Life with the boring parts cut out.
The first website my colleagues and I created was for “Batman Forever” (1995, d. Joel Schumacher), starring Val Kilmer. That website changed my life and career. I never saw “Top Gun,” but Val Kilmer made a brilliant Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors.” Rest in peace.
“187” is a gorgeously lensed, strongly acted Samuel L. Jackson thriller, notable for its sun-dazzled Los Angeles setting, complex morality, and breakthrough trip-hop soundtrack. It would likely have been widely discussed at the time of its release, and might still be remembered, like the not thematically dissimilar “Falling Down”—filmed in the same city and released by the same studio a few years prior—if not for a horrible and tragic event.
187 is the story of a high-minded, humanistic public high school teacher (Jackson) who, after surviving a brutal assault by one of his students (Method Man, in one of his first film appearances!), fights back.
Vigilantism was hardly a fresh plot driver in 1997, but 187’s writer, director, and cast took it to unexpected and rewarding places. 187 challenged expectations. It deserved an audience.
Unfortunately for the film, 187’s release was overshadowed by a horrific real-life event. That year, Jonathan Levin, a public high school teacher, was murdered by one of his former students.
It was the kind of murder—tragic, senseless—that might have gone unnoticed by the press if not for one thing: Jonathan was the son of newly appointed Time Warner CEO Gerald M. Levin.
In the aftermath of the new Warner CEO’s son’s murder, there was no way that Warner Bros could promote a film about a high school teacher who kills his students. Warner buried the film by giving it a limited release with zero promotion.
I remember seeing 187 in a semi-private screening room before interviewing its star for Warner Bros, whose Executive Vice President of Marketing was my client at the time. The film’s moody music and cinematography transported me. I felt deeply engaged by the story, and riveted by Jackson’s performance. And, needless to say, I was also horrified to learn of Jonathan Levin’s murder.
Today’s death notice of Gerald M. Levin brought it all back in a Proustian rush.
Deadline-driven topic-sentence journalists will remember Gerald Levin as the architect of the ill-fated, oh-so-90s Time Warner AOL merger. But I will always think of him as a grieving father.
Rest in peace.
By arrangement with the director, we show our audience Gary Hustwit’s “Rams”—a documentary about product design icon Dieter Rams—during the extended lunch hour on Day II of our three-day UX & front-end conference event. I just finished watching it for the fifth time.
We’ve shown Gary’s film in every city of our tour this year, and each time I’ve watched it with our attendees, I’ve seen new things in the film, and been ever more deeply moved by it.
Rams’s work, and his message to designers seems more important now than ever before. Not only should every designer see this film; I wish every human being would see it.
Brian Eno’s ambient minimalist score feels like an audio correlative to Rams’s design principles. Although it’s used sparingly, every sound counts.
The film’s final shot, where Dieter walks off into the woods, always makes me tear up.
You can watch Gary Hustwit’s film at special events worldwide, on Vimeo, at upcoming An Event Apart San Francisco (our last show of 2019 and the last time we’ll screen Gary’s film), or by ordering it from the director’s company.
If you’re intrigued, as I am, by the trailer for David Fincher’s upcoming The Social Network, and if part of what compels you about the trailer is the musical score—a choral version of Radiohead’s “Creep”—you’ll be happy to know you can purchase said song via emusic.com: On The Rocks is the album, “Creep” is the track, and Scala, a Belgian all-teenage-girl choir, are the artists. Highly recommended.
P.S. If emusic.com had an affiliate program, I’d have free music for life.
Update! Final audio and video are now available for your listening and viewing pleasure at 5by5.tv. This is a wonderful episode about filmmaking and using the internet to reinvent yourself. Don’t miss it.
Live tomorrow, Thursday May 13, at 1:00 PM Eastern, my co-host Dan Benjamin and I interview Melissa Pierce, producer of the documentary film, Life In Perpetual Beta in The Big Web Show Episode 3: “Re-invent Yourself.”
Melissa Pierce’s film asks the question, “is the planned life worth living?” and sketches an answer via interviews with the likes of Baratunde Thuston, Irina Slutsky, and Biz Stone. Watch us turn the tables on the interviewer (now our interviewee) to find out how a homemaker with no filmmaking experience became the darling of the Chicago Independent Film Festival. As always, your live phone-in questions are welcome.
And don’t miss these upcoming Big Web Show episodes:
Thursday, May 20
1:00 PM Eastern
Featuring Kristina Halvorson, CEO, Brain Traffic and author, Content Strategy for the Web (New Riders, 2010); and Erin Kissane, content strategist, Happy Cog, and author, Incisive.nu.
Thursday, May 27
1:00 PM Eastern
Featuring Liz Danzico, chair, MFA in Interaction Design program at School of Visual Arts and author, Bobulate.
Mark Coleran designs, creates, and animates fantasy user interfaces for film. Hat tip: @Murtaugh.
BigThink is a global online forum, conducting interviews with such folk as Paul Krugman, Professor of Economics, Princeton, and Columnist, The New York Times; Jimmy Wales, Co-Founder, Wikipedia; Richard Armitage, Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State; Wes Boyd, Co-Founder, MoveOn.org; Gerry Adams President, Sinn Fein; Moby, Kurt Andersen, and so on.
By some tragic error of judgement, they will interview me today.
When the resulting video appears on the site, you’ll be the second to know.
[tags]bigthink, interviews, zeldman[/tags]
While employed at a famous New York advertising agency twenty years ago, a partner and I created a TV commercial touting an over-the-counter medicine client’s revolutionary new cold and flu remedy for young children.
Only when the shooting and shouting was over did we learn that the product did not, in fact, exist.
The commercial whose every creative detail we’d had to fight for was never going to run.
