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littlepurinsesu · 4 years

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V Watches MagiReco - Season 1 Review

*Spoilers for Magia Record Anime*

If you’ve been been following my weekly reviews on the Magia Record anime, you’ll know that my “reviews” are really more like general impressions, thoughts, and fangirling as I mentally recap the episode after my initial viewing.

For this final review of the season as a whole, however, I’m actually going to try and make it more like an actual “review" and discuss each aspect of the anime separately. I’ll be splitting my points of discussion into individual sections and giving each a score out of 10, before rounding it all off with an overall score/grade.

Oh, not sure if this needs to be emphasised, but these are just my opinions! You may agree and you may disagree, and either way is cool! (・ω・)b

Before I begin, I just want to make it clear that one very, very important thing to keep in mind when watching and reviewing MagiReco is the fact that it isn’t a direct continuation of PMMM. So many people find themselves unable to enjoy the series because it’s “not the same” or “not the PMMM they know” etc. But it isn’t and was never intended to be. It’s a spin-off, not a sequel. To expect a spin-off to have the exact same impact and level of quality as the original is unrealistic to begin with, not to mention that although comparisons will be inevitable, the original PMMM anime has reached a legendary status where it isn’t really fair to compare anything with it xD

(And for the PMMM fans who are unhappy with MagiReco simply because it isn’t “dark enough” and there isn’t enough “suffering”, all I can say is that if a lack of darkness and suffering automatically means the show is bad, then this one just isn’t for you. Dark doesn’t equal good, and suffering isn’t essential. MagiReco is not intended to have the same tone as PMMM, and those elements do not entail everything that defined PMMM to begin with anyway.)

For these reasons, I’m going to try my best to review the MagiReco anime as a standalone piece and try not to make too many comparisons with PMMM, unless explicitly necessary. Also, as a game player, the inevitable curse of “expectations” was a major issue I needed to overcome when watching the anime. I will therefore also try my best to look past these expectations and try to see the anime as a story of its own. However, there will be discussions on the changes that the anime made and how I feel the anime did in adapting the game story for a television series.

Anyway, sorry for all the additional rambling. Let’s jump into the review before I lose everyone’s attention ^^;;

Plot: 8/10

One thing I love about the MagiReco plot is that they take the original world and concepts of PMMM and actually come up with a whole new story. It’s familiar yet different, and a perfect way to please the nostalgic fans while also offering something fresh. The PMMM world always had a lot of potential to explore other girls’ stories, considering how many Magical Girls there are, and it’s nice to meet a whole new cast of characters with their own story that’s still set in the same world and uses the same concepts we’re familiar with.

I think my favourite thing about the MagiReco plot, which is the same both in the game and in the anime, is the idea of the Wings of Magius. Any story that involves Magical Girls somehow trying to undermine or overthrow the Incubators’ system always has a lot of potential, in my opinion, and it’s a creative way to delve even deeper into PMMM’s unique take on the magical girl genre without being repetitive. But the key to what makes the Wings of Magius so compelling and intriguing as antagonists is the moral issues it raises. The grey morality going on with the Wings of Magius is not too different from the issues presented by Kyubey, and these kinds of moral debates get the audience really thinking about what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s good and what’s evil. The Magius are presented as being very similar to the Incubators in many senses--sometimes even worse--and I always love a compelling villain or villain group that actually gets the audience pondering whether the bad guys really are that “wrong" after all. Plus the whole idea of salvation and liberation and the whole cult impression we get from the Wings of Magius really adds another layer of that dark and creepy atmosphere that PMMM does so well.

However, I do strongly feel that many of the important scenes and major plot points were presented much better in the game. As mentioned earlier, having played the game meant I was going in with expectations for how I wanted/hoped/expected certain things to be done, and this is a common issue that adaptations have when there’s an audience familiar with the source material. I’m okay with completely changing parts of the game’s story to create something new, but there were instances where the anime intended to replicate the scene as it was in the game but somehow fell short in its presentation. These cases of inadequate storytelling thus hinder the unfolding of the plot, ultimately creating problems with coherency and pacing. (I mean, if you think about it, the “main plot” doesn’t really even truly begin until all five main characters have been introduced.) I have dedicated a whole section to this pacing issue, so I’ll go into detail when we get there xD

Characterisation: 7/10

The anime’s presentation of the characters ranges from fantastic to extremely lacking. Iroha has moments where she’s extremely passive, but also times where she’s shown to be quite proactive and brave as well. I’m honestly not too sure what to make of Iroha’s characterisation so far due to this big range, but I’m hoping that she’ll show more growth and that her changes will be written in a way that actually makes sense, rather than abrupt shifts that make you question how and when she had it in her. Either way, she’s a lovely sweet girl and a very likable character, and I do like that even if she isn’t necessarily always doing anything or contributing to a fight, the sole reason she’s in Kamihama in the first place (to look for her sister) is a good sign that she knows what she’s doing and has taken the necessary measures to go about her quest.

Yachiyo didn’t seem to display much uniqueness until her past was unveiled, and that wasn’t until we were well into the second half of the first season. In my opinion, this took way too long. I find this to be a slight problem because of how central to the plot Yachiyo is, and while I understand that backstories being revealed later on can have a bigger impact (like Homura’s in Episode 10 of PMMM), the way they portray Yachiyo throughout the majority of the season doesn’t have that constant loose thread hanging. She almost seems too “normal” at times, blending into the cast, and only when certain things happen or when someone says something in particular do you actually remember that we still don’t know what her deal is yet. I guess what I mean is that a more looming sense of “mysteriousness” could have justified the late reveal a lot better. The reveal of her past and her wish were slightly underwhelming, too, seeing as we hardly got to know Kanae and Meru before they were killed off, making it difficult to connect with those characters and thus relate to Yachiyo’s grief at losing them. And as for the revelation of her wish, I’ve ranted enough about it in my review for Episode 13, so you can check that one out if you haven’t already xD

Tsuruno has it even worse than Yachiyo because they literally haven’t revealed or even teased anything about her. All we know is that she works at a Chinese restaurant, was already friends with Yachiyo in the past (this “mystery” was later explained in Yachiyo’s flashbacks), and is super cheerful and energetic. Her backstory is the only one that hasn’t been shown yet, and they never really even hinted at there being something deeper about her character. While I completely understand that they’re intending to leave all that for the Rumour Tsuruno arc (which will most likely be done next season), I feel that they really needed to give us at least something for now. Even in the game, we got a better sense of who Tsuruno was as a person before the Rumour Tsuruno arc revealed her hidden sadness. I guess I can’t really fault the anime for this, since they’re just going in chronological order, but a little more insight into Tsuruno’s character would have been a better decision so that we don’t get another round of “info-dumping” when we do get to Rumour Tsuruno, and the reveal about her inner emotional turmoil would actually be a slight twist that adds even more depth to her character, rather than random information that never seemed important because there were never any signs of it.

But while Yachiyo’s and Tsuruno’s characterisation could have been better, Felicia’s and Sana’s were handled superbly. The anime actually made me adore Felicia as a character when I merely “liked her enough” in the game. She’s so much more than just the spoiled and rowdy child who goes berserk when seeing a Witch, and her introductory episodes (namely Episode 7) actually managed to move me to tears. Her bond with Iroha is also portrayed even more nicely in the anime, and I have a newfound love for the friendship between these two, which is quite underrepresented in the game. Felicia manages to retain all the lovable traits she displayed in the game with just the right amount of brattiness so as to not seem too annoying, and the anime hasn’t even really touched upon the cruel reality behind her wish. Whether or not they venture into that territory at some point, I just hope they continue doing as amazingly as they’ve done with Felicia so far, because she really is super cute and a lot more likable in the anime version <3

As for Sana, she’s more or less the same as her game counterpart, but something about the way the anime unveils her past makes it even more tragic. We’ve always known of her terrible “family” and the unfortunate circumstances of her home life prior to joining Mikazuki Villa. But the episodes that detail her story did a stellar job at bringing out and actually showing the sheer horror of having a family like Sana’s, and just how deep and suffocating her sense of loneliness was. Her story is absolutely miserable, but the anime manages to present it in a way that doesn’t make it seem like they were “trying too hard” just to make it as sad as possible. The things happen for a reason, and the consequences it has on Sana as a character are all realistic and believable, and even a wish as extreme as hers made perfect sense after seeing everything she had to go through.

Other characters don’t seem to have as much of a presence to warrant a paragraph of their own, but I will give honourable mentions to Rena and Tsukuyo. Rena’s Magical Girl Story made me a sobbing mess when I first read it, and while the anime obviously couldn’t sidetrack and include all the details, I think they did a pretty good job considering the limited amount of time they could spend on a supporting character. The anime also did a really nice job at giving Tsukuyo that humanising moment during her conversation with Iroha at the cafe, emphasising the good inside of her despite being an antagonist, and also taking the chance to give her a sense of individuality so that she and her sister are not always seen as an identical and inseparable pair with no personal lives or traits, so props to them for that :) Mitama has hardly made many appearances and doesn’t even seem very story-relevant at this point, so I’m wondering how they’re going to build up her importance in the next season so that she doesn’t seem like the “token shopkeeper character” who’s there for no real purpose outside of gaming mechanics (because we all know that Mitama is so much more than that). And as for characters like Kaede, she’s been changed so much that I’ll reserve my judgment for now because I simply don’t know where they’re intending to take her character. Same goes for Kuroe and her still-unclear purpose in the plot lmao

I think it’s important to remember that a lot of characterisation we get in the game is from Magical Girl Stories and Event Stories, both of which are obviously not viable to delve into too much in the anime. As a result, I guess it’s “to be expected” that the anime will have to give up quite a bit of the details that make all these characters so real, likable, or relatable. I’m not an anime writer, nor do I know anything about adapting games into anime, but I do feel that it would have been so much better if they had come up with some other way of compensating for the lost characterisation moments that are only shown in the game’s side stories. Not sure how else they should have done it, but simply removing some of these vital bits of information does harm the portrayal of these characters, especially when they’re part of the main cast.

