Downfall of the House of Rahm

by Jillian Butler, Ampersandology

The Daily Beast reports Obama’s chief of staff may leave any day now. 


Say it ain't so, Rahm! How can I pretend the Obama White House is on The West Wing if you, the integral Josh Lyman-lite, leave the narrative?!?

Josh Lyman would never desert his troops in the thick of the battle! What about what Leo said, Mr. Lyman?



Won't someone think of the children? And by children, I mean my personal amusement.

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Culture Snaps, August 31st

by Jillian Butler, Ampersandology

WATCHING...

The West Wing, Season 3

You don't seal up the old car in the garage just because she's got a little mileage. She cleans up nice, and purrs all the way home. Love like this, you can't buy it in a store.

READING...

Kazan on Directing by Elia Kazan

The legendary (some might substitute 'notorious' here) Broadway and Hollywood director Elia Kazan's collected notes comprise this slim volume, on topics that vary from casting actors for their unseen wounds to Brando's ferocious arm muscles. From the LA Times: 

Before starting to direct a new play or movie, Elia Kazan would purchase a little school notebook and, as rehearsals and early performances proceeded, fill it with his thoughts. Taken together, these notebooks constitute a unique (and as far as I know unparalleled) record of an uncommonly passionate and acute directorial mind at work and, in edited form, they are the fascinating and unsparing core of "Kazan on Directing."

LISTENING...

The Honeycombs, "Have I the Right?"

Men in suits spinning in unison? IN 1964?

I thought about suing these guys for reading my diary 20 years before it was written in an attempt to collectively woo and demolish my heart for all other men, but then I remembered how clutch this song is, and I told the lawyer to chill already. Simply put: this song is why we all do what we do, whether or not we know it yet. Plus: clapping in groovy unison!

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Sorkin vs. Sorkin: The West Wing and The American President

by Jillian Butler, Ampersandology

In the pantheon of great American films, The American President might place. You know, if Network was sick that day and took all its friends just out of spite (it's something Network would do, we all know that). But it's a pretty good way to spend a Sunday afternoon: a smart, semi-political romantic comedy that at least pretends it's aiming itself at adults. The idea is simple: Andrew Shepard (played by Michael Douglas) is the President, and a widower of three years, who meets and begins to date a lobbyist (Annette Bening, aka the legs that made Warren Beatty stop running). In turn, they have to deal with the vicious media onslaught who are only too happy to speculate on the effect this development has on the family values of the nation en masse. 


Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin was still a strugging playwright and script doctor when he penned The American President, working under contract to Castle Rock Entertainment. It was his last script for the studio and, in a move that surprises no one familar with Sorkian dialogue, was butchered down to a reasonable running time from an initial 385 page draft. It was a coup for the then-unproven Sorkin, a critical and commercial success that likely made it easier for networks to swallow his subsequent networks pitches. 


So it's a success that stands on its own legs. But having watched the film very recently, I can't help but see the entire movie as training ground for his magnum opus, television series The West Wing. For those not familiar with the series, first of all, what's wrong with you? Go here, I'll wait.


And second: the first four seasons are a masterwork of political opera, with very few missteps; the last three, while shaking from withdrawal pangs from Sorkin's departure, is still generally very strong when placed near its competition (such as the 2006 winner of the Nielsen ratings, Desperate Housewives). It too follows the presidency of one man: Josiah (Jed) Bartlet. But the two Sorkin projects share more than a screenwriter and a couple of set pieces; I'm pretty sure if movies had family, they'd at least be cousins. Identical cooooousins. 

*

The first thing that I've noticed is that Aaron Sorkin likes his friends. He likes to give them work. I don't blame him for this; Hollywood does seem like the kind of place when if you possibly can, it seems wise to surround yourself with people you trust. It also has a long tradition in Tinseltown, with the Apatow gang rotating comedic duty these days, the Brat Pack bascially sopping up all viable roles for young people in the 80s...even as far back as Scorsese and De Niro in the 70s or Hitchcock and his famous Blondes. 


