Last weekend in Malibu, a group of paparazzi descended on the beach to take photos of actor Matthew McConaughy, who was surfing nearby. Their presence on the beach wouldn't have been notable--"paps," as these photographers and videographers are called, can be spotted most days in Malibu. But on this particular day, the group was confronted by a group of local surfers. Verbal sparring ensued as the surfers insisted on protecting both their beach and McConaughy. "Get off our beach," they told the paps. "Get a real job." Before long the incident escalated into violence. On video, the surfers can be see kicking one pap and throwing his camera into the water.

It's unclear who actually instigated the violence; the video would seem to implicate the local surfers, but the Malibu Surfside reports that the paps were the aggressors, and that one of the photographers pulled a knife on the men. Regardless, the incident, which was quickly picked up by the media, highlighted the ongoing problem of paparazzi in Malibu. And many Angelenos quickly took the side of the locals. "The general sentiment around here is that any time a paparazzo gets his camera smashed or gets popped in the face or gets dunked in the water, we're all for it," Brian Pietro, owner of Malibu General Store, told the Los Angeles Times.

Gossip scribe Joanne Molloy, who writes the Rush & Molloy column for the Daily News, says there's been an escalation in incidents involving citizens harassing the paps. "It used to be that celebrities like Chris Martin or Sean Penn or Alec Baldwin had to fight off the paparazzi themselves," Molloy writes in an email to Propeller. "But we've seen an increase in incidents like the one, with surfers in Malibu or clubgoers in New York who take the side of a star who's just trying to chillax."

As Molloy points out in yesterday's Daily News, the beach fight quickly spread online following last weekend's incident. Thousands of comments were left on the website of the X17 agency, which sells photos to magazines, and paps were quick to respond to the disparaging comments. "I'm a pap," writes one commenter. "I've made $94K a year and I'm only four months into it... because stupid white trash people like your fat mother buy the magazines. We hunt the very people you worship for no reason."

Also lost in the debate---and the media coverage--was an another response. Why attack the photographers when the real villains are the magazines editors and publishers who pay for the photos? A moot point, says Rebecca Fox, managing editor of media web site Mediabistro.com. "It's parallel to the meat industry," she tells Propeller. "People elect not to think about how they get their information." She adds: "I think people want their celebrity stuff however they can get it."

At least one photographer has filed charges, according to reports, while Malibu Mayor Pamela Conley Ulich and L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca announced that following last weekend's incident, a task force will consider whether paparazzi should be required to have special licenses. The task force will also "address what Ulich termed 'a new breed of paparazzi'," who "travel in packs, run red lights, make unsafe . . . U-turns in pursuit of their subject,' according to the Los Angeles Times.

Police also will be heading to the same Malibu beach this weekend. According to comments left on the X17 website, the two sides are planning to have a huge rumble on the beach either on Saturday or Sunday. "The common theme seems to be that one of the weekend days, the two sides are going to come together," one police captain told the Times.

Meanwhile, for all the fuss on the web, the submitted story got few votes here at Propeller. But it was a story that was noticed by locals--and by Propeller Scout Deirdre Woolard, who lives in Los Angeles. "I think that surfers always feel some ownership of the beaches that they frequent and so there is some ego there," she wrote in an email. "Also, it is at the core a sport which requires concentration and the proper environment. If the paparazzi were swarming a golf course (which they have started doing too), you'd hear about angry golfers whacking at cameras with five irons."

Deirdre also believes that paparazzi are indeed getting more aggressive, and using new tactics--like just staking out a spot and waiting for celebrities. "The groups have gotten bigger and bigger and can represent a danger to the community. I think keeping paparazzi off the beach is a good idea."

In a career stretching back nearly three decades, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has trained a cool but compassionate eye on such disparate subjects as a pet cemetery, cosmology, the legal system, and the waffling confessions of Robert S. McNamara. His films are always arguments of a kind, designed to tamper with the status quo. The Fog of War (2004) may have won him an Oscar, after all, but one suspects that Morris is even prouder of The Thin Blue Line (1988), which got an innocent man off death row. Yet he is too fascinated by human ambiguity to divide his dramatis personae into freeze-dried heroes and villains. In almost everybody, he sees the potential for both--which is what gives his latest production its somewhat creepy power. A visual meditation on the Abu Ghraib photographs, Standard Operating Procedure is an elegant movie about profoundly ugly behavior. During a recent swing through Manhattan, the director sat down with Propeller to talk about the photos, the film, and his responsibilities as (to use his own phrase) an "investigative vacuum cleaner, hoovering up stuff as I go along."

Propeller (submitted by not2needy): What was your own reaction when you first saw the pictures?

Morris: I had a feeling of shame, actually. At the same time, the photographs struck me as utterly bizarre--there was something insane about them. They're unique. They're very different from war photographs. They're not taken by journalists or war photographers, but by soldiers themselves. And because they're taken by soldiers themselves, the question arises: are these pictures of policy, or of some aberrant behavior? It's one of the central stories of our time, I think, and I remain as fascinated now as I was when I first heard about it.


Propeller: You mentioned earlier that you've collaborated on a book about the Abu Ghraib photographs with Philip Gourevitch. How will that differ from the film?

Morris: When Philip and I started working together, he saw the transcripts of the interviews that I had done up to that point, and they represented over one and a half million words. So there's a lot of material, and the movie is just one small part of it. I interviewed probably twice the number of people that I used in the movie.

Propeller: How did you decide which people to use in the movie?

Morris: I kept going back to the photographs. If the center of the story is the photographs, then it was important to feature those people who were directly involved in taking them. It was as simple as that.

Propeller: Is there a voyeuristic element to dwelling on the photographs? Are we in some way prolonging the humiliation of the victims by doing so?

Morris: One of the things that's so fascinating about this story is that people were blamed for taking pictures--not so much for what is depicted in the pictures. People were blamed for embarrassing America, for embarrassing the administration, for embarrassing the military. But this loses sight of a fundamental thing: the crime here is not photography. The crime here is what is depicted in the photographs, and as such, the photographs represent very significant evidence, not to be hidden, suppressed, redacted. They should be shown and discussed.

Propeller: Why didn't you interview Joseph Darby, who first turned over the Abu Ghraib images to the U.S. military command?

Morris: I did interview him, at length--I have a six- or seven-hour interview with Joseph Darby. I chose not to use the interview for a whole number of reasons. Darby is really not part of the story that I wanted to tell. First of all, most of those photographs were widely known, I believe, before Joseph Darby turned them in to CID [Criminal Investigation Command]. I also believe that CID is implicated in many ways in some of the things that happened at Abu Ghraib.

Propeller: And how did you decide which photographs to use in the film?

Morris: In a certain way, I did something very simple and crude: I tried to put the pieces in chronological order. Always ill-advised, because chronology never follows the dictates of drama. I picked the photographs that were the most infamous. I mean, there's Gus with Lynndie (left) holding the leash. There's the night of the human pyramids, when everything seemed to go nuts. Then there are the Al-Jamadi photographs, because this was the story of an actual murder that had nothing to do with these guys, with these "bad apples." If they were responsible for anything, they were responsible for uncovering it.

Propeller (submitted by Spadecaller): Can one truthfully assert that the photographs depict a series of isolated events caused by a small group of misguided soldiers--by, as you just said, "bad apples"?

Morris: Everybody loves to imagine what these stories are. You see something really, really, really bad--and I would put Abu Ghraib in that category--and the natural human tendency is to imagine that these people are beyond the pale, they're not like you and me, they're in some deep sense subhuman. And on the flip side, there are the real heroes, who stood up and said, "I won't allow this to happen." Now, I'm not saying that there aren't people who are beyond the pale, and that there aren't real heroes. I just think that the story is far, far more complex.

