Planned Parenthood, channeled information and catharsis

This recent TPM post about the looming government shut-down ties in with a couple of ideas we've discussed before. [Emphasis added]

Facing a Sept. 30 deadline to fund the government, GOP leaders in both chambers decided they would fast-track standalone anti-abortion bills in an effort to allow conservative Republicans to express their anger over a series of “sting” videos claiming to show that Planned Parenthood is illegally harvesting the tissue of aborted fetuses. The leadership hoped that with those votes out of the way, the path would be clear for long-delayed bills to fund the government in the new fiscal year, even if those bills contained money for Planned Parenthood.

But anti-abortion groups and conservative House members are not backing down from their hard line. They are reiterating that they will not vote for bills that include Planned Parenthood funding under any circumstances, despite the maneuvering by leaders to vent their outrage over the videos. If anything, anti-abortion groups are amping up the pressure on lawmakers not to back down from the fight.

Here's what we had to say about the GOP reaction to those videos a month ago.

Fetal tissue research will make most people uncomfortable, even those who support it. If you were a Republican marketer, the ideal target for these Planned Parenthood stories would be opponents and persuadables. By contrast, you would want the videos to get as little play as possible among your supporters. With that group, you have already maxed out the potential gains – – both their votes and their money are reliably committed – – and you run a serious risk of pushing them to the level where they start demanding more extreme action.

With all of the normal caveats -- I have no special expertise. I only know what I read in the papers. There's a fundamental silliness comparing a political movement to a business -- it seems to me that in marketing terms, the PP tapes have been badly mistargeted. They have had the biggest viewership and impact in the segment of the voting market where they would do the least good and the most damage (such as pushing for a government shutdown on the eve of a presidential election).

[I really should have said "causing supporters to push," but it's too late to worry about that now.]

I haven't followed the press coverage that closely, but based on what I've come across from NPR and the few political sites I frequent, I get the feeling that the center-left media is more likely to discuss the doctoring of the tapes than to focus on the gory specifics of harvesting fetal tissue. I'd need to check sources like CNN before making a definitive statement, but it appears that the videos are having exceptionally little effect on what should have been their target audience.

Instead, their main impact seems to have been on the far right. The result has been to widen what was already a dangerous rift. The pragmatic wing looks at defunding as a futile gesture with almost no chance of success and large potential costs. The true believers are approaching this on an entirely different level. It has become an article of faith for them that, as we speak, babies are being killed, dismembered and sold for parts. They demand action, even if it's costly and merely symbolic, as long as it's cathartic.

I've been arguing for quite a while now that we need to pay more attention to the catharsis in politics (such as with the reaction to the first Obama/Romney debate), particularly with the Tea Party.  Conservative media has long been focused on feeding the anger and the outrage of the base while promising victory just around the corner. This has produced considerable partisan payoff but at the cost of considerable anxiety and considerable disappointment, both of which produce stress and a need for emotional release.

There's a tendency to think of trading political capital for catharsis as being irrational, but it's not. There is nothing irrational about doing something that makes you feel better. That's the real problem for the GOP leaders: shutting down the government would be cathartic for many members of the base. It would be difficult to get the base to defer their catharsis, even if the base trusted the leaders to make good on their promise that things will get better.

For now, the Tea Party is inclined to do what feels good, whether it's supporting an unelectable candidate or making a grandstanding play. It's not entirely clear what Boehner and McConnell can do about that.

Some people inefficiencies are other people's core services

This is Joseph.

Mark Evanier talks about his experience with Uber customer support:

You cannot phone Uber. There is no number to call. No matter what goes wrong, you cannot get a live person on the line. You have to send an e-mail to their customer service people who, in dealing with a current problem I have with them, have proven to be pretty useless. You write to them and say, "I have a problem with A" and a few days later, they write back to you to say, "We need more information from you to help solve your problem with B." One of them wrote back to me at my e-mail address to tell me he couldn't do anything to solve my problem because he didn't have my e-mail address.

Most taxi regulators have complaint lines, which are not free to provide.  Complying with these municipal codes is expensive and I think that is one of the inefficiencies that Uber is trying to remove from the personal transportation system.  But, when there is a problem, these codes and regulators can actually be a useful service. 

In a sense it is like fire insurance.  Most of the time it is sensible to save the costs associated with insuring a home against an unlikely event.  But it can look pretty daft if the unlikely event actually happens. 

