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captain-of-the-historicfuture · 3 years

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~hello~ !! For the meta asks!: 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, and 25 :))

Hello!! Thank you for sending these; I was really excited to see that ask game and I was hoping somebody would send some in. It still took me a while to actually answer them though, and for that I apologise. But without further ado! Some meta answers (under the cut because they ended up being fairly long, whoops):

3. What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (Consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway.)

I thought of a few examples, but they could basically be grouped together under a common theme: whumpy/angsty scenes that were self-indulgent as all heck. The whole self-indulgent aspect often required the characters to be just the teeniest, tiniest bit OOC and/or necessitated rather unrealistic plot circumstances. So it was simply easier to keep such scenes as maladaptive daydreams, rather than trying to think of explanations for the character/plot issues…or exposing myself to judgement for them LOL.

Receiving permission to write/share one such scene anyway is an opportunity I can’t let slip by though. It might be because I’m writing this while running on zero (0) hours of sleep—let’s hear it for insomnia, y’all!—but I suddenly couldn’t remember any of my newer ideas under this category. However, I did recall a one-shot I had started writing a couple of months ago that sort of counts? “Sort of” because I could actually be arsed to write it since I was, ya know, writing it. Only got about six hundred words down though.

…should I share those six hundred words…?

………nahhh. I don’t think I’m quite ready for that yet.

But here’s the gist of it: Coulson and May (because of course it’s Philinda) were married for quite some time before the Attack on New York. But then Coulson DiedTM and then got ResurrectedTM. But gasp of horror, he had to lose his memories of his romantic relationship with May because reasons. (I actually did have some ideas for those reasons but sshhhh this is about me yeeting context and setup.)

The first half of S1 still happens as normal (except MayWard doesn’t happen because??? Vows) and it’s now post-E20 “Nothing Personal”. The morning after (or a morning soon after, whatever) the T.A.H.I.T.I. reveal! May’s mom—who doesn’t know about GH.325 and whom May fed a cover story about Coulson divorcing her or something equally as oof, IDK—shows up at the hotel and starts ripping into Coulson for breaking her daughter’s heart, then dragging her back into the field with her ex-husband (him), then accusing her of terrible things and forcing her away again.

Poor guy’s confused as heck, and so is the team, and soon enough so is Lian. The only one who understands what’s going on is May, and she’s freaking dying off to the side like why is this happening to me and eventually everybody’s like! Explain??? (Was thinking about including something from Coulson like, “Are you still keeping things from me?” Just for that extra smidge of angst, yay!)

So yeah then May gives a, like, two-sentence debriefing that elicits more questions than answers. Coulson decides to take May aside and they have a heart-to-heart. Lots of feelings and angst and hurt/comfort and at some point plenty of kissing too. Just! May hiding her feelings for Coulson’s sake but really magnified, plus some actual apologies and consideration of the grief May’s been through on Coulson’s part.

And uhh yeah that’s basically it I dunno hdsjncjshd. I warned y’all it’s OOC, plot-bendy, and very self-indulgent!

6. What character do you have the most fun writing?

I don’t think I could name a single character for this. I get different things out of taking on different voices, you know? I guess recently I’ve found myself gravitating towards more taciturn and introspective points of view, like JQ from my original novel Rosewood or M. Yisbon from my…other original novel Temple.

Generally, however, I like tackling stories from an outsider’s perspective. That’s why I so rarely write my more “substantial” (serious? demanding? for lack of better words?) projects from the PoV of my “preferred” character. This usually means writing from their love interest’s perspective, but not always. With shorter fanfic, using a more removed/unconventional/niche PoV can be really fun. Like, I once wrote a canon compliant ficlet purely(-ish) about Philinda from Tony Stark’s perspective. That isn’t always sustainable with stories that demand more character development or closer character studies, however, which is why it’s a good thing I like writing drabbles!

9. Are you more of a drabble or a longfic kind of writer? Pantser or plotter? Do you wish you were the other?

My word counts tend to run long, but I usually only write one-shots for fanfic. If I’m even inspired with a novella- or novel-length story idea for a fandom, you already know I’m in deep with them. And if I actually find the motivation to plan and execute that idea? Dangg. That’s only ever happened…twice, maybe thrice, and I’m in a lot of fandoms.

At times, I wish I could go for more of a middle ground ’cause, like, you know what I love to see? An AO3 dashboard with several completed novellas for my ship/character of choice. I mean yes, I hecking love >90k fics, but sometimes I’m in the mood for quick reads…and what am I supposed to do when I burn through all the drabbles and 2k one-shots? (Besides despair and/or reread my faves desperately.) Novellas are basically always safe for me LOL, and I’d hope to be able to give as much as I take.

Ultimately though, I think I’m okay with where I am with regards to that. I wish I could write more in general, but I’d be okay with “writing more” just meaning “writing more one-shots”, ya know? More than okay, really. I have mad respect for fic writers who have, like, a hundred or more one-shots under their belt for this one ship. The fandom ecosystem would be incomplete without them (as well as every other type of writer, but sshhh that’s the type of writer I’m closest to being right now).

I’m definitely a plotter, and I definitely prefer it that way. It’s cool having such a detailed record of my process. I like feeling like a frazzled genius on the brink of a major discovery with all of my different outlines and colour coding and many drafts and various websites.

12. Do you want your writing to be famous?

Not exactly. It might be cool if my original works were recognisable in the world, but I don’t think I’d want to be recognisable. As for fanfic, I’d low-key enjoy gaining a place in that fandom’s community as a fic writer. Like someone who gave and got fic gifts from fic writer friends, who participated in challenges and GCs, who received writing prompts on Tumblr, whose name was known for doing a certain trope/genre a bunch of times… Ya know what I mean?

Unlikely to happen when I’m so hecking hesitant to publicly (i.e., outside of AO3) claim credit for my writing, but fjnskfsjhfjs. A writer can dream, right?

15. Which is harder: titles or summaries (or tags)?

Of those three, tags are the easiest for me, for I have a reliable system for figuring out those.

Next easiest would probably be titles. For fanfiction, I like to use titles that are a quote from the source material. You should have seen all of my old Hamilton fanfic… I was really proud of some of those titles. And I don’t mean, like, whole lines—usually only two to five words. It’s a unique type of wordplay that I just love dabbling in.

And lastly, summaries. Sometimes inspiration strikes me and a snappy and intriguing synopsis just jumps out—one that I’m quietly pleased with—but most of the time I’ll spend way too long trying to think of such a synopsis and eventually just go with whatever I’d come up with so far. And live with my quiet dissatisfaction for the rest of time.

18. Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (Plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations...?) Tell us about them!

Typically, no. If I have deleted scenes, I save and publish them separately, but that’s about it. I sometimes think of AUs for my own work and might talk about them in my author’s notes—might even talk about writing them—but I never really do anything with them.

Although…

It’s not uncommon for me to decide a plotline isn’t working for a certain story or to think of an interesting but undoable arc for a certain character, but what I’ll do is make a whole new story for those ideas. Once I’m done developing the original idea and the branched-off one, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell they grew from the same roots. Does that count?

21. What other medium do you think your story would work well as (film, webcomic, animated series, etc.)?

That depends on the story. I’ve actually written stories in other mediums—movie screenplay, musical stageplay, poetry, TV show scripts, play scripts, roleplay—but the novel does tend to be my comfort zone. Sometimes, if I have an idea that I think could work, or would even work better, as another medium, I’ll label it as such in my folder of ideas and decide not to write it as a novel.

Most of the time, my non-book projects are collaborations. I’m working with five different people on six different story ideas: two webcomics, one stage musical, one anime, and two animated TV shows. Little concrete progress has been made in any of those, mind you, but they’re still fun to discuss!

24. Would you say your writing has changed over time?

Absolutely. But I’ve been writing stories since I was five years old, so we would hope so, huh?

I wouldn’t say my writing’s changed completely, though maybe that’s just my insider’s perspective.

25. What part of writing is the most fun?

Oh gosh, I can’t believe you’d make me choose. Writing is just such a wonderful experience for me; I love just about everything to do with it. Admittedly, not all the time, but. Since that barely qualifies as an answer, however, I’ll give you this—

The endings. Not only that intense feeling of rightness when you wrap up that last sentence, but also the moments before. The adrenaline of knowing you’re almost there but you gotta push just a bit more to actually get there. And also the part right after—the real wrap-up, honestly: the revision and the editing. Heavens, I love revising and editing my work.

Which is not to say I don’t like writing it out for the first time, too—there’s nothing quite like seeing your cursor scroll to the next page, like going from a blank expanse to a Oh man, how many more lines are even going to fit on this page?, like watching that page counter tick up another number. However, there’s something cathartic about finally ironing out those problems I had to force myself to stop worrying about earlier because “just finish the first draft dangit”.

I guess that’s not really the end of the writing process, but whatever. Close enough (as fic writers are wont to say).

Another thank-you for these asks, and feel free to come back with more at any time! ;P

Send in fun meta asks for your friendly neighbourhood writer!

#thou canst not then be false to any man #ask game #invictusmaneo #to write and read comes by nature

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vanessakirbyfans · 3 years

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Late last year, Chrissy Teigen and Meghan Markle both shared their personal stories of miscarriage and child loss.

On Friday, Netflix’s Oscar-contending film “Pieces of a Woman” is released, shining a light on the taboo topics, which are rarely discussed in society, but highly common for women and families around the world.

The subject matter is what attracted star Vanessa Kirby to the project, along with Ellen Burstyn, who says the film is emblematic of the strides Hollywood has taken when it comes to the way women are portrayed in media.

“When I started out, I started out in the 1950s, so no, it would not have been possible at all! Not for many reasons. But we’ve come a long way in those 150 years,” Burstyn says, with a laugh.

“Not just in film, but with women — we acknowledge women as human beings,” the legendary actor continues.

Recalling her six decades in Hollywood, Burstyn speaks of “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” the 1974 film that won her the best actress Oscar and marked her first collaboration with a then-unknown Martin Scorsese, who is an executive producer on “Pieces of a Woman.”

“That line that I put into ‘Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,’ when I say, ‘I mean, it’s my life, it’s not some man’s life that I’m helping him out with,’ that really was the way that it was when the change started, whenever Ms. magazine was founded, I guess in the early 70’s,” Burstyn says. “When I did ‘Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,’ I did not really recognize the women in film; they did not match the women I knew in my life. It was my intention then — this was in 1974 or probably 1973 — that I wanted to tell a story like women that I knew: women that were raising a child alone and earning a living and coping, both as a mother and as a person, and coming into their own being.”

“So, to do it on film?” Burstyn says, speaking about portraying child loss in Kirby’s character. “That’s pretty bold.”

“Pieces of a Woman” starts with an extended 23-minute scene, which was shot in one take, where Kirby’s character Martha gives birth, and then tragically loses the baby during the home birth. The scene is tough to watch, and painfully portrayed by Kirby, who received the best actress award at the Venice Film Festival and is a top contender to receive the Oscar nomination.

When Kirby received the script, she had never read anything like it and certainly had never seen it portrayed on screen before.

“It felt like a total journey of female courage,” Kirby tells Variety, explaining that the film “gives a voice to a subject that is so often silenced and so rarely spoken about.”

In preparation for her role, Kirby spent time with many women who had been through losing a baby at many different stages, whether throughout pregnancy or just after they’re born. She also watched a woman give birth in real life, which she says changed her life forever.

“Watching her do that, seven hours, it was like the most powerful act that I’ve ever experienced in my life,” Kirby says with her jaw dropped. “She had to surrender everything and just let her body do it and become so primal and so animal and let that innate wisdom and intelligence take over and run the show. Even though she was in the most amount of pain she’s ever been in her life, something beautiful was happening. It taught me that pain can sometimes lead to something beautiful, and sometimes just getting through it and having the strength to.”

Martha has a tough journey, struggling to articulate her emotions and alienating those around her, including her mother, played by Burstyn, and her husband, played by Shia LaBeouf. Kirby believes her character has a tough time speaking about her experience because society doesn’t talk enough about miscarriage and child loss, despite the staggering statistics.

“54% of people have been through it or know someone who has been through it,” Kirby shares from her research for the role. “That very female experience just felt like something that was really important, and I’m really proud to be a small part of that conversation.”

Kirby hopes that this film will add to the growing conversation surrounding miscarriages, which have recently been illuminated by Teigen, who shared her heartbreaking story about suffering pregnancy loss while carrying her third child, and Markle, who penned a piece in November, revealing she had a miscarriage this summer. Earlier this week, “The Hills” star Whitney Port revealed she suffered her second miscarriage.

“I think it’s so brave of them to do so,” Kirby says about Teigen and Markle. “When I read the article that Meghan had written, I felt so connected to them somehow, and I felt so in awe of their bravery. Someone told me that the reaction to Chrissy was really mixed. Some people found it really hard and didn’t want to know about it, and that indicates it’s a subject that’s so hard to talk about.”

“From the women I spoke to, so many of them describe how lonely their experience is,” Kirby continues. “In sharing pain and sharing grief, when you feel totally alone, the act of sharing it or the act of someone reaching out or the act of someone saying, ‘I understand and I see you and I remember what it’s like and I know what it’s like,’ I think that’s why it’s so important that women like them speak up publicly. And I really hope this little movie, as difficult as it is to watch — because it is difficult, it’s the most difficult subject — I really hope that [it helps] one woman out there who feels left alone in their experience.”

Burstyn believes “Pieces of a Woman” represents the evolution of women that society has finally embraced, both on-screen and off.

“Of course, now, Hollywood has grown, along with how women have grown, both societally and personally and politically, so I think we’re moving, we’re improving, we’re growing,” Burstyn says. “It just always takes longer than we hope it would.”

#Vanessa Kirby #Pieces of a Woman #Ellen Burstyn #Interview #Articles

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angsty-nerd · 4 years

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So let me tell y’all a little story that I found myself reflecting on after that last post.

Let me tell you a bit about a wee little 18-21 year old fangirl named Anne. Anne had never been a fangirl before. But she was going through a hard transition in life. High school ended, college began. She lost all her friends. She lived with her parents, took classes at the local community college, spent 2 hours every day riding the bus home from college, and then spent evenings working full time at Blockbuster Video.

But she happened to be home the night that a silly little television show about aliens and romance started airing on TheWB, and it hooked her. By the end of the 4th episode, she was on the internet looking for people to discuss it with and learning that fanfiction existed.

By the end of the winter, she was getting off work at 1am, going home, and then writing fanfiction herself for hours before going to sleep.

Fandom was different back then. There really wasn’t a whole lot of talk about representation, overall, because there were no characters that weren’t white, straight, etc. No one really talked about how the show whitewashed the books. We were aware, but we just didn’t question that stuff back then. Plus most of us looooooved Shiri Appleby.

I remember when Season 2 came around, there were a lot of unhappy people. Max and Liz didn’t feel right anymore. Tess was hanging around more. End of the World happened and everyone felt awful and heartbroken about it. I remember being in Covina with a bunch of friends visiting filming locations when the spoilers broke about Max sleeping with Tess, and we all lost it. We posed in front of a medical facility that had a “chest pain” sign out front to prove that we were HEARTBROKEN.

But I guess the thing is that when these moments in storytelling happen, I often become an optimist. Because I as CERTAIN it wasn’t true (it was true). I was SURE Max and Liz would get back together and end up together (and they did). But my fandom friends were so upset that once again, for the second time in about a year and a half...I lost all my friends. Because they didn’t want to “hurt” me with their negativity. (Them walking away hurt 1000000% times more). But eventually I found new fandom friends that loved me and it was all okay.

I understand being hurt. I understand being upset. I try not to let it overtake me because I am only in this fandom (and that fandom, and other fandoms) because I WANT to love this stupid story. And if things aren’t going the way I want them to enough that it hurts my heart *coughDoctorWhocough*, then I walk away.

As a funny little final interlude, I will share my most unpopular opinion regarding OG Roswell: I hated Michael Guerin. I was infamous for it. Everyone knew that I couldn’t stand him. He rarely made an appearance in my fic. I didn’t like his relationship with Maria. I don’t think love should be based on bickering. It became such common knowledge and such a running gag among my friends that I was a Michael hater, that in my favorite/best OG fic, I tongue-in-cheek wrote Michael as spending the entire fic on his couch watching hockey, which both fit with canon and made me not have to deal with him. It still amuses me to see because I knew exactly what I was doing and it cracked me up. Hell, it still cracks me up.

The thing is...fandom has changed a lot since then. Everyone is a whole lot smarter. The world is a lot more “woke”. People get worked up hard about representation and identification and problematic characters and plots in a way that they just didn’t back in the OG days. I found myself thinking today that if I had the same reaction to RNM Guerin as I did to OG Guerin, I straight up wouldn’t be able to admit it publicly or be this open about it without getting heavily criticized or even blacklisted by the majority of this fandom.

I guess my point is, even though we’re smarter and stronger and have better minority representation, it’s important to remember that we’re not all the same person. We don’t all see things the same way. We don’t identify the same with every character. We don’t PROJECT onto the characters in the same way. Everyone deserves to say their piece and SHOULD, frankly. That’s the point of fandom. But just remember that we’re all real people with our own ideas and feelings and wants and needs.

And don’t forget. Fandom is supposed to be FUN. If you’re not having fun, you’re doing something wrong and I’d highly encourage you to reconsider your priorities.

Take whatever you don’t like and stick them on a couch in the corner watching hockey. Or whatever you need to do to get them out of your headspace.

Cultivate your own perfect fandom experience.

And treat each other with love and respect. 💚💛

#fandom #og roswell #roswellnm

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yobaba30 · 5 years

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trump’s reality TV gig

Expedition: Robinson,” a Swedish reality-television program, premièred in the summer of 1997, with a tantalizing premise: sixteen strangers are deposited on a small island off the coast of Malaysia and forced to fend for themselves. To survive, they must coöperate, but they are also competing: each week, a member of the ensemble is voted off the island, and the final contestant wins a grand prize. The show’s title alluded to both “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Swiss Family Robinson,” but a more apt literary reference might have been “Lord of the Flies.” The first contestant who was kicked off was a young man named Sinisa Savija. Upon returning to Sweden, he was morose, complaining to his wife that the show’s editors would “cut away the good things I did and make me look like a fool.” Nine weeks before the show aired, he stepped in front of a speeding train.

The producers dealt with this tragedy by suggesting that Savija’s turmoil was unrelated to the series—and by editing him virtually out of the show. Even so, there was a backlash, with one critic asserting that a program based on such merciless competition was “fascist television.” But everyone watched the show anyway, and Savija was soon forgotten. “We had never seen anything like it,” Svante Stockselius, the chief of the network that produced the program, told the Los Angeles Times, in 2000. “Expedition: Robinson” offered a potent cocktail of repulsion and attraction. You felt embarrassed watching it, Stockselius said, but “you couldn’t stop.”

In 1998, a thirty-eight-year-old former British paratrooper named Mark Burnett was living in Los Angeles, producing television. “Lord of the Flies” was one of his favorite books, and after he heard about “Expedition: Robinson” he secured the rights to make an American version. Burnett had previously worked in sales and had a knack for branding. He renamed the show “Survivor.”

The first season was set in Borneo, and from the moment it aired, on CBS, in 2000, “Survivor” was a ratings juggernaut: according to the network, a hundred and twenty-five million Americans—more than a third of the population—tuned in for some portion of the season finale. The catchphrase delivered by the host, Jeff Probst, at the end of each elimination ceremony, “The tribe has spoken,” entered the lexicon. Burnett had been a marginal figure in Hollywood, but after this triumph he, too, was rebranded, as an oracle of spectacle. Les Moonves, then the chairman of CBS, arranged for the delivery of a token of thanks—a champagne-colored Mercedes. To Burnett, the meaning of this gesture was unmistakable: “I had arrived.” The only question was what he might do next.

A few years later, Burnett was in Brazil, filming “Survivor: The Amazon.” His second marriage was falling apart, and he was staying in a corporate apartment with a girlfriend. One day, they were watching TV and happened across a BBC documentary series called “Trouble at the Top,” about the corporate rat race. The girlfriend found the show boring and suggested changing the station, but Burnett was transfixed. He called his business partner in L.A. and said, “I’ve got a new idea.” Burnett would not discuss the concept over the phone—one of his rules for success was to always pitch in person—but he was certain that the premise had the contours of a hit: “Survivor” in the city. Contestants competing for a corporate job. The urban jungle!

He needed someone to play the role of heavyweight tycoon. Burnett, who tends to narrate stories from his own life in the bravura language of a Hollywood pitch, once said of the show, “It’s got to have a hook to it, right? They’ve got to be working for someone big and special and important. Cut to: I’ve rented this skating rink.”

In 2002, Burnett rented Wollman Rink, in Central Park, for a live broadcast of the Season 4 finale of “Survivor.” The property was controlled by Donald Trump, who had obtained the lease to operate the rink in 1986, and had plastered his name on it. Before the segment started, Burnett addressed fifteen hundred spectators who had been corralled for the occasion, and noticed Trump sitting with Melania Knauss, then his girlfriend, in the front row. Burnett prides himself on his ability to “read the room”: to size up the personalities in his audience, suss out what they want, and then give it to them.

