KPOL radio station on Sunset Blvd (1976) .. Vitajex -- A Face in the Crowd -- as fresh and relevant as tomorrow's headlines (1957) ...
Image by marsmet481
"My study of history has convinced me that in every strong and healthy society, from the Egyptians on, the mass has to be guided with a strong hand by a responsible elite," Haynesworth informs Rhodes.
"Let us not forget that in TV we have the greatest instrument for mass persuasion in the history of the world."
--- General Haynesworth
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.....item 1)... A Face in the Crowd (1957) ... Directed by Elia Kazan ... Writing credits Budd Schulberg
www.library.spscc.ctc.edu/electronicreserve/swanson/Facei...
The setting for the film is late 1950s America, when television was rapidly replacing radio
as the most popular entertainment medium. Although Rhodes is coarse and abusive, he
possesses a colloquial, on-air charm that quickly endears him to the hearts and minds of
rural listeners. A talent scout invites him to appear on televison in Memphis, Tennessee
where Rhodes is introduced to Mel Miller (Matthau), a bookish Vanderbilt graduate who
writes his scripts. However, Rhodes makes a name for himself by insulting his sponsor — to
the delight of his adoring audience.
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I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee and we Southerners immediately identify Rhodes as a familiar personality using a well-worn technique. More than Arthur Godfrey, he is reminiscent of Sputnik Monroe, Dewey Phillips and, of course, Elvis Presley, feigning ignorance while playing every possible angle. These personalities stroked their poor white and black audiences, treating them better than they'd ever been treated while at the same time deceiving them cheerfully and taking their money. These Memphis personalities exploited (and were exploited by) a complex cultural dialectic at play which Griffith, Schulberg and Kazan all understood perfectly and, might I add, personally.
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Mark Deming's comments for All Movie Guide are typical of most reviews and summaries of the film: “And while Walter Matthau has the thankless task of delivering the film's moral in his final speech, you can't say that he didn't know how to make the most of it, as he sums up Lonesome's crimes with lip-smacking cynicism” (7). I hope it is clear how wrong this assessment is. This is no 'message movie' whose message is obvious and dated. Matthau's speech is actually a subtle self-indictment (an indictment that Kazan and Schulberg are levying against themselves as well) that speaks volumes about the media's complicit involvement with corrupt governments owned by faceless corporations. A Face In the Crowd is, in fact, as fresh and relevant as tomorrow's headlines.
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.....item 2)... TV Prophecy ... The Voter Update ... thevoterupdate.com
TV Prophecy
The prescient vision of Andy Griffith's 'A Face in the Crowd'
By Bryan Warner
Published: July 16, 2010
thevoterupdate.com/articles/2010/7_16_10_face_in_the_crow...
RALEIGH - There is nothing novel about those who lust for power using art and technology to transfigure themselves as icons. Emperors commanded bronze to be forged into their image. Royalty commissioned painters to immortalize them with brush and oil. The printing press was employed to bend reality to the will of rulers.
But of all communication advances, it may be television that has proven the most potent -- and perilous -- when it comes to marshalling popular will. That is the message of director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg in their astonishingly prescient film "A Face in the Crowd."
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img code photo ... A Face in the Crowd
thevoterupdate.com/images/articles/2010/face_in_crowd_pos...
A Face in the Crowd
(Warner Bros., 1957)
Director: Elia Kazan
Screenwriter: Budd Schulberg
Starring: Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Anthony Franciosa, Walter Matthau, Lee Remick
Profile on IMDB.com
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Here Andy Griffith gives a riveting, breathtaking performance as Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, a drifter-turned-celebrity, or as one observer puts it, a demagogue in denim.
Plucked from obscurity in an Arkansas jailhouse by local radio producer Marcia Jefferies (Patricia Neal) while recording her program "A Face in the Crowd," Griffith's Rhodes swiftly becomes a favorite among listeners for his homespun humor and folksy music. Soon enough Rhodes catches a glimmer of his newfound power, persuading his listeners to mischievously swarm the lawn of the town's oafish sheriff with packs of hounds.