On the other hand, it is almost certain that Taxis are over-regulated given that they are run by low levels of government (regulation seems to get worse as the scale of the government decreases).  But the precise way to determine which rules are essential might not necessarily be to ignore them for a while and see what goes wrong. 

Matthew Yglesias has a good overview of the Jeb cuts

Mostly familiar if you've been following the story, but it does a good job pulling the pieces together.

Why is the media more interested in Hillary's email than in Jeb's profoundly dishonest tax pitch?

Mercury and Mars

It looks like we might be revisiting Citizen Kane and the Mercury Players in the near future. The topic has a way of leading to arguments over who did what (which is rather silly when you think about it. There is certainly more than enough credit to go around). Anticipating that discussion, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at how things worked at  The Mercury Theatre on the Air.

War of the Worlds, 1927 reprint in Amazing Stories.


Rightly, Orson Welles was considered the most promising talent of the American theater in the late 30s, as a director, actor, producer, and to a lesser extent, writer. Under the circumstances, branding the Mercury Theatre as a one-man show not only appealed to Welles' ego, it also made a great deal of commercial sense.

To get an idea on Welles' standing, check out the first few minutes of the first episode, Dracula.



Mercury clearly represented the vision of Welles, but it was also very much a collaborative effort. Check out the following from Wikipedia:

Producer John Houseman wrote that The War of the Worlds contrasted with the classics that had so far been adapted for The Mercury Theatre on the Air—"to throw in something of a scientific nature."[2]:392 Welles considered adapting M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World before purchasing the radio rights to The War of the Worlds in 1938. He had first read the story in 1936 in The Witch's Tales, a pulp magazine of "weird-dramatic and supernatural stories" that reprinted the story from Pearson's Magazine. An initial script was done.[9]:162

Howard Koch had written the first drafts for the Mercury Theatre broadcasts "Hell on Ice" (October 9), "Seventeen" (October 16)[9]:164 and "Around the World in 80 Days" (October 23).[10]:92 Monday, October 24, he was assigned to re-script "The War of the Worlds" for broadcast the following Sunday night.[9]:164

Tuesday night, 36 hours before rehearsals were to begin, Koch telephoned Houseman in what the producer characterized as "deep distress". Koch said he could not to make The War of the Worlds interesting or credible as a radio play, a conviction echoed by his secretary Anne Froelick, a typist and aspiring writer that Houseman had hired to assist him. With only his own abandoned script for Lorna Doone to fall back on, Houseman told Koch to continue adapting the Wells fantasy. He joined Koch and Froelick and they worked on the script throughout the night. On Wednesday night the first draft was finished on schedule.[2]:392–393

On Thursday associate producer Paul Stewart held a cast reading of the script, with Koch and Houseman making necessary changes. That afternoon, Stewart made an acetate recording, with no music or sound effects. Welles, immersed in rehearsing the Mercury stage production of Danton's Death scheduled to open the following week, played the record at an editorial meeting that night in his suite at the St. Regis Hotel. After hearing "Air Raid" on the Columbia Workshop earlier that same evening, Welles viewed the script as dull. He stressed the importance of inserting news flashes and eyewitness accounts into the script to create a sense of urgency and excitement.[9]:166

Houseman, Koch and Stewart reworked the script that night,[2]:393 increasing the number of news bulletins and using the names of real places and people whenever possible. Friday afternoon the script was sent to Davidson Taylor, executive producer for CBS, and the network legal department. Their response was that the script was too credible and its realism had to be toned down. As using the names of actual institutions could be actionable, CBS insisted upon some 28 changes in phrasing.[9]:167
...
On Saturday, Stewart rehearsed the show with the sound effects team, giving special attention to crowd scenes, the echo of cannon fire and the sound of the boat horns in New York Harbor.[2]:393–394

Early Sunday afternoon Bernard Herrmann and his orchestra arrived in the studio, where Welles had taken over production of that evening's program.[2]:391, 398

Keeping that process in mind, check out the opening and closing credits of the actual broadcast courtesy of the Internet Archive. [or in text form here]:

Uber as a restaurant

This is Joseph.

Mark sent me this piece on surge pricing for Uber.  He mentioned some thoughts about surge pricing in other industries.  I got permission to scoop him in talking about one specific example: restaurants.  If we are lucky, a broader post on this topic is about to show up.   