The client—the marketing side of a product development group—had a budget of $60,000 to spend. So they spent it, even though the R&D side of the product development group had not been able to deliver the product.
It was not a liquid medicine that needed to be measured. It was not a pill that needed to be chewed or swallowed. It was a pill that dissolved instantly on the tongue. Or would have been, if the engineers had been able to create it.
During weeks of presentation, the client rejected campaigns that would have caught the attention of the nation’s parents. The client bought a safe campaign that called less attention to itself, then set about systematically softening its edges. My partner and I wanted to cast like Fellini or Woody Allen. We brought in amazing children of various backgrounds, their faces rich in character. But the client picked cute blonde girls instead.
And so on. Every decision, however small, required approval. Everything was a fight. A ladies-and-gentlemanly fight. A fight that sounded like polite, mutually respectful discussion. A fight with invisible knives.
We won some and we lost some. For all the back-and-forth with the client, the resulting commercial wasn’t bad at all. The first few times anyone—even the guy delivering sandwiches—saw it, they laughed. Afterwards, they smiled. It could have been okay. It could have gotten my partner and me out of that agency and to a better one.
After the shoot was completed, the client told our account executive that the product did not exist and the commercial was never going to run.
The client had known this going in. So why didn’t they let us win more creative battles? Because they wanted something soft and safe to show the boss who had the power of life and death over their budget.
Why did the boss give them $60,000 to produce a commercial for a product that didn’t exist? Because that’s how corporations work. If they didn’t spend advertising dollars in 1988, they wouldn’t get ad dollars in 1989, when (in theory) they would finally have a product to advertise.
Governments, at least the ones I know of, work the same way. Since last night, the city of New York has been paving 34th Street in places it doesn’t need to be paved. Why do they do this? To justify the budget. In a better world, money set aside to pave streets that don’t need paving would be reassigned to something the city actually needs—like affordable housing, or medical care for poor or homeless people. But cities are corporations—that Mike Bloomberg is New York’s mayor merely confirms this—and few corporations are agile enough to rethink budgetary distributions on the basis of changing needs.
Last week, in an airport, on one of the inescapable widescreen TVs set to CNN (and always set to the wrong resolution) I saw a commercial for a revolutionary children’s medicine product that melts instantly on the tongue.
I guess they finally made it.
[tags]advertising, design, artdirection, writing, copywriting, TV, production, commercials, adverts, wisdom, work, experience, budgets, business, waste, government, medicine, OTC, overthecounter, newyork, nyc[/tags]
Crisply produced Voices That Matter Podcast video interviews with your humble narrator and a host of design and web luminaries—people like Nathan Shedroff, Dori Smith and Tom Negrino, Stephanie Sullivan, Robert Hoekman, Jr., Aarron Walter, DL Byron and many more—are now available for your listening and viewing pleasure in the iTunes Music Store and at Peachpit.
Additional Happy-Cog-related SXSW video, coming soon, includes:
Watch for announcements!
[tags]podcast, video, interview, zeldman, sxsw, voicesthatmatter, peachpit, authors[/tags]
Dragging my cheap three-wheeled suitcase home from Penn Station after a Boston business trip late Tuesday night, I passed three businessmen standing in the middle of Park Avenue with their raincoats awry. White, pushing 40, a few beers past sober. The one who slightly resembled Larry of the Three Stooges was trying to keep the party going.
“One more fucking beer,” he said. “Come on. I’ll fucking pay for it, motherfucker.”
Ever since Pulp Fiction electrified audiences and changed the film industry, every putz pushing 40 with a few beers in him thinks he is Samuel L. Jackson. Quentin Tarantino has a lot to answer for.
[tags]reallife, myglamorouslife, putz, pulpfiction, tarantino, pennstation, samuelljackson, zeldman[/tags]
[tags]catchphrases, hollywood, screenwriting, scriptwriting, brucewillis[/tags]
Now playing in New York and Washington D.C. and opening “everywhere” later this month, NO END IN SIGHT is the story of the American occupation of Iraq. The film explains how a military victory in 2003 descended into a seemingly endless nightmare of war.
Political scientist and first-time director Charles Ferguson in not a propagandist, and his film is not a left-wing tract. It is an attempt to chronicle U.S. policy decisions, told by the people who implemented or advised on them.
Ferguson’s camera captures the candid recollections of high-level insiders including former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; Ambassador Barbara Bodine, in charge of Baghdad during the Spring of 2003; Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell; and General Jay Garner, in charge of the occupation through May 2003.
Interspersed with these interviews, footage shot in Iraq shows what life is like on the ground for Iraqi civilians and American soldiers as the country spins into chaos.
NO END IN SIGHT somberly chronicles the principal initial errors of U.S. policy in Iraq: insufficient troop levels; allowing the looting of Baghdad; purging professionals from the Iraqi government; and disbanding the Iraqi army. With relentless logic, the film shows how Iraq descended into insurgency, warlord rule, criminality, and the anarchy that now borders on civil war.
It also reveals how the advice of military commanders and strategic analysts—advice that might have saved Iraq—was consistently ignored or trivialized by a small cadre of ideologues who thought they knew better.
NO END IN SIGHT offers much truth and little hope. It is a glimpse into a terrifying abyss—and a film every grown-up American should see.
[tags]noendinsight, iraq, war, charlesferguson[/tags]
[tags]POSH, kramer, exphone, keen, britannica, search, searchengine, wiki, google, wikipedia, mahalo, recycle, iphone, ipod, recycling, hitchcock, apple, design, webdesign, accessibility, backgrounds, patterns, tiles, diagonal, tartan, generator, ajax, tile, maker, creator, web2.0, stripes, diagonal, diagonal stripes[/tags]
