one person ever to have noticed the moon.

We met as freshmen at Columbia. I was flattered someone so cool would talk to me. Sam clothed and carried himself with a perfect carelessness, while I wore sweater vests and dropped things a lot.

I won Sam over by talking about weasel menstrual fluid.

“I like taxidermied animals, too,” I lied, as we rode the elevator up to the 11th floor of John Jay Hall one autumn afternoon. He was holding a stuffed rodent.

“It’s a weasel?” I mumbled.

“Yes,” he answered. He looked at me blinking, as if peering through a curtain of bangs, though his raven hair was combed and parted to the right of his clear, pale face. “His name is Portnoy.”

“Portnoy means ‘tailor’ in Russian,” I said. He looked down at me with a half-smile and studied my buzzed head. I continued with more confidence: “My great-grandmother, who, I think, was a witch in Iran, said that sleeping on a pillowcase stained with a she-weasel’s menstrual fluid chases away nightmares.”
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