One example of "surge pricing" that I have often noticed is the existence of a lunch menu at expensive dinner restaurants.  You can often get the same or a similar entrée at a rather substantial discount if you show up at the (comparatively less busy) lunch hour than in the evenings.  Take a look at this example of cheaper lunch entrees. 

So why is this differential pricing not as annoying?  I think the answer is predictability.  One can look at the menu and make a decision about whether or not to dine.  It can be checked online in advance.  If a taxi service suddenly shoots up in price then it is unclear whether you can still afford it.  The key is the inability to plan, likely coupled with some lack of trust (how do I know for sure that there is a real car shortage?). 

So I suspect that the industry would get less overall push-back with peak/off-peak pricing.  I occasionally see this used for things like road tolls, for example, with very little of the opposition that surge pricing creates.  Because people can plan for the costs, and some marginal customers will opt for off-peak pricing (smoothing earnings and making everyone happier). 

EDIT: Mark points out that these are dips, and that off-peak discounts are somewhat different.  I think he's got a point, as the psychology of loss aversion might matter here.  But I think the predictability point survives this question.

Naked emperors, standard hack templates and a really bad piece by the NYT's Alan Rappeport -- UPDATED

[If you're just tuning in, you might want to catch up on the naked emperor thread here, here and especially here.]

There is an extremely popular template for mainstream political reporters:

Take a press release;

Paraphrase it in such a way that all the spin and major talking points are preserved;

Close with a brief paragraph from the opposition for "balance."

For the journalist, there are a number of selling points. The stories are quick and easy. They inoculate you against charges of bias thanks to the closing quote. If the subject is a Republican, you (as a member of the nominally liberal press) get points for lack of bias and, far more importantly, if the subject is powerful and well-connected (like a Bush, for example), you get a chance to stroke a valuable potential source.

This sort of thing is so common that it might seem mean of me to pick on Alan Rappeport by name, but even this genre does have some standards. The spin and talking points you're regurgitating don't have to be entirely truthful but they do have to fall somewhere north of Dashiell Hammett's famous sign. 

With the NYT piece, the title alone is enough to give you a sense of Rappeport's relentless credulity:
 

Jeb Bush’s Tax Plan Looks to Cut Loopholes for Wealthy

As Jared Bernstein spells out in crushing detail, Bush has just proposed a set of enormous tax cuts for the wealthy slightly offset by the closing of a few loopholes. Obviously, Jeb would like people to focus on the loopholes and not the extraordinarily unpopular cuts, but keeping on the candidate's message is not Rappeport's job.

Nor is it Rappeport's job to write spin-heavy paragraphs like these.

Former Gov. Jeb Bush is challenging some long-held tenets of conservative tax policy with a populist plan that targets valuable deductions that benefit the wealthy and the “carried interest” loophole that has enriched hedge fund managers for years.
...

The plan is intended to spur the economy to grow at an annual rate of 4 percent by giving companies incentives to invest domestically and by easing the tax burdens on low and middle-income families.

“Low growth, crony capitalism and easy debt — that’s President Obama’s economic agenda in a nutshell, and the tax code has helped make it possible,” Mr. Bush wrote ahead of an economic policy speech in North Carolina. “It’s past time for a change.”

Once again, this is clearly the way Bush would like to frame the debate but as Bernstein and Jonathan Chait point out, the majority of Jeb's proposals not only fail to challenge "long-held tenets of conservative tax policy"; they actually push it further than those of his brother did.

Here's Chait:

Bush’s plan, unveiled in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, would replicate his brother’s program in extremis. Like Dubya, Jeb would reduce income taxes at the bottom of the earning scale. Dubya reduced the estate tax; Jeb would eliminate it entirely. Dubya cut the top tax rate to 35 percent, while Jeb would lower it all the way to 28 percent. Unlike his brother, he would also slash corporate tax rates, from 28 percent to 20 percent.

And then there's the other elephant in the room. Rappeport keeps talking about that 4 percent as if it were an actual target and not, well, this:

Chait again:

Jeb Bush has made the ludicrous promise that, if elected, his still to-be-determined economic program will launch the United States into 4 percent economic growth. Reuters reported out the genesis of this promise a few months ago. “There were no fancy economic models or forecasts when former Florida Governor Jeb Bush first tossed out the idea that 4 percent annual growth should be the overarching goal for the U.S. economy,” it revealed. Just a bunch of guys on the phone pullin’ numbers out of thin air:

    That ambitious goal was first raised as Bush and other advisers to the George W. Bush Institute discussed a distinctive economic program the organization could promote, recalled James Glassman, then the institute's executive director.