But yeah, mixed feelings because while some characters really needed more work in the characterisation department, others were handled amazingly well xD

Pacing: 4/10

Okay, let’s be real. The pacing was almost definitely the anime’s weakest point, and possibly one of the main reasons why someone would find the show hard to enjoy or even understand. I’ve seen people complain that the story is too fast, and I’ve also seen people complain that it moves way too slowly. In my opinion, it really is a combination of both, and I’m honestly quite fascinated at how the anime somehow manages to pull off being both too fast and too slow at the same time xD

The story is almost excruciatingly slow in that it takes a whole ten episodes before the main cast is fully assembled. I thought a bit about this and, to be fair, some classic magical girl shows also take many, many episodes before all the main characters are introduced, such as Sailor Moon taking a whopping 33 episodes before all five Inner Senshi have gathered. So I guess this slow episode-by-episode “collection” of team members really isn’t something new. But MagiReco isn’t really a long-running anime that has filler episodes back-to-back to justify the slow pace of the plot. The plot is moving every week, yet it still feels like it takes forever to get the main cast together, which is slow enough to make the viewer question what they had been sitting through all this time when it’s been ten episodes and the story is really only “actually beginning” now.

And at the same time the plot somehow manages to feel too fast at the same time. How is this even possible? My answer to this is simply the fact that they introduce conflicts and mysteries, only to quickly resolve them and then immediately jump to the next one before the audience has even had a chance to really process or understand what they just watched. We’re not given the time to really absorb the development of the story or the subtle changes the characters are undergoing before we’re immediately thrown into a new mini “arc” the next week. In some ways, it almost seems like the “Monster of the Week” formula that many magical girl series adopt, only instead of being aware that we’re seeing trivial conflicts that are intended to last for one episode with characters we are likely not going to see again, MagiReco is throwing out new ideas, new terms, and new plot-relevant characters almost every episode, vomiting out information in a way that viewers who haven’t played the game will find very difficult to keep up with.

And that brings me to one of the biggest problems I had with the anime: important terms and concepts are often thrown in as a “by the way”. (This is most apparent with anything to do with the Wings of Magius before Episode 10, most notably Alina’s introduction.) Game players will obviously know what they’re talking about, but anime-only viewers are left confused and lost as to what exactly is happening half the time. I’ve seen more than a few instances where a viewer who wasn’t familiar with the game needed extra clarification and explanation before they understood certain things, and honestly that isn’t a good sign. All the important stuff should be made crystal clear so that even anime-only viewers will be able to grasp all the concepts without game players to spell things out for them. The anime should be a standalone piece on its own, not a “supplement" to the game. And the consequence is that anime viewers are constantly raising their eyebrows and wondering what the heck just happened or when the heck something was ever established, because crucial information is thrown around with no emphasis and the fast pace doesn’t allow viewers to digest anything properly. This unclear storytelling wastes the opportunity to present mysteries that are intended to keep the audience invested; rather than continuing the series because you just have to find out what something means or why something is the way it is, you’re left with question marks popping up all around your head because you’re confused af and wondering if you forgot or missed some crucial information at some point.

Another issue I had with the anime was what I’ve decided to dub the “one-shot curse”. Witches and Rumours alike are one-shot-ed so quickly and fights resolved so suddenly that I was often left wondering what the point of that fight was. Not to mention that a lot of the battles lacked real “action”. Witches appear, get one-shot-ed, and the characters return to whatever it was they were doing before as though nothing had happened. So... what was the point? I guess they really wanted to emphasise just how many Witches there are in Kamihama and just how easy it is to come across one everyday? Or maybe it was just for the sake of including an obligatory battle in each episode so there’s at least some action each week? Either way, if you’re going to include Witch battles, you may as well do them properly. For crying out loud, InuCurry, the guy who designs the Witches, is the director of the MagiReco anime! You’d expect a bit more emphasis and flourish to highlight what he’s so good at! But to be fair, there were some good Witch battles, such as the ones in the first episode, the ones in Yachiyo’s flashbacks when Kanae and Meru died, and of course, the epic battle between Holy Mami and Sayaka in the final episode. So they’re not all that bad, but I just feel like there was a lot of wasted potential.

I find that the main problem is a lack of balance between the battles, the exposition, the plot, and the fluffy slice-of-life stuff. All these are crucial to a good anime, and a lot of these moments were done quite nicely as standalone scenes. But the way the MagiReco anime has packaged them together and tied a very unattractive Bad Pacing ribbon on top just doesn’t work. It’s like a giftbox that has some lovely things inside if you look carefully at them one by one, but the way the gift is presented just isn’t very appealing and ruins the goodness of the content inside.

I get that the anime probably has issues with pacing because it’s essentially adapting a mobile game. I’m not sure if the pacing would be better if this weren’t the case and the MagiReco story was scripted for an anime to begin with, but I really, really hope they fix these pacing issues next season.

Visuals and Animation: 8/10

To me, the visuals were nearly always top-notch, and definitely a huge improvement from the original series. They managed to retain the art style of PMMM while also updating it so that it looks a lot more sleek and polished. The characters looked great, the scenery is gorgeous, the labyrinths all unique and intricately designed, and there was a lot of clever visual symbolism going on in the still shots and subtle scene transitions. I’m not an expert on animation or visual arts, but I definitely think this series deserves a very high score for this section.

There were a few instances where we saw some wonky “meguca" shots, but those were rare and nowhere near bad enough to detract from my overall enjoyment of the series. I don’t really have much else to say because, like I said, this really isn’t my forte, but I genuinely loved most of the visuals we got.

Music and Soundtrack: 9/10

I know a lot of us were disappointed when we learned that Yuki Kajiura would not be returning to do the music for MagiReco. And we all knew that whoever they hired would have very, very, very large shoes to fill. And I can definitely say that I was not disappointed at all.

Guys, the music for this series is AMAZING. Takumi Ozawa managed to capture the style that Kajiura used for PMMM in a way that retains the original tone of the franchise without seeming like a mere carbon copy of her work. I don’t think there was a single musical piece in there that didn’t make me feel like, “Ah, this is no doubt a PMMM anime!” And none of them gave me the impression that he was “trying too hard" to “rehash” Kajiura’s style. No, there’s familiarity and there’s originality, and it’s all packed together in a way that allows MagiReco to retain the charm of its predecessor while also standing strong as a work of art by itself.

I only docked one point because there were so many amazing tracks from the game and I don’t really understand why they didn’t use them when there were moments that seemed perfect for those tunes. It would be a nice sense of familiarity for game players, and it’s still considered “new stuff” for anime-only viewers too, so I really don’t get why xD Maybe they really wanted to separate the anime from the game? Which is also fair enough :)

I wasn’t so sure about “Gomakashi” as the OP when I first heard it in the trailer, but it’s definitely grown on me! While I still think “Kakawari” is superior and has a more catchy and iconic sound to it, “Gomakashi” is sweet and girly, very much like the kind of song you’d hear in a magical girl series. I don’t think this is an OP that will be legendary enough that everyone knows the tune (like the theme song for Sailor Moon, for example), but it’s a lovely song and I do like it a lot ^^

“Alicia” was beautiful from the very first time I heard it, and I’ve only grown more and more fond of it with each listen. Definitely one of my favourite EDs of all time, and perhaps my favourite OP/ED song out of the entire PMMM franchise.

And that ED song for the final episode? Gorgeous, too. Almost has a “Magia” kind of sound, and definitely sets a darker tone for the upcoming season where (I assume) sh*t starts getting real.

Overall: 7/10, B+ or A-

Despite my criticism and picking the anime apart in this review, overall I still genuinely enjoyed it a lot :D It’s far from perfect, but I was nowhere near as disappointed as I’ve been in the past with other anime adaptations, and while some parts could definitely have been handled a lot better, it was mostly still decent in my opinion. Get rid of the pacing issues and I’d probably give it a solid 9 (for context, I rate the original PMMM anime a 10/10, perhaps even higher if possible).

Again, I think my experience and knowledge as a game player definitely influenced my view on the anime as an adaptaion. For example, I already love the characters and know enough about them, and so I probably didn’t really feel the consequences caused by the anime’s sometimes lackluster characterisation. I also often have ideas of how I want or hope a part gets adapted, and then get disappointed when it’s done in a different and underwhelming way compared to what I imagined. I’m sure my impressions, comments, and scores would be very different if I were an anime-only viewer and had no idea how things went in the game. But alas, you can’t have both experiences to compare, so it is what it is xD

Anyway, no matter how much I nitpicked, I still love MagiReco a lot, both the game and the anime, and am really looking forward to Season 2! With the obvious changes they made in that last episode, I get the feeling that it’ll only diverge even further as the story unfolds. I’m okay with these new surprises and new takes on characters, but I do hope that they aren’t changing it all completely, because there’s a lot of good stuff in the later chapters that I really hope gets animated, e.g. Kanagi’s entrance, Rumour Tsuruno, Yachiyo vs. Holy Mami, basically everything that happens at Fenthope in Chapter 9, and of course, the big reveal about Ui, Touka, and Nemu’s wishes in the final chapter. Just imagining these things animated already gets me super excited, so hopefully we’ll at least still keep the core of the game’s story despite the changes (and hopefully these changes are all improvements!) ｡^‿^｡

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And since the anime is taking a break, my reviews will also be going on a break ╥﹏╥ I’ll probably still pop up in the MagiReco tag every now and then if I can think of something to talk about, though? Depends on what I can come up with xD But yeah, I don’t really post updates about my gameplay here (unless it’s something major like pulling my favourite character lol), so if you’re interested in seeing any of that stuff, you can follow me on Twitter instead, since I’m much more active there nowadays. I’m always happy to discuss things and scream with fellow fans, so whether it’s here or on Twitter, please feel free to approach me anytime if you want someone to fangirl with (๑ゝڡ◕๑)

I’ll be ending this post here! Thank you so much for reading, and please continue to love and support MagiReco while we wait for the second season ღゝ◡╹)ノ♡

#magia record #magireco #puella magi madoka magica #puella magi madoka magica side story #pmmm #fandom #mine #anime #review #magia record review #v watches magireco

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topweeklyupdate · 6 years

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TØP Weekly Update #53: Out (7/6/2018)

This is it, boys and girls. The “hiatus”, as we’ve called it for the last 364 days, is finally, finally, finally over... probably. Let’s cover the week that was, and look forward to the new era that could be.

This Week’s TØPics:

“New” Music Discovery

The Last Message From Dema

The Return of WILD SPECULATION

Major News and Announcements:

On any other week, new music from Tyler Joseph would be the biggest news story. And... well, I mean, I guess it should be, so we’ll cover it first, but it really doesn’t feel like it. That’s really weird, isn’t it?

@ultrawafflehouse shared a unique piece of content with the world in the middle of the week. After a friend of a friend received an old Tyler Joseph mixtape from a local youth pastor trying to prove his street cred to the middle schoolers of suburban Ohio, Ultra discovered that two of the unnamed tracks were pieces of music that had never previously found their way onto the Internet.

