The Cosby Conundrum

Teachers of media history routinely screen episodes of The Cosby Show for their students.  We cite it as a turning point in the cultural depiction of African Americans.  A colleague of mine now wonders if he should be troubled by rape accusations surfacing against the series’ eponymous star.

Of course he should be troubled.  We should all be troubled by accusations of sexual misconduct.  Will Cosby’s personal life color his contribution to media history (and vice versa)?  Yes.  Does that complicate our appraisal of the Huxtables?  Does it add to the meta-conversations about black celebrity presented in Black Dynamite?  Yes, yes, and again… yes.

As a stretch, one might point to the ancient statues of olympic cheaters lining a Greek “road of shame” as a progenitor of modern celebrity reporting.  But there was no Us Weekly to report the accusations of sodomy leveled against Da Vinci in 1476.  No OK! magazine to  malign Paganini following his scandalous refusal of last rites in 1840.  Even in the age of yellow journalism, celebrity news contributed only minimally to the sensational headlines of Pulitzer and Hearst.  

No, celebrity tabloid reporting is a fairly new phenomenon.  It pretty much grew up with motion pictures.  Thus, movie attendance, broadcast ratings — and now, internet traffic measurement — have always been cited as referenda on the lifestyles of everyone from Roscoe Arbuckle to Tom Cruise.  Indeed, we can hardly imagine an alternate reality in which an artist/performer’s sexuality, religion, criminal record, and politics aren’t factors in the appraisal of his art.

Do the Cosby allegations change the landscape of broadcast history?  I don’t think so.  Rather, they may expose our discipline’s staple of author-based criticism as too naive for the current generation of students.  They’re too aware of entertainment news, of legal proceedings, of public relations as ingredients in a multi-factorial soup that certainly flavors (and sometimes overpowers) the artistic decisions which govern what’s playing on TV Land.

Avid, Apple, Adobe (Again)

Today's essay comes with a caveat:  We are always having this conversation.  Production folk don't ever stop talking about it.  I do not expect it to be helpful a year from now as the marketplace changes.  But because a colleague at another school asked (she's on the cusp of a major institutional purchase), I'll submit some observations that feel true to me in the moment.

Our school (70 production majors at a liberal arts college of 3500) was firmly committed to Avid. The company had market share. They had ProTools. They had the edge in server-based file sharing. They had great student pricing. Then, in February, Avid stock was delisted by NASDAQ following some financial shenanigans. Even though they’ve been reinstated, I think institutions are (rightly) a bit wary of financial dealings with them.

If you buy an Avid system, turn-key, you’ll have the planet’s most powerful editor. If, however, you buy only Avid software, expecting it to run on machines purchased through your school’s IT department, prepare your engineer to devote regular attention to compatibility issues. We hold our breath at every operating system update.

Apple, it seems, has the prosumer market in its cross hairs. Understandably, students love (indeed, too often rely upon) its many presets. The shortcuts it takes in service of a friendly learning curve will likely result in a sameness of product among entry-level editors (famously and deservedly lampooned by Conan O’Brien). For my money, color grading functions feel more accessible in Final Cut than Avid. 

Of late, Adobe is the real marketplace winner. For $20 a month, students can access the entire Creative Suite. Project files travel seamlessly between Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, AfterEffects, Audition, SpeedGrade, MediaEncoder… But Adobe hasn’t done such a great job making its software affordable for colleges. Despite a solid lobbying effort from University Film and Video Association (are you a member?) president Norm Hollyn, Adobe is completely uninterested in the old site-licensing structure. Be prepared to pay a subscription fee for each of you school’s computers. 

If you keep your eye on the Occupational Outlook Handbook (and for the sake of your graduates, please do), you’ll see that the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts most media producers will be employed by firms of fewer than 30 persons. Because the likelihood of freelancing is so high, our graduates will be buying their own computers, their own software — they won’t buy Avid to shoot weddings. They might buy Final Cut (it’s cheap enough with a new Mac). But they will also buy Photoshop. And once they’ve stuck a toe in the Creative Suite water, they will buy everything else Adobe sells. Putting myself in the shoes of those entrepreneurs of the future, I’m more and more inclined to outfit a college with Adobe products.

One final thing: No matter which platform you adopt (a timeline is a timeline — ultimately, who cares?) I’d strongly consider some kind of certification program. You can find authorized training by certified instructors in Apple, Avid, and Adobe. Every one of the graduates who attended a weekend certifying seminar says it has absolutely made the difference in getting hired. We tried like crazy to maintain certifying credentials among the faculty, but the semester calendar works against academics — easier and more cost effective in the long haul just to bring in someone.