    "Even if we don’t make 4 percent it would be nice to grow at 3 or 3.5,” said Glassman, now a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In that conference call, “we were looking for a niche and Jeb in that very laconic way said, 'four percent growth.' It was obvious to everybody that this was a very good idea."

(George W. Bush’s policies didn’t produce anything close to 4 percent annual growth, but the Bush Institute has made 4 percent growth its major theme, in keeping with the general Republican practice of acting like the Bush administration never happened.)

[And, yes, we're talking about that James Glassman]

A lot of people at the New York Times are greatly concerned about the rise of Trump and the state of democracy, but none of them seem to have considered the possibility that, if the country's best-respected and most influential paper hadn't been doing such a crappy job, the country's electoral process might be in better shape now..

UPDATE

Jonathan Chait has another post up this morning further exploring the misreporting of Bush's proposal. He provides additional examples, though none quite as awful as the NYT piece.

On a related note, Bruce Bartlett (one of the architects of the 1981 tax cuts) is firmly in the Bernstein camp on this one:

    Jeb’s tax plan makes George W. Bush’s policies look good

Can Uber beat buses?

This is Joseph

In an interesting experiment, Uber is trying to reinvent the urban bus system.  At first glance this sounds insane -- we already have a transit system and it is subsidized.  That said, it has some pretty massive inefficiencies in it.  Consider:

As a small example, I was riding the bus on Sunday and getting annoyed with how frequently it stopped. If you eliminated half the stops, I tweeted, the buses would go way faster and DC transit would be much better. Nobody disagreed with me but everyone pointed out the problem: better eliminate the other guy's stop, not mine. That's the logic of politics, so change doesn't happen. A private company wouldn't do that. They would ruthlessly alienate a noisy minority of customers in order to drastically improve service at zero financial cost.

Not part of this argument is the odd cultural idea that private industry should favor efficiency above all else whereas the government should favor "accountability" or some such objective.  That said, Houston (of all places) seems to have risen above these issues to create a much better bus system. 

It also can't be a quirk of geography.  Canada has the same basic geographical issues (possibly a tad worse but that can be debated) and manages to have excellent public transit.  Just try taking public transit in Toronto to see the amazing difference.  And these are systems that, as a user, I could see ways to improve.

The last piece here is that the biggest barrier to being 100% transit is to have reliable and frequent transit.  I had this in graduate school and lived for five years without a car.  During part of that time I was quite disabled due to an injury, and I found the frequent service made up for the longer walks between bus stops.  Yes, you occasionally missed a bus.  But when the next one was 10 minutes away it was a completely different type of disaster. 

Only Nixon can go to China; only Trump can go to Iran and Kentucky -- UPDATED

Entering the political stage as a birther xenophobe cuts you a certain amount of slack with the base, and Donald Trump appears determined to make the most of it.

In an interview with MSNBC, one day after signing the party's loyalty pledge to not run as an independent, Trump said he would work with the Obama administration's nuclear agreement with Iran, nevertheless calling it "a disastrous deal" and "a horrible contract."

Many of the 16 other Republicans seeking the party's nomination for the 2016 presidential election have vowed to undo the agreement. But Trump, a wealthy businessman, reiterated his view that too much money was at stake and his rivals were wrong to say they would rip it up.

"I love to buy bad contracts where key people go bust, and I make those contracts good," he said, adding that he would strictly enforce the Iran deal.

Trump took a different tack on the Kentucky battle over gay marriage. Some Republicans loudly backed Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis, who opted for jail time rather than issue any marriage licenses after the U.S. Supreme Court's June ruling in support of gay marriage, which goes against her religious beliefs. 

"We are a nation of laws," Trump said. "You have to go with it. The decision's been made, and that's the law of the land."

It's important to distinguish between these moderate positions and the ones Trump took on taxes and the social safety net. Those earlier stances weren't really that risky – the majority of Republican voters actually agreed with him – but on the Iran treaty and marriage equality the median GOP position appears to be considerably to his right.