One of the unnamed tracks is a slick instrumental with elements of some of Tyler’s other early works like “Two” and “I Need Something To Kill Me” on full display: i.e., an extremely promising but unfinished arrangement from an extremely talented novice with no training or experience and a dozen better ideas than this that he decided to actually flesh out. Little wonder it, like presumably most of Tyler’s work, never made it to the general public.

The other track, however, actually sounds like a full song. Dubbed “Going Down” due to the phrase’s repetition in the hook, the track fits in perfect with the general No Phun Intended/Self-Titled sound; passionately-sung heart-on-sleeve lyrics supported by a simple piano arrangement with some basic hip-hop elements thrown in. I’ll be real: I was not blown away by this song. The writing in general, particularly on the hook, is low-energy, all over the place, and stretches the metaphors real thin. Tyler’s vocal delivery is at peak teenage whine, and his bars in the sole rap verse seem amateurish and out of breath.

But I wasn’t expecting to love it- most of Tyler’s stuff pre-Self-Titled, and even some tracks on the first two albums, are clearly made by someone who has no real clue how to do the whole music thing. “Drown” and “Blasphemy” are the only truly great songs from No Phun Intended, and they were both repurposed later down the road when Tyler had a better idea what he was actually doing. I still think Tyler is a genius, but he was not born the songwriter and performer he had become by the time Fueled By Ramen signed him. I still appreciate tracks like these, but more as historical curiosities, stepping stones to what Twenty One Pilots would become with brief flashes of Tyler’s insightful introspection and genuine brilliance.

The biggest news of the week, as with last week’s update, was not new music, but updates from the world of Dema. To start, we got three updates from dmaorg.info on Sunday. The first was a gif of a creepy vulture slowly turning to camera. Not too much to derive from this one. There’s the iconography of vultures, aka the carrion feeders who consume the bodies of the dead left at real-world Towers of Silence. The vulture can be seen to “blink” with its thin transparent eyelid, aligning it with the fifth Closing Eye Lyric: “Nobody dreams when they blink.” This correlation is strengthened by the name of the gif itself: “i”.

The second post, another letter from Clancy, was much more intriguing. The letter contains some great prose, with Clancy describing how the bishops have robbed the denizens of Dema of their dreams using something referred to as “smearing�� and pledging to not let them crush his hope. The references to nighttime and light connect it to the sixth Closing Eye Lyric, “remember the morning is when night is dead”. The image title of this update is “e_sr_eve_r.jpg” (”reverse” in reverse), and that’s reflected both the content of the letter and its organization- you can swap the order of the sentences, and it still makes perfect sense. But why this command to reverse? To what end? Hmm....

The answer to that comes in the third update, a simple smattering of yellow marks slipped out of chronological order in the middle of the list the list under the date of the band’s Grammy win. When laid over the Clancy letter, the markings for individual letters again spell out the word “trench”, which connects it to the audio clip from the previous Dema update, while the solid vertical lines highlight the phrase “We are banditos.” When you connect all these dots and reverse that audio, as several people had already discovered previously, it becomes pretty clear that Tyler is singing “We are banditos.” What does that mean? Well, hold your horses, kid, because the circled letters in the message spell out “end”. That looked like it might be it...

Until the gif that originally revealed the Dema site made its way back onto the main website. Many interpreted this to be the fulfillment of the last Closing Eye Lyric, “Now I just sit in silence,” due to the gif ending with the finale of the “Car Radio” music video, and a sign to the Clique to pay attention to the site if they weren’t already.

dmaorg.info finished its mission on Thursday with another rush of content. First, a photo of a vast desert with a single small figure possibly visible on the horizon. The image was simply titled “o_ut.jpg”. Not much else to say; once again, the big reveal was delivered to us by Clancy.

This letter is honestly the best fiction writing and world-building I’ve seen from Tyler yet, good enough to make me wonder if he’s been considering writing a Hunger Games-style YA series if this whole music career thing doesn’t pan out. Clancy lays out his plan to break out of Dema: since it will be impossible to sneak past the huge walls unnoticed, he plans to make a big commotion during the enclave’s biggest holiday, the Annual Assemblage of the Glorified, to distract the “watchers” and permit those from the “other side” to find a way in, then avoid being “smeared” by the bishops until the others can show him the way out. There are tons of great details and turns of phrase (”concrete coffin of a city”) and really cool moments (”They don’t control us” should sound way more cringey than it reads here.) They even snuck in a final hidden message message: following the dotted lines up the same number of rows as there are squares reveals one last “Wake up.”

The biggest takeaway from this letter, though, is how direct it is. It makes reference to it being “a year since the last convocation” and directly says that “by morning, everything will be different.” And, if you still didn’t get the message- *poof*. Within minutes of the Clique posting and dissecting these new posts, dmaorg.info was gone. They pulled the plug. The only evidence of the last few months of theorizing, speculating, and decoding will be on Reddit threads lost to the dust of time, as our thoughts become occupied with a whole different type of Twenty One Pilots content...

WILD SPECULATION:

As of the moment I’m writing this (7/6/18, 1 am PST), the band has not released any new music. I am not bopping to “Jumpsuit” right now. But something is totally happening within the next 12-24 hours. The only question is... what?

Well, I have zero information beyond the registration of the song titles “Nico and the Niners” and “Jumpsuit” and the implication that the songs will relate to this unfolding tale of Clancy and the Bishops of Dema. But I do have some theories/wishes.

First, I don’t think we’ll be getting a whole new album all at once. Twenty One Pilots ain’t Beyonce. They don’t have the clout (yet) for FBR to let them get away with dropping a full project with zero mainstream promo (also, there’s no other registered song titles, so nothing for at least a few weeks). I think that, in following the standard pop music tradition of the last few years, we’ll get two singles dropped on the first day (the aforementioned registered names), with a music video for one to tide us over, then a trickle of songs for two or three months before an album in time for the holidays. I suspect “Jumpsuit” to be the main radio-play single (I’m already picturing a prison break from Dema for the video), while “Nico” serves as the song for the fans that lays out more about this concept.

The thing that excites me most about the whole Dema idea is that, unlike the rather straightforward metaphor of Blurryface, the ARG content we’ve received so far has laid out an entire world populated with multiple named characters and concepts that we aren’t clear on just yet. Because of that, I think we might get quite a few songs (like, hopefully, “Nico”) that focus more on storytelling (and, also hopefully, killer soundscapes) than just affirming the importance of staying alive. I really hope “Nico” is, like, a nine-minute long rock/EDM opera that lays out all the different bishops’ plans and motivations while mashing genres in the classic TØP style. I really want to see Tyler and Josh push themselves artistically, and I think that what we’ve seen so far is really indicating that is the case.

A few more questions (and some speculation):

What other songs are coming? “Trench”? “Heavy”? “Banditos”? “Wake Up”? “Coconut Sharks: Requiem”? (No clue, can’t wait to find out.)

What will the promo look like? Will the band bother to participate in local radio interviews anymore? (Depends on how early sales go, I think.) Will they do any long-form/in-depth sit downs? (Rooting for Zane Lowe, but also hoping a mag like Rolling Stone that’s willing to put artists in the hot seat puts Tyler on his toes and asks some of the difficult questions.)

What can we expect of tour? (I’m calling amphitheater followed by arena shows, just like with Blurryface and a lot of the bigger FBR acts. Praying for more live musicians and maybe some theatrical stuff with Dema.)

What will the album be called? Dema? Silence? Tower of Silence? Iris [remember that, holy crap]? Blurryface 2: Electric Boogaloo? Hard to say (Probably the first one, let’s be real).

Will it be successful? (Almost definitely not as much as Blurryface. We’ll have to see how hard they focus on the Dema concept or an alternative sound, since radio hates weird.) Will it be good? (Yes. I was unsure for a long time, but I’ve got a really good feeling now. A really, really good feeling.)

Community Spotlight:

This is technically cheating, but I am part of the community, so I’m gonna write about myself today. Forgive me.

Last year, on my 21st birthday, Twenty One Pilots posted a shut eye and some mirrored lyrics on their social media and then, for all intents and purposes, disappeared. I spent my whole twenty-first year of life without ‘em (the irony is not lost on me), which was weird considering how much they had inspired and impacted me throughout high school and college.

I did a lot of stuff when I was 21. I graduated college. I got a new job. I made friends. I lost friends. I got in fights. I learned to let go, but not soon enough to spare someone I cared about from unnecessary heartbreak. I turned corners in my mental health, only to run into new walls. I listened to a ton of music. I grew up.

Today, I turned 22. The irony of the absence of Twenty One Pilots aside, I’m so glad I had the chance to figure out who I was without this band by my side every step of the way. I learned that I could make it. And now I get to have them back while I continue to make it. How sick a birthday gift is that?

Power to the local dreamer.

|-/

#twenty one pilots #tyler joseph #josh dun #dema #hiatus #top weekly update #music

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lancecarr · 5 years

Text

ART OF THE CUT with the editors of Ӂd Astra

Editors Lee Haugen (l) and John Axelrad, ACE (r). They were dressed in the space suits to shoot insert shots.

Editor John Axelrad, ACE, has been in post-production since 1991, including a stint as Oscar-winner Anne Coates’ assistant on Out of Sight and Erin Brockovich. He’s edited dozens of features including Slither, We Own the Night, Two Lovers, Crazy Heart, Something Borrowed, Miles Ahead, and Krampus.

Editor Lee Haugen started as an apprentice under Axelrad and then cut several films including Repentance, Dope (which won Best Editing at Sundance), and Miss Stevens before joining Axelrad again to cut Papillon and The Lost City of Z.

In this interview, we discuss their latest collaboration cutting Ad Astra.

I last spoke to Lee and John after they edited The Lost City of Z.

This interview is available as a podcast.

(This interview was transcribed with SpeedScriber. Thanks to Martin Baker at Digital Heaven)

HULLFISH: You guys must be on to your next projects already.

AXELRAD: I’m working on a Lionsgate movie starring Janelle Monae. It’s an untitled socio-political thriller. Actually, it is titled — they’re just keeping it under wraps.

HAUGEN: And I’m on an independent film called Keyhole Garden, starring Zoe Saldana.

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HULLFISH: How are you guys monitoring in your cutting rooms?

AXELRAD: I’m now working in 5.1. I absolutely love it. There were limitations for this film because they wanted us in a very secure environment and we were at a Pivotal Post in Hollywood and the rooms were really small and the configuration didn’t work for 5.1. So I’m embarrassed to say we did not do 5 1. We did LCR and we both had the LG 65 inch OLED, which I love so much I personally bought one for my living room.