If It Bleeds, It Leads (A)

One of my dearest grad school professors came to academia from the news desk of an Alabama TV station.  She wrote her dissertation on the relationship between morbidity and ratings, observing a significant increase in the coverage of violent crime and trauma during the ratings sweeps of February and November.  TV ad rates for the rest of the year are determined by the audience measurement snapshots taken during these periods. 

The pressure on local news programs is enormous.  Their ads typically account for more local revenue than any other programs a station carries.  Thus, low ratings frequently motivate personnel changes.  Anchors, reporters, news directors — they all live and die by the ratings book.  So the connection of ratings and revenue to the “if-it-bleeds-it-leads” headline is intensely personal.  You want to keep your job?  Deliver eyeballs.  Make people watch.

   
The obvious danger is expressed in a question: what will people do to keep their jobs?  What ethical corners might they cut?  Jake Gyllenhaal’s new movie Nightcrawler offers some unsavory — some might say psychopathic — answers.

   
Gyllenhaal’s eerie Louis Bloom stumbles into a career as an ambulance-chasing videographer.  Increasingly unscrupulous, he elbows out other mercenaries competing to provide exclusive, “first-on-the-scene” footage of fires, collisions, and killings.

   
News director Rene Russo offers him candidly damning advice.  She’ll pay more for videos which depict the creep of violent crime toward L.A.’s white, affluent suburbs.  Such footage inspires fear in viewers.  And people in fear watch the news.  At 6 in the morning.  Again in the evening.  Fearful people sign up for alert texts and e-mails.  Have there been any developments?  Have cops run the bad guys to ground?  Is the fire creeping toward my neighborhood?

   

Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler

Bloom risks big to win big.  He executes a chillingly calculated plan for besting his rivals, not really weighing the consequences of his reportage.  By the time the ethics alarm sounds, Bloom’s hook is in too deep.  He has ingratiated himself as an indispensable news gathering professional. 

   
Many essayists lament the slant of news in service of political agendas.  Nightcrawler and Gyllenhaal’s career-defining performance reminds us of an equal or greater threat.  Ratings fever, simple popularity — in short, raw democracy — prioritizes the worth of human lives.  It is true on American Idol.  It is true on the evening news.  It has been true of the drug war for decades:  Afghani farmers will stop growing poppies when Americans stop buying heroin.

The Scariest Comedy Ever (A)

If you don’t know silent comedy, then maybe you’ve only heard of Charlie Chaplin.  If you took a Film Appreciation course in college, you might also know Buster Keaton.  But when Safety Last was released in 1923, Harold Lloyd was by far a bigger star than either of his better-remembered competitors. 

Lloyd’s masterwork follows a Midwestern rube to bustling Los Angeles.  He promises to send for his naïve fiancée when he makes good.  But he can’t afford married life on the hourly wage of a dry goods clerk.  When his manager offers $1000 to anyone who can dramatically increase the store’s visibility, Lloyd concocts a public event with his roommate, a “human fly” known for scaling skyscrapers.  Only the roommate never quite does his share of the climbing, leaving Lloyd to navigate twelve stories of obstacles without a net.

You're freaking me out, Harold.

I don’t care that the film is more than ninety years old.  I don’t care that the effects are simple tricks of camera placement and composition.  I only know that’s Lloyd’s brand of thrill comedy twisted me in knots.  I could hardly look at the screen as Lloyd scaled the DeVore Department Store – but I certainly couldn’t look away.  I was nearly apoplectic by the time he created one of cinema’s most iconic images, that of the bespectacled everyman dangling from the hands of a clock.  Even the less perilous scenes were tense with comic anticipation.  Gag elements came together, paying off in ways that seldom seemed contrived. 

Crowning the story’s own excellence is a 2013 high-def restoration.  Blu-ray is ideally suited to high contrast stock of the silent era.  But it can also magnify every artifact of dust, hair, wear, and neglect.  If you’ve bought the Criterion re-issue (and why wouldn’t you?), breathe easy; once again, the distributor earns its reputation with a crisp print that justifies its cost.  Buy this one to share with friends.

The Edge of Not As Bad As It Could Have Been (B+)

Tom Cruise as Bill Cage
in Doug Liman's Edge of Tomorrow

"Not as bad as I expected," seems to be a recurring theme of response to Edge of Tomorrow. Because I don't have money to throw away on intentionally disappointing films, I generally don't buy tickets to movies I expect will be bad (live Rifftrax events being an important exception to the rule).