If this were fall of 2016, I'd call this a Nixon pivot (run as far to the right as you can during the primary then as fast to the center as you can during the general election). I suppose it's possible that Trump believes he's that far ahead (with the Donald, you can't really rule anything out), but I suspect that the underlying strategy – assuming there is a strategy – is based on the insight that the Tea Party movement may have less to do with ideological purity of the core and more to do with dislike for and distrust of the Republican Party establishment.

If you dislike and distrust me, we can still do business, but the moment you feel taken advantage of, you'll look for a way to terminate the relationship. The base likes Trump. They find his rants cathartic and his style refreshing (particularly when he's sharing the stage with the likes of Bush, Rubio and Walker). Trump is probably free to make choices that aren't open to other candidates (with the possible exception of Carson) and, given the current set of rules, that can open up this game in all sorts of interesting ways.

UPDATE

Charles Pierce has a characteristically sharp and funny post up on the recent anti-treaty rally. His take on Trump is particularly interesting.

How profound the cynicism of this whole enterprise is was on clear display outside the Capitol on Wednesday. While inside the building, an actual debate bounced around the Senate floor, out on the lawn, the Tea Party Patriots – who, as their six-figure president Jenny Beth Martin will assure you, represent merely a spontaneous uprising of people concerned about taxes and the deficit – were sponsoring a design contest for the creation of phantom bogeymen. Besides Cruz and Levin, whose entries were impressive, indeed, there was retired Admiral "Ace" Lyons, who's worried about Iranian missiles being launched from "their base in Venezuela," retired General Jerry (My God Can Lick Your God) Boykin, and Frank Gaffney, the guy who thinks Grover Norquist is a Muslim Brotherhood mole, and who is so completely around the bend that he's back where he started. The boogedy-boogedy flew thick and fast, and the historical amnesia on display was consistently impressive. For example, Levin bellowed that, "Never before has an American president armed our enemies," showing most arrant disrespect for Ronald Reagan ever evinced by a putatively conservative speaker.

My point is this. The Tea Party Patriots are merely rebranded movement conservatism, which is a very cynical thing to do. The rally on Wednesday was an incredible parade of retired military bloodworms, outright grifters, washed-up geopolitical sorcerers, and mutton-witted drive-time radio cowboys. Donald Trump, whatever you may think of him, is none of those. He knows what a festival of fruitcakes he joined on Wednesday. The way you know this is that his remarks did not contain warnings of electro-magnetic pulses or Iranian missiles launched from secret South American bases. There was nary a single mention of Neville Chamberlain. (I considered voting for him for a fraction of a sliver of a millisecond on that basis alone.) He declined to enter a gargoyle in the design contest. The worst he said about the agreement that had brought everyone out on such a miserably hot and humid day was that it was "incompetent," which is the mildest thing anyone called it all afternoon. And then, when he got off the stage, he told a jostling knot of reporters that the Iran agreement was a "done deal" and that the only solution would be to "vote those people out of office." A completely reasonable reaction, but one that would have gotten his head spitted on an iron gatepost if he'd said it from the stage. It was a moment of almost crystallized cynicism.

Most of the people who participated in the rally were sincere. Completely bananas, some of them. Misguided, certainly. But they believed what they were saying. The Libidinous Visitor looked out over the west lawn of the Capitol, off toward the Washington Monument, and he saw a lovely carpet of complete suckers laid out before him. He has less in common with most of them than he does with the Dalai Lama. He knows he's not like the rest of losers whom he followed to the podium on Wednesday, but he's willing to swim in that sewer if he has to, and he will tell you that he always comes up smelling like roses, because he's Donald Trump and you're not.

Is Trump the leper with the most fingers?

If you haven't already, check out Paul Krugman going off the NYT reservation again, this time on Trump, then (if the memory isn't still fresh), compare his take to the rest of the paper's reporting.

A must read

This is Joseph.

A really good post by Olivier Blanchard, taking about how the sharing economy is mostly a deregulation scheme.

An excerpt:

If you really believe that a “ride-sharing” or room-booking service that deliberately attempts to avoid a country, state or city’s laws regarding licensing, insurance, fees and rate limits is somehow “competing” with legitimate taxis, hired cars and hotels, you’ve probably also rationalized that scoring your music and TV shows for free from pirating websites is somehow an example of legitimate market competition too. Well, it isn’t. Two sets of rules for “competitors” usually doesn’t end in fair competition – not in sports, and certainly not in business. Tip: There’s a reason Lance Armstrong was stripped of his 7 Tour de France victories, and it wasn’t because his training model was “disruptive” or “innovative.”