HULLFISH: I used the exact same monitor on my last feature and definitely considered buying one for my home as well. It’s gorgeous.

There’s an opening revelation scene — not to give anything away — it’s the beginning in the movie where Brad Pitt’s character is being told all these important things that are then going to propel the movie for the rest of the way. I noticed that a lot of it was played on his reactions. Can you guys talk about the importance of playing lines on or off?

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HAUGEN: This being the third film that I’ve worked on with James and John, it’s always our number one priority to understand the point of view of the main character and get inside of his head, and get inside of what he’s processing and thinking. And it’s not so important to have the dialogue on camera as it is to see how the dialogue is affecting our main character. So that scene was a challenging scene because there was a lot of information that was given out. But our goal was to to make sure we knew how Brad was reacting to every single thing that was said and to see this whole revolutionary thought process totally change the way he felt about his dad and lay the groundwork for how things were going to be moving forward for the rest of the film.

AXELRAD: James is a very point-of-view-driven filmmaker, and so when we edit with him he’s always saying, “Where’s the point of view?” So we’ve been conditioned that we follow our main character and James wanted to get interior to his thoughts as best as possible, and playing so much of it over his reactions sets up the significance of his father — how traumatic it was for him — how the revelation that he still may be alive affected him. But the through-line throughout the film is to stay with Brad. James is very neoclassical in his approach. He likes to work in a very linear chronological fashion and staying with Roy as a character was paramount to that goal.

HULLFISH: You mentioned point-of-view and that’s definitely something that is strong with a lot of people. A lot of directors or editors want to know where that point-of-view is. Did the point-of-view change? Or did he always want you on a point-of-view of Brad’s character?

AXELRAD: Pretty much. If you look at the film it’s pretty much the story of Roy McBride. Just like The Lost City of Z was the story of Percy Fawcett. James is not one for irony — not one for multiple points-of-view.

The film I’m working on right now is very, very different. It’s a little more omniscient point-of-view and we do shift quite a lot. But James is purely focused on the main character and how the other characters interact with him and influence that main character’s thinking throughout the film.

HAUGEN: That was one of the things that — as we were going through the process — we always had to keep in mind because we wanted to send our audience on this journey to the edge of the solar system with Brad.

Ruth Negga and Brad Pitt star in “Ad Astra”.

There is one shot that we do change point-of-view and it was on purpose. There is one shot of Ruth after she drops him off to give his message from Mars, where we stay with her and the camera dollies back with her. It was kind of a warning to the audience — subconsciously saying, “Hey, this person is going to be an important character coming up,” but without tipping off too much of the information. It was more of a subtle thing — shift in point-of-view. And that’s the only time.

AXELRAD: Also because it stood out by itself, it was the only big break and I think was more powerful as a result.

HULLFISH: To explain that to the audience who hasn’t seen the movie — without giving away anything: this character Ruth is walking down a hallway with Roy, Brad Pitt’s character, and somebody else meets him. And Roy and the other guy walk away and instead of staying with the people that you would think you would stay with the camera turns and goes with her as she leaves them, so that’s the difference. That’s really interesting.

Lee, have you done films — or is your current film one — where you feel like you can or need to switch perspective?

HAUGEN: My current film, Keyhole Garden, is definitely one that changes point-of-view quite a bit. It’s six main characters shifting through time, perspective and point-of-view throughout the whole film intercutting between all of them. Since there are many characters set up in different places, we need to make sure the audience cares about each one of them, especially right away. Then we tie them all together and allow the story to unfold as it does.

It’s almost the complete opposite of Ad Astra. With Ad Astra, the number one thing is that we need our audience to understand Roy, care about him and root for him on this journey. It’s always a fun challenge to keep your audience engaged in and care about your characters.

HULLFISH: The other thing I talk about a lot is structure. Did the structure change at all?

The opening scene I believe is of Roy’s character taking or a psychological test. Is that the way the movie always started or did you feel like that better put the audience in with him? You guys are both smiling.

AXELRAD: James — to his credit — he’s writer-director and he co-wrote this with Ethan Gross, but every film I’ve done with him — and it’s been five up to now — he’s very willing to do a complete rewrite in post-production, so he’s not so precious about the written word. He allows the actors to bring what they bring to the story which ultimately transforms what was written on the page — either through ad-libs or just an actor having an idea of working within the framework of the script.

So post-production being the final rewrite, it was very fluid. It did change quite a bit from the script. We experimented quite a lot. And James — being the meticulous filmmaker he is — we tried almost every variation mathematically possible in putting the story together.

The film began in many different ways. They did some additional shooting at the end which I think was the big breakthrough– especially for the ending. This was the consensus the production team came up with working on a studio movie. There is a lot of collaboration going on and ultimately I think we finally got it working to where everyone was satisfied and it best served the story.

HULLFISH: It seemed like although it’s a linear story — the guy gets on a spaceship and leaves Earth — there were a lot of opportunities to change the structure — various scenes that you could easily move around. Was that a challenge or the fun thing?

HAUGEN: Some of the things that shifted around quite a bit were the psych evaluations because those were things that allowed us to give the audience insight into where Roy was at a specific point in time — and video messages as well.

Brad Pitt stars in “Ad Astra”.

We were able to manipulate them to heighten the tension or remind people what Roy is going through at that time.

HULLFISH: The other thing that I noticed was that there are big action set-pieces and there are also much more intimate in-your-head scenes. Did you find that you needed to manipulate those to keep the movie from dragging at any one point or you know trying to keep all the action spread out a little bit?

AXELRAD: This film was a particular challenge, especially for James. Some people have said that this is a beautiful film filled with wonderful production value, but at its heart is a very simple story about the heart. Throughout the film, the further we venture into space, the deeper we dive into the subconscious mind — the film itself is tackling existential issues about mankind’s place in the cosmos and reflections on who we are as a human race; being about identity and how we relate to each other. Those are very meta concepts. How do you really portray that in a feature film, especially a film that you want to be somewhat commercial for a mass audience? The action sequences were strategically placed throughout, mostly to support the more introspective scenes. We wanted to start off with a bang — which was the fall from the space antenna and then the lunar rover chase. The climbing of the rocket is more of a hypnotic, almost dream sequence in my opinion.

If you look at the subtext of Roy getting into the subconscious and us diving into the subconscious. His diving under the water — the cooling liquid under the rocket — I mean it’s almost intended to be a dreamlike sequence. He dives down — the subconscious mind as we dream gives us superpowers in a way. He climbs a rocket to reach his father. The whole story is mythological. Later in the film, it definitely becomes more metaphysical. Hopefully, the action sequences are paced in a way that it fits within the more hypnotic qualities of the film.

HAUGEN: We wanted to start out with a bang for the audience to enjoy. Space travel can be very unpredictable. As you go on this journey, you learn space is a terrifying place and a lot of bad things can happen in a short amount of time. Those other set-pieces and other things that happen on his journey act as a warning sign of: “should we really be going out this far as a human race? Is this a good idea?”

HULLFISH: There are a bunch of big action sequences but there’s also a lot of narration. Did you guys find yourselves having to scratch that kind of stuff or rewrite stuff in post with the director? Talk to me a little about the use of narration throughout the film?

AXELRAD: While not part of the original script, the voice-over narration was discussed between James and Brad both during preproduction and during production — that Brad would kind of do a stream of consciousness recording of the character’s thoughts. We didn’t have that as part of the script stage. So we edited the film without it and then this was later added in post.

Brad came in a couple of times and did a lot of ad-libbing — some of it was written. So there is a version of the film that exists without the voiceover and there is a version obviously that came out with it and ultimately I think it really enhances the film overall — the themes and the psychology.

This was an example of how James continues to manipulate the material in post and how he’s not precious to the original script. The final rewrite is in post and we were fortunate enough to work with some really good recordings from Brad.

As we developed the story, it became clear the fact that Roy is reclusive. How do you get into the mind of someone who’s so stoic and so closed off? The film itself is about his awakening — his catharsis and his metamorphosis into realizing what it is to be human: reaching for the stars but knowing that what he has is right in front of him and he doesn’t see it. So the narration was something we added later during the editing process, and that was a constant fluid rewrite collaboration between James and Brad Pitt. It changed as we changed the story during the editing process, but ultimately the goal was to get into Roy’s head as best as we can.

HULLFISH: Was it hard to keep a straight face with Lee scratching tracks for Brad Pitt?

HAUGEN: I do a pretty good Brad Pitt.

HULLFISH: Let’s hear it! I’m ready!

HAUGEN: James actually does an amazing Brad Pitt impression, and a Tommy Lee impression. He did all the temp ADR for us.

The other thing for the voiceover: when we were recording it, we wanted to make it feel more like stream-of-consciousness — to not be just narrating the film. We wanted it to really feel like you’re understanding what Brad’s character is thinking about.

The first ADR session to record voiceover with Brad we had quite a few lines written down and we were planning on taking a full day to do it, but Brad sat down and he just went on a run and did everything in a one-hour straight take. He just kept going. Nobody knew what he was going to do but it was amazing.

AXELRAD: This is a testament to James. The fact that he will let the written word evolve.

Editors Lee Haugen, John Axelrad, ACE, and additional editor Scott Morris

You’ve heard that the script is the first stage; production is the second rewrite, and post-production is the final rewrite. The editing room — for James — is a blank canvas. It empowers us as editors and empowers James as a filmmaker. It doesn’t surprise me that we would come up with ideas like that to make the film transcend what it was on the page.

Brad definitely improvised quite a lot. Some of it was written. Some of it was improvised, so that was one of the more challenging things to find the right words in the end and to craft the story as a whole with the narration.

HULLFISH: Talk to me about having to edit that ad-libbed or improvised stuff because then you’re not just choosing your favorite take of a specific line, you’re choosing your favorite LINE. You’re choosing content over just performance.

HAUGEN: That’s something that was a great asset to have and also very challenging. He would come up with these great lines or James would come up with great lines and it would kind of shift the way scenes would play and that would also affect other things around it. So we were constantly re-editing to elevate each scene as we went along.

HULLFISH: One of the things that I spotted was a couple of video montages and even some audio montages. Were those written as montages or were they things you had to condense from full scenes or maybe some of each?

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AXELRAD: There wasn’t anything I think that we condensed or took bigger sequences and cut down. Maybe the swimming in the rocket coolant liquid underneath the rocket. That probably changed from the way it was originally intended.