“I need to show respect to Mr. Trump,” Burnett recounted, in a 2013 speech in Vancouver. “I said, ‘Welcome, everybody, to Trump Wollman skating rink. The Trump Wollman skating rink is a fine facility, built by Mr. Donald Trump. Thank you, Mr. Trump. Because the Trump Wollman skating rink is the place we are tonight and we love being at the Trump Wollman skating rink, Mr. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.” As Burnett told the story, he had scarcely got offstage before Trump was shaking his hand, proclaiming, “You’re a genius!”

Cut to: June, 2015. After starring in fourteen seasons of “The Apprentice,” all executive-produced by Burnett, Trump appeared in the gilded atrium of Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue, to announce that he was running for President. Only someone “really rich,” Trump declared, could “take the brand of the United States and make it great again.” He also made racist remarks about Mexicans, prompting NBC, which had broadcast “The Apprentice,” to fire him. Burnett, however, did not sever his relationship with his star. He and Trump had been equal partners in “The Apprentice,” and the show had made each of them hundreds of millions of dollars. They were also close friends: Burnett liked to tell people that when Trump married Knauss, in 2005, Burnett’s son Cameron was the ring bearer.

Trump had been a celebrity since the eighties, his persona shaped by the best-selling book “The Art of the Deal.” But his business had foundered, and by 2003 he had become a garish figure of local interest—a punch line on Page Six. “The Apprentice” mythologized him anew, and on a much bigger scale, turning him into an icon of American success. Jay Bienstock, a longtime collaborator of Burnett’s, and the showrunner on “The Apprentice,” told me, “Mark always likes to compare his shows to great films or novels. All of Mark’s shows feel bigger than life, and this is by design.” Burnett has made many programs since “The Apprentice,” among them “Shark Tank,” a startup competition based on a Japanese show, and “The Voice,” a singing contest adapted from a Dutch program. In June, he became the chairman of M-G-M Television. But his chief legacy is to have cast a serially bankrupt carnival barker in the role of a man who might plausibly become the leader of the free world. “I don’t think any of us could have known what this would become,” Katherine Walker, a producer on the first five seasons of “The Apprentice,” told me. “But Donald would not be President had it not been for that show.”

Tony Schwartz, who wrote “The Art of the Deal,” which falsely presented Trump as its primary author, told me that he feels some responsibility for facilitating Trump’s imposture. But, he said, “Mark Burnett’s influence was vastly greater,” adding, “ ‘The Apprentice’ was the single biggest factor in putting Trump in the national spotlight.” Schwartz has publicly condemned Trump, describing him as “the monster I helped to create.” Burnett, by contrast, has refused to speak publicly about his relationship with the President or about his curious, but decisive, role in American history.

Burnett is lean and lanky, with the ageless, perpetually smiling face of Peter Pan and eyes that, in the words of one ex-wife, have “a Photoshop twinkle.” He has a high forehead and the fixed, gravity-defying hair of a nineteen-fifties film star. People often mistake Burnett for an Australian, because he has a deep tan and an outdoorsy disposition, and because his accent has been mongrelized by years of international travel. But he grew up in Dagenham, on the eastern outskirts of London, a milieu that he has recalled as “gray and grimy.” His father, Archie, was a tattooed Glaswegian who worked the night shift at a Ford automobile plant. His mother, Jean, worked there as well, pouring acid into batteries, but in Mark’s recollection she always dressed immaculately, “never letting her station in life interfere with how she presented herself.” Mark, an only child, grew up watching American television shows such as “Starsky & Hutch” and “The Rockford Files.”

At seventeen, he volunteered for the British Army’s Parachute Regiment; according to a friend who enlisted with him, he joined for “the glitz.” The Paras were an élite unit, and a soldier from his platoon, Paul Read, told me that Burnett was a particularly formidable special operator, both physically commanding and a natural leader: “He was always super keen. He always wanted to be the best, even among the best.” (Another soldier recalled that Burnett was nicknamed the Male Model, because he was reluctant to “get any dirt under his fingernails.”) Burnett served in Northern Ireland, and then in the Falklands, where he took part in the 1982 advance on Port Stanley. The experience, he later said, was “horrific, but on the other hand—in a sick way—exciting.”

When Burnett left the Army, after five years, his plan was to find work in Central America as a “weapons and tactics adviser”—not as a mercenary, he later insisted, though it is difficult to parse the distinction. Before he left, his mother told him that she’d had a premonition and implored him not to take another job that involved carrying a gun. Like Trump, Burnett trusts his impulses. “Your gut instinct is rarely wrong,” he likes to say. During a layover in Los Angeles, he decided to heed his mother’s admonition, and walked out of the airport. He later described himself as the quintessential immigrant: “I had no money, no green card, no nothing.” But the California sun was shining, and he was eager to try his luck.

Burnett is an avid raconteur, and his anecdotes about his life tend to have a three-act structure. In Act I, he is a fish out of water, guileless and naïve, with nothing but the shirt on his back and an outsized dream. Act II is the rude awakening: the world bets against him. It’s impossible! You’ll lose everything! No such thing has ever been tried! In Act III, Burnett always prevails. Not long after arriving in California, he landed his first job—as a nanny. Eyebrows were raised: a commando turned nanny? Yet Burnett thrived, working for a family in Beverly Hills, then one in Malibu. As he later observed, the experience taught him “how nice the life styles of wealthy people are.” Young, handsome, and solicitous, he discovered that successful people are often happy to talk about their path to success.

Burnett married a California woman, Kym Gold, who came from an affluent family. “Mark has always been very, very hungry,” Gold told me recently. “He’s always had a lot of drive.” For a time, he worked for Gold’s stepfather, who owned a casting agency, and for Gold, who owned an apparel business. She would buy slightly imperfect T-shirts wholesale, at two dollars apiece, and Burnett would resell them, on the Venice boardwalk, for eighteen. That was where he learned “the art of selling,” he has said. The marriage lasted only a year, by which point Burnett had obtained a green card. (Gold, who had also learned a thing or two about selling, went on to co-found the denim company True Religion, which was eventually sold for eight hundred million dollars.)

One day in the early nineties, Burnett read an article about a new kind of athletic event: a long-distance endurance race, known as the Raid Gauloises, in which teams of athletes competed in a multiday trek over harsh terrain. In 1992, Burnett organized a team and participated in a race in Oman. Noticing that he and his teammates were “walking, climbing advertisements” for gear, he signed up sponsors. He also realized that if you filmed such a race it would make for exotic and gripping viewing. Burnett launched his own race, the Eco-Challenge, which was set in such scenic locations as Utah and British Columbia, and was televised on various outlets, including the Discovery Channel. Bienstock, who first met Burnett when he worked on the “Eco-Challenge” show, in 1996, told me that Burnett was less interested in the ravishing backdrops or in the competition than he was in the intense emotional experiences of the racers: “Mark saw the drama in real people being the driving force in an unscripted show.”

By this time, Burnett had met an aspiring actress from Long Island named Dianne Minerva and married her. They became consumed with making the show a success. “When we went to bed at night, we talked about it, when we woke up in the morning, we talked about it,” Dianne Burnett told me recently. In the small world of adventure racing, Mark developed a reputation as a slick and ambitious operator. “He’s like a rattlesnake,” one of his business competitors told the New York Times in 2000. “If you’re close enough long enough, you’re going to get bit.” Mark and Dianne were doing far better than Mark’s parents ever had, but he was restless. One day, they attended a seminar by the motivational speaker Tony Robbins called “Unleash the Power Within.” A good technique for realizing your goals, Robbins counselled, was to write down what you wanted most on index cards, then deposit them around your house, as constant reminders. In a 2012 memoir, “The Road to Reality,” Dianne Burnett recalls that she wrote the word “FAMILY” on her index cards. Mark wrote “MORE MONEY.”

As a young man, Burnett occasionally found himself on a flight for business, looking at the other passengers and daydreaming: If this plane were to crash on a desert island, where would I fit into our new society? Who would lead and who would follow? “Nature strips away the veneer we show one another every day, at which point people become who they really are,” Burnett once wrote. He has long espoused a Hobbesian world view, and when he launched “Survivor” a zero-sum ethos was integral to the show. “It’s quite a mean game, just like life is kind of a mean game,” Burnett told CNN, in 2001. “Everyone’s out for themselves.”

On “Survivor,” the competitors were split into teams, or “tribes.” In this raw arena, Burnett suggested, viewers could glimpse the cruel essence of human nature. It was undeniably compelling to watch contestants of different ages, body types, and dispositions negotiate the primordial challenges of making fire, securing shelter, and foraging for food. At the same time, the scenario was extravagantly contrived: the castaways were shadowed by camera crews, and helicopters thundered around the island, gathering aerial shots.

Moreover, the contestants had been selected for their charisma and their combustibility. “It’s all about casting,” Burnett once observed. “As a producer, my job is to make the choices in who to work with and put on camera.” He was always searching for someone with the sort of personality that could “break through the clutter.” In casting sessions, Burnett sometimes goaded people, to see how they responded to conflict. Katherine Walker, the “Apprentice” producer, told me about an audition in which Burnett taunted a prospective cast member by insinuating that he was secretly gay. (The man, riled, threw the accusation back at Burnett, and was not cast that season.)

Richard Levak, a clinical psychologist who consulted for Burnett on “Survivor” and “The Apprentice” and worked on other reality-TV shows, told me that producers have often liked people he was uncomfortable with for psychological reasons. Emotional volatility makes for compelling television. But recruiting individuals for their instability and then subjecting them to the stress of a televised competition can be perilous. When Burnett was once asked about Sinisa Savija’s suicide, he contended that Savija had “previous psychological problems.” No “Survivor” or “Apprentice” contestants are known to have killed themselves, but in the past two decades several dozen reality-TV participants have. Levak eventually stopped consulting on such programs, in part because he feared that a contestant might harm himself. “I would think, Geez, if this should unravel, they’re going to look at the personality profile and there may have been a red flag,” he recalled.

Burnett excelled at the casting equation to the point where, on Season 2 of “Survivor,” which was shot in the Australian outback, his castaways spent so much time gossiping about the characters from the previous season that Burnett warned them, “The more time you spend talking about the first ‘Survivor,’ the less time you will have on television.” But Burnett’s real genius was in marketing. When he made the rounds in L.A. to pitch “Survivor,” he vowed that it would become a cultural phenomenon, and he presented executives with a mock issue of Newsweek featuring the show on the cover. (Later, “Survivor” did make the cover of the magazine.) Burnett devised a dizzying array of lucrative product-integration deals. In the first season, one of the teams won a care package that was attached to a parachute bearing the red-and-white logo of Target.

“I looked on ‘Survivor’ as much as a marketing vehicle as a television show,” Burnett once explained. He was creating an immersive, cinematic entertainment—and he was known for lush production values, and for paying handsomely to retain top producers and editors—but he was anything but precious about his art. Long before he met Trump, Burnett had developed a Panglossian confidence in the power of branding. “I believe we’re going to see something like the Microsoft Grand Canyon National Park,” he told the New York Times in 2001. “The government won’t take care of all that—companies will.”

Seven weeks before the 2016 election, Burnett, in a smart tux with a shawl collar, arrived with his third wife, the actress and producer Roma Downey, at the Microsoft Theatre, in Los Angeles, for the Emmy Awards. Both “Shark Tank” and “The Voice” won awards that night. But his triumphant evening was marred when the master of ceremonies, Jimmy Kimmel, took an unexpected turn during his opening monologue. “Television brings people together, but television can also tear us apart,” Kimmel mused. “I mean, if it wasn’t for television, would Donald Trump be running for President?” In the crowd, there was laughter. “Many have asked, ‘Who is to blame for Donald Trump?’ ” Kimmel continued. “I’ll tell you who, because he’s sitting right there. That guy.” Kimmel pointed into the audience, and the live feed cut to a closeup of Burnett, whose expression resolved itself into a rigid grin. “Thanks to Mark Burnett, we don’t have to watch reality shows anymore, because we’re living in one,” Kimmel said. Burnett was still smiling, but Kimmel wasn’t. He went on, “I’m going on the record right now. He’s responsible. If Donald Trump gets elected and he builds that wall, the first person we’re throwing over it is Mark Burnett. The tribe has spoken.”

Around this time, Burnett stopped giving interviews about Trump or “The Apprentice.” He continues to speak to the press to promote his shows, but he declined an interview with me. Before Trump’s Presidential run, however, Burnett told and retold the story of how the show originated. When he met Trump at Wollman Rink, Burnett told him an anecdote about how, as a young man selling T-shirts on the boardwalk on Venice Beach, he had been handed a copy of “The Art of the Deal,” by a passing rollerblader. Burnett said that he had read it, and that it had changed his life; he thought, What a legend this guy Trump is!

Anyone else hearing this tale might have found it a bit calculated, if not implausible. Kym Gold, Burnett’s first wife, told me that she has no recollection of him reading Trump’s book in this period. “He liked mystery books,” she said. But when Trump heard the story he was flattered.

Burnett has never liked the phrase “reality television.” For a time, he valiantly campaigned to rebrand his genre “dramality”—“a mixture of drama and reality.” The term never caught on, but it reflected Burnett’s forthright acknowledgment that what he creates is a highly structured, selective, and manipulated rendition of reality. Burnett has often boasted that, for each televised hour of “The Apprentice,” his crews shot as many as three hundred hours of footage. The real alchemy of reality television is the editing—sifting through a compost heap of clips and piecing together an absorbing story. Jonathon Braun, an editor who started working with Burnett on “Survivor” and then worked on the first six seasons of “The Apprentice,” told me, “You don’t make anything up. But you accentuate things that you see as themes.” He readily conceded how distorting this process can be. Much of reality TV consists of reaction shots: one participant says something outrageous, and the camera cuts away to another participant rolling her eyes. Often, Braun said, editors lift an eye roll from an entirely different part of the conversation.

“The Apprentice” was built around a weekly series of business challenges. At the end of each episode, Trump determined which competitor should be “fired.” But, as Braun explained, Trump was frequently unprepared for these sessions, with little grasp of who had performed well. Sometimes a candidate distinguished herself during the contest only to get fired, on a whim, by Trump. When this happened, Braun said, the editors were often obliged to “reverse engineer” the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage to emphasize the few moments when the exemplary candidate might have slipped up, in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense. During the making of “The Apprentice,” Burnett conceded that the stories were constructed in this way, saying, “We know each week who has been fired, and, therefore, you’re editing in reverse.” Braun noted that President Trump’s staff seems to have been similarly forced to learn the art of retroactive narrative construction, adding, “I find it strangely validating to hear that they’re doing the same thing in the White House.”

Such sleight of hand is the industry standard in reality television. But the entire premise of “The Apprentice” was also something of a con. When Trump and Burnett told the story of their partnership, both suggested that Trump was initially wary of committing to a TV show, because he was so busy running his flourishing real-estate empire. During a 2004 panel at the Museum of Television and Radio, in Los Angeles, Trump claimed that “every network” had tried to get him to do a reality show, but he wasn’t interested: “I don’t want to have cameras all over my office, dealing with contractors, politicians, mobsters, and everyone else I have to deal with in my business. You know, mobsters don’t like, as they’re talking to me, having cameras all over the room. It would play well on television, but it doesn’t play well with them.”

“The Apprentice” portrayed Trump not as a skeezy hustler who huddles with local mobsters but as a plutocrat with impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth—a titan who always seemed to be climbing out of helicopters or into limousines. “Most of us knew he was a fake,” Braun told me. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.” Bill Pruitt, another producer, recalled, “We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture. We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise.”

Trump maximized his profits from the start. When producers were searching for office space in which to stage the show, he vetoed every suggestion, then mentioned that he had an empty floor available in Trump Tower, which he could lease at a reasonable price. (After becoming President, he offered a similar arrangement to the Secret Service.) When the production staff tried to furnish the space, they found that local venders, stiffed by Trump in the past, refused to do business with them.

More than two hundred thousand people applied for one of the sixteen spots on Season 1, and throughout the show’s early years the candidates were conspicuously credentialled and impressive. Officially, the grand prize was what the show described as “the dream job of a lifetime”—the unfathomable privilege of being mentored by Donald Trump while working as a junior executive at the Trump Organization. All the candidates paid lip service to the notion that Trump was a peerless businessman, but not all of them believed it. A standout contestant in Season 1 was Kwame Jackson, a young African-American man with an M.B.A. from Harvard, who had worked at Goldman Sachs. Jackson told me that he did the show not out of any desire for Trump’s tutelage but because he regarded the prospect of a nationally televised business competition as “a great platform” for career advancement. “At Goldman, I was in private-wealth management, so Trump was not, by any stretch, the most financially successful person I’d ever met or managed,” Jackson told me. He was quietly amused when other contestants swooned over Trump’s deal-making prowess or his elevated tastes—when they exclaimed, on tours of tacky Trump properties, “Oh, my God, this is so rich—this is, like, really rich!” Fran Lebowitz once remarked that Trump is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person,” and Jackson was struck, when the show aired, by the extent to which Americans fell for the ruse. “Main Street America saw all those glittery things, the helicopter and the gold-plated sinks, and saw the most successful person in the universe,” he recalled. “The people I knew in the world of high finance understood that it was all a joke.”

This is an oddly common refrain among people who were involved in “The Apprentice”: that the show was camp, and that the image of Trump as an avatar of prosperity was delivered with a wink. Somehow, this interpretation eluded the audience. Jonathon Braun marvelled, “People started taking it seriously!”

When I watched several dozen episodes of the show recently, I saw no hint of deliberate irony. Admittedly, it is laughable to hear the candidates, at a fancy meal, talk about watching Trump for cues on which utensil they should use for each course, as if he were Emily Post. But the show’s reverence for its pugnacious host, however credulous it might seem now, comes across as sincere.

Did Burnett believe what he was selling? Or was Trump another two-dollar T-shirt that he pawned off for eighteen? It’s difficult to say. One person who has collaborated with Burnett likened him to Harold Hill, the travelling fraudster in “The Music Man,” saying, “There’s always an angle with Mark. He’s all about selling.” Burnett is fluent in the jargon of self-help, and he has published two memoirs, both written with Bill O’Reilly’s ghostwriter, which double as manuals on how to get rich. One of them, titled “Jump In!: Even if You Don’t Know How to Swim,” now reads like an inadvertent metaphor for the Trump Presidency. “Don’t waste time on overpreparation,” the book advises.

At the 2004 panel, Burnett made it clear that, with “The Apprentice,” he was selling an archetype. “Donald is the real current-day version of a tycoon,” he said. “Donald will say whatever Donald wants to say. He takes no prisoners. If you’re Donald’s friend, he’ll defend you all day long. If you’re not, he’s going to kill you. And that’s very American. It’s like the guys who built the West.” Like Trump, Burnett seemed to have both a jaundiced impression of the gullible essence of the American people and a brazen enthusiasm for how to exploit it. “The Apprentice” was about “what makes America great,” Burnett said. “Everybody wants one of a few things in this country. They’re willing to pay to lose weight. They’re willing to pay to grow hair. They’re willing to pay to have sex. And they’re willing to pay to learn how to get rich.”

At the start of “The Apprentice,” Burnett’s intention may have been to tell a more honest story, one that acknowledged Trump’s many stumbles. Burnett surely recognized that Trump was at a low point, but, according to Walker, “Mark sensed Trump’s potential for a comeback.” Indeed, in a voice-over introduction in the show’s pilot, Trump conceded a degree of weakness that feels shockingly self-aware when you listen to it today: “I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back, and I won, big league.”

The show was an instant hit, and Trump’s public image, and the man himself, began to change. Not long after the première, Trump suggested in an Esquire article that people now liked him, “whereas before, they viewed me as a bit of an ogre.” Jim Dowd, Trump’s former publicist, told Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, the authors of the 2016 book “Trump Revealed,” that after “The Apprentice” began airing “people on the street embraced him.” Dowd noted, “All of a sudden, there was none of the old mocking,” adding, “He was a hero.” Dowd, who died in 2016, pinpointed the public’s embrace of “The Apprentice” as “the bridge” to Trump’s Presidential run.

The show’s camera operators often shot Trump from low angles, as you would a basketball pro, or Mt. Rushmore. Trump loomed over the viewer, his face in a jowly glower, his hair darker than it is now, the metallic auburn of a new penny. (“Apprentice” employees were instructed not to fiddle with Trump’s hair, which he dyed and styled himself.) Trump’s entrances were choreographed for maximum impact, and often set to a moody accompaniment of synthesized drums and cymbals. The “boardroom”—a stage set where Trump determined which candidate should be fired—had the menacing gloom of a “Godfather” movie. In one scene, Trump ushered contestants through his rococo Trump Tower aerie, and said, “I show this apartment to very few people. Presidents. Kings.” In the tabloid ecosystem in which he had long languished, Trump was always Donald, or the Donald. On “The Apprentice,” he finally became Mr. Trump.