From the Arkansas backwater, Rhodes, accompanied by his "Girl Friday" Jefferies, makes his way to Memphis television, where his full-body laugh and cutting mockery of the program's sponsors further intoxicates the masses and turns him into a regional icon.
It's in Memphis that two more players join the Lonesome Rhodes caravan: Mel Miller (Walter Matthau), an acerbic writer who sees through the stagecraft of his program's star, and Joey DePalma (Anthony Franciosa), a duplicitous and ambitious peon who becomes an agent for Rhodes.
DePalma's bluff and bluster with New York advertisers paves the path for Rhodes' arrival in the Big Apple, where he is given a nationally televised variety show sponsored by "Vitajex," a modern-day snake oil remedy -- and a good fit for Rhodes' brand of faux folksiness.
Rhodes' cult of personality sweeps the nation, landing him on the cover of glossy magazines, having a ship christened after him and a snowcapped summit dubbed "Mt. Rhodes."
All of the hype prompts a sullen Miller to remark, "It's dangerous -- power. You've got to be a saint to stand all the power that little box can give you."
The wealthy proprietor of Vitajex, General Haynesworth (Percy Waram), soon takes Lonesome Rhodes under his wing with the intention of turning him into his own version of Will Rogers to be used as "a force" and as "an institution as sacred to the nation as the Washington Monument."
The aim is to pivot on Rhodes' appeal with average American voters in order to push the presidential aspirations of Haynesworth's political ally, Sen. Worthington Fuller, known as "the last of the isolationists."
Haynesworth hardly sees television as the epitome of Jacksonian democracy, but rather an opiate of the masses, to be used for his own cynical pursuits.
"My study of history has convinced me that in every strong and healthy society, from the Egyptians on, the mass has to be guided with a strong hand by a responsible elite," Haynesworth informs Rhodes. "Let us not forget that in TV we have the greatest instrument for mass persuasion in the history of the world."
The scene in which Lonesome coaches the avuncular, stodgy Fuller (whom he nicknames "Curly" for his "fine head of skin") is a pitch-perfect depiction of the unholy union between Madison and Pennsylvania Avenues.
When one of the bland Fuller's acolytes insists that the senator is respected, Rhodes barks back, "Have you ever heard of anyone buying a product because they respect it? You got to be loved!"
And so Rhodes and his cohorts set about transforming the senator into a man of the people, instructing him to ditch his Siamese cat in favor of a dog, since "it didn't do Roosevelt any harm, Dick Nixon, either." It's all in an effort "to find 35 million buyers for the product we call Sen. Fuller."
With the rise of Rhodes' fame comes the leavening of Sen. Fuller's poll numbers. Scanning the New York skyline from his towering penthouse apartment, Rhodes glowers, "This whole county's just like my flock of sheep. I'm gunna be the power behind the president."
Indeed, General Haynesworth convinces the would-be president Fuller to plan a new cabinet-level position for Rhodes: secretary for national morale.
The ploy of using Rhodes' celebrity as a political vehicle works, for a time. Like any Shakespearian tragedy, the antihero of this tale is ultimately hewn down by his own hubris and folly, and with it comes crashing the White House hopes of his client.
The film is a revelation to any longtime viewer of idyllic reruns of "The Andy Griffith Show," for here Griffith is a million miles from Mayberry. He plays a man that is at turns charming, menacing and infantile. He at once burns to be loved by his public, but despises them for their blind affection.
This may be his best dramatic performance -- a bold statement, to be sure, made all the more so by the fact that this was Griffith's first lead role as a film actor, a craft for which he had received little formal training.
What makes the movie most potent is how prophetical it seems today. The film was released three years before the watershed 1960 contest between Kennedy and Nixon that saw the first-ever televised presidential debate. The power of television in politics has grown exponentially since, making and breaking many a political career and becoming the prism through which Americans view their democracy.
Although director Kazan paints a pessimistic picture of the manipulative ways of politics and mass marketing that reveals both to be interchangeable, the film ends on a hopeful note of sorts, unexpectedly delivered by Matthau's hard-boiled writer.