It’s the natural part of the editing process. There were scenes that were cut down quite a bit. Some scenes towards the end were intercut. And that wasn’t necessarily part of the original script.

The whole sound design was so paramount to making the film work, and you hear some weird sound at the beginning of the film that sounds like “bluh-bluh-bluh… bluh-bluh-bluh.” It’s just this rhythm thing and it’s basically Tommy Lee Jones’ character saying “I love you, my son. I love you, my son. I love you, my son.” Gary Rydstrom did a wonderful job with the sound design, and Tom Johnson stretched and mixed the words and manipulated them into a drone-like audio montage.

We were not short of visually fascinating images. Part of the process was to condense where we could.

HULLFISH: Since that sonic landscape was so important, did it change when you got the final of that? Did it affect things or were you guys getting elements that you could put in as you went? Talk to me a little bit about sound design and kind of when it happened and what you guys did yourselves.

Screenshot of the Avid editing timeline mid-way through the edit process.

HAUGEN: Being on a larger budget studio film, we did have the benefit of having a sound team early on. Doug Murray was able to get to work with us while we were editing. And he was able to develop some amazing sounds and give them to us early, and those did affect certain points of the story that we were editing. We would just feed off of each other and we’d come up with cool ideas. He’d come up with amazing concepts and we would extend the cut or we’d shorten the cut or we’d pace it out differently– because once you add sound you add a whole other element to the building blocks of a scene, and it can make it feel very different.

AXELRAD: Doug Murray started the film and was in-house as was our postvis team. We had amazing postvis along with the previs. Adam Avery was our VFX editor and Eddy Garcia was the VFX assistant editor. It was just fascinating to be able to go down the hall and say, “Hey, we’ve got a new idea. Can you mock something up?” And in a few hours, he would not only do it but go beyond what we thought about. He would creatively add to the concepts and then we would take that and play with it. The whole post process was so fluid that way, where we were collaborating and it was a very open editing room.

When I work I encourage having collaboration. Lee and I go back and forth with ideas. Scott Morris — who was our first assistant and then got promoted to additional editor on the film — and all the assistants on the team were involved. We encouraged ideas in all departments — from sound to visual effects and music.

Max Richter started composing very early. I always tell the composer “Hey, if there’s something in the edit that doesn’t quite work and you want to musically do something and want us to potentially change the edit, I’m completely open to that.” I think that’s what the editing process should be — just a synergy of all the departments working together for the best film possible.

Brad Pitt stars in “Ad Astra”

HULLFISH: You mentioned Max Richter’s score. It’s very different. It’s very electronic….

AXELRAD: It wasn’t all Max. I think some of the electronic stuff you heard — there were more composers that contributed towards the end of the process. The main themes you hear throughout the film is Max’s minimalist music.

HULLFISH: Did you guys temp with stuff from Max? Or was he delivering stuff as you went?

AXELRAD: We did. Definitely. We used a lot of Max from previous scores and from his own personal compositions. I think for a while we used his version of Vivaldi. He did just a beautiful composition that we temped with at the beginning. Our music editor, Katrina Schiller, started with us early on and was down the hall in the edit suite. James worked with her a lot, and she did a fantastic job with the temp score. Of course Katrina worked directly with Max as he composed and during the scoring sessions in London.

James loves to temp with classical music and we use a lot of Wagner. In many of his past films, we use Puccini, who is a personal favorite of James. But this one seemed to be a very Wagner-heavy film. And we temped with Eliane Radigue — she has this almost transcendent drone. James definitely likes drones and minimalism. So a lot of that was used throughout the film and then Max came in and did his own themes and the film really evolved once he got into it.

HAUGEN: We did have a little Pink Floyd in there for a while too.

AXELRAD: We couldn’t afford it. So it was a non-starter anyway. Pink Floyd wasn’t gonna give it up.

HULLFISH: There were times when you didn’t use music where I think you might have. There is an emotional message to Eve. Roy leaves and my recollection of that is that there’s no music under what you would think: “Oh, let’s put some emotional music under here.” Can you talk about that decision?

L to R: Donald Sutherland, Brad Pitt and Sean Blakemore star in “Ad Astra”.

HAUGEN: We do like to use silence too, throughout the film. There are parts where you don’t have music and it’s more raw, emotional and real. We wanted the audience to just be in his head and feel what he’s feeling. We didn’t want to manipulate it as much with music. Let the audience see it on Brad’s face and through his tone and his voice.

AXELRAD: And to further that point: I call it the “S” word because studios get very nervous when you start proposing long stretches of silence. But it’s a very brave thing to do, especially when you’re making a film about outer space where the silence is just deafening. And the whole idea is that Roy goes through this transformation in his isolation and that the silence itself causes him to reflect inward and really try to dive into the subconscious mind. And for the viewer, it’s to experience what space is and the idea of isolation.

Lee and I have both worked on films that dealt with isolation. We worked on Papillon and The Lost City of Z. This concept is very hard to convey– especially when you’re trying to get so interior to one’s thought process. So towards the end of the film, we did employ much more stretches of silence. Not having music on certain scenes such as the one you mentioned — the message to Eve — was really just to buck the trend of what’s expected and to punctuate certain scenes with more emotion by having less instead of having more.

HULLFISH: I have this note that I wrote in a dark movie theater “Dissolve. Pitt appears.” Was there a really long dissolve?

AXELRAD: Yeah. That was in the journey to Neptune.

Towards the end of the process, Hank Corwin came on board and he really worked on that whole sequence — the journey to Neptune.

Brad Pitt stars in “Ad Astra”.

That sequence had many different iterations. At first, it was more lyrical, but as we put the film together the desire was really to demonstrate the fractured state of his psychology. Hank was very inventive and took that whole sequence and went with it. That sequence ends with an empty chair and it dissolves to show Roy as he appears in it. This is right before we reveal the planet Neptune. The challenge was: “How do you convey such a long journey and how arduous it is but not bore the audience to death?”

We have to give credit to Hank for those ideas and that particular sequence.

HULLFISH: On a lot of this movie, you don’t have the structure of dialogue to carry you. Can you talk about the inventiveness of anything that you guys had to do or that Hank had to do to be able to carry some of those scenes that were largely, “Hey, it’s a journey. How do we portray this?”.

AXELRAD: Yeah. This is a tough one. When editing I adhere to the philosophy that less is more. I believe you can shape the best performances around what is not said through more nuanced cues of facial expression and gesture. I think our proud moments in the film as editors are when we can craft something that transcends what is written and what is photographed– to achieve a compelling synergy of sound, music, and performance to create heightened emotions. And that’s one of the more challenging things to do.

As challenging as it was to edit the lunar rover chase sequence, that really did not compare to some of the more nuanced drama sequences where there wasn’t much dialogue. That’s really challenging as an editor and rewarding at the same time: when we can pull something off that we don’t have the written word and dialogue to structure around. And so it was very malleable because there were so many different ways we could do it and we did keep experimenting with that. Brad just delivered such a nuanced, subtle performance — so rich with his gestures and thoughts. And that was the goal really — to get inside his head without having to use much dialogue in those places.

HULLFISH: How did you two collaborate as editors — or even with Hank. How are you breaking up responsibilities and deciding what stays and what doesn’t?

HAUGEN: Collaboration is a great word to describe the way that John and I work together. During the dailies process, we each would grab a scene. We’d go through the process of editing the rough assembly together and then right away we would show it to each other and to our assistant editors. We’d get everybody’s opinion and outside perspective on what was working and what wasn’t working.

Sometimes we would trade scenes just to try different things out. As we moved through the process to the director’s cut, we never took sole responsibility for each scene by itself. I don’t think there’s a frame on the film that John and I both didn’t touch. It’s a process that we continually kept working through — a very fluid process between John and me to allow us to try and find the best scene possible.

AXELRAD: Some editors on an editing team may say, “OK, I’ll do this part of the film. You do this part of the film.” Personally, I think the film benefits with more brains working on everything. I think James appreciated that too.

When Lee and I first started working together with James on The Lost City of Z, it took James a little while to warm up to the idea of “Hey, I’ve got two editors here.” A lot of times we would work with both of us in the room and we would brainstorm. Either Lee or I was at the controls — depending on whose room it was — and we would brainstorm together with James.

If Lee was working and we were in his room, I might say, “Well, what about this?” And James would say, “Great idea! Go try it.” And I would disappear into my room and then James would later come in with Lee and we’d work in my room for the rest of the day.

Lee Haugen, Scott Morris, and John Axelrad, ACE

And Scott Morris, who got promoted to additional editor, became very, very instrumental — especially towards the end of the process. There was more than just Lee and me. Our other assistants – Jared Simon, Jason Voss, and Eddy Garcia – also contributed ideas, and I think that it ultimately made the film a better experience. We’re not serving ourselves and our egos. We’re serving the film, so there is no pride in ownership of certain things within the movie.

HULLFISH: I cut a bunch of movies with a director that also writes and you would think that those kinds of director/writers would be a bit precious with their words, but I know it’s not for Alex — the director I work with — and it sounds like it’s not for James either.

AXELRAD: Certain directors that I’ve worked with — I remember early in my career I worked with a director who will go unnamed — but I would show him the cut and he’d say, “Yeah, but you cut out two words.” And I would say, “Well yeah, because they’re not quite necessary.” But he was insistent on the final cut being word-for-word to the script that he wrote.

Just knowing the possibilities and potential of what we can do in post, I do think most directors — even those who have written — he or she would welcome the idea of improving — or in a way transforming — what was on the page, because you can’t necessarily convey nuance very well in a script. It’s why some novels may not necessarily translate well into movies. It’s just a different medium. The actors themselves bring their own interpretation to the script. And so I think the best-laid plans of a writer/director immediately goes out the window when you start collaborating with your actors. To see what they can bring to the themes of a movie with their performances. Sometimes it works — sometimes it doesn’t work.

Director James Gray (Photo by Kris Connor/20th Century Fox)

Joaquin Phoenix is a prime example. He’s such a brilliant method actor. James, I think, has done four films with him and I edited three with him. What Joaquin brings to it just elevates the material to a whole third dimension that pops off the page.

HULLFISH: I just interviewed the Joker editor and he said the same thing about him. Just incredible performances and a huge range and great technical skill.

I’m shocked that the narration was not a big part of this movie when it was originally written. I am shocked.

AXELRAD: I think it’s a good thing. What makes the film work? You throw out the blueprints. There is a version of the movie without the narration — without hearing his thoughts. But in the end, this was what the production team decided to include. James always maintained that this idea was discussed in pre-production to be an extension of the psych evaluations. It just wasn’t done until post.