“We have to subscribe to our own myths,” the “Apprentice” producer Bill Pruitt told me. “Mark Burnett is a great mythmaker. He blew up that balloon and he believed in it.” Burnett, preferring to spend time pitching new ideas for shows, delegated most of the daily decisions about “The Apprentice” to his team, many of them veterans of “Survivor” and “Eco-Challenge.” But he furiously promoted the show, often with Trump at his side. According to many of Burnett’s collaborators, one of his greatest skills is his handling of talent—understanding their desires and anxieties, making them feel protected and secure. On interview tours with Trump, Burnett exhibited the studied instincts of a veteran producer: anytime the spotlight strayed in his direction, he subtly redirected it at Trump.

Burnett, who was forty-three when Season 1 aired, described the fifty-seven-year-old Trump as his “soul mate.” He expressed astonishment at Trump’s “laser-like focus and retention.” He delivered flattery in the ostentatiously obsequious register that Trump prefers. Burnett said he hoped that he might someday rise to Trump’s “level” of prestige and success, adding, “I don’t know if I’ll ever make it. But you know something? If you’re not shooting for the stars, you’re not shooting!” On one occasion, Trump invited Burnett to dinner at his Trump Tower apartment; Burnett had anticipated an elegant meal, and, according to an associate, concealed his surprise when Trump handed him a burger from McDonald’s.

Trump liked to suggest that he and Burnett had come up with the show “together”; Burnett never corrected him. When Carolyn Kepcher, a Trump Organization executive who appeared alongside Trump in early seasons of “The Apprentice,” seemed to be courting her own celebrity, Trump fired her and gave on-air roles to three of his children, Ivanka, Donald, Jr., and Eric. Burnett grasped that the best way to keep Trump satisfied was to insure that he never felt upstaged. “It’s Batman and Robin, and I’m clearly Robin,” he said.

Burnett sometimes went so far as to imply that Trump’s involvement in “The Apprentice” was a form of altruism. “This is Donald Trump giving back,” he told the Times in 2003, then offered a vague invocation of post-9/11 civic duty: “What makes the world a safe place right now? I think it’s American dollars, which come from taxes, which come because of Donald Trump.” Trump himself had been candid about his reasons for doing the show. “My jet’s going to be in every episode,” he told Jim Dowd, adding that the production would be “great for my brand.”

It was. Season 1 of “The Apprentice” flogged one Trump property after another. The contestants stayed at Trump Tower, did events at Trump National Golf Club, sold Trump Ice bottled water. “I’ve always felt that the Trump Taj Mahal should do even better,” Trump announced before sending the contestants off on a challenge to lure gamblers to his Atlantic City casino, which soon went bankrupt. The prize for the winning team was an opportunity to stay and gamble at the Taj, trailed by cameras.

“The Apprentice” was so successful that, by the time the second season launched, Trump’s lacklustre tie-in products were being edged out by blue-chip companies willing to pay handsomely to have their wares featured onscreen. In 2004, Kevin Harris, a producer who helped Burnett secure product-integration deals, sent an e-mail describing a teaser reel of Trump endorsements that would be used to attract clients: “Fast cutting of Donald—‘Crest is the biggest’ ‘I have worn Levis since I was 2’ ‘I love M&Ms’ ‘Unilever is the biggest company in the world’ all with the MONEY MONEY MONEY song over the top.”

Burnett and Trump negotiated with NBC to retain the rights to income derived from product integration, and split the fees. On set, Trump often gloated about this easy money. One producer remembered, “You’d say, ‘Hey, Donald, today we have Pepsi, and they’re paying three million to be in the show,’ and he’d say, ‘That’s great, I just made a million five!’ ”

Originally, Burnett had planned to cast a different mogul in the role of host each season. But Trump took to his part more nimbly than anyone might have predicted. He wouldn’t read a script—he stumbled over the words and got the enunciation all wrong. But off the cuff he delivered the kind of zesty banter that is the lifeblood of reality television. He barked at one contestant, “Sam, you’re sort of a disaster. Don’t take offense, but everyone hates you.” Katherine Walker told me that producers often struggled to make Trump seem coherent, editing out garbled syntax and malapropisms. “We cleaned it up so that he was his best self,” she said, adding, “I’m sure Donald thinks that he was never edited.” However, she acknowledged, he was a natural for the medium: whereas reality-TV producers generally must amp up personalities and events, to accentuate conflict and conjure intrigue, “we didn’t have to change him—he gave us stuff to work with.” Trump improvised the tagline for which “The Apprentice” became famous: “You’re fired.”

NBC executives were so enamored of their new star that they instructed Burnett and his producers to give Trump more screen time. This is when Trump’s obsession with television ratings took hold. “I didn’t know what demographics was four weeks ago,” he told Larry King. “All of a sudden, I heard we were No. 3 in demographics. Last night, we were No. 1 in demographics. And that’s the important rating.” The ratings kept rising, and the first season’s finale was the No. 1 show of the week. For Burnett, Trump’s rehabilitation was a satisfying confirmation of a populist aesthetic. “I like it when critics slam a movie and it does massive box office,” he once said. “I love it.” Whereas others had seen in Trump only a tattered celebrity of the eighties, Burnett had glimpsed a feral charisma.

On June 26, 2018, the day the Supreme Court upheld President Trump’s travel ban targeting people from several predominantly Muslim countries, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sent out invitations to an event called a Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. If Pompeo registered any dissonance between such lofty rhetoric and Administration policies targeting certain religions, he didn’t mention it.

The event took place the next month, at the State Department, in Washington, D.C., and one of the featured speakers was Mark Burnett. In 2004, he had been getting his hair cut at a salon in Malibu when he noticed an attractive woman getting a pedicure. It was Roma Downey, the star of “Touched by an Angel,” a long-running inspirational drama on CBS. They fell in love, and married in 2007; together, they helped rear Burnett’s two sons from his second marriage and Downey’s daughter. Downey, who grew up in a Catholic family in Northern Ireland, is deeply religious, and eventually Burnett, too, reoriented his life around Christianity. “Faith is a major part of our marriage,” Downey said, in 2013, adding, “We pray together.”

For people who had long known Burnett, it was an unexpected turn. This was a man who had ended his second marriage during a live interview with Howard Stern. To promote “Survivor” in 2002, Burnett called in to Stern’s radio show, and Stern asked casually if he was married. When Burnett hesitated, Stern pounced. “You didn’t survive marriage?” he asked. “You don’t want your girlfriend to know you’re married?” As Burnett dissembled, Stern kept prying, and the exchange became excruciating. Finally, Stern asked if Burnett was “a single guy,” and Burnett replied, “You know? Yeah.” This was news to Dianne, Burnett’s wife of a decade. As she subsequently wrote in her memoir, “The 18-to-34 radio demographic knew where my marriage was headed before I did.”

In 2008, Burnett’s longtime business partner, a lawyer named Conrad Riggs, filed a lawsuit alleging that Burnett had stiffed him to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. According to the lawsuit, the two men had made an agreement before “Survivor” and “The Apprentice” that Riggs would own ten per cent of Burnett’s company. When Riggs got married, someone who attended the ceremony told me, Burnett was his best man, and gave a speech saying that his success would have been impossible without Riggs. Several years later, when Burnett’s company was worth half a billion dollars, he denied having made any agreement. The suit settled out of court. (Riggs declined to comment.)

Article from January 7, 2019 By Patrick Radden Keefe

Yobaba - New Yorker mag articles are LONG; I posted this mostly for my own reference so I will have a record of it; that said, I strongly urge everyone to read this. it explains a lot.

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wineanddinosaur · 4 years

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What It’s Like to Be a Black Man Working in the Wine Industry

Do you ever wonder what it might feel like to be a Black man working in wine, an overwhelmingly white- and male-dominated industry? You may not see me — or people who look like me — very often. Black professionals make up just 2 percent of the drinks industry, despite accounting for more than 13 percent of the U.S. population. So I’m here to tell you: Even though I stand out, I often feel invisible.

During my past seven years working as a sales representative for a major distributor, I’ve had plenty of great experiences. But, I’ve also missed out on trips, tastings, and supplier-related events that have been available to my white colleagues. When I think of a quote that encapsulates my experience, one from American novelist James Baldwin comes close: “I can’t trust what you say because I see what you do.” By this, I mean it has been nearly impossible for me to be taken seriously, to excel, and to gain recognition. It is hard for me to believe the wine industry truly wants diversity when I rarely see people of color in leadership roles.

The disparities between my experience and that of my coworkers largely comes down to the wine industry’s lack of inclusion. You have to be in the room to be recognized. Think back to the tastings you’ve attended, to the wineries you’ve visited. How many Black men were there? Probably none. Writer J’Nai Gaither recently shed light on the casual racism found in Napa tasting rooms, but BIPOC professionals have to endure racism and bias throughout the industry, including the off-premise environment that I work in.

BIASES AMONG CONSUMERS — AND PROFESSIONALS

As a sales rep, before Covid hit, I’d typically spend part of every week preplanning the most effective way to visit my accounts, to discuss sales with each store or department manager. A lot of decisions for promotional programs and brands displays happen on a corporate level, but my relationships with these local managers increases the opportunity for items “not on plan” to still be featured somewhere in the store.

I build and maintain case displays that sometimes exceed 30 to 60 cases. At every account, I interact with customers — or at least that’s my goal. Anytime I’m on the floor, I greet customers and inquire if they need any assistance finding wine or any recommendations. I want nothing more than to help them find a great wine for their specific need. Yet I usually hear, “No I’m OK.” I wish I could say that customers decline the help of white men I’m often working alongside, but that’s not the case: I’ve found many customers to be prejudiced. They want help, but not from me, as if a Black man is incapable of having wine knowledge.

One method I’ve implemented is to follow up after the customer has declined my help. In whatever area of the shop they’re standing longest in, I’ll recommend a bottle nearby. More frequently than not, the customer will purchase a wine I’ve suggested, or they’ll finally engage to tell me what type of wine they’re seeking. It’s an exercise in frustration, though. I have to try so hard just to be heard by the customer, to give them a recommendation.

On the flip side, when I am the customer, be it at a restaurant or a fine wine shop, wine professionals show their overt or unconscious biases toward me almost immediately. If I ask a question about a white wine, I’ll be escorted to the sweet wine section, or to the bargain whites.

But no — I’m looking for the grower Champagne, that indigenous Italian wine from Puglia, or the excellent Bordeaux blanc-inspired wine from Australia. In order to be taken seriously, I have to prove myself, pulling out obscure producer names and regional information before a retailer will engage with me, and that’s just disappointing. The wine industry is full of intelligent people who can do better than relying on racially motivated stereotypes.

As a colleague, let me say to other wine professionals: It’s time to let go of your tired prejudices. Black men don’t just drink sweet wines, or cheap wines. Speaking from my experience facilitating wine tasting events, Black men do drink a broad range of wines. We are hungry to explore the world of wine; we just need wine professionals who are willing to take the time to explain it, in the same way that’s afforded to white customers.

BEING THE ONLY BLACK MAN IN THE ROOM

Over the years, I can easily count how many supplier-led or company-related events I’ve been invited to — it’s not many. While my white coworkers get invited to countless winery visits and industry events, I rarely do. And when I have been included, I’m often the only Black man present. One winemaker interaction last year was particularly eye-opening.

One day, I showed up at one of my retail accounts, and my coworkers had, unbeknownst to me, scheduled a winemaker visit. It was not standard protocol for me to be unaware of the visit, but I played along and was happy to interact with the winemaker, expressing my passion for her wine in our brief discussion. She invited me to dinner that evening, along with coworkers who had already been invited.

When I arrived at the dinner, my coworkers were conciliatory, acknowledging the mistake: “Vince, I’m so sorry. I did not know that they were going to your account today.” Looking around the table, everyone present was either a white woman or a white man, and somehow they all got invitations in advance. But inevitably that’s always the case — I’m a last-minute addition, if anyone invites me at all. This lack of inclusivity has discouraged me in so many ways.

I think back to the first time I ever saw a Black man taken seriously in the wine industry. It was DLynn Proctor in the “Somm” film. That was huge for me. Representation matters immensely and if you never see someone who looks like you making moves in places you could never imagine it makes it more difficult to garner interest in any field; the wine industry is no different.

In tired moments, I wonder why I pour my energy into an industry where gatekeepers often fail to recognize BIPOC and give us a seat at the table. But then my passion for wine takes over. I love wine and I know that I have a greater purpose being present in the industry than absent. My work in wine will help the next generation of Black men see that space exists for them here.

GAINING ACCESS TO OPPORTUNITIES

My BIPOC colleagues and I have largely been excluded from industry-funded wine events and regional wine trips. When I finally landed my first successful industry-related tour to the Napa Valley in 2019, that felt amazing. But it took nearly six years of inquiries to make it happen. Would it have taken a white wine professional half that time to be asked?

That’s the question at the root of several new non-profit organizations designed to help the industry advance on racial equity, including Black Wine Professionals, Wine Unify, and The Roots Fund. If a wine brand wants to hire or invite BIPOC talent, there’s no longer an excuse to say, “I don’t know any Black wine professionals.” Just go to the Black Wine Professionals website for a directory. To hire a wine intern from a diverse background, connect with The Roots Fund, which helps facilitate that job placement. For minorities looking to find a mentor locally, head to Wine Unify’s website to apply.

The resources exist for companies to recognize, hire, and recruit BIPOC talent. Now it’s time for the wineries, suppliers, distributors, sales teams, and management staff throughout this industry to step up and mandate actionable change. That means business models that require a diverse staff throughout the organization, including upper management. It means creating scorecards to publicly rate or rank companies each year on their DIP (diversity improvement progress), and to hold them accountable.

In an ideal world, companies will have minorities at the table at all levels within their businesses. Wineries will have BIPOC professionals working in the tasting room areas without being subjected to stereotypes or prejudices. Black wine professionals will be compensated equally to their white counterparts. Each of these environments will also be LGBTQIA+ -friendly as well, with regular staff trainings on unconscious biases. And Black men, like me, will no longer feel invisible.

The article What It’s Like to Be a Black Man Working in the Wine Industry appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/black-man-wine-industry/

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thearchworks · 7 years

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I Like Ghostbusters (2016)

This is going to be long and I almost didn’t post it because of that, but I spent hours on this, and I’m not letting that go to waste. So here you go.

Also Spoiler Warning.

And I understand that’s a point of contention because some vocal people in the world don’t agree with the idea that some other people in the world are born with vaginas...

My heart bleeds...

I’m going to clarify before I get into the meat of this and explain why I like the movie, I don’t think it’s the best movie, I don’t even think it’s a great movie.

It’s alright. It’s about as enjoyably flawed as most other movies and I don’t see anything really terrible about it.

And I’m not saying that so I can appear neutral on the topic, I feel it’s an honest criticism that the movie is just OK, but that’s not a damnable offense.

My favourite movie (Pokémon The First Movie) is flawed as hell, from Pokemon being referred to by the wrong name, staggeringly inconsistent world-mechanics, emotional scenes almost ruined by what looks like stock on-model clip-art Pokemon smiling in the background while Ash lies “dead”, laughable uses of early 2000′s CG and even a well-meaning but ham-fisted and easily misconstrued message about ignoring the things that make people different and instead celebrating that we’re all the same in a way (which in turn limits discussion about cultural differences and why they’re so fascinating and worth sharing)

And that’s not even touching on how Meowth is honestly the true hero of the movie.

But anyway, I could go on forever about that.

What I’m laboriously trying to get to is that even movies you love and maybe consider perfect, have things wrong with them. It’s a logical truth about not just all movies, but probably all things in the universe.

And I think a wonderful way to illustrate that, whilst also talking about the main focus of this thing I’m writing right now, would be to list off a select handful of things I liked about Ghostbusters 2016 and compare them to the original movie (And maybe even the second one).

So let’s get to it.

The Ghostbusters actually all believe in ghosts.

Yeah, So I’m going to address this point with the original movie first.

You have Ray, who believes in ghosts and Egon, who also believes, or at least is interested in the actual research that goes into proving the existence of ghosts. That’s fine, you need at least one person to be a believer for the premise to make any logical sense.

But then you have Venkman, He has PHDs in psychology and a para-psychoogy. So he at least has some kind of passing interest into, at the very least, the psychological component of why people might believe ghosts are real.

But as is proven within the opening moments of the film, he doesn’t really seem to believe anything he’s spouting. You see him in the midst of an experiment on negative reinforcement and it’s affect on ESP, but he’s not doing it because he’s interested, at least not when you see him. He’s doing it to impress a female student.

Because if anything is going to get a girl probably half your age raring to go it’s electrocuting a classmate for giggles.

Anyway, moving on to Winston. It’s worth mentioning that when Aykroyd and Ramis were writing Winston they wanted him to also be a scientist, or at least someone with a higher degree of education or a background in engineering, but it was agreed later on that having the cast comprised of all scientists leaves them no every-man for the audience to relate to, so we got the Winston that is in the movie.

I have nothing against that, that’s a fine judgement call in my opinion. And I don’t think it makes his role in the movie any less valid, if anything it makes him more essential for grounding the story, because he arrives in the story to get a job hunting ghosts, something he doesn’t discredit, but also doesn’t openly believe in straight away. And remarks that as long as he gets paid he’ll believe whatever they ask him to.

So two of the four original Ghostbusters don’t believe in ghosts or at the very least don’t have a strong opinion about it either way.

In the 2016 version, all of them believe in ghosts.

Erin, believed in ghosts due to repeated encounters with an old woman who died next door when she was a little girl, prompting her parents to put her into therapy and her peers at school to ridicule her. Which is when she met Abby and they became fast friends over their mutual interest in the paranormal.

They grew up and co-wrote a book about their hypothesis about potentially encountering, interacting with and containing ghosts. Fast forward to the start of the movie, Erin has forced herself to repress her interest in ghosts and convinced herself that she doesn’t believe anymore as a means to succeed in mainstream academia.

Abby however continued to believe and eventually meets Holtzmann, who as it would seem also believed in ghosts and feels she’s capable of constructing the mechanisms necessary to fulfil Abby and Erin’s previous dreams.

Then as a result of encountering a real ghost, Erin believes again and Abby and Holtzmann have their evidence to validate their research.

Later on in the movie we are introduced to Patty, Who admittedly doesn’t indicate any previous belief in ghosts, but she is inspired to join the Ghostbusters because she encounters one, so realistically, that makes her a believer before she joins.

All four Ghostbusters are believers in the thing they set out to do in the 2016 movie for individual reasons.

Erin, because of past experiences, Abby because she bonded with her closest friend over the paranormal, Holtzmann because it’s later revealed she has a hard time fully understanding how people work and was looking for companionship from Abby and ghost hunting sounded like a cool enough reason to hang out*. And Patty actually sees a ghost before finding the right people to ask about it.

(*That isn’t to say that Holtzmann only believed because Abby did, Holtzmann clearly thinks ghosts exist, look at her reaction to the first ghost in the movie, she’s not surprised to find that Abby was right, she’s hyped as hell to see a ghost, it validated her and her friends work together.)

To move further onto this point, and introduce the next section...

The people in positions of power believe in ghosts as well.

In Ghostbusters 2016, the Mayor of New York has his people make contact with the Ghostbusters to congratulate them on their discovery, but to ultimately stop making such a big deal about it for fear of public hysteria. Because unlike in the original movie (And a little bit in two) Ghosts were happening even when the Ghostbusters weren’t around. I know it’s crazy to think about.

The original movie, somehow expected it’s audience to buy into a premise of scientists fighting against paranormal activity in a major metropolitan area where seemingly no one believed in or had ever encountered a ghost before the start of the film... It goes double for the second movie, because in the intervening time between the end of one and the beginning of two, the Ghostbusters were court ordered to stop any paranormal investigations of any kind.

So in that time, I guess nobody saw a ghost? You never hear anyone saying how they want the Ghostbusters back because they were actually providing a service? It’s ridiculous. And the men in charge of the city are still skeptics, despite everyone witnessing a giant marshmallow man about a year prior?

So yeah, the portrayal of authority in the 2016 movie is more forgiving, You probably won’t see anyone insulting the man who played the Mayor in the 2016 role for how much of a shit his character was, unlike what unfortunately happened to the actor who played Walter Peck.

And the attitudes presented by these characters (in the 2016 movie) are a constant throughout, sure there’s one scene where they publicly don’t believe Erin when she’s screaming about the impending crisis, but their role in the movie is that of a mediator between what’s actually happening and the public, it’s a facade and probably a little closer to what would actually happen in this scenario.

The Ghostbusters tech is iterative (in the 2016 version).

So everyone is familiar with the Proton packs, anyone who was a child during the 80′s and 90′s probably wanted a Proton pack or grew into an adult that eventually owned a screen-accurate one. I wager almost no one will argue that the Proton pack isn’t one of the coolest and most iconic pieces of Sci-Fi tech in film.

But it wasn’t until watching the 2016 version, that I realised I’ve always wanted to see how they made them... In the original movie they just have Proton packs, traps and a containment grid ready to go on their first mission to hunt for Slimer.

You never see the process of how they designed or constructed the tech in the original movies. The closest you get to this is in the second movie where you see Ray tinkering with the slime launcher, but even then, it’s more-or-less fully built even before they reveal what it is.