This is a key issue with these services.  I know that some people see all regulation as bad, but there are important rules and simply disrupting all of the rules presumes that unregulated systems are better.  And the intellectual property piece is key, because these are rules that tech companies don't want to be disrupted.

A hat tip goes to Mike the Mad Biologist

"Maybe there are two different Donald Trumps"

I generally try to be wary about armchair psychoanalysis of politicians. Most of the time it's badly done, often telling us more about the analyzer than about the analyzee, and even when done well, it's generally a distraction from the important issues.

With Trump, though, the question of persona is difficult to avoid. The reality show villain/pro wrestling heel aspect is an essential part of the story. The campaign so far has been driven by an interaction of policy and personality (or, in the case of Bush/Rubio/Walker, absence of personality).

 Which makes clips like this worth noting [about two minutes in]:






As is the following from TPM:

Following inflammatory statements about Mexican immigrants and policy proposals targeting undocumented immigrants from Latin America, Donald Trump on Tuesday sat down for a meeting with the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce's CEO, Javier Palomarez.

Palomarez told CNN on Tuesday that he was "encouraged" by his meeting with Trump. According to Palomarez, Trump joked that he didn't need the Hispanic vote, but then indicated that he's looking for support from that community.

"I want it. I feel like I've been mischaracterized and treated unfairly and my name has been slandered to some extent with this audience," Trump said, according to Palomarez.

Palomarez later joined MSNBC's "All In With Chris Hayes," where he said he was "very surprised" by his meeting with Trump, describing the real estate mogul as "hospitable."

"The Donald Trump that I met today and that I sat with today was very different from the Donald Trump that I saw in the media," he said on MSNBC. "He was a gentleman. He listened much more than he spoke. He asked questions."

I don't want to make too much of these anecdotes -- Even if we ignore the fact that n=2, there's no reason to believe that the polite and reasonable persona projected with Olbermann and Palomarez represents "the real Trump" any more than the Fox News cartoon bully does. -- but these stories are a useful reminder that we're watching political theater.

Interesting discussion of crowdfunding movies

From the good people at Cracked.

Or you could flip this around and say that big-budget superhero movies are a terrible investment

[Part of our ongoing economics-of-movies thread]

The following analysis is a bit simplistic but it does raise interesting questions about perceived vs. actual success in Hollywood.

From Planet Money

Using data from Studio System, a company that collects entertainment industry data, we looked at what kind of films have had the best return on investment over the last five years.
Horror films are at the top of the list, with 13 of the top 30 films by ROI since 2010.

And within the horror category, profits can be huge on small investments. The top five films in horror all had an ROI around 2,000 percent (translation: for every $10 put into a movie, an investor would get $200 in profit). By comparison the top films in comedy had an ROI around 1,200 percent.

...

Obviously if you're looking for the biggest payoff in total dollar amounts, the most profitable films in Hollywood will still be the traditional action and drama blockbusters. Look at this year's big summer flick, Jurassic World. It has made $1.6 billion in profit worldwide, but it cost an estimated $300 million to produce and market. That's an ROI of roughly 533 percent. By contrast, the horror hit Paranormal Activity 2 made $236 million but only cost $9.4 million to produce and market. That's an ROI of 2,510 percent.

The Tragedy of Mercury

If you think we have a lot of threads here at West Coast Stat Views, you ought to see the queue.

One of the threads I'd like too spend more time on is the mystery of sustained success. Why are certain individuals and institutions able to hold onto, perhaps even build on early successes, which, of course, leads to the related question of why the enormously promising so often fail to sustain that promise.

Pauline Kael's controversial essay "Raising Kane" is explicitly built around this question using W.R. Hearst, Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles as case studies. She also says some very smart things about what we might now call fanboy critics. I quoted some of her observations in a recent discussion at Brad DeLong blog. After finding the relevant passage I kept reading till I got to the end of the essay and it hit me just how much this was how well the theme of unfulfilled promise applied to all of the Mercury Players.  They all had good careers as character actors (Cotten even had a good run as a leading man), but, as Kael points out, entirely along conventional Hollywood standards. It seems strange now to think of the mother on Bewitched and the detective on Perry Mason as being integral parts of a group that was expected to revolutionize stage, screen and radio.