HULLFISH: It’s an internal monologue more than it is narration.

AXELRAD: Yes. Internal monologue. So it’s not really narration. The film works without it, but it’s a different movie. So it wasn’t like the internal monologue throughout the film saved the picture. It just was an additive layer that helped us convey the themes we wanted to convey.

It was actually very liberating because things that audiences weren’t fully understanding — there are so many high concepts in this with technology and psychology – we were able to truncate scenes and parts of scenes that were purely expository: Why this person does this? Why does this character think this way? And it helped us to condense in so many ways. But it was just an added layer — the way that music is, the way that sound is.

vimeo

HAUGEN: I think in the overall scheme of things the entire film is extremely complicated as far as editorial goes because we had so many different things to deal with — whether it was the dune buggy chase or the solitude. To find the right balance through editing, to make the movie soar to where it could go was very rewarding in the end.

It’s a rarity these days to work on a film with this large of a budget but really be an internal, arthouse-type film. To balance those elements was challenging, but also a lot of fun. Not too many times do we get to edit a shoot-out on the moon or a zero-G fight or a fall from a huge tower. And at the same time to get such an amazing performance from an actor that just took it to a whole other level. For us, that was the joy of being able to work on this film. We hope they do keep making these types of films.

AXELRAD: It’s got a lot of commercial elements. Obviously we want the biggest audience possible watching it. But it’s got a lot of more independent or arthouse elements as well. I think that with sequels and everything out these days, there isn’t a whole lot that’s just purely original. And studios tend to be a bit cautious. I mean it’s a huge investment. Any type of film is.

Lee and I are just eternally grateful to be able to work with such a broad canvas and really to be able to shape the film in many different ways in the editing process. It’s why the editing on this film took a while because there are so many moving parts.

Allen Maris, who is our Visual Effects Supervisor, just went above and beyond the call of duty, because visual effects — as expensive as they are — were part of the process to fully develop the film.

Brad Pitt stars in “Ad Astra”.

The whole sequence of the lunar rover chase worked as scripted, but it became clear that it was too claustrophobic. We needed geography, and so we added those high angle shots looking down, which not only helped clarify geography, but it also heightened the tension: to see these pirate rovers encroaching upon our hero rover. All of this was in the editing process. That’s what was such a joy — is that it wasn’t just paint-by-numbers. We were truly creating as we went along.

HULLFISH: I don’t know how to describe it, but it seems like a movie that could literally go any way. It seems like the editing possibilities in this particular film — because all films, of course, are like that — but the editing possibilities seem endless.

AXELRAD: It was. It was like the void of space. And honestly, if they gave us more time, the editing would continue. There were infinite possibilities.

HAUGEN: We did have to get from Point A to Point B eventually but throughout that journey, there were a lot of different options. Ultimately, we wanted to convey that the inner journey Roy experiences is just as meaningful as the outward journey to Neptune.

HULLFISH: For a cut-and-dried effects film where you say, “Hey, look! Here’s the effects sequence. I’m gonna cut it early in dailies and I’m going to deliver it to the effects house and they’re gonna do it and it’s gonna be done.” That does not sound like what happened with you guys.

HAUGEN: No. For example, the falling tower sequence at the beginning — once we started to get the visual effects in for that – everybody was in love with it and thought it was fantastic. But we actually wanted to expand it. It had a lot of different elements and one of those elements was a skydiver who would go up as high as he could and jump. We actually had to send him back out to do some more jumping to add more of the elements for the falling and to extend the moment even more.

AXELRAD: Yeah, it wasn’t until we started screening for test audiences and they loved the sequence that we decided, “OK, let’s expand it!” And those were very difficult VFX to get right. Nothing was cut-and-dry and I think that allowed us to bring the film to the place where it wound up.

HULLFISH: I talked to somebody else that was said that there was a visual effect in their movie that when audiences saw it they wanted more time to look at the amazing shot. When you guys are cutting it, you’re looking maybe at a graphic that says “wide shot goes here” or something, or possibly some clunky previs, but you don’t know it’s gonna be something you want to watch for 20 seconds until you see the final shot.

AXELRAD: It was very illuminating working on such a visual-effects-heavy show. The visual effects weren’t all preplanned because you’re dealing with outer space and the story itself evolving the way it did. So Allen Maris stayed with us to the very end and just allowed us and James and Brad and everyone involved just to work with this canvas to let the movie transcend to new heights.

Every day we worked in the editing room with James and it just made the film better and better.

HULLFISH: Lee, John, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you talking to me about this movie. Good luck with your next projects.

Art of the Cut: Conversations with Film and TV Editors

AXELRAD: Thank you much.

HAUGEN: Thanks, Steve. Bye.

To read more interviews in the Art of the Cut series, check out THIS LINK and follow me on Twitter @stevehullfish. or IMDB

The first 50 interviews in the series provided the material for the book, “Art of the Cut: Conversations with Film and TV Editors.” This is a unique book that breaks down interviews with many of the world’s best editors and organizes it into a virtual roundtable discussion centering on the topics editors care about. It is a powerful tool for experienced and aspiring editors alike. Cinemontage and CinemaEditor magazine both gave it rave reviews. No other book provides the breadth of opinion and experience. Combined, the editors featured in the book have edited for over 1,000 years on many of the most iconic, critically acclaimed and biggest box office hits in the history of cinema.

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altusfl · 6 years

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1. Welcome to My Alternate History of the USFL

“If GOD had wanted football in the Spring, he wouldn’t have created baseball.”

---Donald Trump, owner of the New Jersey Generals, a team in the United States Football League, a spring football league.

Trump made that statement to the media as part of an active campaign to discredit the idea of spring-time professional football.

Trump’s fellow USFL owners were content with the spring when Trump finally got around to buying into the league prior to its second season, so Trump wanted to create momentum for a move to the fall. So he went to the media.

As a teenager I remember thinking, “Doesn’t he realize that he is hurting the businesses of all of his fellow owners?”

The thoughts of children....

About a year ago I decided to write an alternate history of the United States Football League after reading a post by Allen Bertsche (a.k.a. “Wide Right”) who wrote an alternative history of the USFL, beginning after the 1984 season that I thought was quite inspiring.

I have long thought the USFL had a shot if Donald Trump and Eddie Einhorn had not taken the league off a cliff.

I have read a ton of articles, websites, and books about the USFL.

After reading Mr. Bertsche’s writing I became even more convinced that the league walked away from a viable product specifically due to that vote.

Survival may have been surprisingly possible

Now some of Allen’s premises I found to be very, very unlikely, but as I read, I was sucked into the fact that his contentions overall didn’t seem all that unreasonable.

I wasn’t prepared for that.

I couldn’t escape the underlying premise that had some minor actions changed for the USFL — even after what I had always considered “the point of no return” — the 1984 season — the league could have been saved.

Some of his ideas about which players might head to the USFL after 1984 are incredibly insightful and, if things had unfolded in a different manner, probably would have happened. So from time to time in my chronology, you’ll see some parallels to his timeline as I steal / plagiarize certain things from his chronology. (Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Mr. Bertsche.)

I began to write and soon my normal blog, The Sports Minority Report, was filled to the brim with posts about this alternate timeline for the USFL.

Eventually, I couldn’t stand it anymore and decided to move it to the dedicated blog you are reading now.

........

This may be all you want to read in this first post. Things get moving and shaking in post #2.

To get there, you can skip to the end of this article. On every page there is a link to the next piece of this alternate history.

The rest of this post is an FAQ.

Q: You had this formatted differently in the old blog...Why reformat everything?

A: I have tried to cut the articles into more bite sized pieces here with each post covering a specific subject.

My goal was to paint a three dimensional picture of what could have been if people with interests contrary to running Spring football teams didn’t convince the struggling USFL owners to jump off a cliff, taking down several solid franchises.

One of my goals was to show that this wasn’t just a non-viable idea. This was a typical business with struggles, that a pair of corporate raiders skunked.

But in fleshing that out, I ended up with posts that were just too long.

I have tried to make this more reader friendly by “chunking” it more by main ideas.

Doing so also makes it easier for me to write future seasons as the membership swells.

Q: “Who cares about the USFL? It was bush league football.”

A: I do for one, and No... it really wasn’t.

A lot of USFL superstars went to the NFL after the league ended and those superstars dominated there too on their way to Hall of Fame careers.

I think the USFL was on a better than parallel development path to the one the American Football League took. And the Jets beat the NFL’s champ in Superbowl III!

The USFL had a LOT more star talent, and a lot more talent overall than the AFL, much earlier in their existence. If you look around you will find that no one disputes that point..

And a lot of that was due to George Allen. Allen organized tryouts all over the nation. He was a bit gluttonous (signing ----no joke --- about 350 players who flashed in his workout to contracts to his initial Chicago Blitz team, lol...) but a ton of those players made it on to USFL rosters in year one.

The league started in year one with a talent level leagues like the XFL and UFL couldn’t touch.

I read a news article written by Hall of Fame Pittsburgh WR turned TV analyst Lynn Swann published after the USFL’s initial season. Swann had just recently retired from the NFL after the 1982 season.

After watching the USFL’s first season, the difference he saw in terms of level of play with the USFL was that the new league had little depth at that point compared to NFL rosters and they played with more simplistic coverage schemes to cover a lack of secondary talent and depth.

That said, Swann said that several USFL teams’ starting lineups could compete with NFL teams.

Given Swann’s comments , I feel safe in saying good USFL teams would not have dominated in the NFL, but it is fairly likely at least the top 4 teams in year one (Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Boston) could have beaten a fair number of NFL teams.

They might have been 6-9 win teams in the NFL...even with their lack of depth.

And the USFL’s talent level improved every year.

A lot of USFL players have made the comment that in year one maybe a third of team’s starting lineup were legitimate pro players. By year two, it might be 2/3 of their starting roster. By year 3 the entire starting units were legitimate pros.

(I think you can look at this as the natural payoff to having a league worth of players spending two paid offseasons training and improving their games under the supervision of quality coaches. Everyone with talent gets better with practice.)

Now the NFL HAD more talent, but you need to wrap your head around what that really means...

Something like 3% of Division I-A players will ever play for an NFL team.

With the USFL around, that number swelled to about 5%.

Do you really think a team comprised of players from the 4th and 5th percentile could not beat a team comprised from the top 3%? That is Oklahoma beating Texas or Michigan State beating Michigan or Auburn beating Alabama.