For both the Left and Right, the bad apples are these odd constructions. Everybody has an investment in seeing them as bad. Part of what the movie is trying to do--and I think it's a risky thing to do--is to show people struggling with a kind of nightmare.

Propeller: The nightmare of Abu Ghraib itself?

Morris: Yes. I mean, the place was crazy. They put a prison in the middle of the Sunni Triangle! One of the standards of the Geneva Convention is that you do not put prisoners in a war zone, where they can be killed. You put them behind your own lines. Abu Ghraib, setting aside all its associations with Saddam's regime, was in a place that was just dangerous. There were two military intelligence officers who lost their lives that September during a mortar attack. Prisoners were killed, too. It was a dangerous place, ill-supplied, understaffed, with people pouring in from random sweeps. People coming into the place were unable to get out, due to endless bureaucratic rigmarole. For all intents and purposes, we were running a concentration camp in the middle of the Sunni Triangle. Congratulations!

Propeller: So does the nightmarish location essentially give these soldiers a free pass? That, plus the idea that they were just following orders?

Morris: First of all: it's the military. Of course they follow orders! They're privates, and specialists, and sergeants! What do you think happens in the military? Philip and I have been talking about writing an essay for the Times on the whole concept of following orders--what it really means in the post-World-War-II period. Obviously it's not an excuse for everything and anything. But this is how armies operate.

Propeller: But sometimes there are people who refuse to follow orders. And Darby did eventually turn in those photographs.

Morris: Take my word for it, I could not in good conscience include Darby. Nobody knows the full story.

Propeller: Do you think there's any chance that somebody like George W. Bush or Donald Rumsfeld will someday submit to an extensive interview for you, the way Robert McNamara did in The Fog of War?

Morris: I don't know. I'd be happy to interview Rumsfeld anytime. I'd do it tomorrow--I'd cancel a lot of these press interviews if necessary! But meanwhile, it amazes me that people will say, "How come you didn't interview Cheney? Why didn't you interview Rumsfeld? Why do I have to listen to fucking privates talking about this?" There's a very simple answer. You have to listen to them because they are right there at the center of it all. To me, the story is about the people who took the photographs. It's not a story of seven bad apples who got caught because they were so stupid. It's a different kind of story. And I like to think that I'm trying to tell it in a way that it's never been told before.

Propeller: Did you interview any Abu Ghraib prisoners?

Morris: I didn't want to talk to prisoners at random, I wanted to talk to the prisoners in these iconic photographs: Gus and Gilligan. I could find neither of them. And it's not because I didn't try.

Propeller: Did the military ever get any usable intelligence out of Abu Ghraib?

Morris: That depends on who you talk to. If you talk to Janis Karpinski (right), the answer is no. I'm sure that they got some intel out of the place. But the great irony is that the main reason for Abu Ghraib's existence was to find Saddam. And there was no intelligence from Abu Ghraib that led to his capture.

Propeller: Your film includes interviews, photos, and stylized reenactments of specific incidents. How are viewers supposed to treat those differing levels of reality?

Morris: Here was my thinking. I was trying to tell a story about photographs. How do you do that? You show the photographs, you put white borders on them to show that they haven't been adulterated--yes, it's anachronistic to put the white borders on, but that's how I think the pictures are read. I then have retrospective accounts, which are themselves a kind of reenactment: they're people speaking two or three years after the fact, about why they took the photograph. They're all retrospective accounts: verbal reenactments, if you like.

I hear what the people say to me. Inevitably there are lines that suggest images, which would allow me to bring their retrospective accounts to life. It could be somebody throwing a Nerf football, it could be somebody talking about how they forced these three prisoners to "low crawl." The images are there, usually in ultra-slow motion, to bring you into that moment when the photograph was taken.

Propeller: But is there some danger of blurring the line between what is authentic and what is not?

Morris: The word authentic worries me. The reenactments are not authentic, and they're not intended to be in that sense. I've probably created the problem myself, by referring to them as reenactments. They're attempts to imagine, or reimagine, what might have taken place. Not because you're reconstructing reality perfectly--you can never do that. But because you want the audience to join with you in thinking about what transpired.

Propeller: A certain kind of postmodernist might say that we're beyond the truth, it doesn't really matter anymore.

Morris: That makes me sick.

Propeller: Yes, well, at what point is exposing the truth not enough?

Morris: If exposing the truth means adjudicating the final details, that's not enough--I would agree. You can uncover useless, irrelevant truths with respect to certain issues. I like to think (in a self-serving way) that some of the things I've uncovered are relevant to the war.


Propeller: Did the making of this film transform your own feelings about the war in any significant way?

Morris: My own two cents--and I shouldn't really interpret my own movie, I should just make it and shut the fuck up--is that we're dealing with some crazy war of humiliation. The idea was to show Iraq and Saddam Hussein who was boss.

Propeller: You see that in the actual conduct of the war itself, or elsewhere in the culture?

Morris: It's taken various kinds of expression. I think it was half a year ago, I was at the MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] in Los Angeles, arguing for an R rating for the movie. At the same time, I was telling people that I did not want to redact the photos. I didn't like the idea of blurring them out, I wanted them to appear as they were. Otherwise it seemed to spoil the whole underlying idea that these were the real photographs.

Anyway, I started to tell the head of the MPAA my feelings about this being a war of humiliation. And the head of the agency, who has to watch everything, said to me: The horror movies that have been coming in since the war started are different. Now you don't kill people. You humiliate them first, then kill them--the killing is an afterthought. And I think there is some truth to it.

Propeller: Do you think the administration knowingly pursued this scenario of humiliation at Abu Ghraib?

Morris: Maybe the administration didn't order up all these things from some kind of luncheonette menu. I don't think that they did. But what is clear is that they created a setting where things could just devolve into insanity. Whether it's relaxations of what constitutes torture, or abrogating certain conventions, treaties, international agreements, or sending an ill-equipped army to an area where bad things are inevitably going to happen. There's no single element that you can point to. It's a myriad of different things. But the combination of them produces a disaster.

Propeller (submitted by SonOfTheMask): You've spoken about journalism as being a process of recovering reality. What reality do you think your film has recovered for us, and how might that change the national dialogue about Abu Ghraib?

Morris: I remain firmly convinced that Abu Ghraib teaches us something, perhaps something deeply unpleasant, about ourselves. It is a kind of State of the Union address in its most perverse form. It tells us more than what we want to hear and what we want to know.

Propeller (submitted by Spadecaller): Is the seeming indifference by the media and the public a defense against a frightening reality: that our leaders have made it more inviting to look the other way?

Morris: The US government and the military would have loved to suppress all of these photographs. And the photographs rendered an enormous public service, an ironic one: they opened the curtain and gave us a glimpse into Abu Ghraib. But then we stopped--as if somehow, the photographs shouldn't lead us deeper into the place and what it was about.

Propeller (submitted by gamahuche): Exactly. We can have an almost Pavlovian reaction to such photographs, where they seem to prevent us from thinking.

Morris: The photographs became iconic for a reason. They seem to express something, yet it's not really clear what they express. Having spent years thinking about them, I can't say that I understand them fully. They're these weird tableaux vivants--Cindy Sherman from Hell, things created for the camera--yet they captured something about the zeitgeist, something very disturbing.

Propeller (submitted by Radiofreeeuropa): Do you see yourself more as an artist or a journalist? Or to put it another way, what is your responsibility, and what is ours as the audience?

Morris: I think we all have a responsibility to think about this stuff. Why this country is so apathetic about the war, I can't answer. It very quickly devolved into a Battle of the Blogs--the Right and Left could take their positions, and people could get really tired of listening to it. But I truly believe that before you decide what something is, you have to know something about it: you have to investigate it. And the photographs, which horrified me and made me ashamed... well, I needed to know what they were and how they were produced and what they were about.