You could claim that this is a “modern cinema” way of thinking, because back in the late 80′s to early 90′s it was less important* to show how everything worked in a film like it is today.

(*There are doubtless movies from the same time that DID do it, it just wasn’t as necessary as it is today)

That’s a fine point and I honestly can’t argue against it, it is more telling about the times in which the movies were made.

But I still feel like I would have rather have seen them even just doing a montage of putting their business together.

They buy an old firehouse and a hearse, then suddenly it’s got everything they need in it?

I will also concede that, in the 2016 movie, they seem to have access to basically all of the stuff they need despite never showing any indication of having any kind of budget.

(Also, I’m not sure why they actually needed a receptionist... Let alone budgeted in the wages for one...)

I don’t know much, but I reckon it’s not easy to make four portable nuclear accelerators on the cheap, even if they’re made of salvaged scrap. But you do have to allow for a little suspension of disbelief with Sci-Fi comedies.

So yeah, both have a some inconsistencies on where exactly their tech comes from or how they can afford to make them, but whatever.

I also really enjoyed the variances of the tech in the 2016 version, you have a ghost vacuum crossed with a paper shredder, a hand mounted, punch activated proton gauntlet, the... I’ll be honest I can’t tell what it is that Erin uses during the final scenes is it a proton grenade launcher or a shotgun or what? Speaking of grenades they also have those and then the show piece, Holtzmann’s duel Proton whips.

These variations of the same basic tech are brilliant and I love them. Why would you just have one catch-all (Pun some-what intended) device that all ghosts are susceptible to? I mean there’s going to be instances where a ghost is too large or small for a proton pack right? Or what if a ghost presents itself to be too dangerous to risk the time it’d take to capture?

The original movie never really touched on the idea of killing ghosts (Despite doing so at least twice), probably because on paper it sounds nonsensical, but when you give ghosts a physical presence that can be interacted with and through proton manipulation, moved around and held indefinitely, killing them becomes less absurd. The movies can easily work around it by simply saying “we didn’t kill a ghost, we just destabilised it.”

Which honestly works for me. You don’t really need to explain further, you shot lasers at a thing until it turned to mist, righteo!

And that is a thing that actually happens in the 2016 film, during the final scenes the team squares off against an entire street of different kinds of human-shaped ghosts. And they don’t capture any of them, there are no prisoners in the 2016 film.

They successfully capture one ghost and then set it free to spite one of their biggest and most vocal naysayers. But the actual reason they don’t catch any ghosts in this one, is because they don’t have a containment grid until the END of the movie when the government has finally recognised their efforts and provides them funding.

Giving yet another reason why the authority figures in the 2016 version are better than the originals.

OK, that’s probably going to do it, because this became really long, really fast. But I would like to just very quickly speak directly about some criticisms the movie received.

“Women can’t be Ghostbusters”.

This is the most common one and it baffles me to no end. I don’t remember that being firmly established within the first two movies. I mean looking at the evidence you can at least say that until recently all Ghostbusters were male, but that in itself still doesn’t state that women CAN’T be Ghostbusters...

I’ve also heard a variation of the argument, saying that it isn’t that they’re women it’s because they’re all women, and fair enough. I can’t say that the movie would or wouldn’t have been better or at least more favourably received if there were at least one male Ghostbuster, but that’s not the direction they took, so we’ll never know.

But ultimately there is nothing stopping women from putting on a back pack and shooting lasers at ghosts. Nothing at all. I could do it from my chair, it doesn’t take much effort. So any out-dated argument about it being a physically demanding, manly job for strong, manly men, just remember, the first movie was about three nerds shooting lasers at ghosts.

“There was a Queef joke within five minutes of the movie starting!”

That’s your metric for whether a movie is bad? are you fucking five? I’ve watched movies in the past where the central joke was that people fart. If a movie with a female cast want to make something their bodies do into a joke, then let them... in the grand scheme of things, one queef joke is nothing compared to the near endless stream of farts, poops, puke, burps and erections I’ve seen in movies. Fuck in Super Bad a girl has her period on a dudes leg. Now let me just go see... Nope I checked there isn’t mass hysteria in the streets over this...

Fucking grow up.

And it’s not even like it carries on that way throughout the movie. as I said, I’ve seen whole films about the core conceit that farts are funny.

But no, if the Ghostbusters want to make one throw away gag about yet another kind of gaseous expulsion, then that’s too far!

“All the men in the movie are stupid!”

Yeah, OK. Name a comedy that hasn’t included at least one stupid male character.

Also, only two of them are stupid in the typical sense. The rest are skeptical.

And I wouldn’t mind this argument if some of those characters weren’t justifiably stupid.

Let’s look at the classic example, Kevin the receptionist. So this is a man who is textbook handsome but absolutely stupid to the point of possibly being a danger to himself and others. But he kind of has to be that way.

You’re probably confused so let me validate that claim. He at some point saw a job listing to be a receptionist for a new private business, the name of the business is a bunch of long words he can’t even remember half the time but it’s something about paranormal whats-its and it’s located above a Chinese restaurant.

Would you, go for that job? I know money is tight for everyone, but still. imagine that job listing and then imagine the kind of person who would go for it.

And I bet you’re imagining the kind of person who takes the lenses out of their glasses to stop them from getting dirty.

“We don’t need to reboot Ghostbusters!”

Actually, I fully agree. This is my one major problem with the film. We didn’t need to reboot it.

I know it’s been 30 years since we had a Ghostbusters movie and reboot is the new original IP in the current movie business. But there is one line in the original move that validates spin-off movies over flat out reboots or remakes.

“The franchise rights alone will make us rich beyond our wildest dreams.”

This is a line that Venkman says to Ray when they gather the funding for their business.

The full intention was to make Ghostbusting a FRANCHISE, not a single business.

So there is in no uncertain terms more than enough wiggle room to create Ghostbuster movies set in different places. I mean what if it became an international franchise? the possibilities are now endless.

But they went with a reboot. Because.

And that is honestly the only major criticism I can think of.

#Ghostbusters 2016 #Ghostbusters #Movie #Discussion #Why I like it #essay #analysis #criticism

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plusorminuscongress · 6 years

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New story in Politics from Time: Brett Kavanaugh Isn’t the First Supreme Court Nominee Accused of Sexual Misconduct. Here’s What Happened Before

The revelation on Sunday that psychologist Christine Blasey Ford is the woman who accuses Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault has opened a new phase in a confirmation process that had been drawing to a close.

But, with her lawyer saying that Ford is willing to testify about the alleged incident, the news has also opened up an old wound.

Ford’s allegations of assault at a high-school party in the 1980s were relayed in a letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein and began circulating publicly last week. The possibility that she might speak to the Senate Judiciary Committee inevitably calls to mind a moment from more than 25 years ago. That was when another woman accused a Supreme Court nominee of sexual misconduct.

On Oct. 11, 1991, when she testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Anita Hill became the face of what was arguably the biggest sexual harassment case ever seen in the United States up to that time.

Hill, then a 35-year-old University of Oklahoma law professor and commercial law expert, told the committee that 43-year-old Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had ambushed her with unsolicited dirty talk when they had worked together at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in the early 1980s.

As TIME pointed out in summarizing her eight hours of “virtually uninterrupted” testimony about his conduct at work, the details of her allegations were shocking in their specificity:

“He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals, and films showing group sex or rape scenes,” she alleged. “He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involved in various sex acts. On several occasions Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess.”

The most charged moments came when she offered specific details about Thomas’ alleged behavior. One of the “oddest episodes,” she said, involved an exchange in Thomas’ office when he reached for a can of Coke and asked, “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?” (Later, Hatch accused Hill of stealing the story from a work of fiction. Holding aloft a copy of the book The Exorcist, Hatch quoted, “There seems to be an alien pubic hair in my gin.”) On other occasions, Hill maintained, “he referred to the size of his own penis as being larger than normal” and spoke of the pleasure he had “given to women with oral sex.”

Urged by Biden to recall her most embarrassing encounter with Thomas, Hill responded, “His discussion of pornography involving these women with large breasts and engaged in a variety of sex with different people or animals.” Under questioning, she also recalled an exchange in Thomas’ office where Thomas alluded to the large penis of an actor in a pornographic film by referring to the character’s name.

“Do you recall what it was?” pressed Senator Biden.

“Yes, I do.” Hill, permitting herself a rare display of emotion, wrinkled her nose in disgust. “The name that was referred to was Long Dong Silver.” Hatch, who emerged as one of the panel’s most aggressive interrogators, later dug up a 1988 decision by a federal appeals court in Tulsa, citing an obscene photograph of a character by that name. Hatch suggested it was this court case that had brought the name to Hill’s attention — not Clarence Thomas.

Hill said that, because they worked together at the time, she feared that if she spoke up or resisted, she might lose her job. Hill also told the committee that Thomas had once told her that he knew that “if [she] ever told anyone of his behavior, that it would ruin his career.”

It didn’t, however.

Thomas denied everything and at one point characterized the hearing as “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks,” which he said played “to the worst stereotypes we have about black men in this country.” Describing the experience of having reporters comb through his private life as “Kafkaesque,” he implored the Senators to vote one way or the other in order to end the hearing. When they did vote, the Senate confirmed Thomas 52-48, on Oct. 15. He now sits on the Supreme Court.

“Her word against his,” TIME concluded. “Neither Hill nor Thomas was able to bring decisive evidence before the committee last week to support their widely differing versions of their dealings in the past. Thus the evidence of character counts all the more heavily. But even that appeared to weigh equally on both sides.”

Even though Hill’s testimony failed to keep Thomas from being confirmed, it did change the national discourse about sexual harassment in the workplace and elsewhere.

The indelible image of Hill remaining “cool and unflappable” as the 14 white male Senators on the committee questioned her sparked a stronger reaction outside that hearing room. In the world of the Senate, “it is hard to empathize with someone worried enough about her career that she would overlook offensive conduct until it became literally a federal matter. Senators don’t interact with women as colleagues — they have only two — and most of the other women they come in contact with are subservient,” TIME pointed out in an article that noted how the men on the committee were “slow to grasp” how much the issue of sexual harassment mattered. Many of those watching the televised hearings had no such trouble.

Hill’s testimony is thus credited with everything from inspiring more women to run for public office to helping to change the legal possibilities for assault and domestic-violence survivors. In the years that followed, the Supreme Court would further clarify the definitions of and laws on sexual harassment, for example by ruling same-sex harassment at work is illegal. And last year, former Vice President Joe Biden, who was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991, said that he owed Hill an apology for the way she was treated during the hearings.

And yet, in the era of #MeToo and #TimesUp, it’s clearer than ever that issues surrounding sexual assault and harassment are far from settled.

That’s part of the reason why, in the years since her testimony made her a household name, Hill has remained one of the most prominent public faces of the fight against those problems. Speaking to TIME in 2016 for the release of the HBO movie inspired by her story, Hill, now a professor at Brandeis University, said she didn’t mind continuing to talk about what she went through back then, because she knew it could provide “new inspiration” for victims.

“I do think we don’t do necessarily a great job about teaching people a history about how they got to where they are, but that’s different than taking things for granted. I think they’ve got real strong ideas about how they want to be treated in the workplace. They may not realize the obstacles that will come their way exactly, but they have strong feelings about fairness and equity,” she said. “And that’s the legacy that I want them to remember. They don’t necessarily need to know my name, but to take that away.”

Read the full 1991 issue about Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, here in the TIME Vault: Sex, Lies & Politics

By Olivia B. Waxman on September 17, 2018 at 05:46PM

#Time #politics #PlusOrMinusCongress #±Congress #Indega±#IndegaPlusOrMinus #TimeMag #TimeMagazine

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trendingnewsb · 6 years

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Glenn Close: You lose power if you get angry

From vengeful mistress to Agatha Christie matriarch: the actor talks about Harvey Weinstein, mental illness and growing up in a cult

Glenn Close and I sit at the corner of a large boardroom table in an intimidatingly minimalist office on the 14th floor of a Los Angeles talent agency. Its the kind of environment in which Patty Hewes, the ruthless lawyer Close played in Damages for five seasons, would feel at home and Im almost waiting for her to stand up, slam both hands on the table and shout, Ill rip your face off or any of the other terrifying put-downs that defined her double Emmy award-winning performance.

But Close is in high spirits and radiates such warmth I barely notice the chill from the tower blocks air-con. After we fiddle with the settings on our swivel chairs, which are so high they make anyone under six foot kick their legs like a child on a swing, the 70-year-old, six-time Oscar nominee and star of stage, television and film starts telling me about her dreams. I have had a lot recently, full of this wonderful love for a younger man. The dreams just keep coming and I wake up thinking, that was wonderful! It wasnt necessarily us doing the sexual act, just the feeling of love.

With her white hair cut to a sharp crop, and wearing a relaxed navy blazer, chinos and black scarf on account of the arctic corporate temperature, she looks stylish and fit. I have never felt better in my life, and I am, like, 70, she says. Im really a late bloomer.

She says she feels a disconnect between how she sees herself and how people may view me when I walk down the street, like: Theres an old lady. You know, there is now this cult of the model. Everyone on the red carpet is made into a model. That is very hard to not play into I have a bit of podge I am trying to get rid of, but its hard. I just think, Oh fuck, Ive been doing this my whole life! But the irony is, you just get better and better with age. You dont feel less alive or less sexy.

In Agatha Christies Crooked House. Photograph: Nick Wall

We are here to talk about Crooked House, the Agatha Christie adaptation debuting on Channel 5, before its theatrical release, in which Close plays Lady Edith, a matriarch of a very dysfunctional family. Close says, Christies grandson came to the set and he validated the fact that it was her favourite book, and the one that had never been adapted. He said when she handed it to the publisher, she was told she had to change the ending, because it was too upsetting and controversial. She refused. Its still pretty controversial.

This production, co-written by Julian Fellowes, might not be as spendy as Kenneth Branaghs $55m Murder On The Orient Express, but the ensemble cast is equally starry: joining Close are Gillian Anderson, Max Irons, Terence Stamp and Christina Hendricks. Close presides over her co-stars with gravitas and grace, in an understated performance that finds the humour in an otherwise bleak setup. But youd expect nothing less from the actor whose 40 years in the business started with star turns in Broadway productions (she won a Best Actress Tony in 1983 for Tom Stoppards The Real Thing). Her first film role, at the age of 35, was with Robin Williams in The World According To Garp, for which she received an Oscar nomination as she did for her supporting roles in The Big Chill and The Natural. Her performances in Fatal Attraction, Dangerous Liaisons and Albert Nobbs, about the life of a transgender butler in late 19th century Ireland, which she also co-wrote, racked up further Oscar nominations but still no win. This is seen by many as a travesty: Close brings a precision to her film work, honed through her years on stage. She has that rare taut quality Jack Nicholson also has it where you believe that beneath the steely control she is capable of snapping at any moment.

It was this that led Andrew Lloyd Webber to cast her in 1993 as the tragic silent movie star Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard on Broadway. Close reprised the role 23 years later, getting her old costumes out of storage (she has kept all her costumes and recently donated the collection to a university in Indiana) for its revival in Londons West End.

As Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction: Clearly she had mental health issues. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

But it was her Oscar-nominated turn as Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction in 1987 that proved career-defining. Thirty years on, Close still counts Forrest as the character of whom she feels most fond; she has admitted to fighting tooth and nail against the films eventual denouement, which turned the character into a bunny-boiling psychopath and Close into the casting directors go-to woman on the verge for years afterwards. Now we have the vocabulary to talk about these things, clearly she had mental health issues, she says.

Close sits regally still as she speaks, emphasising her points by leaning forward and locking eyes. Shes comfortable with silences and often takes a theatrical beat or two before answering questions. Shes all poise and control, but does she ever lose her temper?

I express my feelings quietly. I am not afraid of confrontation, but I am not particularly good at it. If I get attacked, I am not good at attacking back. There is fight, flight and freeze and I tend to freeze. That is not a strength of mine. I love the fact that my daughter Annie [Starke, an actor] is more of a fighter than I am. She doesnt let people get away with shit. While she agrees that women have a harder time being angry, publicly, than men, she says, I have played a lot of characters, and actually anger makes you lose power. Patty Hewes [in Damages] she hardly ever lost her temper, but when she did, it was very specific. I have always felt you lose power if you get that angry.

The collective outpouring of anger among women in Hollywood right now is something of which Close is acutely aware. She says that sexism in the industry has shifted more slowly than it should have done throughout her career: It took Harvey Weinstein and someone calling him out [for real change to happen]. I know Harvey, and he has never done that to me, but people would say he was a pig. I never knew that it was that bad and I dont personally know anybody who has endured that. I would like to think that I would have done something about it.

We discuss whether its possible to separate the work from the personalities involved in it. News has just broken that House Of Cards will be back for another series without Kevin Spacey, after it was originally canned because of harassment claims brought against its leading man. Close wraps her scarf around her chest and fixes me with her electric eyes. Artists, to make a huge generality, walk on a very thin line. Sometimes, like my beloved friend Robin Williams, who was one step away from madness, whatever makes them a great artist also makes them very complicated human beings. Again, that doesnt mean they can prey on and abuse people.

With Harvey Weinstein in 2013. Photograph: Mike Coppola/Getty Images

At the root of the problem of sexism in Hollywood right now is, Close says, biology. I think the way men have treated women, from the beginning of time, is because they have different brains to women. So I am not surprised by it at all. I say to a guy, Tell me the truth, if you see a woman walk into a room, what is the first thought that goes through your head? His answer, always, is, Would I fuck her? It doesnt mean they act on it. If you can evolve into a society where men know that they should not always act on it then there has been a positive revolution. But you cant just say that theyre not going to have the thought that is ridiculous. It also has to be the women, who are not powerful, to be OK to say no and leave the room. I think its unrealistic to say were going to change but we have to evolve.

I ask Close who she thinks is a great man today. She is silent, thinking, for what feels like a full 60 seconds in which I am so tempted to throw out some options: Barack Obama, the Pope, the friendly security guard on reception who let us in

Nelson Mandela, is her final answer, but Im not sure shes convinced. I guess for me, she says, greatness is taking your humanity and still doing the good thing. Its sad to say that there are very few men, who are leaders, who have some sort of moral code that they dont deviate from because of popular opinion.

She thinks we are undergoing a crisis of masculinity: In the public mind, yes. I was outraged when I heard that there was a war against men I was like, are you joking? What do you think has been happening against women for centuries?

Close knows all too well about the misuse of power, because her own upbringing was, as she puts it, complicated. When she was seven, her parents joined a cult. Moral Re-Armament or MRA was a modern, nondenominational movement founded by an American evangelical fundamentalist which extolled the four absolutes: honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. Her father, a physician working in the Congo, sent Close with her brother and two sisters from the family home in Greenwich, Connecticut, to live at the MRA HQ in Caux, Switzerland (Closes mother, Bettine, was a socialite).

She is vague on the details but clear on the impact this experience had on her as a teenager: I was repressed, clueless and guilt-ridden. The timeline is patchy, but Close travelled with MRA in the 60s as a member of their musical groups, and spent time back in Connecticut at an elite boarding school. I had a wonderful time at Rosemary Hall, a girls school, she says. I was in a renegade singing group called the Fingernails: A Group With Polish. But she remained, as she calls it clueless. A lot of my friends knew boys youd have these horrendous dances with boys schools and they would get the guys they wanted and I would just stay with the person I was with.

As Patty Hewes in Damages. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

She was briefly married before going to university. It is a complicated story for me. I was married before college, and kind of in an arranged marriage when you look back on it, and my marriage broke up when I went to college, as it should have. I was 22. But my liberal arts school had a wonderful theatre that was my training, my acting school.

Was that where she finally learned about sex, popular culture, the ways of the world? Not really, she says. I still am learning.

Close has two sisters, Tina the eldest, and Jessie her younger sister; and two brothers, Alexander, and Tambu Misoki, who was adopted by Closes parents while living in Africa. At the age of 50, Jessie spent time in a psychiatric hospital and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a weight that had been hanging over the family, undiscussed, for years. Talking about mental illness just wasnt done, Close says. You dont have a vocabulary for it and youre also very aware of appearances. You dont want to appear a crazy family.

In 2010 Close founded Bring Change to Mind, a charity that aims to end the stigma around mental illness by talking openly about it and its effect on families. It was my nephew who was first diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. This is basically schizophrenia with an ingredient of bipolar. And when that happened, it was like, What? My sister Jessie, his mother, didnt know what was wrong. He went to the hospital for two years and that saved his life. Then Jessie was, finally, correctly diagnosed herself.

With sister Jessie in 2009. Photograph: Getty Images

Close felt a duty to her family to give them a high-profile person who is not afraid to talk about it publicly. It affects the whole family. We always knew my grandmother and mother had depression my sister does, I do to a certain extent. But I didnt know my great-uncle had schizophrenia. I knew my half-uncle died by suicide. There was a lot of alcoholism addiction, self-medication. Nobody ever talked about it. I knew my grandmother was depressed, but at first I thought she lived in a hotel, not a hospital, because she always said how good the food was.