It happens all the time.

A lot of NFL coaches will tell you that the guys they cut in the final cut are just as talented as the backups they keep on the roster.

If you think about it, that makes a ton of sense. A coach might keep a guy on the roster who he trusts over a guy with more talent who he can’t trust.

The USFL starting lineups were made of those guys, with a sprinkle of high profile 1%ers.

One only has to look at the Superbowl III champion Jets to see what those kinds of guys can do against the “elite” if given 4-5 years of on the job football training.

At that 5% level, it is all about how you select and coach the talent.

A skilled solid NFL receiver might be a lower to mid tier star in the USFL ....if he landed with a coach who would maximize his talent.

Jim Kelly’s Run and Shoot offense dominated USFL secondaries by flooding the field with what the NFL at the time would have considered 3rd or 4th WRs. In the cookie cutter NFL world where everyone ran pro set offenses, those tiny receivers were a dime a dozen.

But then Jim Kelly explodes and one of his receivers (Ricky Sanders) goes to the NFL and dominates.

A sound NFL QB might be a star in the USFL because in the USFL’s early years the league’s secondary talent was a half step slower, turning NFL INTs into USFL completions.

That isn’t to say that the real superstars of the USFL --- Jim Kelly, Herschel Walker, Reggie White, etc. ---- the 1%ers wouldn’t also be superstars in the NFL.

It is important to get that. AND that the USFL was catching up to the NFL’s level of play faster than the AFL did.

It was legitimately a pro league. And that’s why people like myself still like thinking about it to this day.

Disclaimers

Alternate timelines involve a lot of wishful thinking and optimal decision making. It is easy to get lost in that.

I’ve tried to keep the sheer optimism to a minimum, and instead have focused on strategies that involved people might have employed if things had gone slightly differently.

But things go better for the USFL if they stay in the spring.

The money increases geometrically as new principles become involved and frankly the league gets better at being a league. It matches and then surpasses their spending rate, much as the AFL did.

The way to view this in writing it, is as if I have “tuned in” to an alternate timeline where the USFL made a couple optimal decisions early on, and now I am just reporting what happened.

I have made every effort to write this “organically”. I tried to make it realistic, with bumps and flubs along the way based on my perceptions of the owners, coaches, and front office personnel.

Principles on this chronology make pointed stances only to back off them a year later when the circumstances change.

That is how the USFL was.

Just like in the first two seasons where the LA Express, then the expansion Pittburgh Maulers franchise, both skipped on Dan Marino ---- opportunities are missed in my timeline when the principles involved would actively pass on a great option.

You’ll see years where the conditions financially are rough for USFL owners. You’ll see them really pass for the most part on name prospects, resigned to sign rookies who will take the league minimum or backups on other teams.

One of the reasons I keep writing entries is that I am absolutely taken with how many top college players the survival of this league could have employed.

And how few it hurts. With the exception of Brett Farve. (Poor, poor Brett Farve....But that season is very far up the list.)

Three areas with big mistakes

This blog is setup to trace this league into late 80′s and beyond. That created a lot of hugely time consuming issues.

I curse myself for adding annual breakdowns of notable players on each team’s rosters. I have players on multiple rosters here and there. I have to have those lists to keep the players straight, but it is a major pain to fix a misplaced or duplicate player over several seasons.

I also have some of these guys playing WAAAAY too long. Some of these guys were on their last legs when the league started and wouldn’t be backups or starters even in 1985. I don’t think those guys retiring dramatically change how I would think the teams would finish. Most teams maybe had 1 or 2 old difference makers and I caught those. George Allens team had many and I think I had that team basically getting old overnight.

What I am more talking about are the middling starters and notable backups that were old. I will fix that in time.

Stadium capacities are also an area where I may have mistakes here or there. I have made every effort to get the stadiums capacities right for the years, but human errors occur.

Also as the league survives their home stadiums would be updated or in certain situations, like San Antonio, replaced.

I have tried to show that.

Reallocation

Every time there is expansion, players are reallocated. As I was doing this I noticed that sometimes I reallocated players a couple times. At first I thought that was just lazy and bad writing. (and admittedly some of it may be...)

But I thought about reallocation in real leagues and you see the same thing occurring.

There are “types” of players who are just more likely to get reallocated in real life and in alternate timelines.

When you are building a team via an allocation draft, you generally want players from the following categories:

1) The one year, older, expensive guy. A name player past his prime your fans know and can cheer for. If the allocation requires teams to take on salary, this guy may have one expensive year remaining and he may be picked exclusively for that reason and not for how he played.

2) The cheap guy with minimal talent but a great attitude, work ethic, and techniques. The idea is that you are going to draft and sign talented players that will steal these guys’ jobs. You want as many of these guys as possible to create that kind of environment. You want to see your system being executed right, even if your players have marginal talent.

3) The cheap young guy with great raw talent that hasn’t been tapped either due to lack of playing time, a bad system fit, or poor coaching.

I have tried to apply that.

That is why I have a guy like WR Neil Bahlholm who tied for 9th in the league in receptions in year 1 with 63, getting reallocated a few times. Bahlholm averaged 11.2 yards on those catches. He was a BYU product at a time when BYU was cranking out a lot of very polished slow white receivers with great hands.

He hits me as a category 2 guy.

If you catch 63 passes in any league and aren’t on crack, teams will give you the benefit of the doubt.

Some transactions may or may not make sense at first glance

I have far too much pro football minutia in my head. It is booth a boon and a hindrance in writing this. It is a big factor in transactions and injury assessments.

Arizona Wrangler coach George Allen had a method. He ran a 4-3 defense he filled with veterans who didn’t make mistakes that he would stock with defensive linemen who could pass rush playing from multiple positions in order to protect his team from injuries.

I feel confident in saying if George Allen left the league and came back at some point he would build a team using that same model. Now did I chose the right kind of defensive linemen? I don’t know, but I have tried to use a logic path that might make sense for George Allen.

I have former Atlanta Falcons coach Leeman Bennett coaching a USFL team. At one point that team needs a RB. When Leeman Bennett was the head coach of the NFL’s Tampa Bay team, the Bucs brought in RB Vagas Ferguson. I had Vagas Ferguson backing up on another USFL team, so I assumed Ferguson was Bennett’s kind of back, so I had him move to Bennett’s team.

While some of the moves I list are not as well thought out as that, There are a lot of moves that have an unstated logic behind them.

I know that Brian Bosworth had a degenerative shoulder condition that pretty much destroyed his pro career. I write about Bosworth assuming you all know that and don’t think, “well, if he played in a lesser league he wouldn’t have incurred that problem.”

No, not the case. He was going down anyway. Regardless of the pro league he had about 2 years of painful tackles in him before he’d have to retire.

Now Syracuse NT Ted Gregory was a great college player who had a damaged knee when he was drafted by the NFL Broncos in the first round. The NFL has no patience for that. They have too much invested for a #1 pick to not show anything for a year and a half. Bring on the next guy. And no other NFL team is chomping at the bit for a damaged player who his team was embarrassed about drafting. His career was done.

In the USFL could he have rehabbed his knee and been at least a backup? I can’t say, but I can’t write it off as impossible. If he could play at some point, a USFL team would take him. So I have him kicking around on the roster of the USFL team that drafted him for a few years.

You may wonder why I assume some other players who had injuries that killed their NFL careers would not have ended up playing in the USFL.

It is because some injuries that ended careers prevented the players from ever playing like they could while other injuries just prevented the player from ever getting another contract. There is a big difference.

Draft day Busts and player movement between leagues

This is a hot button of mine. I get annoyed when people pronounce a player a bust.

To me, a bust is a player who doesn’t work at the game for whatever reason.

Oakland QB Demarcus Russell got fat and didn’t get back into shape. He was a bust. (I hear much of the problem with him was that he had a father figure Ray Ray Russell who died and it messed with his head. I am sorry for him having to go through that, but at the end of the day he didn’t do what he needed to succeed. Bust.)

Oakland QB Todd Marinovich had a drug problem. (Probably in no small part due to his parents divorce messing with his head. Again, sad, but still a bust.)

San Diego QB Ryan Leaf fucked up his wrist on his throwing arm big time in his NFL rookie season. Ryan Leaf may have been immature. He may have been a crap leader, but he wasn’t a bust. I saw him play a lot when he was trying a comeback with Dallas and you could see flashes of why teams loved him. If he doesn’t fuck up his wrist losing consistent accuracy, he is Jeff George. Still an asshole, but nobody is calling him a bust.

Oakland Raider Bob Buczkowski had a ridiculous 2 year run of injuries after the Raiders drafted him. Were some of those “out of shape” injuries? I don’t know, but I am not really comfortable hanging him with the bust tab either. He could have just been the victim of a horrible run of bad luck.

Denver first round pick QB Tommy Maddox came into the league early and predictably washed out. Then he matured, got a fresh start in the XFL where he could display his talent and then became a successful starting QB in Pittsburgh for a few years.

So was he a bust or wasn’t he? I would say he totally was a bust. ....But he got better.

Steve Young was was one of like 7 first round prospects signed by the LA Express that year for the media attention. He was a hard to contain player in the USFL, but his passing was a major disappointment vs. his collegiate excellence. Probably he was a bad fit in John Hadl’s offense. He went on to Tampa Bay and stunk up the joint. He worked hard but he was just bad. Then he lands in a system that accentuates his skills in San Francisco and becomes a Hall of Famer.

You could argue he was kind of a bust in the USFL and became an NFL hall of famer. How does that fit in your world view?

The problem with calling someone a bust is that you are lumping too many reasons together so you can have a quick one word description on why your pick didn’t work out.

The NFL has a real knack of drafting good players and slotting them in to systems where they don’t fit.

They draft a 6′7″ edge rusher to play inside linebacker.

They draft a 6′3″ 280 lb 3-4 DE who never had more than 7 sacks in a season in college, but they think he will be a terror as a 4-3 DE in the pros because he runs a 4.7 forty ---- even though he doesn’t show any pass rushing technique on film.

They draft killer collegiate 5′10″ safeties who run 4.4s and can tackle, play the ball in the air and pick off passes but can’t cover at all and NFL coaches want to make them all CBs.

A startup league like the USFL needed to hit on every player they gave big money to, so for the most part they made damned sure the player had a proven history of executing what they needed him to do. If they don’t think he will work out, they pick someone else.

They don’t have the luxury of an unlimited budget.

The NFL generally has a pretty hard divide between coaching and personnel. Coaches get players they can’t stand all they time. And they bury them thinking, “I’ll get a better replacement next year.”