Some say the romantic comedy is dead, that its formula is tired and predictable. And actor Ryan Reynolds, now starring in Definitely, Maybe, concedes there is something to this inconvenient truth. "We knew this," he acknowledges. "That's why we had to go in a different direction and do something completely unpredictable." The strategy seems to have worked. Definitely, Maybe has done what a spate of recent romantic comedies have failed to do: garner some critical praise. In Boston, where Reynolds is set to begin work on The Proposal--you guessed it, another romantic comedy--he sat down for a chat with Propeller's Stephen Head.

Propeller: Your character, Will, works in Bill Clinton's campaign office. He's the lowest of the low, of course, answering phones and making photocopies. But was it part of the plan to release this film smack dab in the middle of the primaries, which happen to include Hillary Clinton?

Ryan Reynolds: Nice little release date, isn't it? But no, not at all. In fact, at the time when we were doing the film, we were wondering who the front runners were going to be. We had no idea, obviously. There were rumblings that Clinton might decide to run. And then, when we where shooting in Brooklyn, we had this big set that was supposedly the Bill Clinton campaign office, and people kept walking in wanting to volunteer for Hillary.

Propeller: You're in almost every scene of this movie, which can mean 16-hour days on the set. Was that a hardship for you?

Reynolds: Yes. Well, I mean, it's always difficult. But I love what I do, so I don't mind the long days.

Propeller: How long was the shoot?

Reynolds: I think it was probably about two and a half months.

Propeller: Half of which was spent turning back the clock to 1992. For example, nobody was using cell phones.

Reynolds: We were careful about the cell phone thing. But it's not a perfect science. Occasionally you'll see like a 2004 minivan cruise by--and there goes the take! It can be a problem. And I'm that jackass on set who's always saying, "Oh, we'll just paint it out in post." That costs, like, $40,000 dollars a frame. So the director would say, "No, we're going to shoot it again."

Propeller: How does one prepare for a role like this? Did study the ins and outs of working in a campaign office, or being a political junkie?

Reynolds: I've always been fairly knowledgeable about politics. But here I just did as much reading as I could on Bill Clinton, because that, I think, was really the driving force for my character. In the beginning, he's the guy who emulates this iconic presidential candidate. And of course my journey mirrors Bill Clinton's: my downfall happens around the same time as his. I'm disillusioned with him, and he's disillusioned with the world.

Propeller: So that was all?

Reynolds: I also spent time with a political analysts and a speechwriter--a guy named Frank Wilkinson, who was writing for the New York Times and the Huffington Post. I just kind of hung out with that set. Beyond that, there's not a ton of research I can do.

Propeller: Abigail Breslin plays your daughter. She's a talented little actor.

Reynolds: She's wonderful. You can't quite believe that she's in this pygmy shape--I kept wondering if she was just Judi Dench in good make-up. I loved hanging out with her. And the chemistry and dynamic that we share onscreen is exactly the same that we shared offscreen. We established that right off the bat.

Propeller: It's funny to think that a child actor would go to the director and say, "This is not working."

Reynolds: (Laughs) Actually, I wouldn't be surprised these days, you know? I mean, most child actors are on their fourth stint in rehab. They're pretty intense.

Propeller: So there wasn't any offscreen friction between you and your costars?

Reynolds: (Laughs) No. We all did the junket together in Los Angeles, and we were laughing about that, because it's really rare that you have an entire cast, especially an ensemble cast such as this, eating lunch together. And everyone's still talking to one another, which is a plus.

Propeller: In the movie, your character has the worst job in the office. He's essentially the toilet paper guy on the campaign. What was the worst job you've had in real life?

Reynolds: Oh God, I've had a few pretty bad jobs. The worst was when I worked at this restaurant in Vancouver and my bosses were all irretrievable crackheads. That was scary. They were ingesting their profits, and it was a dangerously sad thing to watch. These guys ran this restaurant, but they were like villains from Miami Vice.

Propeller: I imagine they're no longer in business.

Reynolds: I'd be surprised if they were still breathing. Who knows? But Hollywood is pure as the driven snow. I haven't experienced anything like that.

Propeller: So you made this movie with the makers of Love Actually.

Reynolds: And About A Boy and Bridget Jones...

Propeller: What would you say is their secret to doing romantic comedies?

Reynolds: My feeling is they have a real handle on irony. They're clever producers, and they have a real eye for material that's unorthodox in genres have been a little bit exhausted.

Propeller: There's a belief that romantic comedies are going through a change, that they've lost a lot of their charm. What's your opinion on that?

Reynolds: I think romantic comedies in general are still popular. But there is a formula to them, and that can be a little bit tired. That's why I think this film is different. For example, when you look at the poster for any typical romantic comedy, you think, "Okay. He ends up with her." When you look at the poster for Definitely, Maybe, you have no idea who this guy's going to end up with. You just know he's not going to end up with the daughter. (Laughs) Because that would be a little weird.

Propeller: After Blade and The Amityville Horror, did you get a lot more offers for horror and science-fiction stuff?

Reynolds: Oh yeah. But I don't think I ever did any more of those. The Nines, I guess, was kind of bizarre, but it's not really science fiction.

Propeller: If a studio offered you a Marvel superhero role, is that something you would consider?

Reynolds: Sure. There's The Flash, but that would be DC. The Flash has come up a lot--they did have a project for a while, but it hasn't gotten off the ground. I mean, it's such a complicated movie to do.

Propeller: Actors get pigeonholed very quickly.

Reynolds: It works that way in every genre. You do a big, broad comedy, then suddenly you're getting all these big, broad comedy scripts. So you really have to kind of fight for different stuff. Sometimes you have to audition, or go win somebody over. And that's part of my job. It's something I love doing, fighting for a role.

Propeller: What makes you want to fight for a role?

Reynolds: For me it's usually finding some aspect of the script that scares me a little bit. I have that little voice that says, "You can't do this." So that helps me choose something, it pushes me. Or, to be perfectly eloquent, it scares the s*** out of me. Then I'm in.

Propeller: What was that special something about Definitely, Maybe?

Reynolds: I felt it was a role that James Stewart would have done if he were alive. And that terrified me. I felt like I was suddenly stepping into shoes that were that big.

Propeller: You've mentioned that shooting movies out of sequence can be an issue, especially when actors are trying to grow into the role.

Reynolds: True. I've shot movies where we shot the last scene first, and I just remember wanting to execute the line producer.

Propeller: Do you think you've gotten to a point where you might be able to show other actors how to do a scene? Offer advice, and so forth?

Reynolds: I guess there's never really a way to show someone how to do a scene. But the other day it dawned on me that, well, I've kind of been doing this for a long time. I was shocked to think that I'm 31 years old and I've been doing this professionally since I was 13. I looked at my IMDB page and felt old for a minute. But there's always a part of me that feels like a newbie. I think that's a good feeling, too.

Propeller: But some actors are very attached to their favorite tricks.

Reynolds: Yes, but that's not acting. The best advice I've ever been given, and the best advice I could ever give anyone, is just play the scene as honestly as possible. And listen. The biggest tip in this business is just to listen.

I use the word "perfect" about once a year. There just isn't that much these days that merits such an august description. For the last four weeks in Los Angeles, however, there has been.



Throughout this month I was privileged to attend a series of live performances by musical shaman Rickie Lee Jones. The artist does have a new album out--The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard--but didn't seem to be playing these shows just to hawk it. To quote the Los Angeles Times review after the first evening in the series: "She was just playing because, well, that's what she does."

In concert, Jones is nothing short of astounding. She gives 100% of her energy to the songs every single time. As a result, she never delivers a "canned" show. Although she begins with a few songs she and her band have clearly agreed upon, I'd be surprised to discover that there was a set list. No Rickie Lee Jones show is exactly like any other Rickie Lee Jones show you've ever seen--and you will be moved in ways you never could have expected. She has the ability to read an audience, and to give it exactly what it wants and exactly what it needs. You leave the club sated and buzzing in a way that's just perfect, having forgotten who you are, where you are, and everything else that ever was. All you've been doing is listening.