Close says she and her siblings are of one mind politically, but admits she does have members of her family who voted for Trump. I tried to understand that. Theyre not crazy people who have been brainwashed by Fox News, but I try to understand the anger, because I think that has been building up ever since Watergate. It was watching that scandal unfold that made her realise Americans have always been naive, we just take for granted what we have, and we always thought of our leaders as good people. With Watergate, people became cynical about government.

Today, she says, Washington is a bunch of self-serving She searches for an expletive and after a second settles on men. She says, Its hard to believe that people are so out for themselves. It goes against what you would like to believe about your country. I feel eloquence is incredibly important for a leader, and we had that with Barack Obama, who made his initial impact because he gave that incredibly eloquent speech, but he lost his eloquence in his presidency. We always need someone to say, I hear you, someone who can put their words into unity and hope and we dont have that. I think the last person may have been Robert Kennedy.

And now you have Trump tweeting nonsense.

Its devastating. Social networks are now like our nervous system, and if you keep pumping that kind of crap into the nervous system, it is going to have an effect on a population.

With Kevin Kline in The Big Chill. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

Close doesnt talk politics with her friends because she doesnt really have many friends. I have always forced myself into situations I am not comfortable in. I am an introvert, and I was painfully shy as a child. I think I still have a big dollop of that in my persona. I read a book called Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Cant Stop Talking and it was a real comfort to me I realised I was that person I had always been. And it was at that point I told myself to stop pushing myself into situations that I dont enjoy. I dread cocktail parties.

She tells me shes pretty reclusive and can count her closest friends on two fingers. I ask if shes still good friends with Meryl Streep.

I have never been close friends with Meryl. We have huge respect for each other, but I have only done one thing with her, The House Of The Spirits.

I apologise for assuming they were pals, being of a similar age and stature in Hollywood, and admit this negates my next question: Who would win in an arm wrestle, you or Meryl?

Close laughs. Oh, I would, because I am very strong.

***

The tightest bond Close has is with her only daughter Annie, 29. Annies father is the film producer John Starke whom Close dated for four years from 1987, but never married. Annie was never a door-slamming, difficult teenager. Close tells me: When my Annie was three, she looked at me, and said, I want you. I knew what she meant. I, at the time, was a single working parent, sometimes even when I was home, working or producing something, I was there and not there.

With daughter Annie Starke in 2010. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

She doesnt think its any easier for working mothers today and acknowledges, I had it easy because I could afford to have help think of the women who cant afford it and have to put their child in some shaky childcare centre. No, I think it is incredibly hard for women. Any person, in any profession, feels that tug [of guilt]. We discuss the intimacy of the single-parent, only-child bond. Once, I went to vacuum Annies car seat as we were moving house, and a lot of life had happened there, so I was crying. She said, Mummy, are you OK? I said, Yeah, Im OK. And she said, Here I am.

She was married to businessman James Marlas from 1984 to 1987 and then, following other relationships, including that with Starke, she married again, in 2006, to venture capitalist David Evans Shaw, divorcing him nine years later.

Would she marry again?

I dont know.

Does she think marriage is important?

I think it is a positive evolutionary component that we are better with a partner. I think to have a partner that you can go through life with, creating a history with, that you can find a comfort with, have children with there is nothing better. This is an opinion I have come to very late in life, at an ironic moment, where I dont have any of that. I dont know if I will again. But I do think its a basic human need to be connected.

Despite this, shes happy on her own right now. This is a good time in life. I do think, what would it be like to have a partner again? But it would have to be very different from what I had before. Then I have that great dream and wake up happy.

Crooked House is on Channel 5 at 9pm on 17 December.

Commenting on this piece? If you would like your comment to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazines letters page in print, please email [email protected], including your name and address (not for publication).

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/dec/16/glenn-close-harvey-weinstein-mental-illness-cult-fatal-attraction

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Seth Rogen Is Relieved His Mom Likes An American Pickle

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Family is a tricky thing. Most people rest assured knowing that their family loves them….but does that mean their family likes them too?

Such is the conflict at the center of HBO Max’s Seth Rogen-starring comedy An American Pickle. Rogen stars as both Herschel Greenbaum and his great grandson Ben Greenbaum. Herschel is a salt-of-the-earth old world Jewish man who becomes quite literally salty when he falls into a vat of pickles and is perfectly preserved for a century. He wakes up to a world of a gentrified Brooklyn, ubiquitous cell phones, and a disappointingly unmasculine descendent.

The concept comes from novelist, short story crafter, and TV writer Simon Rich, who couldn’t help but wonder what his great grandfather would think of his privileged, comfortable position in life. That hypothetical became the New Yorker-published short story “Sell Out”, which in turn became the script for An American Pickle. After a long brining…er, production process, the film finally made its way to audiences via streaming on HBO Max on Aug. 6. And that’s in no small part to Rogen taking on his most ambitious acting challenge yet.

Rogen, who has increasingly publicly discussed his heritage as of late, shines in both roles of the intergenerational story. Den of Geek caught up with the comedy star to discuss what drew him to the role and what he believes his ancestors would really think of him.

Den of Geek: The film has a lot of interesting themes of family, generations, and pickles. What aspects drew you to this role to begin with?

Seth Rogen: I really related to a conversation I had with Simon (Rich), the writer. He said, in conceiving of the film and the short story that it’s based on, that he had a picture on his desk of his great grandfather when he was in his twenties. He would look at it and think “if we were both in our twenties, he would hate me.” That’s something that I could not have related to more with my own grandfather and grandparents. We got along pretty well, but they led very different lives than I did and the things they considered big accomplishments and the things I considered big accomplishments were very different. Our sensibilities were very different. And even though I am born of them and they love me and I love them, if we were the same age, we probably would not have got along very well.

I actually did have a chance to speak with both Simon and (director) Brandon (Trost). I asked them had they done an Ancestry.com or 23andMe type deal? Have you?

My family has looked into our ancestry and it’s pretty straight forward. I mean, my grandmother was an immigrant – came to Canada from Poland. So my roots back to the old folk country are not that far. I am an Ashkenazi Jewish person.

Yeah. Simon said he was 99.6% Ashkenazi and 0.4% Neanderthal.

Exactly, yeah. Every part of him that is homo sapien is Jewish. Honestly, one of the reasons I thought playing both roles actually served the story is that a unique element of the Jewish experience is that we are Jewish by DNA. Most religions cannot make that claim. That inseparability from our Judaism and our past and who we are, I think is a major theme in the lives of a lot of Jewish people I know.

What do you think your actual great-grandpa “Herschel Rogen” would make of Seth Rogen?

I knew my great-grandfather, actually, one of them. Joe Rogen was his name – no relation to the podcaster. Joseph Rogen was a mailman in New York. He was a nice guy and a funny guy and a blue collar guy. But I think he would’ve appreciated what I do. My actual grandfather was in the war, played football, and was a plumber. He did like my work, but did not really care that much about it, honestly.

How did you develop your Herschel accent for the film?

It’s a combination of, I would say, Russian, Lithuanian, and Polish accents. It was developed by listening to old tapes of Jewish people from the old country. I also wanted to make sure that I developed an accent that allowed me to keep comedic rhythms and be funny. Because I’ve at times seen comedians paint themselves into a corner accent-wise where they aren’t allowed to be funny in the way they normally are because of the accent they have given themselves.

Your director Brandon Trost said that you guys filmed this in an interesting way where you basically just shot the movie twice, once with you as Ben and once as Hershel due to that massive, impressive Herschel beard you had. Did that help you develop each character in a more distinct way?

Yeah. It was ultimately helpful from a character standpoint. It was more helpful from a performance standpoint, honestly Because I just know what a pain in the ass it is to act with a fake beard on, and I knew it would affect my performance if I had to wear a fake beard. That was a real concern for me. You’re wearing it on your face and you’re self conscious of whether it’s popping up. And it just seemed like something that would have been a nightmare for a million reasons.

Given how pickle focused the movie is, I’m curious, do you like pickles?

I like them. I’m not a pickle fanatic. They’re fine. I don’t eat any pickles in the movie at any point actually. So, for me, it wasn’t that pickle heavy an experience. I handled the pickle jars a lot, and I was in the pickle vat, but yeah, I didn’t eat any pickles.

You interact with yourself for essentially 90% of the movie. What was it like on the rare occasions when you get to interact with actual other real human individuals like Sarah Snook?

It was great! It’s funny because I had been filming the movie a while when Sarah came in. It was such a relief honestly to share scenes with another performer who was ultimately going to be on camera. And I remember thinking, “Oh man, these scenes are going to be so much better because she’s in them. The audience is going to be so thrilled that I am not literally the only person I’m interacting with throughout this film.”

If his social media presence were not an issue, how far do you think Herschel could make it in the political realm?

All the way, all the way! If we’ve learned anything lately, it’s that you can know nothing and become the President of the United States. So I think all bets are off.

Your mother is very active on Twitter. Given that family is such a big theme of the film, has she shared her thoughts with you? And do you think that she will tweet out her thoughts to us?

I hope she does. And I hope that she likes it. Because she’s brutally honest with her opinion on films. I think she’s already tweeted that she liked it. So, I should be in good shape.

Saw " an American Pickle " it will make you cry , it will make you laugh!!

— Sandy Rogen (@RogenSandy) August 5, 2020

The post Seth Rogen Is Relieved His Mom Likes An American Pickle appeared first on Den of Geek.

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talabib · 4 years

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How To Inspire Confidence In The Workplace.

We live in a knowledge economy where success is a matter of solving problems and coming up with the next big idea. It’s not enough to be smart or hard-working, either. Organizations need their employees to collaborate, experiment, and respond to business needs that are constantly changing.

But in many offices and boardrooms, people lack the confidence to do exactly this, silenced by the fear of failure, judgmental colleagues, or unapproachable bosses.

This post introduces the concept of psychological safety and why it should be a feature of every work environment. Through research and examples from prominent businesses, this post breaks down the ways in which a culture of openness and support enables success, and what leaders can do to develop this in their own organizations.

Worrying about how we’re perceived prevents us from doing our best work.

Imagine you’re sitting in a strategy meeting. Your boss has shared some of the challenges that need to be addressed, and now she’s asking the team to come up with suggestions. You’ve got an idea, but you’re worried that others will think it’s no good. So, rather than risk it, you keep your thoughts to yourself.

Whether it happens in a meeting, a classroom, or even around a dinner table, most of us have experience of having something to say but holding back in case it made other people think less of us. We learn to do this early; as children, we start caring what our peers think and avoid saying or doing anything that could make us look silly, weak, or not as cool as everyone else.

By the time we’re adults, the habit of silencing and restricting ourselves is almost unconscious, and it prevents us from speaking up when we have ideas, questions, or concerns at work.

In a 2003 study into people speaking up in the workplace, academics Frances J. Milliken, Elizabeth W. Morrison, and Patricia F. Hewlin found that 85 percent of study participants felt unable to approach their bosses with concerns about work. The most common reason for this? The participants didn’t want their bosses to see them in a negative light.

Even seemingly confident people experience this. Take business innovator Nilofer Merchant; she was labeled a visionary by CNBC, and in 2013, she was awarded the Future Thinker Award by Thinkers50. But in a 2011 Harvard Business Review article, Nilofer shared that while working at Apple, she would keep quiet about problems she noticed because she didn’t want to be wrong. She’s quoted as saying, “I would rather keep my job by staying within the lines than say something and risk looking stupid.”

When fear gets in the way of people speaking up at work, it’s not only the individuals keeping silent who miss out. Companies also lose opportunities to generate new ideas, and this is especially dangerous in a world where businesses need to innovate if they want to succeed.

Psychological safety leads to better performance by both individuals and teams.

Let’s revisit that strategy meeting you were sitting in. But this time, instead of worrying that your idea won’t be received well, you know for sure that your boss and colleagues will respond positively. If they like the idea, they’ll tell you so. And if it doesn’t hit the mark, they’ll give you constructive feedback.

In this ideal scenario, you and your colleagues have psychological safety – the shared feeling that you can freely express your thoughts and ideas, or make mistakes and ask for help without receiving negative reactions.

Author, Amy Edmondson came across the concept of psychological safety in the 1990s while studying medical errors in hospitals. At first, she was surprised to find that the best medical teams seemed to make more mistakes than lower-skilled teams. But a closer look revealed that they weren’t making more mistakes; they were just more open and willing to report them, which led to discussions about better ways of working.

Refined work processes aren’t the only benefit of psychological safety – it also helps unleash creativity and innovation. A 2012 study by Taiwanese researchers Chi-Cheng Huang and Pin-Chen Jiang demonstrated this. They surveyed 60 research and development teams whose work demands innovative, outside-the-box thinking, and learned that teams with psychological safety performed better, while members of the other teams were too scared of rejection to share their ideas.

For further proof, consider one of the world’s most innovative companies – Google. In 2016, a New York Times article shared the tech giant’s research on what factors made the best teams. After studying over 180 Google teams, researchers found that the most important characteristic of a good team was, in fact, psychological safety.

Now, innovating is difficult no matter what; when you then add different personalities who often have to work across distances and cultures, it becomes significantly harder. But where there is psychological safety, these challenges are easier to navigate.

Why? It comes down to communication. In 2006, Professor Christina Gibson of the University of Australia and Professor Jennifer Gibbs of Rutgers University studied innovation teams with members scattered across the world and found that psychological safety helped teams communicate more openly. When teams can not only share their thoughts openly but work through them together, they’re much better prepared to tackle whatever challenges come their way.

The absence of psychological safety can have terrible consequences for a company, its employees, and its customers.

Have you ever noticed something not right at work? Maybe your supervisor has made a mistake in a presentation. But she has a reputation for being harsh, so instead of pointing anything out, you go along quietly, afraid to rock the boat.

Unfortunately, many bosses think fear is a good leadership strategy. While the atmosphere that this creates is no picnic, there can be far worse consequences.

When leaders use fear to motivate, people can turn to extreme and sometimes dangerous methods to get the job done. Take the employees at Wells Fargo. In 2015, Wells Fargo was the leading bank in America thanks to its community banking division’s impressive sales. On average, every customer was signed-up to about six banking products, around double the industry average.

But as it turned out, these impressive figures were the result of sketchy sales tactics. Employees were under pressure to hit an incredibly ambitious target of eight products per customer, and those who failed were publicly ridiculed or even fired. Scared of speaking up about the unrealistic targets, they instead opened accounts for customers without permission or lied about certain products being package deals. Two million accounts and credit cards were set up this way, and when the practice was discovered, the scandal cost Wells Fargo $185 million in settlements.

Fear in the workplace doesn’t always lead to unethical practices, but it can prevent staff from being upfront about a company’s challenges, stopping them from finding solutions before it’s too late.

Nokia learned this the hard way. During the 1990s, it was the top cell-phone manufacturer globally, but by 2012 it had lost this spot, along with over $2 billion and 75 percent of its market value.

How did this happen? Well, in 2015, graduate business school INSEAD published a study of the company’s fall, revealing that Nokia’s executives didn’t communicate openly about the threat from emerging competitors Apple and Google. At the same time, managers and engineers were afraid to tell their bosses that the company’s technology couldn’t compete in an evolving market. As a result, Nokia missed the opportunity to innovate and soon became irrelevant.

Businesses like Nokia and Wells Fargo are cautionary tales for any leader who thinks fear is the best way to get the most out of their teams. So, if fear has taken root in your workplace, the first step in creating psychological safety is to root it out – for good.

A fearless workplace starts with reframing failure and redefining the boss’s role.

How many times have you been told to do your best? We get this advice throughout our lives, from parents, teachers, coaches, friends, and even anonymous quotes on the internet. Rarely are we ever told to fail.

But being OK with failure at work is the first step in creating a fearless environment. When team leaders and bosses start talking about failure as something that happens often and as a learning opportunity, people become comfortable with taking risks, trying out new things, and openly discussing their mistakes.

While failure seems like the opposite of what any company wants to do, some of the most successful ones have made the belief that it’s OK to fail a key part of their work practices.

Animation studio Pixar is behind 15 of the 50 highest-grossing animated films of all time, and co-founder Ed Catmull makes a point of telling staff that every movie is bad in the early stages. This reduces their fear of failure and makes them more open to feedback. And in a completely different industry, Christa Quarles, CEO of restaurant reservation company OpenTable, encourages her team to fail often and early so that they can quickly find new strategies.

In fact, being comfortable with failure is so important that Smith College and other schools in the United States now offer courses to help students understand failure not as a setback but as a step toward learning.

Failure isn’t the only thing we need to redefine. In many workplaces, leaders are seen as authorities who know best, giving instructions, and judging how well they’re carried out. But in a fearless workplace, leaders instead set the direction and goals, then encourage people to contribute their own ideas and insights.

A great example of this approach is Cynthia Carroll, a former CEO of the mining company Anglo American, who wanted to lower the number of mining injuries and deaths. But instead of just sending an order down to workers, Cynthia chose to organize meetings with thousands of the mine’s employees and find out what they felt was needed to improve safety. This input shaped new safety guidelines, and after these were implemented, mining deaths reduced by an impressive 62 percent between 2006 and 2011.

When leaders are curious and admit that they don’t know everything, people are encouraged to speak up.

We’ve all heard the phrase, “No one likes a know-it-all,” and it can definitely be annoying to be around someone who thinks they have all the answers.

However, when the know-it-all is your boss, they’re not so much annoying as they are intimidating. Leaders who think they know everything intimidate people out of expressing ideas and opinions. And so a key component of a fearless workplace is a boss who openly says that they don’t have all the information or all the ideas. This makes it clear that they’re open to learning and hearing from other people.

Former chairperson and CEO of Xerox Anne Mulcahy was so comfortable with saying she didn’t know the answers that people nicknamed her the “Master of I Don’t Know.” This gave Xerox employees the confidence to engage fully in tackling the company’s challenges, and under Mulcahy’s leadership, Xerox came back from the brink of bankruptcy.

However, even when the boss admits they need help, getting people to share their thoughts and ideas isn’t as simple as asking them.

To encourage participation, leaders should ask questions in a way that shows genuine interest in what others have to say. This can be accomplished by avoiding questions that only have “yes” or “no” answers, and asking thought-provoking ones that motivate people to reflect and think creatively.

The art of asking questions also involves knowing that different situations call for different kinds of questions. If you want to widen your understanding of an issue, ask people what they think is missing or invite those with different perspectives to chime in. If your aim is to get a deeper understanding, ask people to share the reasons behind their thinking or to give examples.

Another way leaders can create a culture of participation is by setting up structures specifically for sharing information. These can be regular workshops, focus groups, or meetings.

When the food company Groupe Danone started holding conferences to encourage information sharing between different departments, management noticed that people not only started generating new ideas, they were also more comfortable with speaking up and asking for help.

Once people start taking action and providing input, the feedback they receive is key to maintaining psychological safety.

When people take risks and speak up, it’s important for leaders to respond productively.

Picture a group of five-year-olds learning about shapes. Their teacher asks if anyone can name the shape on the chalkboard, and when a child shouts out the wrong shape, he’s instantly and bluntly dismissed. Do you think that child will try again? Probably not.

In the same way, people in the workplace can be discouraged if leaders don’t respond to input in the right way.

A good place to start is by showing appreciation. Speaking up or taking action takes courage, so whether the outcome is good or bad, first thanking people for their effort helps maintain the feeling of psychological safety.

For instance, imagine a nurse who isn’t sure that the doctor is giving a patient the right treatment. The nurse is nervous about speaking up because he’s heard the doctor respond negatively to questions from other colleagues. But if he were to say something despite his reservations, and the doctor thanked him for the input before going on to explain her decision, the nurse would feel more confident and continue sharing his thoughts.

In the same way that input requires the right response, so does failure. But it’s important to keep in mind that failure comes in different forms, and there are appropriate ways to respond to each one.

When people fail because they tried something new and didn’t get the results they hoped for, they should be encouraged, and their experiences discussed and learned from. At the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, they go as far as throwing parties to celebrate and share failed experiments. This may seem extreme, but cementing the idea that failure is a positive thing ensures that people don’t continue to waste time and resources on experiments that aren’t going anywhere.

On the other hand, there are preventable failures, and learning from these means trying to make sure they don’t happen again. This can be through training or putting new systems in place. But if the failure happens because set processes weren’t followed or company values and boundaries were ignored, then the response should be a fair consequence like a sanction, suspension, or even firing, if necessary. When employees know that they always face fair feedback and consequences from their leaders, the feeling of psychological safety is strengthened.

You don’t have to be a leader to help create a fearless work environment.

What would you do if you ruled the globe for a day? You probably have lots of great ideas for how to improve things if you were in charge but can’t imagine making a difference in the real world because you’re not in a high enough position of authority.

This frustrating feeling happens in the workplace, too. But the good news is that if you want to work in a less fearful environment, there are small steps you can take to help make this happen, even if you’re not the boss.

For one, you can show your colleagues that you’re curious about what they have to say and slowly create safe spaces for them to speak up. Make a point of regularly asking them for their input and expertise; this works especially well when you direct your questions to specific individuals. The next time you speak up in a meeting, hand the baton over to someone else by asking them what they think.