But Sorkin likes to take this to a new, adorably extreme level. In fact, if you look at the IMDb page for The American President at the right angle, it reads more like a pre-pre-pre-audition reel for The West Wing. Here are but a few: 

Aw, look, it's Dr. Nancy McNally, National Security Advisor to President Bartlet! But..why does she have that awful nineties hairdo? And why is she doing CJ's job? I'm so confused.

Hey, Martin Sheen got a promotion! He goes from Chief of Staff in 1995 to President in under a decade! You must admit, that's impressive. Also, his taste in ties has vastly improved! Way to be a winner, champ.


It doesn't end there;  Nina Siemaszko (Ellie Bartlet) and Joshua Malina (Will Bailey) also appear. And take it from me: it's incredibly confusing to see President Bartlett pretend to not be President and call someone else 'sir.'


Michael J. Fox's unbalanced but passionate Lewis Rothschild  is but a pale foreshadowing of the unrelenting wunderkind Josh Lyman. Oh and Sorkin? Don't think I didn't notice the casual name-drop of a Senator Stackhouse, whose namesake would later be used for the eponymous senator in my favourite episode, season two's "The Stackhouse Filibuster." As far as I'm concerned, anything that sends me back to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a good thing in my books.

*

I'm not really surprised by any of these staff overlaps; it also occurs, in smaller doses, on Sorkin's other projects (Sports Night and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, are your ears burning?). It may seem like I'm treating this overlap as a bad thing...a kind of creative cherry-picking that Sorkin falls back on rather than brainstorm new ideas.

But it's just the opposite: it makes me happier than ever that Sorkin got the opportunity to expand on the themes he could only briefly touch on in a major Hollywood film designed to appeal to a much larger audience. The American President is the teaser trailer to what The West Wing would later accomplish: they both feature a Democratic President, and the short sonnet for liberal ideals written for Shepard's staff in 1995 is turned into an epic poem during The West Wing's seven year run. 

The show, I proudly report, was nicknamed the "Left Wing" for it overwhelmingly liberal stance. It is, without question, the bastard offspring of the Stuff White People Like set: a bunch of like-minded, well-educated people are put in a position of power and actually try to do good, damn it. It's the fairy tale I imagine I'll tell to my kids someday: "Once, there was the Bartlet White House, and it was a wonderful place, filled with people who zinged with impossible witticisms and were also smart-people pretty..."

The interpersonal connections also deepen. In The American President, A.J. (played by Sheen) is the longtime best friend to the President, and was the force that got him to run several years before. There's really only one scene that explores what itmeans to be second in command to the most powerful man in the free world AND his BFF:




President Andrew Shepherd: Is the view pretty good from the cheap seats, A.J.?
A. J. MacInerney: I beg your pardon?
President Andrew Shepherd: Because it occurs to me that in twenty five years I've never seen your name on a ballot. Why is that, A.J.? Why are you always one step behind me?
A. J. MacInerney: Because if I weren't, you'd be the most popular history professor at the University of Wisconsin.




A fine scene, but it's an idea that Sorkin returns to with President Barlett and his Chief of Staff Leo McGarry, only this time he has six plus seasons to complicate the relationship. Bartlet bridles at Leo for always behind the man behind the President, and never running for office himself; Leo is frustrated when he's unable to tell Jed exactly what he needs to hear to make the right choices, no matter how politically incorrect.





But the loyalty never falters.


Sorkin also takes every argument the Conservative Right has thrown at various Democrat leaders over the past two decades-- that he doesn't have a history of military service; that he's Ivy League educated and lives out his days in a hypothetical Ivory Tower; that his elitist tendencies put him at a loss for the needs and desires of the "common people."


From this blueprint, Sorkin builds a magnificent, often pigheaded, but always so gosh darn noble President, a man who is intelligent without apology and nerdy without abandon. It's as if Sorkin was writing Jed Bartlet as proof to all the haters that a Democratic presidency doesn't mean weakness, pandering or simple elitism. Sorkin built a candidate that would make most sensible people sigh over their popcorn and wish for a President like Jed Bartlet to pave the way for future generations.


(All of this applies to Michael Douglas' President Shepard, of course, but it gets lost in translation when facing the black hole of Michael Douglas' smarmy good looks.)