Until these shows, I'd forgotten how much I love doing that.

With all of the choices available to us in the way of amusement, it's certainly tough finding those rare artists who remind us of how incredible it is to be alive. But if you take the time and are patient, the payoff will be more than you could have hoped for: a rediscovery of grace, both yours and the artist's. So here's to Rickie Lee Jones, and to all the artists who give us back to ourselves. We can't thank you enough.

In Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, Jack Black delivers the goods as Jerry, a failing video store's most devoted customer (a.k.a. loiterer). A freak accident early in the film temporarily turns Jerry into a human magnet. And upon returning to the store, which rents only VHS cassettes, he inadvertently erases the entire catalog. It's up to Jerry and Mike--the store's manager, played by Mos Def--to refurbish the merchandise, by videotaping their own, low-tech, personalized versions of every single movie. Propeller's Steve Head recently spoke to Black about his career, his music, and his undeniably magnetic performance in Be Kind Rewind.

Propeller: Michel Gondry said something interesting about working with you: he was intent on confusing you. Did you get a sense of that when you were working with him?

Jack Black: That son of a bitch! That's what he was doing? I didn't know that until right now! Why, I oughta....

Propeller: Were you being intentionally distracted?

Black: Sometimes I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but I thought it was just his accent. It's so thick, like pea soup--or French onion, I should say. But yeah, before one scene he told me to get up on a jungle gym. And I was like, "What are those toys down there?" And he'd say [imitating Gondry's French accent]: "Don't worry! Go on zee jungle gym and fight for your life like you are hanging from one hundred feet high." Only later, when I saw the playback of the footage, did I get what he was talking about. Michel works in mysterious ways.

Propeller: With so much ambiguity in Michel's technique, how does anything work? It seems like the film would be a total mess.

Black: Don't let his messy appearance fool you, man. He's got a really great crew helping to bring his vision to the screen. He's got it all planned out. Yeah, it's a little haphazard at times, like a child's room, the toys are strewn about. But there's a method to the madness.

Propeller: Michel is a musician, you're a musician, Mos Def is a musician. You guys have any jam sessions?

Black: No. We never broke into a jam session. We really should have. All that music, how did we not form a band? What would we have been called?

Propeller: You'd think all you guys would talk about is music.

Black: There was some talk about Fats Waller, just because that's what the movie was about. But we didn't really jam, not that I can remember. It was a long time ago--like, a year ago.

Propeller: In Be Kind Rewind you guys create your own versions of major films. If you could create a new version of a movie that you guys didn't do, which would you pick?

Black: Hmm, I'd like to go back and do the old Jack Nicholson movies. I just love One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Shining. Nicholson plays the kind of guys that aren't really working in the fabric of society--he did that the best. Those are also the characters I like to play. So those would be fun to do.

Propeller: With the character Jerry, you strike a balance between likable and occasionally dastardly. Sort of meanly nice.

Black: For me I think that's key. You don't want to be Mister Goody Two-Shoes, just so that everyone likes you, because then you get into trouble. So you want to strike a balance. You don't want to be a f***ing evil dude, but you also don't want to be squeaky clean.

Propeller: Reading this script for the first time, you might find the whole thing completely puzzling. But then you see Michel Gondry's name, and it's a whole different story.

Black: First thing I do before I read a script is I ask who's directing. Always. But with Michel--if he just had a turd on a stick and wrapped it in a sweet biscuit, I'd still do it.

Propeller: It's a different kind of script, this one.

Black: He didn't have a script when he came to me. He had a homemade comic book that he drew with crayons and a couple lines of dialogue. It was a very simple story, and it just resonated with me. I was like, "Man, I can see that! Yeah! I could see this being funny and emotional!" It was a good idea.

Propeller: Did they ever consider having the characters remake one of your own movies?

Black: No. I mean, there's King Kong, but we did the old version.

Propeller: Did you know Mos Def at all before you started working on Be Kind Rewind?

Black: I did know Mos Def, but I'd never worked with him before. We did have a shared passion for music and a shared sense of humor. We felt that same things were funny. We hit it off right away when we were rehearsing, everything seemed to fit together well.

Propeller: You two have very different styles.

Black: Complementary. Because he's very real, and his acting style is relaxed. He doesn't rush anything. Whereas my stuff tends to be a little bit more explosive and ridiculous. So together we made a good ying and yang--Laurel and Hardy, as it were.

Propeller: I see you got a military haircut for your last film.

Black: Yeah, it was for a role that I'm done with. It's kind of a military comedy called Tropic Thunder.

Propeller: What's your part?

Black: I play a Chris Farley-esque actor going who's going for a more serious role. He's been doing a lot of fart comedies and now he's going for the Oscar. And he's going out to make this movie, a Vietnam war film.

Propeller: Is that something you would like to do--make a transition from comedies to more serious drama?

Black: Me, I'm just trying to keep it going. I like making movies and I'm not really picky as to the genre. I'll make a drama if there's something interesting out there.

Propeller: You're starting yet another film, Year One, this month. What's your role there?

Black: I'm just a guy in biblical times wandering though the Old Testament stories.

Propeller: Finally, is there any news on the Tenacious D front?

Black: We've been writing. We've got a new song called "Death Star," and hopefully George Lucas will not sue us. But it's so good! Now we just need to write, like, thirteen more songs to go with "Death Star." So I'm thinking it's going to come out in the Tens: 2010 or 2011. Maybe 2019. Somewhere in the Tens, anyway.

In his relatively brief political career, Barack Obama has already achieved miracles. Still, nobody expected the candidate to wake the dead--which is exactly what happened last night at San Francisco's Warfield Theater. After a four-year hiatus that easily could have been permanent, the Grateful Dead reunited to play a benefit concert for the presidential contender.

The four-hour concert, held on the eve of the California primary and attended by a crowd of 2,400, kicked off with a video clip of Obama, who thanked the members of the band for their endorsement. The candidate made only a single faux pas. "I want everyone to sit down and enjoy the music," he said, prompting a roar from the crowd. Sit down? No way.

The Dead, who officially broke up in 1995 after the death of guitarist Jerry Garcia, started in with "Playing In The Band," then took a typically circuitous route through such staples as "Sugaree," "Throwing Stones," "Deal," and "Iko Iko." Guitarist Bob Weir, drummer Mickey Hart, and bassist Phil Lesh, all original members of the band, were joined by Jackie Greene, John Molo, Steve Molitz, Mark Karan and Barry Sless. The late Garcia was also there and not just in spirit: A small, shaggy-haired Garcia doll rested on recording equipment on the right hand of the stage.

Between sets, band members shared their thoughts on the Illinois senator and his campaign. "I haven't seen something like this since Robert Kennedy in 1968," said Lesh, speaking of watching Obama at a rally last fall. "This is the real deal." In fact, Dead fans could thank Brian Lesh, the bassist's 18-year-old son, for the impromptu reunion. After spending the last summer working on Obama's campaign, he convinced his father and the rest of the band to do the show.

"Every few generations a guy like [Obama] comes along," drummer Hart told Reuters at a news conference held hours before the concert. "It seems like desperate times and we're desperate people."

Famously apolitical, the Dead have never before given their collective endorsement to a candidate. But band members have supported personal causes: Weir played at President Bill Clinton's inauguration festivities and publicly supported John Kerry in the last election, while Lesh is active in numerous issues in Marin County.

For Deadheads who'd already decided who to vote for, the band's imprimatur was sweet. "They just happen to be backing the guy I'm backing," said Mike Shoun, 37, a San Francisco resident who claims to have seen 75 Dead shows. "It's a nice coincidence." Other voters, such as Irenie Schlesinger, 49, were still undecided. "I was voting for Edwards, " shrugged Schlesinger, who added that she had spent the last 12 years following RatDog, Bob Weir's band, around the world.