Now, sharing an idea or voicing an opinion doesn’t mean much if no one is listening. And so another way you can contribute to psychological safety is by actively listening to people, whether or not you’re the one asking the questions. When your colleagues speak up, listen attentively and respectfully, even if you don’t necessarily agree with them. This shows interest and appreciation for the effort they made, as does providing feedback and building on their ideas.

Finally, you can improve the feeling of safety and support in your work environment by allowing yourself to ask for help when you need it, and letting others know that you’re available to help them. Start using phrases like, “I need help,” “I don’t know,” “I made a mistake,” “What challenges are you facing?” and “What can I do to help you?”

When people realize that others around them can be vulnerable and that there’s always help at hand, they’ll eventually start sharing ideas and being bold enough to reach their full potential.

Today, success at work means being able to take risks and have conversations that lead to innovation, but this is impossible to do when people feel unsupported and afraid. When leaders and colleagues alike start inviting other voices to the table and encouraging people to learn from failure, the result is a workplace in which people and ideas thrive.

Action plan: Play to win. A lot of the time, we play it safe and avoid being vocal or trying new approaches because we don’t want to risk failing or being judged harshly. This mindset is called playing not to lose, and it’s the reason we miss out on opportunities that come our way. Start adopting a play to win mindset by focusing not on what you stand to gain if you step up to the plate, rather than what could go wrong.

#How To Inspire Confidence In The Workplace.

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learningrendezvous · 4 years

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Criminal Justice

FALSE CONFESSIONS

By Katrine Philp

Defense attorney Jane Fisher-Byrialsen exposes the dark side of the American justice system.

Law enforcement agencies across the U.S. commonly use a complex psychological tactic during interrogations to get suspects to confess to crimes, often without regard for whether or not the suspect is actually guilty. FALSE CONFESSIONS follows defense attorney Jane Fisher-Byrialsen as she fights to put an end to this institutionalized injustice. Through the stories of four of her cases, including that of Korey Wise who was only sixteen when he was manipulated into a false confession in the infamous Central Park Jogger case, the film examines the psychological aspect of how people end up confessing to crimes they have not committed as well as the consequences of these confessions - for those accused, for their families and for society.

On the heels of the difficult and critically important national conversation sparked by Ava Duvernay's miniseries about The Central Park Five, FALSE CONFESSIONS is an urgent in-depth look at the dark side of the American Justice system that goes even further into investigating the social, racial and legal issues at stake.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2019 / 91 minutes

FEELING OF BEING WATCHED, THE

By Assia Boundaoui

In the Arab-American neighborhood outside of Chicago where journalist and filmmaker Assia Boundaoui grew up, most of her neighbors think they have been under surveillance for over a decade. While investigating their experiences, Assia uncovers tens of thousands of pages of FBI documents that prove her hometown was the subject of one of the largest counter terrorism investigations ever conducted in the U.S. before 9/11, code-named "Operation Vulgar Betrayal."

With unprecedented access, THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED weaves the personal and the political as it follows the filmmaker's examination of why her community-including her own family-fell under blanket government surveillance. Assia struggles to disrupt the government secrecy shrouding what happened and takes the FBI to federal court to compel them to make the records they collected about her community public. In the process, she confronts long-hidden truths about the FBI's relationship to her community.

THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED follows Assia as she pieces together this secret FBI operation, while grappling with the effects of a lifetime of surveillance on herself and her family.

DVD (Color) / 2018 / 87 minutes

GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY

Director: Harry Moses

Guilty Until Proven Guilty explores Louisiana's criminal justice system through the story of Tim Conerly, a young African-American man who was arrested in the wake of an armed robbery in New Orleans and waited 28 months for a trial for a crime he says he did not commit. After more than two years in the Orleans Parish Jail, Conerly must choose between accepting a plea bargain of seven years or risking a sentence of 49 1/2 to 198 years if he is convicted at trial. It's a choice that no human being should have to make...and one that someone with more resources could almost certainly avoid having to make.

DVD / 2018 / 53 minutes

HOME TRUTH

By April Hayes and Katia Maguire

Filmed over the course of nine years, HOME TRUTH chronicles one family's pursuit of justice, shedding light on how our society responds to domestic violence and how the trauma from domestic violence tragedies can linger throughout generations.

In 1999, Colorado mother Jessica Gonzales experienced every parent's worst nightmare when her three young daughters were killed after being abducted by their father in violation of a domestic violence restraining order. Devastated, Jessica sued her local police department for failing to adequately enforce her restraining order despite her repeated calls for help that night. Determined to make sure her daughters did not die in vain, Jessica pursued her case to the US Supreme Court and an international human rights tribunal, seeking to strengthen legal rights for domestic violence victims. When her legal journey finally achieved widespread national change and she became an acclaimed activist, Jessica struggled to put her life and relationships back together.

DVD (Color) / 2018 / 72 minutes

THOUSAND GIRLS LIKE ME, A

By Sahra Mani

A THOUSAND GIRLS LIKE ME is an awe-inspiring verite documentary that tells the story of a young Afghan woman's fight for justice after experiencing years of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her father.

Khatera Golzad was brutally raped by her father for thirteen years, resulting in numerous pregnancies, most of which ended in forced abortions. But two reached full term. Despite her many attempts to file charges, neither the Afghan police nor the legal system helped her. In 2014, she appeared on national television to publicly accuse her father, finally succeeding in bringing her case to court despite threats from male relatives and judges who labelled her a liar.

A THOUSAND GIRLS LIKE ME sheds light on the broken Afghan judicial system and the women it seldom protects. In a country where the systematic abuse of girls is rarely discussed, Afghan filmmaker Sahra Mani presents a story of one woman's battle against cultural, familial, and legal pressures as she embarks on a mission to set a positive example for her daughter and other girls like her.

DVD (Color) / 2018 / 52 minutes

TRIBAL JUSTICE

Directed by Anne Makepeace

Documents an effective criminal justice reform movement in America: the efforts of tribal courts to return to traditional, community-healing concepts of justice.

TRIBAL JUSTICE is a feature documentary about a little known, underreported but effective criminal justice reform movement in America today: the efforts of tribal courts to create alternative justice systems based on their traditions. In California, the state with the largest number of Indian people and tribes, two formidable Native American women are among those leading the way. Abby Abinanti, Chief Judge of the Yurok Tribe on the northwest coast, and Claudette White, Chief Judge of the Quechan Tribe in the southeastern desert, are creating innovative systems that focus on restoring rather than punishing offenders in order to keep tribal members out of prison, prevent children from being taken from their communities, and stop the school-to-prison pipeline that plagues their young people.

Abby Abinanti is a fierce, lean, elder. Claudette White is younger, and her courtroom style is more conventional in form; but like Abby, her goal is to provide culturally relevant justice to the people who come before her. Observational footage of these judges' lives and work provides the backbone of the documentary, while the heart of the film follows offenders as their stories unfold over time, in and out of court. These other stories unfold over time, engaging viewers with the dedication of the judges, the humanity of the people who come before them, and a vision of justice that can actually work.

Through the film, audiences will gain a new understanding of tribal courts and their role in the survival of Indian people. The film will also inspire those working in the mainstream legal field to consider new ways of implementing problem-solving and restorative justice, lowering our staggering incarceration rates and enabling offenders to make reparations and rebuild their lives.

DVD / 2017 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adults) / 87 minutes

WHAT DOESN'T KILL ME: DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND THE BATTLE FOR CUSTODY

By Rachel Meyrick

Every day, 5 million children in the U.S. experience domestic violence, either as witnesses or victims. Due to a horrific system that favors abusive fathers, a shocking number of mothers who seek to protect their children (and themselves) end up losing them. Most Americans are unaware that an abusive father, who contests custody from a protective mother, will win 70 percent of the time. This bold and provocative film is a long overdue exploration into why the most powerful country in the world is not protecting its most vulnerable mothers and children and thus enabling generations of abusers to continue their abuse.

Along with intimate personal stories, family revelations with hard hitting facts and frank discussions on the child custody issue with feminists, lawyers, judges and domestic violence experts we follow the indomitable 86-year-old Charlotta Harrison, a survivors' advocate who herself survived a 60-year abusive marriage. She speaks hauntingly about the pressures and fears that make it so difficult for women in danger to leave. With Charlotta, we meet women and children who have been separated, silenced, and pushed to extreme methods of escape-and who are fighting back.

DVD (Color) / 2017 / 81 minutes

INCARCERATING US

Directed by Regan Hines

Exposes America's prison problem and explores various criminal justice reforms.

Incarcerating US exposes America's prison problem and explores ways to unshackle the "land of the free" through vital criminal justice reforms. With 2.3 million people behind bars, the U.S. has the largest prison population in the history of the world.

Through dramatic first-hand accounts, expert testimony, and shocking statistics, Incarcerating US asks fundamental questions about the prison system in America: What is the purpose of prison? Why did our prison population explode in the 1970s? What can make our justice system more just?

The film begins with a brief overview of U.S. prisons and the flawed policies that fueled unprecedented overincarceration. In many cases, these laws exacerbate problems they were designed to solve. Through both empirical evidence and the eyes of those tragically affected by the system for committing minor crimes, we see the failures of two major initiatives: the War on Drugs and mandatory minimum sentences.

Incarcerating US tells the story of America's broken criminal justice system through the eyes of those who created it, those who have suffered through it, and those who are fighting to change it. After decades of failures, now is the time to unshackle the land of the free.

DVD / 2016 / (Grades 9-12, College, Adults) / 84 minutes

PROFILED

By Kathleen Foster

Profiled knits the stories of mothers of Black and Latin youth murdered by the NYPD into a powerful indictment of racial profiling and police brutality, and places them within a historical context of the roots of racism in the U.S. Some of the victims-Eric Garner, Michael Brown-are now familiar the world over. Others, like Shantel Davis and Kimani Gray, are remembered mostly by family and friends in their New York neighborhoods.

Ranging from the routine harassment of minority students in an affluent Brooklyn neighborhood to the killings and protests in Staten Island and Ferguson, Missouri, PROFILED bears witness to the racist violence that remains an everyday reality for Black and Latin people in this country. Moving interviews with victims' family members are juxtaposed with sharply etched analyses by evolutionary biologist, Joseph L.Graves, Jr, (The Race Myth) and civil rights lawyer, Chauniqua D. Young, (Center for Constitutional Rights, Stop and Frisk lawsuit). PROFILED gives us a window on one of the burning issues of our time.

DVD (Color) / 2016 / 52 minutes

RETURN, THE

Directed by Kelly Duane de la Vega, Katie Galloway

After California's "Three Strikes" law was amended, thousands of lifers were suddenly freed, but re-entry presented problems for the lifers, their families and their communities.

In 2012, California amended its "Three Strikes" law--one of the harshest criminal sentencing policies in the country. The passage of Prop. 36 marked the first time in U.S. history that citizens voted to shorten sentences of those currently incarcerated. Within days the reintegration of thousands of "lifers" was underway.

THE RETURN examines this unprecedented reform through the eyes of those on the front lines--prisoners suddenly freed, families turned upside down, reentry providers helping navigate complex transitions, and attorneys and judges wrestling with an untested law. At a moment of reckoning on mass incarceration, what can California's experiment teach the nation?

DVD / 2016 / (Grades 9-12, Adults) / 84 minutes

TADMOR

By Monika Borgmann and Lokman Slim

Amidst the popular uprising in Syria that began in 2011, a group of former Lebanese detainees of the Assad regime decides to break their long-held silence about the horrific years they spent imprisoned in Tadmor, Palmyra, one of the Syrian government's most dreaded prisons.

They testify publicly about the systematic torture and humiliation they experienced. And to reclaim and overcome this dark chapter in their lives, in TADMOR they recreate the prison in an abandoned school near Beirut. There, and by playing out the roles of both "victims" and "victimizers," they will relive their survival.

DVD (Color) / 2016 / 103 minutes

EL POETA

Directed by Katie Galloway, Kelly Duane de la Vega

After his only son is murdered in the Mexican drug war, a mystic poet launches an international crusade to save his country.

EL POETA tells the story of renowned Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, who ignited mass protests and an ongoing movement for peace after the brutal murder of his 24-year-old son Juan Francisco - collateral damage in a drug war that has left 60,000+ dead since 2006 - the majority civilians.

Drawing on the philosophical, artistic and spiritual dimensions of Sicilia and his movement, EL POETA reinterprets the "hard news" horror story of the Mexican drug war as a deeply personal, poetic and at times even hopeful one, tracing Sicilia's path from poet and father to movement leader and international symbol of grief and redemption.

DVD / 2015 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 55 minutes

ROOM OF BONES, THE (EL CUARTO DE LOS HUESOS)

By Marcela Zamora Chamorro

Across Mexico and Central America, the last twenty years have been plagued by a meteoric and troubling rise in desaparecidos, or missing persons. Mass murder has become all too common, and the identity of the perpetrators remains unknown as the relationship between governments, gangs, and other criminal organizations is shrouded in mystery. As civil and legal systems have failed to thoroughly investigate the crisis, families of victims are left to seek closure and justice on their own. In THE ROOM OF BONES, El Salvadoran filmmaker Marcela Zamora follows a group of forensic anthropologists in her home country tasked with the noble but gruesome work of unearthing human remains and matching them with names of desaparecidos. The result is a harrowing portrait of a region in crisis.

DVD (Spanish, Color) / 2015 / 60 minutes

WHEN JUSTICE ISN'T JUST

Director: David Massey

Directed by Oscar-nominated and NAACP Image Award winner David Massey, this dynamic documentary features legal experts, local activists, and law enforcement officers delving into ongoing charges of inequality, unfair practices, and politicized manipulations of America's judicial system. Additionally, the Black Lives Matter movement and citizens nationwide question the staggering number of police shootings of unarmed Black men and women.

DVD / 2015 / 40 minutes

ABOUT EXECUTING EICHMANN

By Florence Jammot

On December 15, 1961, in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann was sentenced to death for crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity.

The court's judgment was largely met with public consensus, but some spoke out against it, and on May 29, 1962, a group of Holocaust survivors and intellectuals, including philosophers Hannah Arendt, Hugo Bergmann, Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, sent a petition to Israeli President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi demanding that Eichmann's death sentence be commuted.

By opposing Eichmann's execution they raised questions about the Holocaust and also defended values of Judaism, raising questions about Jewish morality for Israel, and about the very nature of a Jewish State.

ABOUT EXECUTING EICHMANN brings together the texts, eyewitness accounts, archival footage, audio recordings, and materials from the time, with discussions amongst contemporary Israeli historians and philosophers to both set out the facts, and go over the arguments. Amongst those taking part are historians Anita Shapira and Hanna Yablonka, and philosophers Moshe Halbertal and Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin. Returning to a little remembered debate that was central to that era, they also expose its relevancy today, and why it deserves to be revisited.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2014 / 60 minutes

PRIVATE VIOLENCE

Directed by Cynthia Hill

PRIVATE VIOLENCE explores a simple but deeply disturbing fact of American life: the most dangerous place for a woman in America is her own home. Every day in the U.S., at least four women are murdered by abusive (and often, ex) partners. Through the eyes of two survivors-Deanna Walters, a mother who seeks justice for the crimes committed against her at the hands of her estranged husband, and Kit Gruelle, an advocate who seeks justice for all women-we bear witness to the complex realities of intimate partner violence. Their experiences challenge entrenched and misleading assumptions, providing a lens into a world that is largely invisible; a world we have locked behind closed doors with our silence, our laws and our lack of understanding. PRIVATE VIOLENCE begins to shape powerful, new questions that hold the potential to change our society: "Why does he abuse?" "Why do we turn away?" "How do we begin to build a future without domestic violence?"

DVD (Color) / 2014 / 77 minutes

UNAFRAID: VOICES FROM THE CRIME VICTIMS TREATMENT CENTER

By Karin Venegas

A deeply personal documentary, UNAFRAID gives voice to four, diverse rape survivors and takes a historic look back at the pioneering treatment center where they now receive counseling. In her directorial debut, Karin Venegas highlights the work of two unsung feminist heroes in the movement for victims' rights at the height of 1970s feminism and the Women's Movement. From breaking victims' silence to the revolutionary invention of the rape kit, this powerful film intimately explores the impact of rape and the capacity of ordinary individuals to effect change.

Although frequently referenced in popular culture, few audiences know of the rape kit's feminist origins. UNAFRAID is the first film to address the grassroots genesis of this important tool, which not only made it easier to convict in the criminal justice system but which helped shape our very cultural acceptance of rape as a serious crime, worthy of prosecution and compassionate treatment.

Together, UNAFRAID's collage of voices aims to lift the stigma that traps victims in silence - and to remind its audience that social change is indeed possible. Essential viewing for Criminal Justice, Law and Women's Studies Classrooms.

DVD (Color) / 2014 / 44 minutes

FACING FEAR

Directed by Jason Cohen

A former neo-Nazi skinhead and the gay victim of his hate crime meet by chance 25 years later, are reconciled and collaborate in educational presentations.

In this Academy Award-nominated short documentary, worlds collide when a former neo-Nazi skinhead and the gay victim of his hate crime attack meet by chance 25 years after the incident that dramatically shaped both of their lives. Together, they embark on a journey of forgiveness that challenges both to grapple with their beliefs and fears, eventually leading to an improbable collaboration...and friendship.

FACING FEAR retraces the haunting accounts of the attack and the startling revelation that brought these men together again. Delving deep into their backgrounds, the roots of the ideologies that shape how they handle the reconciliation process are exposed. Self-doubt, anger and fear are just a few of the emotions they struggle through as they come to terms with their unimaginable situation.

DVD / 2013 / (Grades 9-12, College, Adult) / 23 minutes

UNREAL DREAM, AN

Director: Al Reinert

From Oscar-nominated director Al Reinert, An Unreal Dream is the terrifying true story of Michael Morton, who spent over two decades in Texas prisons for a crime he didn't commit.

In 1986, Christine Morton was brutally murdered in front of their only child. After Michael was accused and convicted his son Eric, only three at the time, was raised by family members and eventually cut off all contact with the father he believed had killed his mother.

The Innocence Project, in partnership with John Raley, a Texas attorney working on his first ever criminal case, spent years fighting for DNA testing and investigating possible prosecutorial misconduct in Michael's case. Twenty-five years after the murder, DNA analysis of a bloody blue bandana found near the crime scene not only cleared Michael, but yielded a hit on a known felon who has since been charged with the murder of Christine Morton, along with the murder of another young woman two years later.

Upon his release in late 2011, Michael riveted the outside world with his lack of bitterness or anger. Instead, he reached out to his estranged son, and focused his newfound freedom on the fight for reform. An Unreal Dream tells his story, and sheds needed light on America's flawed criminal justice system.

DVD / 2013 / 92 minutes

GREY AREA, THE: FEMINISM BEHIND BARS

By Noga Ashkenazi

THE GREY AREA is an intimate look at women's issues in the criminal justice system and the unique experience of studying feminism behind bars.

Through a series of captivating class discussions, headed by students from Grinnell College, a small group of female inmates at a maximum women's security prison in Mitchellville, Iowa, share their diverse experiences with motherhood, drug addiction, sexual abuse, murder, and life in prison. The women, along with their teachers, explore the "grey area" that is often invisible within the prison walls and delve into issues of race, class, sexuality and gender.

DVD (Color) / 2012 / 65 minutes

BETTER THIS WORLD

Directed by Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega

The story of two young Texans accused of intending to firebomb the 2008 Republican National Convention reveals the workings of the post 9/11 security state.

How did two boyhood friends from Midland, Texas wind up arrested on terrorism charges at the 2008 Republican National Convention? BETTER THIS WORLD follows the journey of David McKay (22) and Bradley Crowder (23) from political neophytes to accused domestic terrorists with a particular focus on the relationship they develop with a radical activist mentor in the six months leading up to their arrests. A dramatic story of idealism, loyalty, crime and betrayal, BETTER THIS WORLD goes to the heart of the War on Terror and its impact on civil liberties and political dissent in post-9/11 America.

DVD / 2011 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 89 minutes

COMMON PURPOSE, A

By Mitzi Goldman

The trial of the "Upington 25" in South Africa in 1986 saw twenty-five men and women from a black township bordering the town of Upington tried for the murder of a local black policeman. Upington, a small white town located in the heart of Afrikaner nationalism, was besieged by the legal proceedings, which culminated in the conviction of all the defendants, fourteen sentenced to death, the assassination of the lawyer and human rights advocate Anton Lubowski, and the exile of the young lawyer Andrea Durbach who also represented the accused.

A COMMON PURPOSE follows Durbach, now director of the Australian Human Rights Council, as she returns to her homeland to meet with her clients from that landmark case. The story unfolds to reveal one of legal history's biggest cases on the death penalty.

The context, political, and legal events of the time are movingly recounted by the journalist John Carlin, many of the accused themselves, and Durbach. They tell a story of a struggle for justice in a country where injustice was entrenched in the law.

The film also examines the at-times distorted South African legal system, with an explosive and inspirational look at the subsequent Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings.