        Mankiewicz went on writing scripts, but his work in the middle and late forties is not in the same spirit as Kane. It’s rather embarrassing to look at his later credits, because they are yea-saying movies—decrepit “family pictures” like The Enchanted Cottage. The booze and the accidents finally added up, and he declined into the forties sentimental slop. He tried to rise above it. He wrote the script he had proposed earlier on Aimee Semple McPherson, and he started the one on Dillinger, but he had squandered his health as well as his talents. I have read the McPherson script; it is called Woman of the Rock, and it’s a tired, persevering-to-the-end, burned-out script. He uses a bit of newspaper atmosphere, and Jed again, this time as a reporter, and relies on a flashback structure from Aimee’s death to her childhood; there are “modern” touches—a semi-lesbian lady who manages the evangelist, for instance—and the script comes to life whenever he introduces sophisticated characters, but he can’t write simple people, and even the central character is out of his best range. The one device that is interesting is the heroine’s love of bright scarves, starting in childhood with one her father gives her and ending with one that strangles her when it catches on a car wheel, but this is stolen from Isadora Duncan’s death, and to give the death of one world-famous lady to another is depressingly poverty-stricken. Mankiewicz’s character hadn’t changed. He had written friends that he bore the scars of his mistake with Charlie Lederer, but just as he had lent the script of Kane to Lederer, Marion Davies’s nephew, he proudly showed Woman of the Rock to Aimee Semple McPherson’s daughter, Roberta Semple, and that ended the project. His behavior probably wasn’t deliberately self-destructive as much as it was a form of innocence inside the worldly, cynical man—I visualize him as so pleased with what he was doing that he wanted to share his delight with others. I haven’t read the unfinished Dillinger; the title, As the Twig Is Bent, tells too hoary much.

        In his drama column in The New Yorker in 1925, Mankiewicz parodied those who thought the Marx Brothers had invented all their own material in The Cocoanuts and who failed to recognize George S. Kaufman’s contribution. It has been Mankiewicz’s fate to be totally ignored in the books on the Marx Brothers movies; though his name is large in the original ads, and though Groucho Marx and Harry Ruby and S. J. Perelman all confirm the fact that he functioned as the producer of Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, the last reference I can find to this in print is in Who’s Who in America for 1953, the year of his death. Many of the thirties movies he wrote are popular on television and at college showings, but when they have been discussed in film books his name has never, to my knowledge, appeared. He is never mentioned in connection with Duck Soup, though Groucho confirms the fact that he worked on it. He is now all but ignored even in many accounts of Citizen Kane. By the fifties, his brother Joe—with A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve—had become the famous wit in Hollywood, and there wasn’t room for two Mankiewiczes in movie history; Herman became a parentheses in the listings for Joe.
...
        Every time someone in the theatre or in movies breaks through and does something good, people expect the moon of him and hold it against him personally when he doesn’t deliver it. That windy speech Kaufman and Hart gave their hero in The Fabulous Invalid indicates the enormous burden of people’s hopes that Welles carried. He has a long history of disappointing people. In the Saturday Evening Post of January 20, 1940, Alva Johnston and Fred Smith wrote:

            Orson was an old war horse in the infant prodigy line by the time he was ten. He had already seen eight years’ service as a child genius…. Some of the oldest acquaintances of Welles have been disappointed in his career. They see the twenty-four-year-old boy of today as a mere shadow of the two-year-old man they used to know.

A decade after Citizen Kane, the gibes were no longer so good-natured; the terms “wonder boy” and “boy genius” were thrown in Welles’s face. When Welles was only thirty-six, the normally gracious Walter Kerr referred to him as “an international joke, and possibly the youngest living has-been.” Welles had the special problems of fame without commercial success. Because of the moderate financial returns on Kane, he lost the freedom to control his own productions; after Kane, he never had complete control of a movie in America. And he lost the collaborative partnerships that he needed. For whatever reasons, neither Mankiewicz nor Houseman nor Toland ever worked on another Welles movie. He had been advertised as a one-man show; it was not altogether his own fault when he became one. He was alone, trying to be “Orson Welles,” though “Orson Welles” had stood for the activities of a group. But he needed the family to hold him together on a project and to take over for him when his energies became scattered. With them, he was a prodigy of accomplishments; without them, he flew apart, became disorderly. Welles lost his magic touch, and as his films began to be diffuse he acquired the reputation of being an intellectual, difficult-to-understand artist. When he appears on television to recite from Shakespeare or the Bible, he is introduced as if he were the epitome of the highbrow; it’s television’s more polite way of cutting off his necktie.