Announced on the Dead's official web site last Friday, the concert sold out in less than an hour. On Craigslist, frantic fans offered at least $1,000 for a ticket. Crowds gathered outside the Market Street theater long before the show, with Deadheads hawking wooden pipes and light sticks. Overhead, a stereo system played the Dead (what else?) while hopeful fans trawled the crowd, looking for a spare ticket. Most simply held one finger aloft. Others were more direct. "I'll give you $600 for a ticket," yelled one young man, his arm upright, a fistful of bills in his hand.

Inside, a few local celebrities were spotted. Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google.org, the firm's charity, sat next to Sixties activist Wavy Gravy, while NBA star Bill Walton wandered the dance floor.

With a median age of 40-plus, there were fewer tie dyes, and more gray hairs spotted in the crowd. But whatever your political leanings, the event was a joyous celebration. Fans took cell phone pictures, strangers shared joints and friends reminisced about past shows. James Cottle and John Kantor, both who looked to be in their early 40s, had last seen the Dead play at Shoreline in 1995. "What's impressive is [the Dead's] fundraising skills," said Cottle, a self-professed independent. "They can still raise money for a good cause."

Jolie Wiggins, 48, had been to a "decade" worth of shows with longtime friend Danica Rehmy, 46. "We haven't been excited about anything in a long time," said Wiggins, referring to the country's political malaise. But, no, Wiggins hadn't decided on a candidate. Noting the sometimes fractious relationships between Dead members, Rehmy said it was significant that band was "doing something united" with tonight's concert. And looking around at the legions of potential voters, she wondered why no one had tapped these fans. "Has anyone ever thought of Deadheads as a voting block?" she asked rhetorically.

They did last night.

And via the band's official web site, Dead.net, the concert's set list:

I. Playing in the Band Brown-Eyed Women, Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo, New Minglewood Blues, Come Together

II. (Acoustic) Deep Elem Blues, Friend of the Devil, Deal, Ripple

III.China Cat Sunflower, The Wheel, The Other One, Sugaree, Eyes of the World, Throwin' Stones, Iko Iko, Playing reprise

Encore: U.S. Blues

At age 65, Francis Ford Coppola is an elder statesman of American film, a notably successful producer of other people's movies (including those of his daughter, Sofia), and a pretty damn good vintner to boot. For the last decade, however, he has made no movies of his own. With Youth Without Youth, an idiosyncratic production shot on the fly in Romania, Coppola finally breaks this cinematic silence. In early December, he sat down to discuss the new film with James Marcus, who was himself aided and abetted by the Propeller community. The conversation began with a question about the genesis of Youth Without Youth, which is loosely based on a novella by the Romanian philosopher and religious scholar Mircea Eliade.


Coppola: It turns out that Eliade used to write these little fables--maybe for fun, maybe to play around with some of the ideas that were derived from his studies. And when I first read Youth Without Youth, it was like a Twilight Zone thing. Every two pages, something extraordinary would happen to this man. He's hit by lightning. When he wakes up, it turns out that he's young again, and also smarter. Then he turns into two personalities, and one seems to be sending messages about the future of the human species. I said to myself, this is the craziest story I ever read! And I started to become really excited about it: I could make this movie, I could go to Romania. Just bring a crew there, not spend a lot of money.

Propeller: Your excitement about the project makes it sound very rejuvenating.

Coppola: Yes. You know, I didn't count on being so successful so young, with The Godfather. Of course it was great--suddenly I had some money and status. But naturally it bent my career out of shape. I had made The Rain People and The Conversation, and I assumed I would go on to shoot more of these personal films.

Propeller: But that didn't happen.

Coppola: No. So at age 65, I did find myself wishing that I could be that kind of young, European-style film director--like Fellini, when he was making pictures like I Vitelloni. I never got to do that. So I thought, Why can't I be like that now? I'll just go to Romania with the attitude and the budget of an 18-year-old.

Propeller (submitted by SUBMRNR): Do you foresee returning to big-budget filmmaking? Will this project be the catalyst that allows you to finish Megalopolis?

Coppola: I can't imagine wanting to make a big-budget film, for reasons you can guess. There are huge responsibilities, there's a million people. Just count how many producers you see on the credits--they must all be putting their two cents in. So I'd rather make one personal film after another, even if I have to finance them myself. What else do I have to do with the money?

Propeller: So we won't be seeing Megalopolis any time soon.

Coppola: I was frustrated with my Megalopolis movie. I mean, where was I going to get $80 million? Who was going to be in it? And then, when the Twin Towers tragedy happened, a movie about a utopia in New York was harder to make. I tried! I must have done 20 rewrites. In the end, I was feeling kind of depressed about the whole situation.

Propeller: At which point Youth Without Youth entered the picture. It seems that you were excited not only by the crazy momentum of Eliade's story, but by the opportunity to experiment once again with the language of film.

Coppola: To me, the cinema still feels like the most magical field. It's amazing: it's only a hundred years old, but there have been such masterpieces! And it seems to me that the language of film is going to keep evolving. Two hundred years from now, maybe we'll see movies that can actually get inside a person's head.

Propeller: How does the cinematic language of Youth Without Youth differ from that of the films you shot twenty years ago?

Coppola: I stumbled on some new things. For example, there are a lot of dreams in the film. Dreams in the movies are always all wavy, or colored pink. But dreams are not like that. They're realistic. So I started doing the dreams upside down.



Propeller: There's also some tricky business with the protagonist and his double, both of them played by Tim Roth (above, with costar Alexandra Maria Lara).

Coppola: The double is an interesting figure in the film. He was in the story as well, but I used the double much more extensively. At first I wondered whether I should use another actor. Then I thought it would be interesting if I just had [Roth] talk to himself. When he's himself, I shot him looking left to right. When he's the double, I shot him looking right to left. Cut those together, and it looks like he's really talking to someone. I found it pretty convincing.

Propeller (submitted by ind06): The in-camera effects you used in Bram Stoker's Dracula were very striking--they reminded me of the earlier versions of the story, particularly the 1958 Horror Of Dracula by Hammer Films. Did you use similar effects in Youth Without Youth, or are they post-production digital tricks?

Coppola: Dracula was made entirely in-camera, using the kind of effects they used at the turn of the century. The effects in this picture--and as with most modern movies, there are more of them than you think--were very subtle. On an elementary level, it was things like replacing the sky, or getting rid of contemporary objects that wouldn't have been there in 1938.

Propeller: And how about a less elementary example?

Coppola: We shot a scene where the characters were walking along the front of a palace--one of Ceausescu's palaces, actually. It's supposed to be in India. Now, although we hadn't filmed extensively in India, we did shoot the exterior of a temple, with many colored banners, and of course we had the sounds of prayer from inside that temple. So when you see the characters walking along the water afterwards, we very subtly put the reflection of that temple with the banners into the water. You can barely see it. Yet it does marry the two locations, Romania and India.


Propeller: This is your first film in high-definition video. Will you use it again?

Coppola: Yes. It's a beautiful image. I don't think anyone would have necessarily known, seeing the picture, how it was made.

Propeller: Did the new technique have any lessons for you?

Coppola: What I learned is that the two most important things are the eye of the photographer and the lens. We shot the film with very high-quality flat lenses. I had this assistant, a nice young film student from Wesleyan, and one day we heard about these fabulous Zeiss lenses they were going to make for the digital cameras. So I bought them--they were about $50,000--and made the commitment.

Propeller: That's an investment, yes.

Coppola: I do think you'll find that in four or five years, every movie will be made in the electronic medium. And shortly after that, all the theaters will be projecting it.