DVD (Color) / 2011 / 75 minutes

EL SICARIO, ROOM 164

By Gianfranco Rosi & Charles Bowden Directed & photographed by Gianfranco Rosi

The term sicario goes back to Roman Palestine, where a Jewish sect, the Sicarii, used concealed daggers (sicae) in their murders of Romans and their supporters. In modern language, a sicario is a professional killer or a hit man.

In an anonymous motel room on the U.S./Mexico border, a Ciudad Juarez hitman speaks. He has killed hundreds of people and is an expert in torture and kidnapping. He was simultaneously on the payroll of the Mexican drug cartels and a commander of the Chihuahua State Police. There is currently a $250,000 contract on his life and he lives as a fugitive, though he has never been charged with a crime in any country. With his face obscured by a black mesh hood, he tells his story to the camera inside the very motel room he once used to hold and torture kidnapped victims. Aided only by a magic marker and notepad, which he uses to illustrate and diagram his words, the sicario describes, in astounding detail, his life of crime, murder, abduction and torture.

DVD (Color) / 2011 / 84 minutes

MOTHERS OF BEDFORD

By Jenifer McShane

Women are the fastest-growing U.S. prison population today. Eighty percent are mothers of school-age children. Jenifer McShane's absorbing documentary gives human dimensions to these rarely reported statistics, taking us inside Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison north of New York City. Shot over four years, MOTHERS OF BEDFORD follows five women - of diverse backgrounds and incarcerated for different reasons- in dual struggles to be engaged in their children's lives and become their better selves. It shows how long-term sentences affect mother-child relationships and how Bedford's innovative Children's Center helps women maintain and improve bonds with children and adult relatives awaiting their return. Whether it be parenting's normal frustrations to celebrating a special day, from both inside and out of the prison walls, this moving film provides unprecedented access to a little known, rarely shown, community of women.

DVD (Color) / 2011 / 96 minutes

IMPUNITY

By Juan Jose Lozano & Hollman Morris

In 2005, Colombia's new "Commission for Peace and Justice" started gathering evidence about the horrific violence carried out by illegal paramilitary groups. A highly controversial justice and peace process was designed to allow paramilitary leaders to hand in their weapons and give themselves up voluntarily in exchange for reduced sentences. IMPUNITY documents the hearings in which paramilitary commanders, such as "HH" describe atrocities they have committed in detail, as the families of their victims listen and watch on projected screens.

Through a series of commission testimonies, footage of paramilitary crimes, and interviews with victims and experts, IMPUNITY shines a light on the brutal history of paramilitary violence. Yet due to serious irregularities in the justice and peace process, many families express their fear that they will never know the truth surrounding the deaths of their loved ones, and that the perpetrators will escape punishment. In an era where many countries are tempted to sacrifice justice in the name of "peace", what happens in Colombia will resonate beyond its borders.

DVD (Color) / 2010 / 85 minutes

PRESUMED GUILTY

Directed by Roberto Hernandez & Geoffrey Smith

In December 2005 Tono Zuniga was picked up off the street in Mexico City, Mexico, and sentenced to 20 years for murder based on the testimony of a single, shaky eyewitness. PRESUMED GUILTY tells the heart-wrenching story of a man who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A friend of To?o's contacted two young lawyers, Roberto Hernandez and Layda Negrete, who gained prominence in Mexico when they helped bring about the release of another innocent man from prison. As Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (CIDE) legal researchers, they tracked an alarming history of corruption in the Mexican justice system (93% of inmates never see an arrest warrant, and 93% of defendants never see a judge).

Looking into To?o's case, Roberto and Layda managed to get a retrial-on camera-and enlisted the help of filmmaker Geoffrey Smith (THE ENGLISH SURGEON) to chronicle the saga. Shot over three years with unprecedented access to the Mexican courts and prisons, this dramatic story is a searing indictment of a justice system that presumes guilt.

DVD (Color) / 2009 / 88 minutes

ANGOLA 3 - BLACK PANTHERS AND THE LAST SLAVE PLANTATION

Narrated by Mumia Abu-Jamal, this film features interviews with former Panthers, political prisoners and revolutionaries.

The Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation tells the gripping story of Robert King Wilkerson, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, men who have endured solitary confinement longer then any known living prisoner in the United States. Politicized through contact with the Black Panther Party while inside Louisiana's prisons, they formed one of the only prison Panther chapters in history and worked to organize other prisoners into a movement for the right to live like human beings.

This feature length movie explores their extraordinary struggle for justice while incarcerated in Angola, a former slave plantation where institutionalized rape and murder made it known as one of the most brutal and racist prisons in the United States.

The analysis of the Angola 3's political work, and the criminal cases used to isolate and silence them, occurs within the context of the widespread COINTELPRO being carried out in the 1960's and 70's by the FBI and state law enforcement against militant voices for change.

Narrated by Mumia Abu-Jamal, The Angola 3 features interviews with former Panthers, political prisoners and revolutionaries, including the Angola 3 themselves, and Bo Brown, Geronimo (ji Jaga) Pratt, Malik Rahim, Yuri Kochiyama, David Hilliard, Rod Coronado, Noelle Hanrahan, Kiilu Nyasha, Marion Brown, Luis Talamantez, Gail Shaw and many others. Portions of the proceeds go to support the Angola 3.

DVD / 2008 / 109 minutes

DHAMMA BROTHERS, THE

Directed by Jenny Phillips, Anne Marie Stein and Andrew Kukura

An overcrowded maximum-security prison is dramatically changed by the influence of an ancient meditation program.

Behind the high security towers and double row of barbed wire and electrical fence at Donaldson Correction Facility dwells a host of convicts who will never see the light of day. But for some of these men, a spark is ignited when it becomes the first maximum-security prison in North America to hold an extended Vipassana retreat, an emotionally and physically demanding course of silent meditation lasting ten days.

The Dhamma Brothers tells a dramatic tale of human potential and transformation as it closely follows and documents the stories of the prison inmates who enter into this arduous and intensive program. This film, with the power to dismantle stereotypes about men behind prison bars also, in the words of Sister Helen Prejean (Dead Man Walking), "gives you hope for the human race."

DVD (Color) / 2007 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 76 minutes

IN SEARCH OF INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE

Directed by Judy Jackson

The first film about a crucial new commitment to the international rule of law: the International Criminal Court.

This is the first film about a crucial new commitment to the International Rule of Law-so victims will no long suffer without being heard, and war criminals will be punished.

Sixty years ago, with the Nuremberg charter, the world first said "Never Again." But these proved empty words for the victims of the Cold War years. The Superpowers couldn't agree on a universal code to punish war criminals. Tyrants ruled with impunity.

So the voices of their victims have echoed down through the decades, refusing to be silent, even in death. Joined by relatives who are unable to move on, until they know how their loved ones died. Different languages from different places, but with the same universal theme-begging to be delivered from the torment of living somewhere between life and death. Telling us that they will be able, finally, to rest, when we find out how they died. Insisting we listen.

It is because of these voices that International Justice has been reborn. In 2002 the International Criminal Court was established in The Hague. So far 100 countries have signed on to the Court's mandate. However, the world's remaining superpower, the United States is strongly opposed.

The new Court is already busy. It is investigating crimes against humanity in Darfur. It has issued indictments against leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army in Northern Uganda who abduct children and force them to fight. And a militia leader from the Democratic Republic of the Congo faces charges of recruiting children as young as 8 to fight for him.

For the first time war criminals are being forced to listen. The victims' voices now haunt them, telling them they will not be silent until justice is done.

DVD (Color) / 2005 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 66 minutes

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hellofastestnewsfan · 5 years

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In a November 2010 episode of her eponymous daytime talk show, Oprah Winfrey invited 200 adult men, all of whom had said they’d been sexually assaulted as children, to join her studio audience. The opening shots of the episode panned across the room, to the men holding photos of themselves at the age when they said they were first abused. A harrowing chorus rang out as some of the men described their experiences in the sequence that followed: I was 6. I was 12. I was 7.

After the episode’s introductory montage, Winfrey interviewed the mega-producer Tyler Perry, who had shared his own account of childhood sexual abuse on her show weeks earlier. Together, along with the trauma psychologist Howard Fradkin, they spoke candidly about the long-lasting effects of sexual abuse and the specific stigma that male survivors face. The episode left many viewers moved, but for some of its subjects, the opportunity to address past trauma without blame was transformational. That same rare warmth and candor was palpable Monday night, during the special Oprah hosted immediately following the premiere of HBO’s two-part docuseries, Leaving Neverland. The documentary, from the British director Dan Reed, focuses principally on two men who allege that they were abused by Michael Jackson when they were children. Both Reed and the two men, the 36-year-old Wade Robson and the 41-year-old James Safechuck, joined Winfrey onstage to discuss the film and their now well-publicized allegations. (The Jackson estate has vehemently denied both men’s allegations, and the late singer was found not guilty in a 2005 criminal case brought by another young boy in his orbit.)

The special, After Neverland, aired on both HBO and OWN, the network Winfrey co-owns. Crucially, Winfrey’s interview continues the specific work of Reed’s generous, empathetic film by prioritizing the men’s healing—and that of all alleged victims—over the more common public impulse: frenzied, defensive hand-wringing over the accused’s legacy. Winfrey, who has spoken publicly about her own experiences of sexual assault, opened the interview by noting that the audience was composed of more than 100 people who said they had also survived childhood sexual abuse. “Watching this documentary was an intense and very emotional experience for many people here,” she said, then offered a mission statement for the evening after introducing her onstage guests. “Here’s the reason why I’m here: In 25 years of The Oprah [Winfrey] Show, I taped 217 episodes on sexual abuse. I tried and tried and tried to get the message across to people that sexual abuse was not just abuse; it was also sexual seduction.” If her use of the word seduction seemed interpretable as an attempt to romanticize accusers’ relationships with their alleged abusers, Winfrey quickly dispelled any confusion about her sympathies. “After I saw Leaving Neverland for the first time, I called up Dan Reed—I didn’t know Dan Reed—and told him, ‘Dan,’ I said, ‘You were able to illustrate in these four hours what I tried to explain in 217,’” Winfrey continued. “And I know people all over the world are gonna be in an uproar and debating whether or not Michael Jackson did these things or not, whether these two men are lying or not lying, but for me this moment transcends Michael Jackson. It is much bigger than any one person. This is a moment in time that allows us to see this societal corruption. It’s like a scourge on humanity.”

[Read: A new wave of documentaries is taking on sexual assault]

Winfrey’s After Neverland is framed as a kind of communal healing from the effects of this plague. She referred to her own experiences, at one point noting that it was only in her 40s, after hearing an admitted child molester explain on her show how he groomed his victims, that she learned to stop blaming herself for her own assault. Along with Safechuck, who looked visibly distraught throughout the interview, she repeatedly spoke in the second person: “When you are a child … you don’t have the language to explain what is happening to you,” she said at one point. Later, after Robson spoke about the difficulty of having lived with his secret, Winfrey offered a weighty affirmation of his experience: “Your whole childhood is a lie. All the decisions that you make about anything come from that space of a lie, so that’s why you have that feeling of disconnection.”

The special is, like Leaving Neverland itself, at times jarring in its frankness. Acting as a kind of proxy for skeptical viewers, Winfrey asked the men startlingly direct questions about the nature of the abuse they say they suffered, as well as why they didn’t speak up sooner, and whether they continue to blame their parents for allowing them to be near Jackson. Safechuck and Robson relive intimate interactions with Jackson, recount bouts of self-hatred and depression, and revisit the feelings they experienced when defending Jackson against similar allegations during his 1993 trial. (Robson also defended Jackson during the 2005 case.) The men, particularly Robson, express regret that they felt incapable of contradicting the lies they say Jackson groomed them to tell. It is grueling television, with a handful of tense moments. But even as she pried, Winfrey buffered the men’s accounts with the comfort of a shared understanding. She made clear that their stories merit thoughtful inquiry, not just as individual accounts, but also as examples that illuminate a much larger systemic issue. To underscore that point, Winfrey drew her special audience into the conversation. Throughout After Neverland, Winfrey addressed both the studio audience and viewers at home nearly as often as she addressed Reed, Robson, and Safechuck. Her requests for explanation from the three were framed less as attempts to get the men to justify their stories to her, and more as moments of opportunity to address misconceptions that plague all victims. As Robson and Safechuck spoke, the camera cut often to several recognizable figures in the audience, among them Winfrey’s close friend, the CBS News anchor Gayle King, and the #MeToo founder Tarana Burke. King, Burke, and others in the room nodded emphatically as the men spoke, and as Oprah offered her own insights. The onlookers’ eyes were visibly teary, their demeanor subdued. Winfrey also explicitly harkened back to her landmark 2010 episode about male sexual-assault survivors. Two men who had been in the studio then appeared during After Neverland, both affirming Jackson’s accusers partly by sharing how difficult it was for them to come forward with their own stories: the ER actor Anthony Edwards, whose 2017 essay Oprah referenced as a poignant reminder of how hard it is for young boys to disclose experiences of assault, and the former Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Al Chesley, who described having been allegedly assaulted by a police officer as a devastating abuse of power.

As a prominent black woman with a mononymic empire, Oprah was well aware that her support of Jackson’s accusers would attract scrutiny. “I’m gonna get it,” she said with a laugh toward the end of the special, referencing the fury of Jackson’s superfans. “We all gon’ get it, we gon’ get it, we gon’ get it.” It was one of several moments of levity that might seem out of place for those who do not share similar experiences. It’s a decidedly in-group gallows humor, an acknowledgment of the incredibly high stakes that come with publicly alleging sexual abuse. Oprah’s lightness, and the men’s own resigned laughter, emerges against a backdrop of threats—made against her, HBO, Reed, and most punishingly, Robson and Safechuck. On-screen, it is at once disarming and comforting. After Neverland, then, is a rare kind of narrative platform. By treating her interview subjects’ stories with this kind of rigor and familiar thoughtfulness, Winfrey—like Reed—reframes the lens through which abuse allegations are discussed. Before a long embrace with Robson, Safechuck offered a heartfelt meditation on the importance of the space After Neverland has created: “Doing the movie I tried to set a healthy expectation, which was that I would talk to other survivors and that was my audience,” he said. “This moment is why.”

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2IUrKGb

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prideguynews · 6 years

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The ‘gay small movie Oscars’, the Iris Prize, is occurring in Cardiff, Wales as I article this. The 6-working day celebration of LGBT+ movie is centred about its justly prestigious Iris Global Prize. This is the most valuable LGBT small movie prize in the planet, worth £30,000, which lets the recipient to make another small. The initial of the 35 films in opposition have now screened, and after additional it is an eclectic and interesting bunch, covering a variety of themes about sexuality, gender and additional.

This 12 months the screenings of the shorts have been brought together into thematic groups, so choose a glimpse below to see our feelings on the Iris Prize Global Shorts from Day 1 of the fest.

Wild Beasts (Villdyr)

With Close friends Like These

The initial screening brought together a selection of films centring on strategies of friendship, having in the two the positive and the adverse.

Wild Beasts (Villdyr) Director: Sverre Kamme In the snowy isolation of rural Scandinavia, a group of young teens are hanging out, figuring out their lives and making an attempt to find anything to do. However, one particular of the boys may well have sensation for his male good friend that he does not very totally recognize and is not guaranteed how to convey. Wild Beasts is an intriguing and properly shot movie that manages to capture the uncertainties and damaging impulses of adolescence, wherever young people today usually glimpse for a sensation of management in the improper areas. However, when properly observed, the movie could have carried out with digging a small deeper into what is genuinely likely on amongst these people today. That stated, it certainly does not outstay its welcome and has a couple of emotionally resonant times. 3.five out of five

Pink Tablet Director: Xiaoshan Xie China has a odd and challenging to get the job done out mind-set to gay content. In latest several years some Chinese films have been banned or cut prior to release in their homeland to get rid of LGBT-themed scenes, when other people have been authorized out unscathed. Equally, there have been gay-themed films that Chinese authorities have permitted to be screened at worldwide festivals but not at household, when conversely some films (and filmmakers) have been pulled from overseas competition line-ups. I say this not for the reason that it took place to Pink Tablet, but for the reason that I believe it claims anything about the context of how anything like this movie can get designed and the planet it comes from.

In it, a teenage girl’s lifestyle is upended when a homophobic classmate publicly reveals a website page from her diary, which demonstrates she has sensation for another female. Just one of her male classmates still demonstrates curiosity in her, and he may well be inclined to go to serious lengths to make her ‘normal’. Inspired by accurate occasions, Pink Tablet is a provocative and complex movie, wherever its doable to examine items in various methods that give a distinct spin to occasions. For illustration, you could see the primary boy in the movie as wrestling with his individual sexuality, or just as a peaceful but decidedly straight young gentleman. In truth, distinct viewers at the Iris screening took it distinct methods. It guarantees that even when it goes to some darkish areas it hardly ever feels gratuitous. 4 out of five

Three Centimetres Director: Lara Zaeidan Final 12 months a one particular-shot movie won the primary Iris Prize. Three Centimetre is also just a one shot but usually takes on distinct issue make a difference and a distinct, possibly unforeseen, venue. The entire thing usually takes position in the gondola of a ferris wheel in a decaying enjoyment park in Beirut. Four young feminine pals go for a experience, with one particular specifically loud, mouthy female dominating the conversation with discuss about how you do not shed your virginity if its only in three centimetres. When the conversation turns to acquiring about an ex by wondering of them being gay, it results in one particular of the women, Marwan, to appear out. This revelation will get an array of reactions, from worry to anger to dismissal.

Smartly designed, the one particular-shot mother nature of the small movie could have appear throughout as an affectation, but immediately turns into integral to the small and significantly less distracting than it could have been. The Lebanese placing also provides to the movie, so that as a western viewer it troubles perceptions of the middle-east and also make you mirror on the similarities and variation amongst reactions to somebody coming out in distinct nations. 3.five out of five

Don’t Connect with Me Bro (Nenn Mich Nicht Bruder) Director: Gina Wenzel A feminine soccer workforce is baffled when a boy demonstrates up for exercise, right until Cheyenne discovers that new boy Dany is actually transgender. Dany commences to befriend some of the male soccer players, including Cheyenne’s boyfriend, Josh, and he hopes that Cheyenne will maintain his key. Though he immediately starts to find acceptance in this ragtag, chaotic and relatively violent crew, a sense of threat hangs in the air due to what the other boys do not know, and the electric power Cheyenne has about that. This German small productively results in a sense of menace that grows as it goes on.

Some may well choose problem with regardless of whether it is rather stereotyping young ‘chavs’, or certainly regardless of whether its stunning and relatively disturbing times border on exploitative, but it certainly has an impact. It also does a very good work of looking at the reckless and damaging impulses of youth, and the threat of electric power imbalances among all those who do not recognize duty. 3.five out of five

Calamity

Gender & Relatives

The next screening focussed on gender difficulties and films featuring transgender characters, and additional specifically their connection with loved ones.

There You Are Director: Lisa Donato Jessica requires to go household to see her dying grandmother. However, when she is now residing as a trans female, her loved ones have generally acknowledged her as Jason. In buy to check out to mix in in the course of this challenging situation, Jessica attempts to determine out how to go for a boy once more. When she will get household her mother is as challenging as generally, but other people may well have unforeseen reactions. Penned by and starring trans actress Jen Richards, I observed There You Are most interesting for causes that genuinely should not be interesting at all. In the movie the way the emotional character beats and shifts get the job done is carried out in a rather mainstream design, to the issue wherever the most cynical viewer could see it as a small sentimental. However, it is still very rare to see this carried out with trans stories, which tend to be dominated by arthouse outlooks and a focus on the adverse sides of the trans encounter. There You Are demonstrates that possibly just as important are the stories that show a small additional hope, not the very least that in contexts like this it will help underline that trans people today are part of ‘us’ and not just a ‘them’. 4 out of five

Profane Cow (Vaca Profana) Director: Rene Guerra This is one particular of all those films that I can imagine leading to massive arguments amongst viewers who could glimpse at it in radically distinct methods. Nadia is a trans female who’s been mainly acknowledged by her neighborhood in a weak part of Brazil. Just one of her pals has a modest baby she wants to adopt out, so Nadia agrees to choose the baby, satisfying her prolonged held dream of motherhood. However, items get sophisticated when the birth mother has next feelings. It’s certainly an intriguing and at instances provocative movie, when delves into the concept that the longing for motherhood significantly transcends the actual physical means to have a baby, as nicely as the point that the actual physical means by itself does not make you a very good mother. However, the way it does it is perhaps problematic.

Although I do not believe it is making an attempt to propose that trans people today are in essence doing the role of somebody who’s a distinct gender than the one particular they ended up assigned at birth or that they are ‘weirdoes’, but the movie does perform into all those stereotypes at instances, not the very least when Nadia decides to wear a pretend baby stomach. This and a couple of other difficulties signify that when the film’s surface area is trans-positive, beneath it could be viewed as significantly additional problematic. 2.five out of five

Calamity Administrators: Severine be Streyker, Maxime Feyers Middle-aged couple France and Lucien return from a crack to unexpectedly find their son Romain and his new girlfriend Cleo in their household. France insists they stay for evening meal, as she wants to fulfill her son’s new appreciate curiosity. What none of Romain’s loved ones know while, and what he hadn’t wished to convey to them nonetheless, is that Cleo is a trans female in the early times of her ‘treatment’. When they realise this the loved ones does not know what to do, as it is a situation none of them has at any time even contemplated.