But most importantly, Sorkin gets to come full circle and complete the philosophical and idealogical inquiry he began in 1995. He didn't have the time or freedom to delve into the taxing nature of working for the White House, let alone the moral quandaries a staffer can stumble into daily grind of the White House. In The American President, Sorkin starts a conversation about the merits of a widely-accepted military strategy when faced with the destruction of a low-level foreign base:

A. J. MacInerney: Sir, it's immediate, it's decisive, it's low-risk, and it's a proportional response. 

President Andrew Shepherd: Someday someone's going to have to explain to me the virtue of a proportional response. 

The scene, more or less, ends there. But in the third episode of The West Wing, he gets to finish the conversation, when Bartlet finds himself sitting in the Situation Room facing a similar dilemma:

Bartlet: What's the virtue of the proportional response?
Admiral Fitzwallace: I'm sorry?
Bartlet: What is the virtue of a proportional response? Why's it good? They hit an airplane, so we hit a transmitter, right? That's a proportional response. They hit a barracks, so we hit two transmitters.
Admiral Fitzwallace: Yes, that's roughly it, sir.
Bartlet: This is what we do. I mean, this is what we do.
Leo: Yes sir, it's what we do. It's what we've always done.
Bartlet: Well, if it's what we do, if it's what we've always done, don't they know we're going to do it? I ask again, what is the virtue of a Proportional Response?
Admiral Fitzwallace: It isn't virtuous, Mr. President. It's all there is, sir.
Bartlet: It is not all there is.
Admiral Fitzwallace: Just what else is there?
Bartlet: The disproportional response.




So Sorkin gets to flesh out the obvious passion that drove him to write The American President in the first place, in that first 385 page draft. And thank the Powers that Be that Sorkin got the chance. He still hasn't outdone the work he put into the first four seasons of The West Wing, and it'll likely go down as a high-point in a generally strong career. But really, as far as days of glory go, I reckon you could do a whole lot worse than having this stand as your legacy: 





"Break's over."

Visions of Gotham: New York in the Movies

by Jillian Leigh, Ampersandology


In preparing to apply to NYU for my graduate study, I've been doing a lot of research. Or should I say, "research" -- in that it mostly involves renewing my New Yorker subscription, carefully crafting New Jersey jokes and re-watching old episodes of The West Wing (...don't ask how that one's relevant but it IS). Haha, but I kid. I'm snapping at my own heels to get everything together. 


All this planning and fretting got my mind box chugging, and I started to think long and hard about the idea--not the reality--of New York City. That mythical place that needs no introduction, two words that sum up dreams, chance and opportunity better than Jay Gatsby (that poser!) ever could. 


In many ways, New York is my favorite fictional city; no matter how many times I visit, I can't help but remembering its long-ago location, when I was a little girl and it only existed for me in the frames of my favorite movies. 


It inspired me--as most things do--in the most peculiar way. I decided to compile this list: the movies that helped build the image New York still holds proudly, even in these sullied times. But these aren't your mother's New York pictures. These are the oddball, the outliers, the ones that probably only exist to give us a picture that doesn't include Times Square, horses in the park or the Brooklyn Bridge. In other words, they're just a tad closer to the real, tangled, heady mess that is the real New York, the version tourists aren't going to find and won't want anyway. 


After Hours (1985)
This twisted, uncomfortable little black comedy shows the other side the being 'the city that never sleeps'--if you don't ever go to bed, the night will reach a point when the creepiness never seemes to end. Griffin Dunne plays a man who ends up far from his uptown apartment one random night, and follows his mishap-filled journey to just get back home already. 

Great Expectations (1997)
I've got a soft spot in my heart (or, the angry fist where my heart should be) for this adaptation of Charles Dickens' novel--a loving, though not quite accurate by any stretch of the word, snapshot of the New York art world. In this film, those who have money carry on effortlessly, quipping and socializing as Finn (Pip in the book), the bayou artist shot to success by an unknown benefactor, must struggle to learn the language. There's an eerie dream-like quality to the New York scenes, managing to foreshadow the fragility of Finn's success, a quality that just hasn't been in any other version of this story that I've seen--and really, what better well to capture that unnerving, temporary feeling of sudden fame than to suggest a new artist with no previous experience or struggle would become an overnight sensation in the city's finicky and selective art scene?