Propeller (submitted by baddad59): Having made Apocalypse Now, have you ever considered making a movie about how the lives of Vietnam vets were changed by the war--especially as they watch their sons and daughters go off to Iraq?

Coppola: Q: A lot of people ask me if I want to make another war film. I don't. The two big hits of my life were The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, which were very violent. Violent movies are successful commercially, but I really don't want to make any more of them. If I were to make a war movie again, it would be more like Kundun, which was very beautiful.

Propeller: Although you may feel like a budding director again, the release of Youth Without Youth is an event. It's your first movie in many years. Are you nervous about what sort of reception it will get?

Coppola: Whenever I'm invited somewhere--even if it's the local school charity event--they play the Godfather theme when I walk onstage. And I almost want to say: Look, I know The Godfather was a magical thing, and I'm certainly proud of it, but I'm begging your permission to discover other things, to fumble around. The fact is that any unusual movie is going to have a tough go. Even The Godfather: if you read the Variety review, you would be shocked.

Propeller: So time will tell.

Coppola: I'm used to making films that are not exactly in the mainstream. You just hope that later, you'll get another look--and that much later, you'll get a real opinion. So I'm waiting twenty years, and only hope that I'm alive to hear what Youth Without Youth really was.

Story: Net Explodes Over Journalist Firing
Submitted by: TheVisionary

One story that generated very little buzz on Propeller concerned Jeff Gerstmann, who was fired last week by the CNET-owned website GameSpot. Rumors swirled that the 11-year veteran was canned after writing a negative review of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, a heavily hyped video game released by the British company Eidos.

In his review of the game, Gerstmann awarded Kane & Lynch a "6" (out of a possible 10). Mike Krahulik, who, along with Jerry Holkins, edits Penny Arcade, a Seattle-based blog that takes a satirical look at the gaming industry, says that's basically like handing out an "F." "This was a huge game," Krahulik tells Propeller. "People expected it to generate a 9 or 10 based on the hype surrounding it."

Following his firing, the text of Gerstmann's review on the site was edited. The video edition of his review was initially pulled, although later replaced on the site. In the days following his departure, GameSpot staffers alluded to total discord at the office. When Gerstmann was canned, wrote GameSpot editor Alex Navarro on his personal blog, it was "like someone hit the disaster button for me."

On Monday, GameSpot management directly addressed the controversy, denying a rumor that Edios had threatened to pull advertising dollars off the site following the poor review. On Wednesday, the site followed up with a Q & A called "Spot On: GameSpot on 'Gerstmanngate,'" written by staffer Tor Thorsen. While the management stated that they were unable to talk about the firing for legal reasons, they did provide some information. An excerpt:


The Q&A also disclosed that Eidos representatives "expressed their displeasure to their appropriate contacts at GameSpot, but not to editorial directly." And management reiterated that advertisers never dictate any editorial policy at the company.

Throughout the controversy, Gerstmann has publicly stated that he is unable to comment on his departure due to legal constraints. Additionally, editor Navarro referred our request for an interview to CNET PR, who emailed us the above Q & A article.

But an anonymous source at GameSpot spoke to Krahulik and Holkins last week. The conversation followed a company-wide meeting held last Thursday, November 29 (the day after Gerstmann's firing). According Krahulik and Holkins, the source told them that Gerstmann was fired because management didn't like the tone of his reviews, a sore point that had been an ongoing issue with Gerstmann's employers.

Holkins points out that Gerstmann had a tendency to score his games slightly lower than competing reviewers. In the case of Kane & Lynch, the game scored a 6.7 on Metacritic, which aggregates scores. But Krahulik and Holkins believe that GameSpot's reviews are closer to an accurate representation than those on competing sites like IGN or OneUp. "They have the fairest scores out there," says Holkins.

Still, the Penny Arcade team discounts reviews and scores as not particularly important for die-hard fans. Edward Woo, a research analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities, a Los Angeles-based investment bank that tracks the gaming industry, disagrees. "It's like giving a good review to a movie. It increases the odds of having the game do well."

"But there are some movies that do well, regardless of reviews," he adds. The release of Kane & Lynch was particularly important for Eidos, says Woo, noting that the game had been heavily promoted in company press releases.

In an apparent show of solidarity, on Friday, employees of the Ziff-Davis-owned 1up.com demonstrated outside of GameSpot's San Francisco offices. Across the Web, the fallout continues, with commenters still launching attacks--fair or unfair--on GameSpot.

Given the legal muzzling, Krahulik doesn't believe the truth of what happened will come out anytime soon, although with his new notoriety, Gerstmann should be able to snag another job elsewhere. As far as long term damage to the game review industry? "This is the Web," says Krahulik. "Nothing is long term."

Since the launch of the NewsQuake blog earlier this year, we've featured quite a few interviews, with personalities as diverse as Geoff Emerick, Michael Musto, William Langewiesche, Rob van Hattum, and Carlo Bonini. In all these cases, we've welcomed comments from visitors. However, this top-down approach didn't feel quite right for a social news site. To a great degree, it still left the community on the margins, which contradicts the fundamental fact about any social news site: the community belongs in the center ring.

So we're going to try a different approach. Below you will find the subjects of three impending interviews here at Propeller. What we're asking is for community members to submit questions in advance. We can't promise that all questions will be included in the final product--there may be duplicates, or questions that simply don't fit into the conversation. We will also experiment with different ways of integrating these questions: they may be threaded into the interview proper, or grouped at the end as a kind of lightning round. But we hope as many members as possible will join the party. We'll probably set up a mail queue for this express purpose, but for now, please do send those questions to James Marcus via Propeller site mail. Here are the subjects, folks, along with some relevant information about each one:

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
Francis Ford Coppola is the writer and director of such classic films as The Conversation (1974), The Godfather (1972), The Godfather: Part II (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979). His new film, Youth Without Youth, is based on a novella by the Romanian philosopher and religious scholar Mircea Eliade, and will open in the U.S. in December.

ALEX ROSS
Alex Ross writes about classical music for The New Yorker (and occasionally contributes profiles of such hard-to-pigeonhole performers as Björk). He is the author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which was just chosen by The New York Times as one of The Ten Best Books of 2007. Ross blogs about his many musical interests at The Rest Is Noise.com.

GARRETT M. GRAFF
Garrett M. Graff is the founding editor of the blog FishbowlDC.com, and was the first blogger ever to cover a White House press briefing. While still a teenager, he worked on Howard Dean's campaign, serving as the candidate's first webmaster. He is currently an editor-at-large at Washingtonian magazine, and is about to publish The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House. You can learn more about him here, and check out his personal blog here.

(A rendering of the Philip Johnson-designed chapel)

An interesting story submitted last week by Propeller Scout Tim Loftis concerned the groundbreaking for the Interfaith Peace Chapel in Dallas, Texas. Designed by noted architect Philip Johnson, who passed away in 2005, the chapel is on the campus of the Cathedral of Hope, a congregation serving gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender individuals.

Johnson is known for his Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut and for his work with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe on New York's Seagram Building. The Cathedral of Hope commissioned him to create a master plan, one that would encompass 11 acres in Dallas, in 1995.

With 3,500 members, the Cathedral of Hope had been looking to move to a bigger church, according to David Plunkett, spokesman for the congregation. Accordingly, Johnson's master plan included not only the 175-seat chapel but a 2,200-seat cathedral, as well as the John Thomas Memorial Bell Wall, an AIDS memorial that was constructed in 1998. At a 1996 press conference in New York City, Johnson called the Cathedral of Hope project "the finest job I've ever had in my life."

"In the first place, I have waited all my life to design a church, but this is a big civic statement, a big urban statement, a big emotional statement of us," he noted at the conference. "This will be the thing by which I intend to be memorialized."