Calamity is a small which is shut to outstanding. The decision to focus on the mother and to flesh her character out so that we know she is not happy and stuck in an unfulfilling standing quo guarantees the movie avoids the melodramatic. Equally, the short’s humour will help to carry the viewer into the characters’ encounter. It also properly contrasts the appreciate and contentment of the young lovers with the emotional desert of the moms and dads, so that France’s desire for items to go back again to ordinary is not just about transphobia but also about validating the staid selections she’s designed in her lifestyle. However, there are a few far too many times wherever Calamity can’t very stability its loved ones tale with its self-consciously filmic times and an unevenness in its technique to a heightened fact. Although its still a very good movie, I did experience that it could have been additional. 3.five out of five

Michael Joseph Jason Scott

Masculinity

The closing screening of Iris Prize Shorts on Day 1 of the competition focused on difficulties surrounding masculinity.

Crashing Waves Director: Emma Gilbertson A extremely small small, Crashing Waves right away stands out for the reason that most of it is expressed via dance. Two young gentlemen (who, for want of a superior term would be classed by some as ‘chavs’) fulfill just outdoors some substantial-increase tower blocks on an internal-city housing estate. The tensions and doable connections amongst them appear out via dance, which in the beginning looks like it may well explode into violence or as a substitute could erupt into enthusiasm. But even when dancing the gentlemen simply cannot escape the planet they stay in. The movie is only four-minutes prolonged, but it lingers in your thoughts partly for the reason that it is so unforeseen and partly for the reason that it is extremely nicely carried out. Dance is usually filmed terribly on display, but Crashing Waves realises that the digicam is also a dancer and not just a window/lens. As a final result, it pulls the viewer into this sensual pas de deux. 3.five out of five

The War Place Director: Ben Hantkant Each 12 months at Iris there is at the very least one particular movie that absolutely flummoxes me and I experience like almost everything about it has flown about my head. The War Place is one particular of all those videos. I’m not even one hundred% guaranteed I can properly explain what it is about, but it sees a young gentleman dealing with lifestyle in the Israeli Army and the pressures and strategies of masculinity and bravado it areas on conscripts, especially if that form of machismo does not mirror who they are inside of. However, the entire thing usually takes areas in a form of darkish, dreamlike fantasy of projections and online video installations, as nicely as toy army gentlemen and efficiency art.

It’s the form of movie that will speak to some and get their brains performing, when other people will be still left absolutely cold. However for me it is the latter. I also speculate regardless of whether Israeli navy company is one particular of all those items which is challenging for outsiders to properly recognize with no having lived in the region and being familiar with the cultural and societal context of nationwide company. As this is a movie about it that is so open up and experimental, it leaves few openings to let outsider to properly get inside of. Although possibly I just want to enjoy it a few additional instances. 1.five out of five

Michael Joseph Jason Scott A gentleman hooks up with a guy on the web and invitations him round to his New York condominium. The visitor looks keen to maintain items nameless and get to the bedroom ideal absent. However, every single gentleman may well have distinct strategies about what they want to get from the fulfill, with one particular wondering about their long term and another considering anything significantly darker. Michael Joseph Jason Scott (titled immediately after the names one particular of the gentlemen guesses could be the other’s) is a additional clear-cut and easier enjoy than many of the other Iris Prize shorts.

That is not to say it is straightforward while, just that it is additional very easily accessible. Quite a few viewers customers will be capable to relate to problems about who you are inviting into your household, as nicely as the hope and feeling of prospects when you believe you have designed a connection with somebody. Although there are a couple of times, specifically in direction of the end, that could have benefitted from a small additional subtlety, it is still an pleasing enjoy. 3 out of five

Wren Boys I’ve viewed Wren Boys a couple of instances now and each individual time I genuinely want to like it. This is, immediately after all, a movie that acquired a Greatest Brief Film BAFTA nomination and a British Independent Film Awards Greatest British Brief nomination, as nicely as screening at the likes of Sundance, the BFI London Film Pageant and SXSX. However, every single time I’ve viewed it, it is felt to me unfinished and a small far too delighted with alone, and which is not for the reason that of its open up ending. I can recognize why many do like it while, as the concept at the rear of it and how it attempts to unpack that are attention-grabbing. The basic set up is that it is Boxing Day, and an Irish priest in County Cork is driving his nephew to jail to see one particular of the inmates. I won’t say a lot additional as part of the way the movie works is a gradual unravelling of the assumptions the viewer can make about who these people today are, as nicely what other characters are wondering and assuming about them. It also attempts to offer with a region trapped amongst an previous, rigid, Catholic, dogmatic way of being, and a new, enlightened region that has gay marriage (and certainly now has a gay chief). Even so, for me it works superior in concept than exercise, especially as a couple of its ‘twists’ experience like relatively hassle-free sleight of hand. 2 out of five

Something About Alex (Anders) Director: Reinout Hellenthal Something About Alex is a challenging one particular to discuss about just for the reason that the primary thing any viewer is likely to want to talk about about it is also a main spoiler. Alex has developed up on a farm but is upset when he discovers his sister and her boyfriend are transferring absent to the city. Realising that almost everything will improve, Alex finds it increasingly challenging to cover his accurate feelings. The movie works nicely just as what in the beginning seems like it could be a coming out tale, but in direction of the end it turns items on its head with a main twist, so that when we’ve been viewing the ‘truth’ it may well not be as other people perspective it.

Something About Alex is based about what is actually a rather straightforward concept, but it is a challenging one particular to pull off. It is while a extremely intelligent way to appear at the difficulties it is dealing with from a distinct angle, in methods that may well be easier for the viewers to empathise with than additional normal methods of accomplishing it. Even superior is that it is carried out in an very easily accessible and nicely put together way, assisted by a very good efficiency from the young direct. For me it was the greatest movie of Day 1 of Iris. 4.five out of five

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

Connected

The post Iris Prize Festival LGBT+ International Short Films 2018 – Part 1 (Short Film Reviews) appeared first on PrideGuy - Gay News, LGBT News, Politics & Entertainment.

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rolandfontana · 6 years

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Fan Bing Bing’s International Business Lesson

Photo by George Baird

I had a sorta friend in college who smoked like a chimney and drank like a Supreme Court Justice. When people would point out the danger of his ways he would respond by emphatically noting that his grandfather also smoked and drank just as much and he was still alive and kicking at 88. Does anyone not see a problem with this analysis?

And yet, my firm’s international lawyers often hear something similar as an excuse for why some company or some person is doing XY or Z that is not legal. Sometimes they will add that so and so who is a native of the country in which they are doing business has told them that this or that is okay, which to me is the equivalent of relying on someone with no medical training saying it’s okay to smoke.

What has happened to Fan Bing Bing spurs me to mention the above. Fan Bing Bing is a terrific movie actress who recently got into BIG trouble with the Chinese tax authorities for having underreported her income via a dual-contract system in which only one contract is disclosed to the tax authorities. For more on this, check out China Movie Stars and The Two-Contract Problem. But it isn’t just movie stars that employ the two-contract tax dodge; many foreign companies and expats do as well:

Even if Fan Bingbing hasn’t done a single thing wrong (which is very possible), it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that tax evasion is rampant in the film business. Tax evasion is like a national sport in China. Mainland factories regularly misreport income by having payments go to a Hong Kong or Taiwanese holding company. So-called “independent contractors” in China rarely report their income because they and their foreign employer are both operating illegally. And the billion-dollar daigou business is profitable largely through tax and customs fraud.

Around once a month (and 4-5 times in December and January — not kidding), our international lawyers get a call from a foreigner in big trouble somewhere like China or Indonesia for having done something illegal. I myself have taken many of these calls and they usually start out with the person in trouble saying something like the following:

I always follow the law and I wanted to follow the law in __________ [country] but my ___________ assured me that this is how things are done in ___________[country] and so I reluctantly went along. And now I am in legal trouble for having done…..

The person who usually gets the blame is the accountant or general manager or even the person’s wife who is a native of whatever country in which the person is having his legal problems — I say “his” here because I cannot remember getting such a call from anyone not male. My tactic is to quickly push through this sort of discussion by bluntly saying, well yes, not paying your taxes or not doing X is illegal pretty much everywhere in the world and I am not aware of any country in the world where it is a defense to say that everyone else is operating illegally as well. So at this point, what I suggest is that we bring in a top-flight criminal lawyer and work on doing whatever we can to prevent you from going to jail and to reduce what you will need to pay.

Around ten years ago, A reader sent me an article regarding the Sri Lankan parents being denied the return of their 17 year old daughter by a United States judge because the family was unable to prove they were in the United States legally. The judge was denying the daughter’s return both for immigration reasons and because her parents’ credibility had been so damaged by their history of immigration untruths. The reader asked if we were aware of anything like this having happened in China or the United States with Chinese businesspeople and whether “something like this” can impact one’s business in China. I responded by listing out all sorts of examples we had seen where one’s immigration status has harmed a business.

Many years ago, I was involved in an international litigation matter involving two Russian fishing companies. One of the key witnesses for the Russian company on the other side was a woman who had secured a US visa based on her supposed extensive education and experience in the fishing industry in Russia. She had secured this visa by claiming a college degree from one of Russia’s best fishing institutes and by claiming to have spent many years working for one of its largest fishing companies. One of my firm’s crackerjack paralegals somehow acquired a copy of this person’s visa application and noticed that her college degree from a college in Town A in Russia had been stamped by someone in Town B in Russia. This was the equivalent of a Harvard degree with an official Yale stamp on it. In other words, it could never happen if the degree were not a fake.

Our next move was to depose this person and depose her we did. At her deposition, we asked her a series of questions intended to make clear we knew she had lied to get into the United States, including the following:

1. Who was your favorite professor? She said she had no favorite. 2. Name one of your professors. She said she could not remember a single one. 3. Name one professor at the entire college. She said she could not remember a single one. 4. Who was your best friend at college? She said she was too busy studying to have had any friends. 5. Name one fellow student at your college. She said she could not remember a single one. 6. List the classes you took. She gave a really vague answer. 7. Name some of the buildings on your campus. She could not remember a single one. 8. Describe the campus. She gave an incredibly vague description.

We asked the same sort of questions regarding the fishing company at which she had allegedly worked in Russia and we got the same sort of answers.

And guess what, this key witness for the other side never showed up to testify at trial, which greatly strengthened our case and probably helped us prevail. I have no doubt her failure to appear stemmed from her fear of her illegal immigration status being publicly exposed.

I was once contacted by a Russian-American company that wanted my firm to sue an American company over a debt. I pushed my client about skeletons in his and his company’s closet and he admitted he was in the United States on a student visa and so should not have been working at all. We talked about how his bringing this case would probably expose him to visa issues and how he should think long and hard before he brought it. He chose not to bring the case and instead to just walk away from a not insubstantial debt.

We have had to tell a number of foreigners in China the same thing when they have sought our help in collecting on a debt in China or in suing their Chinese partner for having run off with what the foreigner thought was its own business. If you or your business are not 100% legal in China, you have pretty much foreclosed your ability to sue anyone in China, no matter what they do to you. To put it bluntly, you are ripe for the plucking.

A handful of times (usually during periods of stepped-up visa enforcement), my firm has been contacted by foreigners with illegal businesses in China who have either been denied re-entry into China or have been told to leave. These people are desperately seeking our help to get them back into China. They are desperate because their profitable China based businesses cannot function without them. The odds of our being able to help them are slim.

One of the most underrated benefits of having a Wholly Foreign Owned Entity (WFOE) in China is that entity’s ability to hire foreigners and those foreigners’ ability to secure Chinese work visas (Z visas). These companies are legal and they have standing to sue and since their employees are working in China legally on Z visas, they have nothing to fear by testifying on the company’s behalf.

And we too have seen our share of double contracts. Many years ago, a European company hired us to sue an American company for having failed to pay around 2.5 million dollars for the sale of a used airplane (I have forgotten the exact amount). This company told us they had a written contract for this transaction and we told them we like their case. They then sent us the contract and instead of it listing the airplane price at $2.5 million, it listed it at $600,000. We raised the monetary discrepancy with the client who explained that “yes, this is what the contract says but the deal was for $2.5 million and the only reason it wasn’t written in the contract that way was because the other side insisted on it saying $600,000 to minimize its duties when it took the plane to its own country. We told them we were no longer interested in pursuing the case and as far as I know they ended up having to walk away from $2.5 million.

One of my favorite stories is when I went to Papua New Guinea to help a Sakhalin Island client secure the return of two helicopters. When I landed in Port Moresby, I was asked if I was in the country as a tourist or for business. The tourist visa was something around $35 and the business visa was something around $350, but I said “business” and I paid the much higher fee. I then flew to Goroka where I met the next day with the governor of the Eastern Highlands Province, Malcolm “Kela” Smith. I was told “Kela” means bald man. The first thing Mr. Smith did when I met with him was to check my passport. When it revealed I was there on a business visa, I could sense a change in his view of me. Though he never confirmed this to me, I am convinced that had my passport revealed I was in PNG on a tourist visa, Mr. Smith would either have had me thrown out of the country or he would have refused to meet with me because I was in the country illegally. Kela Smith ended up meeting with me and with my client and within a day or two we had a deal whereby my client would get his helicopters back.

With so many companies these days looking to set up in Asian countries with even weaker law enforcement than China, our international business lawyers are often finding ourselves stressing the advantages of scrupulously following a country’s laws even when doing so is difficult and expensive. Our experience is that this virtually always pays off in the end — economically, with stability, and with peace of mind.

The simple and obvious bottom line here is that if you are going to be doing business in a foreign country it pays to do so legally.

Fan Bing Bing’s International Business Lesson syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/

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fashiontrendin-blog · 6 years

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It's Time To Welcome Katherine Heigl's Comeback

http://fashion-trendin.com/its-time-to-welcome-katherine-heigls-comeback/

It's Time To Welcome Katherine Heigl's Comeback

A little over 10 years ago, Katherine Heigl was at the height of her career. The then-28-year-old actress had just starred in Judd Apatow’s big bro-com “Knocked Up,” and earned an Emmy for her Shonda Rhimes-certified role as Dr. Izzie Stevens on “Grey’s Anatomy,” when she was cast as the lead in “27 Dresses.”

She was a bona fide Hollywood star, who could reel in not only viewers but paychecks upward of $6 million.

That is, until we tossed her like a watermelon off a roof.

Here’s how her public approval rating plummeted: Heigl was widely expected to nab another Emmy nod before she removed her name from award consideration in 2008, explaining in a statement widely circulated by the press that she didn’t believe her role in “Grey’s” Season 4 warranted praise.

“I did not feel that I was given the material this season to warrant an Emmy nomination and in an effort to maintain the integrity of the academy organization, I withdrew my name from contention,” she confessed. “In addition, I did not want to potentially take away an opportunity from an actress who was given such materials.”

The statement caused an uproar among “Grey’s” fans, as well as the cast and crew of the show, who read it as an insult to now-primetime TV matriarch Rhimes. The showrunner herself was taken aback, and in 2012, two years after Heigl exited “Grey’s” to “focus on family,” she hinted that the attitude revealed in Heigl’s Emmys statement had led, in part, to her departure from the show.

“On some level it stung and on some level I was not surprised,” Rhimes told Oprah Winfrey of Heigl’s 2008 statement. “When people show you who they are, believe them. I carry that [mantra] with me a lot. It has served me well.”

Rhimes continued to reference the actress over the years, telling The Hollywood Reporter in 2014, for instance, that “there are no Heigls” on the set of “Scandal.”

“I don’t put up with bullshit or nasty people,” she said of her “no assholes policy” in terms of hiring for production company Shondaland. “I don’t have time for it.”

For Heigl, the fallout was ongoing.

A few months before Rhimes ballyhooed her new “no Heigls” set life, TV Guide ran an article entitled “Katherine Heigl: My Career Betrayed Me.” Its first line effectively summarized pop culture’s feelings toward the collapsed star: “Katherine Heigl is continuing her campaign to get back in our good graces by throwing herself yet another pity party.”

The story’s headline was a slight manipulation of a comment Heigl made in an interview with Marie Claire, which read:

″This thing that was my best friend for a long time suddenly turned on me,” she said of the notorious Hollywood machine. “And I didn’t expect it. I was taken by surprise and angry at it for betraying me.”

At this point, Heigl’s career certainly looked different. Although she starred in a handful of film projects from 2010 to 2014, none of them took off the way she’d hoped. Heigl returned to TV in “State of Affairs,” which was canceled by NBC in 2015 after 13 episodes, and then tried with CBS’ “Doubt” in 2017, only to be shortly out of a job once again. The 2017 drama thriller “Unforgettable” gave her a bit of a boost with her role as a jealous, murderous ex-wife (that perhaps capitalized on audiences’ willingness to see her as a villain). But nothing rose to the levels of her 2008 fame.

Earlier this summer, I reached out to Heigl’s team to chat about her return to TV ― as a series regular in Season 8 of USA Network’s “Suits.” The move has “attempted comeback” written all over it.

However, the actress’ representative was “skeptical” of my solicitation, and her manager never returned my requests for an interview. If they were wary of my intentions, maybe that caution was warranted.

Heigl has been asked to rehash her past indiscretion time and time again. In interview after interview, she’s denied her reputation for “diva-like behavior.”

“I’m not a rude person. I’m not an unkind or mean person. I would never go out of my way or consciously try to hurt anyone’s feelings or make them feel bad or uncomfortable or not be professional, not do my job. I like my job. But I will continue to stand up for myself and I’m never going to stop standing up for my right to be heard, my right to be treated respectfully and professionally in return, my right to draw boundaries,” she told Meredith Vieira in 2014. “I am a strong woman, and I’m not going to apologize for that.”

She did apologize. In a 2016 interview with Howard Stern, Heigl recalled an mea culpa she made to Rhimes shortly after the Emmys statement.

“I went in because I was really embarrassed. So I went in to [see] Shonda and said, ‘I’m so sorry. That wasn’t cool. I should not have said that.’ And I shouldn’t have said anything publicly. But at the time, I didn’t think anybody would notice … I just quietly didn’t submit and then it became a story, and I felt I was obligated to make my statement, and [I should have just said], ‘Shut up, Katie.’”

Today, while entertainment junkies cheer on the women leading Time’s Up and wage gap-related discussions that probe Hollywood’s ugly gender imbalance, Heigl’s legacy remains in limbo. Fans are still suspect, even as “Grey’s” co-star Ellen Pompeo continues to earn back pats for her commendable fight for a $20 million paycheck.

The parallel ― between Pompeo’s unabashed battle for high-rise compensation and Heigl’s highly publicized desire for a meatier role ― isn’t perfect. But there are similarities between the two overt campaigns; both Pompeo and Heigl wanted more, and they deigned to ask for it.

Jeff Kravitz via Getty Images

Katherine Heigl, Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann and Judd Apatow, director/writer/producer of “Knocked Up.”

Heigl shared another unfavorable opinion in 2008. Remember that one?

“It was a little sexist,” she told Vanity Fair of Apatow’s “Knocked Up.” “It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys. It exaggerated the characters, and I had a hard time with it, on some days. I’m playing such a bitch; why is she being such a killjoy? Why is this how you’re portraying women? Ninety-eight percent of the time it was an amazing experience, but it was hard for me to love the movie.”

A generous reading of that quote in 2018 positions Heigl as ahead of her time, pleading for Hollywood to portray women as something other than “bitches” or moms or ingénues. A woman in entertainment fighting for better scripts? Hell yes.

Back in 2013, Grantland speculated that a Heigl comeback would take a specific form: “a guest arc on a sitcom, with a few well-placed interviews about what a ‘good experience’ it was for everyone.” On “Suits,” Heigl fills a void left by actress-turned-Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle, playing lawyer Samantha Wheeler, whom Heigl says fits right in with the rest of creator Aaron Korsh’s fictional firm.

“They’re really just confident and comfortable in their own skin,” Heigl told TVLine. “They have flaws, and they have insecurities, for sure, but they’re not afraid to push boundaries. They’re not afraid to push back.”

What’s interesting is, she got the job by asking for it. The now-39-year-old mother of three, who traded in Los Angeles for life on a ranch in Utah, reportedly reached out to Korsh about general collaboration possibilities before flat-out asking if he needed “a tall blonde” for “Suits” Season 8. And voila, she was in.

There’s privilege baked into that request. (Hollywood is rarely not looking for “a tall blonde.” Would, say, Mo’Nique have experienced such a serendipitous opportunity had she asked outright for a role?) But there’s an admirable hubris in it, too.

Comments and career points can be cast and recast to fit convenient narratives that only tell part of the story. Heigl’s string of lackluster TV appearances and rom-com stints, coupled with her rumored “not a team player” status, can either be a signifier of her subpar acting abilities and professionalism, or a reflection of the exclusively crappy material she’s offered ― until she asks for something better. Or maybe reality rests somewhere in between.

Either way, Heigl is coming back. Will you welcome her?

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