        The Mercury players had scored their separate successes in Kane, and they went on to conventional careers; they had hoped to revolutionize theatre and films, and they became part of the industry. Turn on the TV and there they are, dispersed, each in old movies or his new series or his reruns. Away from Welles and each other, they were neither revolutionaries nor great originals, and so Welles became a scapegoat—the man who “let everyone down.” He has lived all his life in a cloud of failure because he hasn’t lived up to what was unrealistically expected of him. No one has ever been able to do what was expected of Welles—to create a new radical theatre and to make one movie masterpiece after another—but Welles’s “figurehead” publicity had snowballed to the point where all his actual and considerable achievements looked puny compared to what his destiny was supposed to be. In a less confused world, his glory would be greater than his guilt.

Kael doesn't mention that part of Welles trouble lay in his choice of company. He had started out with perhaps the most impressive set of collaborators any filmmaker had ever assembled. He ended up with fans and sycophants. He was only in his fifties when "Raising Kane" came out but his last hurrah, Chimes at Midnight (considered by some to be his best film), was already five years in the past and even his supporters (perhaps particularly his supporters) were inclined to talk about him as a revered figure rather than an active force.

As I write this I find myself thinking of another tremendously talented fellow I know very peripherally here in LA.  In his day, extraordinarily productive and influential but his work fell off to a trickle years ago. I've long been amazed by his entourage of admirers, but I never until now considered the possibility that always having someone around who wanted to hear him talk may have made him less inclined to sit down and work.

Arguments for a content bubble

First off a quick lesson in the importance of good blogger housekeeping. It is important to keep track of what you have and have not posted . A number of times, I've caught myself starting to write something virtually identical to one of my previous posts, often with almost the same title. At the other into the spectrum, there are posts that I could've sworn I had written but of which there seems to be no trace.

For example, living in LA, I frequently run into people in the entertainment industry. One of the topics that has come up a lot over the past few years is the possibility of a bubble in scripted television. Given all that we've written on related topics here at the blog, I was sure I had addressed the content bubble at some point, but I can't find any mention of the term in the archives.

One of the great pleasures of having a long running blog is the ability, from time to time, to point at a news story and say "you heard it here first." Unfortunately, in order to do that, you actually have to post the stuff you meant to. John Landgraf, the head of FX network and one of the sharpest executives in television has a very good interview on the subject of content bubbles and rather than "I told you so," all I get to say is "I wish I'd written that."

But, better late than never, here are the reasons I suspect we have a content bubble:


1. The audience for scripted entertainment is, at best, stable. It grows with the population and with overseas viewers but it shrinks as other forms of entertainment grab market share. Add to this fierce competition for ad revenue and inescapable constraints on time, and you have an extremely hard bound on potential growth.

2. Content accumulates. While movies and series tend to lose value over time, they never entirely go away. Some shows sustain considerable repeat viewers. Some manage to attract new audiences. This is true across platforms. Netflix built an entire ad campaign around the fact that they have acquired rights to stream Friends. Given this constant accumulation, at some point, old content has got to start at least marginally cannibalizing the market for new content.

3. Everybody's got to have a show of their very own. (And I do mean everybody.) I suspect that this has more to do executive dick-measuring than with cost/benefit analysis but the official rationale is that viewers who want to see your show will have to watch your channel, subscribe to your service or buy your gaming system. While than can work under certain conditions, proponents usually fail to consider the lottery-ticket like odds of having a show popular enough to make it work. And yet...

4.  Everybody's buying more lottery tickets. The sheer volume of scripted television being pumped out across every platform is stunning.

5. Money is no object. We are seeing unprecedented amounts of money paid for original and even second run content.

For me, spending unprecedented amounts of money to make unprecedented volume of product for a market that is largely flat is almost by definition unsustainable. Ken Levine takes a different view and I tend to give a great deal of weight to his opinions, but, as I said before, Langraf is one of the best executives out there and I think he's on to something.