With its striking curves and slopes, the Interfaith Peace Chapel was inspired in part by works of sculpture, according to principal architect Alan Ritchie at Philip Johnson/Alan Ritchie Architects, who attended Sunday's groundbreaking. "Johnson wanted to create new ideas, and clients don't always want that," said Ritchie. "In this instance, the client was very receptive... and Johnson very much liked this project."

Accepted into the United Church of Christ (UCC) last year, the Cathedral of Hope is the fourth-largest congregation in the denomination. (By way of comparison, the average Presbyterian congregation in 2005 numbered 212.) An anomaly in largely conservative Texas, the church, which is located in a predominately Hispanic section of Dallas, was founded in 1970 by a group of 12 people. The church formally changed its name to the Cathedral of Hope in 1990.

"As a community of faith, our theology is more liberal than progressive," says Plunkett. "The Bible is a guiding ministry, [but] unlike fundamental Christians, we don't believe it's the inherent word of God. It was written more than 2,000 years ago for a different people."

Scheduled to be finished sometime in 2009, the Interfaith Peace Chapel will serve as an intimate venue for weddings, as well as for occasionally contentious religious discussions. ("Too often, religion can be a dividing point rather than a point where people come together," Plunkett concedes.) Fund-raising efforts continue for the larger cathedral, a project that Ritchie and the congregation would like to see completed. Plunkett views Johnson as the only architect truly suited to the project, due both to his professional attainments and to his personal life as a gay man. "He wasn't a person of faith, but he was a person of great vision," says Plunkett. "In order to accomplish our goal and build something that would be a symbol, it took a visionary person."

This week, a popular story on Propeller concerned Stephen Colbert dropping out of the presidential race. While that story prompted much discussion, our users seemed less concerned with a glaring fact: Colbert wasn't even on television anymore. After failing to come to an agreement on residual payments with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the Writers Guild of America commenced its strike on Monday. And the first shows to go into reruns were daily shows like the Colbert Report and Late Show With David Letterman.

Although some networks stockpiled extra scripts in anticipation of the strike, there wasn't enough material for others. Having run out of scripts, ABC's Desperate Housewives was scheduled to finish filming on Wednesday. Other shows, like Fox's Back to You, starring Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton, were canceled, according to the Associated Press.

During the last strike, which lasted for more than three months, the networks lost 10 percent of their audience; this time around, audiences have the Internet and YouTube to turn to, not to mention DVDs and video games. (Ironically, part of the rift between the WGA and the networks is over compensation for Internet streaming.)

To follow up on this story, and to see how the strike would impact certain shows, NewsQuake posed a few questions to a Los Angeles-based striking writer, who asked to remain anonymous.

What kinds of reruns will we be seeing over the next few months? Are there any surprise reruns the networks will bring back to retain their TV viewers?

I don't think we'll be seeing more reruns so much as new programming that you usually don't see in network prime time during the season. For instance, I heard that CBS may launch Big Brother in the spring rather than the summer. It wouldn't surprise me if some broadcast networks run the scripted programming of their sister cable networks. For instance, I could see Fox running FX's Damages and NBC running USA's Burn Notice.

Among your peers, what are writers doing with the extra time? Are they getting other jobs?

People are writing scripts "on spec," which they hope to sell when this is all over. Some people are delving into the novel or the tantric poetry cycle they always wanted to write. If this goes longer than three or four months, I think you'll see some people looking for day jobs. But writers are used to economic instability.

What kinds of writers are hardest hit by the strike? Which striking writers have it more cushy?

Nobody has it cushy. Anyone who was working on an in-production show last week is now on strike and not collecting a paycheck. Obviously, junior writers get paid less and have less of a cushion than more senior writers.

The networks may decide to use the strike as a way to cancel underperforming shows, right? Is there any other silver lining for the networks?

Networks don't need an excuse to cancel shows. But they may decide it's not worth keeping marginal performers, especially because in some cases they would still have to pay the cast without actually producing new episodes.

They can cut some overall deals via "force majeure" for some upper-level writers and producers, if they've decided those deals aren't worth the money. But that's outweighed by the amount of ad money they will have to return in an extended strike--advertisers buy time in advance for new programming.

Also, if the strike goes on long enough, American Idol will have even less competition than usual. That will be good for Fox.

Right, reality shows like Survivor will continue to air. How else will this affect reality programming?

An extended strike will see even more reality shows on the air, and the public may decide they've had their fill, much like what happened to sitcoms in the late Nineties.

A Los Angeles Times article mentioned that during the 1988 strike, Moonlighting never fully recovered. It was a successful show at the time. Which currently successful shows are in danger?

None in particular, though there is a danger that overall viewership of television will decline.

What sort of impact will the strike have on the type of shows that we're watching next fall?

It could have a big impact. Pilot scripts for the next season are usually turned in by writers around Thanksgiving. This year, many were rushed in anticipation of the strike, which means that the pool of shootable material might be smaller than usual. If the strike extends into the spring, then pilots will need to be shot and produced without the writers' involvement, which networks may balk on. Some networks, particularly Fox, anticipated the strike and ordered pilots straight to series to avoid this problem. But even these shows only have a few scripts ready to shoot (at most). Still, if the AMPTP offers the WGA a decent contract by January--and this is more likely, I suspect--then these issues will be avoided.

Nearly eight years have passed since the last Simpsons CD compilation hit the stores. "It's hard to believe it's been that long," says composer Alf Clausen. "We figured the time is right for a new one. And as you might guess, we've collected of a lot of material to choose from." The Simpsons: Testify, which went on sale in late September, should satisfy even the most ardent fans. It features 41 previously unreleased tracks from the series, including four unaired bonus tracks. Yes, you can finally hear The B-52s signing "Glove Slap," Ricky Gervais singing "Lady," and Kelsey Grammer (as Sideshow Bob) singing the "Hullaba Lula" song--all in the privacy of your own home. Propeller's Stephen Head recently spoke with Clausen about the creation of Testify, what it takes to produce weekly orchestrations, and the upcoming season's most challenging musical episode.

Propeller: In putting together this new CD, what were the main things you took into consideration?

Alf Clausen: First of all, input from the fans. I like to read Internet bulletin board postings and stuff like that, to see what the fans really like and what they don't like.

Propeller: Which tracks in particular made the cut due to fan input?

Clausen: Oh, a lot of them. Everybody really loved the "My Fair Laddy" episode, a homage to My Fair Lady. They really liked "Glove Slap" with the B-52s and the "Everybody Hates Ned Flanders" medley with David Byrne. But the other fifty percent of it is that the songs have to have a certain length. There were some impressive bits that were deleted only because they were very, very short and they didn't hold up as cohesive songs.

Propeller: With these shorter pieces, did you feel that perhaps there was something extend? Or would you even consider composing a piece specifically for the CD?

Clausen: In many cases, the shorter bits included guest artists. And if we were to extend or rerecord something or do something new--well, it's difficult enough to get the artists to come in and do the recordings in the first place. It would require a lot of scheduling. But I'm happy with the choices we made for this.

Propeller: Do you have a particular favorite, something you're very excited about?

Clausen: One of my favorite pieces is "The Very Reason That I Live," where Kelsey Grammer is singing as Sideshow Bob. It's really impressive. I think he did such a perfect job capturing that "arch villain" aspect of the song. I love the sensitivity of it, and Kelsey sings it so beautifully, in a way I couldn't imagine it could be done.

Propeller: I assume you've worked with him many times in the past.

Clausen: He's been on the show for a while, but believe it or not, I've never had the chance to work directly with him. When he comes in to record his vocals, I'm busy composing the score for another episode and can't get away to the recording session. Most of the time, my music editor Chris Ledesma comes in and conducts the vocal sessions for me.

Propeller: Do you telecommute, or do you work in an office?

Clausen: I go in to record the score, but apart from that, I basically work at home. I have a detached studio at my house which I use as my office and my writing space. It's very private and quiet, and that's very helpful.