Tootsie (1982)
Oh come on, I'm going to make a list of New York and NOT mention Tootsie? Why not just ask me to stop breathing, huh, or eating, or...or...talking about what a perfect movie Tootsie is! In the words of GOB Bluth, COME ON! 

Working Girl (1983) 
Embarrassing use of "Let the River Run" aside, this charming little movie neatly sums up being a working woman in New York in the 1980s, trying to kick through that glass ceiling with the heel of your pumps. Melanie Griffith is a secretary who is kept down by the twin weaknesses of being a woman and being from Staten Island. So when her boss is kept out of the office by an injury, she takes the opportunity to make things happen. Features Harrison Ford as the loooooove interest. 

Do the Right Thing (1989)
Is it premature to call this Spike Lee's masterpiece? I don't think so. He's a talented filmmaker, but it's hard to see him surpassing this story about the tensions that boil over in a Brooklyn neighbourhood during a blistering heat wave. The heat wave comes with its own built-in suspense --as the tempreture rises, the audience can sense that tensions other than the barometer rise with it.  Do the Right Thing is a story of many things--loyalty, society, and relationships--but the real buzz is around the film's treatment of race and prejudice in a multi-ethnic community. Despite the knowledge that in recent years, the neighbourhood -- Bedford-Stuyvesant -- has been turned over to the hipsters and would-be Bohemians, I find the film's setting enhanced by the eventual threat of gentrification looming on the horizon.

The Best of Everything (1959)
Joan Crawford proves the old adage that you can't have your cake and eat it too, unless you want to throw yourself from a moving car, give up everything you've dreamed about and end up with your best scenes on the cutting room floor (which, supposedly, is what happened to most of Crawford's scenes, including one of the most convincing drunk-acts ever put to film). This tale of three young professional gals in the 1950s follows them as they live, love and grow...oh, and learn that everything they're working for will most likely end in despair. Infused with the most delightful melodrama, the film is more like a really well-dressed soap opera, but for its portrait of New York for the young Peggy Olsons of the world, it's bossanova. 

Woody Allen
It seems counter-productive to pick just one of Allen's movies when for the better part of his early career, his every film was set in or around Manhattan. Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan were all based in his hometown, and it's not much of a strech to suggest the city should have at least snagged a Best Supporting nod. It's like a character the way Allen films it, full of quirks and manipulations and neuroses (I always think that the movie scene in Annie Hall best sums up the collective consciousness of New York: nebbish, intelligent, and more than a little entitled). Though he's since relocated his fixation (first to London and now, it seems, to Europe at large), Woody Allen will have a tough time shaking his big city roots.

Rosemary's Baby (1968)
In Roman Polanski's first significant smash, see New York become a sinister den of demonic possessions  and Satanic rituals. Ordinary street corners suddenly transform into harbours for strangers with unknown agendas; most of the terrible things in the film happen not in dank basements or decrepit houses, but in the comforting light of day or the safety of the homestead. The plot line, revolving around the peculiar pregnancy of Rosemary, is a clever cautionary tale come to life, melding the young housewife's social anxiety of being taken from her old domestic sphere and easy adolescent sexuality and thrust into an adult's world of concerns and expectations. 

OMG. Has the White House Been READING MY DIARY?

THIS JUST IN: Josh Lyman based on real-life, AWESOME person. 

I KNEW IT. 

Remember back when Bush was president and things were really bad, but you could always watch the West Wing, and pretend, at least for a few hours, that Martin Sheen was president? The show is off the air now, but one of the characters is now in the real White House: Bradley Whitford's character, Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman, was based on Rahm Emanuel, back when he was special adviser to the Clintons.

Congrats, Brad Whitford. Your character's perpetual spot on my top five list (a spot that guaranteed me making the joke "I'd like to be the Chief of HIS staff" at least once) just got threatened by your real-life White House counterpart. Usher in the House of Rahm!

Fig. 1

APPARENTLY THE SAME PERSON AS...

Fig. 2

Can't you tell by the moody, Sorkin-esque lighting?!?! And the sexy authoritative stance, playful yet disciplined? 

Fact: NUMBERS DON'T LIE.

As far as I'm concerned, Obama just got himself re-elected.