In the USFL the staffs were smaller and they had a territorial player acquisition system so they didn’t have to scout the whole country. The coaches were much more involved and their coaching regimes had much shorter leashes, so you had a lot less of that.

It is an entirely different mindset.

All of this adds up to the fact that the USFL was well suited to “rehab” “NFL busts” and I would argue to successfully develop the college talent they signed..

Why would USFL teams sign NFL players?

In the early days of the USFL, the league would sign former NFL players to fairly big deals. They never seemed to get as much out of that payout as when they signed collegiate players.

And it was part of why their spending went out of control.

In writing this, I tried to put myself in the shoes of each USFL GM. There are years where they just don’t have any money and they league signs almost no NFL rejects. Then there are expansion years where expansion teams suck up excess talent and NFL players get signed.

I have tried to list it when it “makes sense” for a team to do it. For example when former TCU star RB Kenneth Davis became a free agent, Buffalo offered him the most money among NFL teams. I am sure he didn’t want to play in Buffalo, but as I was looking through USFL teams, there was no team at the time that it made sense for them to pursue Davis, even though Davis totally could have been at least an 800 yard rusher in the USFL.

I have tried to honor “supply and demand” in that way.

Defections in year 2

In our world, a number of notable names would walk away from the USFL in year 2 as the owners moved towards playing in the fall.

New Orleans offensive Coordinator Jim Fassel, who had coached in the WFL, bolted for the University of Utah. Players like Michigan RB Ken Lacy, Arizona CB Frank Minnefield, and others took off for the NFL.

This timeline is one where the decision not to move stops a lot of that movement dead in its tracks.

Retirements, draft nightmares, and deaths

People die. I am saddened as I write this that so many of the people I write about who made the USFL great (or might have down the road), are in jail or dead, often tragically.

I can’t help but wonder if they had had a consistent career the lasted for 4-15 years, helping them mature through their wild youth and putting a little money in their pockets if their lives would have taken a different path.

I can’t help but wonder if X player who flamed out in the NFL because he was drafted by a coach with an ill fitting scheme, or by a GM over the objections of his coach, or landed on a team with a bad position coach might have had an amazing life after playing in the USFL.

But that was taken from them and US, the fans.

And frankly, at times in my writing I have probably ignorantly listed people who may have died by that point.

There were probably backups who I mention as hanging around for future years who may have died in car accidents or other ways and their stories simply aren’t recorded on the sources I used. To them and their families, I apologize.

I hope people get that this is my love letter to those players, the people who made the USFL. It is me screaming out to the world that what they built was fantastic and could easily have lasted.

Re-Writes

I’ve re-written this a few times, consider this version 3.0.

If, from a logical standpoint, I’ve totally missed the mark at certain points in your opinion, please let me know and I’ll incorporate it into version 4.0, when I write that at some point down the road.

The role of a USFL Commissioner

Chet Simmons, the league’s first commissioner was concerned with building consensus. He was seen as a weak commissioner by the owners. They would eventually make that perception reality by creating committees that took away Simmons’ various powers.

Harry Usher, the league’s second commissioner, was hired specifically because Simmons was seen as a weak leader. The expectations were Usher would lead.

I have Harry Usher turning to Peter Hadhazy in an early incident in the Usher tenure, that working, and Usher going back to the well time after time. (I credit Hadhazy with seeing my own view that a bigger league is better/ more leikely to survive, but I have no idea if he thought that way. The league was pretty much imploding in our timeline when Usher took over, due to the vote to play in the fall. He plays a much larger role in this alternate timeline where it wasn’t .)

So at a point you’ll see decisions coming “top down” more than they were in our timeline.

High concept struggles

What Key Moment?

The USFL had several 'key moments’ that could have dramatically changed the direction of the league. An early one was the decision by David Dixon not to start a franchise himself. If Dixon had “skin” in the league, his sway over the other owners would have been much more pronounced and they likely would not have gotten as deeply into financial trouble as they did in the first season.

That in turn might have kept several financially conservative owners in the league following that first season.

But the decision most USFL fans look at as the point of no return was the 1984 vote to start playing in the fall beginning in the 1986 season.

Championed by New Jersey Generals owner Donald Trump and Chicago “franchise” “owner” Eddie Einhorn, that vote is the moment where several former USFL stars say they knew the league was dead.

That is the moment that my 13 year old heart broke because I knew the league was a dead man walking.

Over the years I have found that most USFL players appear to blame Trump for the league’s demise and over the years some high profile owners like Houston’s Jerry Argovitz have come to publicly concede that point.

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A sadder, wiser Ted Diethrich, second owner of the Arizona Wranglers, would say many years later, “I think it [agreeing with Trump and Einhorn to move to a fall schedule in 1986] was a big mistake. When that decision was made, the course for this was charted....and it was going to be a wreck.”

Both Diethrich and Argovitz are named in books on the subject as having voted to play the 1986 season in the fall.

The league would never play that 1986 fall season.

Shortly before the season was to start, a lawsuit by a former player against the Tampa Bay Bandits for back pay would cause the Tampa Bay Bandits’ equipment to be seized. Down one team, the league would be inclined to press on, but they would turn to their surviving leader Donald Trump and Trump would advise them he changed his mind. Again.

He would not field his all-star merged New Jersey team with the league’s two superstars, RB Herschel Walker and QB Jim Kelly.

With no team in New Jersey, there was no hope for TV money. Trump had pulled the plug on the league.

The rest of the owners quit...

Why focus on the 1984 vote?

That 1984 vote is the key moment I address in this blog.

The 1984 vote boils down to the league deciding A) if they wanted to continue to run things like struggling businesses shy of their break even point or B) just treat the entire endeavor like a game of poker with the NFL, pushing in all their chips?

The USFL was not doomed to fail. Not everyone was broke.

What is lost on most people is that only about 1/3 of the league was financially distressed. These owners were looking for a magic bullet solution to fix their issues. They were susceptible to Trump and Eddie Einhorn’s pro-fall bullshit. (And in a lot of cases it was described as intentionally fabricated bullshit.)

These struggling owners outvoted the owners with the most financially solid positions, forcing the league out of several well performing markets, creating a “lame duck” final spring season when the fans stopped paying attention, and dramatically weakening the league.

In the lame duck season, the league would see attendance totally collapse to franchise failure levels in all of their teams in the western half the US as westerners wrote off the league as dead.

This blog answers the question, “What if the owners who had the USFL’s prospering teams won that vote?”

The over extended league owners chose ‘B’. This blog is about what would have happened if they had chosen ‘A’.

The USFL was not a harmonious group activity

Every owner had their own agenda that they put ahead of the best interest of the league. It is crazy, but yeah, they did.

I’ve tried to retain that too, even if I had the pro-spring teams “win” the key “play in the fall” vote.

The USFL owners frankly flocked to Alphas who generated money. This made Einhorn a big player in our reality and is something that plays a big role in this alternate history.

Bigger is better

Conceptually the biggest stretches I’ve taken are assuming that the league would generally support a “bigger (more teams) is better” philosophy in terms of survival if they were choosing good TV Markets.

This is definitely contrary to most people’s thinking. The 1970′s World Football League would have had a much better chance at survival if they hadn’t started each of their seasons with 12 teams. (They had a lot of problems.)

But the USFL was a different beast. Their plan eliminated most of the mistakes that sunk the WFL. They had the potential of TV paying them at quite a good rate for stringing together big media markets.

I contend for the USFL business model, more big market teams was better. It created more TV attraction. It created protection if a team failed.

I think that just makes sense, but it is at best a “neutral position” in terms of the PERSONAL investments of each team owner. (ie. More mouths to feed means slightly less revenue, potentially even with expansion fees, and can put the league at risk if non-viable locations are chosen or if teams are very poorly run, but on the other hand expansion does create more wins for established teams and wins can help a team survive.)

Player retirements, injuries, and lost opportunities

In real terms, most players retire when no one will pay them to play anymore. Some retire due to injuries. That is a real problem in writing this.

Marcus Dupree was probably the second most talented RB in the USFL behind Herschel Walker and the 3rd most talented back in football at the time behind Eric Dickerson. (I am only talking talent here, Kelvin Bryant fans....)

His team moved to Portland where the the turf was horrifically unsafe. Dupree blew out a knee and his USFL career was over. If the vote to move to the fall fails, Dupree’s team stays in New Orleans and he never blows out his knee on that Portland turf.

Would he blow out his knee somewhere else? Can I predict that? Should I? I had to think, “No,the other turfs were good, so he probably would not.” So in that, I am being very optimistic about the health of players in the USFL.

Ken Talton ran for a 1000 yards for Birmingham in year 1. He had talent, was trusted, and given plenty of opportunities. That happens for talented unknown pros when the league is growing.

Then he was replaced by Joe Cribbs as Birtmingham’s primary rushing threat in year 2 and only ran for like 150 yards. He was 28. He didn’t play in year 3. Did he piss someone off in Birmingham? RBs fall off around that age... Did it happen to him? Or did the contraction of the league cause him and several other solid players to be forced into retirement?

I think the later is more likely.

Ken Talton may have played and carried the ball for several more years if the league survived and the number of teams was growing instead of shrinking.

Eventually teams take a hard look at a player’s age. A lot of older players can still play at a high level for 1-3 more years at that point but teams get scared of their age (and their salary demands) and go for younger players.

Other teams assume the players have less in the tank or they wouldn’t have been let go. Or they assume (sometimes correctly) that the player’s salary demands might be cost prohibitive.

What I am getting at is that a lot of players retire with “meat left on the bone” of their playing career. That is increased when the league is contracting and jobs are going away like the USFL in year 3.

Also, it is plainly obvious that the NFL blackballed most USFL players. There were simply too many good starters in the USFL who never got a legit opportunity when the league went down.

The level of play in the USFL was legitimately lower than in the NFL overall, but really what happened to a lot of these players --- like Oakland star WR Fred Banks --- is they went from a team that trusted them and used them correctly to a team where they had no trust equity, in a league that really kind of wanted USFL players to fail overall.

If the USFL survives, If USFL guys stay with their USFL teams, they likely have careers that mirror NFL starters in terms of consistency of play and length of careers.

So you will see that in my work.

It doesn’t mean that they would be stars in the NFL if they were stars in the USFL, but it is still pretty darned prestigious company.

But I say this only to explain the logic behind why, in this blog, you will see players playing longer than they did and often at higher levels than you might expect if your only knowledge of them is looking at their NFL stats.

With that said, lets get into this...

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