Propeller: The tracks by Ricky Gervais are fantastic. Can you discuss how they came about?

Clausen: This was one of those cases where the scriptwriters worked with Ricky and they came up with a set of lyrics. They had the framework, and then they gave Ricky carte blanche to do what he does. In the end, he came up with his own song and his own guitar playing--his own performance.

Propeller: Do you work closely with the lyricists? Are you working for them, or are they working for you?

Clausen: They lyrics are written by the scriptwriters. I know almost all of them personally, and work very closely with them. Sometimes I'll get to a point where, for example, I'll find that one phrase in stanza number one doesn't match up with the phrase in stanza number four. Or I'll call them and say, "You've got three syllables here and I need five." Then they'll do a little rewrite to match my phrasings. It's a very nice, collaborative process.


Propeller: Can you connect with them any time of day? Or do you have some non-Simpsons time set aside?

Clausen: [Laughs] Oh yes. I try to leave a little bit of time for myself, but it's very difficult. Normally when I'm composing, I start at about 9:00 in the morning and work until 10:00 at night, and I do that five days a week. On the sixth day I go to music spotting in the afternoon and record the music I've just composed in a 3-to-4-hour session, with a 35-piece orchestra. Sundays are off. Crash and burn time. And then on Mondays I start all over again.

Propeller: Do you have a regular group of musicians that you work with?

Clausen: The musicians are pretty much the same every week. And I'm so blessed to be able to work with the Los Angeles studio musicians because they're the best in the world. The depth of the talent pool is remarkable.

Propeller: What makes you happy about composing for The Simpsons?

Clausen: Well, it's a different kind of show. It's like no other, as far as I'm concerned. I'm not a household name, I'm not a household face. But there are those times when I go to the grocery store, and I hand the clerk my credit card, and he'll say very quietly, "I love the music you do on The Simpsons." Or I'll go to a pizza joint and hear the same thing. And I think, "Wow! What are the chances that this happens in life?"

Propeller: That's a nice way to connect. It might even happen if you're getting carded at a bar.

Clausen: [Laughs] Right!

Propeller: What can we look forward to musically in this coming season of The Simpsons?

Clausen: It's very hush-hush because we love the element of surprise. But I'll say there is one episode coming up where Homer injures his back. And while he's on the table at the hospital, they discover that Homer can sing opera. He becomes an opera singer. Placido Domingo is in the episode and it's pretty funny.

Propeller: You must have been excited when the writers sprang that story line on you.

Clausen: Well, opera is really not my world. I had to do some very quick research on the pieces that Homer sings, which I have to rerecord with my orchestra. So I was excited, but also a little panic-stricken.

There has, of course, been some tinkering along the way. The novel revolved around five adolescent boys, temporarily sprung from their Catholic orphanage in the Australian outback and plunked down among the eccentrics in a tiny fishing village. Marc Rosenberg's screenplay shrinks the crew to four boys: Spit (James Fraser), Spark (Christian Byers), Misty (Lee Cormie), and Maps (Daniel Radcliffe). As fans of the latest Harry Potter film will be aware, nature has ensured that Radcliffe can no longer play a spindly preteen. No worries, though. Maps is now 17, a kind of tribal elder puffing on his furtive ciggies and dreaming of girls. Needless to say, his prayers will be answered, courtesy of the foxy, booze-swigging Lucy (Teresa Palmer). And his heart will be broken, according to the logic of Summer of '42 and just about every other coming-of-age story ever committed to film.

Yet Maps's sentimental education is only half the story. Not long after the boys arrive, a couple in the village shows some interest in adopting one of them. At once the prospect of escaping from the orphanage fractures their fellowship. Who can be cuter, smarter, the most considerate or the most adorable? This Darwinian struggle marks the real end of innocence. The boys gyrate between solidarity and dog-eat-dog aggression, and when their host, an old salt with an ailing wife, presents them each with a toy gyroscope for Christmas, he casually defines the device as "a ship's conscience."

Directing his first feature, Rod Hardy goes easy on the wistful reaction shots, and wisely leans on the weatherbeaten landscape, with its golden dunes and lunar crags overlooking the water. There's an air of timelessness, which can be confusing. When crusty Father Scully (Frank Gallacher) drives the boys to the shore, for example, his car looks like a Depression-era jalopy. So it's something of a shock to hear Norman Greenbaum's 1969 hit "Spirit in the Sky" blasting out of a tiny record player--and to recall that the same song was just used in the considerably less gossamer Knocked Up. In an age devoted to the dutiful gross-out, December Boys is perhaps too proper, too satisfied with its sepia-toned sweetness. For better or worse, though, it's the kind of movie you could bring home to meet your sister.

Born and bred in Los Angeles, the 51-year-old Nels Cline is probably the best guitarist you've never heard of. In musical circles, he's been steadily building a reputation since the 1980s, when he began recording with Julius Hemphill, Vinny Golia, and Tim Berne. Like these bushwhacking artists, Cline has tended to dwell in the jazz hinterlands, where harmonic complexity meets pure noise. Yet he has also consorted with such diverse figures as Charlie Haden, Willie Nelson, and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore. And all along, Cline has released a string of solo projects, of which the latest is Draw Breath.

Issued on Cryptogramophone earlier this summer, the disc brings back the leader's sparring partners from such earlier recordings as Instrumentals and The Giant Pin: Devin Hoff on bass and Scott Amendola on drums. By now they're a remarkably cohesive unit, equal parts dash and thrash. They're also adept at negotiating the mercurial textures of Cline's music, which defies easy description.

"Caved-In Heart Blues," for example, is not a blues. It begins with a ritualistic, thudding figure from Hoff and Amendola. The leader spells out a minimalist scrap of melody--like John Lee Hooker in a wistful mood--and we do seem to be moving toward the blues. Just then, however, the piece morphs into a cloud of acoustic guitar and processed noise. "Attempted" follows a similar flight plan, swerving from metallic jazz to out-of-tempo atmospherics in the blink of an eye (just to keep us on our toes, Cline makes his guitar sound like a Farfisa organ near the end). The only predictable thing about this music is its unpredictability.

Not that it always works. "An Evening At Pop's" is as varied as the rest of the pack, ladling out feedback, crazed looping, and a refreshingly humane arco solo from Hoff, but the noise-to-music ratio here may be too high for many a listener. The same thing goes for "Mixed Messages," where even Amendola's percussive bombardments fail to sustain nearly fifteen minutes of headbanging and whispery, wind-in-the-branches noodling.

To his credit, though, Cline knows how to vary the program. "Angel of Angels" and "Recognize I" find him in gentler territory, reminiscent of Bill Frisell (a comparison that must drive him crazy by now). "Squirrel of God" beefs up the ensemble--yep, they've added a glockenspiel--and the leader expands his own sonic palette, with some sawing noises that suggest he may be building a tree house.

For Cline, clearly, less is not always more: he thrives on excess. Yet Draw Breath is most effective when he stuffs his protean treats into smaller packages. In that sense, he might take a leaf from his current tenure with Wilco. Jeff Tweedy invited him to join the band in 2004, when they were touring behind A Ghost Is Born, and Cline has added a jolt to that great eclectic's musical universe. (As he told one interviewer, "I've kind of ramped up the noise factor on some of the older rock songs.") But it's also edifying to hear how the concision of traditional song form keeps Cline at the top of his game. Just check out his work on Sky Blue Sky--or this recent Wilco show taped at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City. On a piece like "Impossible Germany," Cline retains much of his solo from the studio version, but adds pizzazz, ornament, extra raunch; on "Jesus, Etc." his pedal-steel fills float buoyantly in the background. Draw Breath is pure, undiluted Cline, and I'm grateful for it, yet the concentrated version is just as thrilling. A little dab will do you.