Based on word of mouth or trusted critics, I decide whether to see a movie (1) in a first-run, 3-D, IMAX theater after a steak, (2) in a $5 second-run house with a box of smuggled Junior Mints, (3) on a scratched DVD borrowed from the library, or (4) interrupted by commercials on broadcast TV. Okay, I employ other nuanced tiers of discernment, but you appreciate the gist of the economic scale.

I paid for three people to watch Edge of Tomorrow in its initial release. No 3-D. No IMAX. I downed an overpriced box of dark chocolate Raisinettes before the previews finished. I watched a man repeat the worst day of his life about fifty times... and I didn't get bored. I saw Tom Cruise play iterations of the same character across a broad spectrum of emotion and thought "okay, he's got some acting chops." I was impressed (but not browbeaten to exhaustion) by character design and FX spectacle. Afterward, I took a family out for burgers and joined in their conversation about time paradoxes, second chances, and the "gamification" of life.

I didn't regret the cost.

Self-Reported Mischief

Last year, Margo created a survey to gauge attitudes toward bullies by their middle school peers.  The questions took months to draft and vet for bias. The Institutional Review Board checked her protocol against NSF rules for the ethical treatment and informed consent of human subjects.  The survey was tested on a dozen middle schoolers.  Three of them misunderstood the wording of question 17.  Six more rewrites.

Next Margo sought guinea pigs.  She needed a representative mix of ethnicities and genders.  Some urban schools, some rural.  Private and public.  Bible Belt South and affluent Northeast.  Six weeks of research, e-mails, and snail mail.  The begging phone calls to sixty principals:  “Yes sir.  Completely anonymous.  I know, sir.  You’re absolutely right; the school day is precious.  I promise.  Fifteen minutes, max.”

Sixteen months after her thesis committee pitch, Margo rips open a manila folder.  Inside there’s raw data collected by the Survey Research Center from 600 7^th graders.  First up:  Grover Cleveland Middle.  Caldwell, NJ.  She gets no further than the demographic summary before the first wave of nausea overtakes her.  The profanity starts low in her belly and works its way up.

The third respondent is seven feet tall, 400 pounds.  A one-legged, Native American bisexual, he has three kids.  He’s served two sentences for dealing crack.  And he’s only 14.

“An outlier.  Please, god, let him be an outlier,” Margo starts to pray.  But the improbable drug dealer has friends.  Extraordinary friends.  Hermaphrodites, award-winning actors, schizophrenics, victims of incest, murderers, spelling bee champions, mathematical savants – a playful group of young teens who have had fun at her very considerable expense.  They have invented personae as comic exercise.  Darkened ovals on their response sheets form geometric patterns.    “Dammit, dammit, dammit,” the grad student chants under her breath.  “They’re useless.”  All she can think about is how far in debt she is, the price tag for a doctorate in Educational Psychology.

Oh, Grow Up!
Tom Hiddleston 
as Loki, Norse God of Mischief
 (in your pick of pretty much 
all the recent Marvel movies)

Maybe Margo calms as she scans the remaining responses, gradually trusting that truth will emerge from time-tested methodology.  Or maybe she becomes a poster child for the research of Joseph P. Robinson-Cimpian from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Last week Robinson-Cimpian published Inaccurate Estimation of Disparities Due to Mischievous Responders.  His common sense observation:  adolescent trouble-makers like to screw with people.  “Mischievous responders are ubiquitous in adolescent research using self-administered questionnaires and can, even in small numbers, lead to inaccurate conclusions that substantively affect research, policy, and public discourse regarding a variety of disparities.” 

The implications are enormous [and obvious], particularly in a world that offers little objective proof of achievement.  Should high schools continue instruction in the fine arts?  Should an assistant professor be promoted?  Are Facebook bullies a threat?  Do the assignments of a given class demand a fair work load?  Ask an adolescent.

As a group, adolescents are not especially evil.  But they don’t generally feel the weight of surveys.  They don’t know they’re used to hire and fire, to fund and defund.  Or maybe they do know.  Maybe anonymity frees a (sometimes-playful) show of power. 

Races are won against clock and competitor.  Walls are built to satisfy a carpenter’s level.  Projects are completed on-time and under-budget.  The success of many human endeavors may be measured by objective means.  Where the measure is anonymous and self-reported, however, it’s possible the resulting data and evaluation deserve greater and more frequent scrutiny.