"We get wise to them," he says. "That's our strength. We get wise to them."
Bryan Warner is editor of The Voter Update Magazine.
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.....item 3)... The Other McCain ... theothermccain.com ..
"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler"
Responsible Elite In ‘A Face In The Crowd’
Posted on | December 14, 2011 | 14 Comments
by Smitty
theothermccain.com/2011/12/14/responsible-elite-in-a-face...
At the suggestion of Ladd Ehlinger , I took in A Face in the Crowd , a 1957 Kazan flick that is well worth your time. ‘Lonesome’ Rhodes goes from nowhere to national stardom. Andy Griffith is powerful as an Icarian pop culture icon.
The documentary on the DVD includes a couple of interesting quotes from the writer and director:
-----Schulberg: “This movie was really meant as kind of a warning that, with the phenomenon of television, that politics would never be the same.”
-----Kazan, attributed: “There is a cost for everything.”
However, what piqued my interest was the General Haynesworth character. He says, starting at 53:06:
My study of history has convinced me that every strong and healthy society from from the Egyptians on, the mass had to be guided with a strong hand by a responsible elite.
Mention of ‘the mass’ recalls The Crowd , by Gustave Le Bon, a serious study of crowd psychology.
Basically, information diffuses poorly in a wad of people. If you’re at a Lady GaGa concert, rumors about whether she will perform the next song dressed in fresh beef cuts, or in a huge flour tortilla worn as a toga, won’t cross the music hall very well. When she comes out on stage, the TV screen will move that crucial information instantly. That’s the difference at which Schulberg was getting.YouTube amplifies the point:
youtube video ... 60 minutes ..
But the crowd has an aggregate pulse, as the information-deprived individuals repeat this or that rumor, or YouTube clips go viral. The beef cuts on Lady GaGa become three strategically placed young baboons, which may or may not be real. Charismatic people like the Lonesome Rhodes character can tap into that aggregate pulse of the crowd, and ride it to fame. Stacy McCain wondered aloud if Huey Long was an inspiration for the Rhodes character, but Wikipedia cites other entertainment names as inspirations .
Amusingly, according to IMDB , sombody named Keith Olbermann likes to refer to Glenn Beck as Lonesome Rhodes.
What about this ‘responsible elite’? No less a figure than Jesus of Nazareth noted For the poor always ye have with you. . . . In other words, there will always be poor, rich, and quite a few in between. There is going to be a distribution of wealth, irrespective of whether the Inner Party uses propaganda to reduce everyone else to poverty (while proclaiming wealth), or not.
The thing that matters, if you’ll allow me something like a Gaussian Distribution of wealth, is that there is a current circulating within the distribution. The simple fact of inequality in wealth distribution is neither evil nor escapable. Money cannot be evenly distributed any more than information in a crowd. That there is wealth movement within that distribution, and that people have liberty to move as much or as little as desired, is crucial. There will be a figure in a burqa doing the next song. Lady GaGa, or not?
And so Lonesome Rhodes has a metorotic rise. Talent and opportunity, along with a soulless media machine, propel him to vast heights. Yet Rhodes lacks the maturity and perspective to handle it. The same figure who casually mentions Grand Theft Auto at the beginning of the movie, who uses women cruelly throughout, never grasps that he is the very thing he despises. To ride the meteor successfully requires a strong internal commitment to something both good and external, where the soul is regularly taken for trimming. Rhodes tries using whiskey, but the whiskey uses him instead. For a worked example of my point, take a tour of Graceland and ask whether Elvis handled the fame well, or did his head ‘splode? Would you date Lady GaGa?
Is Glenn Beck a Lonesome Rhodes figure? Beck seems more in touch with the nature of human evil, including the internal portion. Does he constitute a member of a ‘responsible elite’? In the movie, the General seemed more of an oligarch, delegating the messy work of dealing with the mass to Rhodes.
No, Beck wants everyone to do the homework, and move as far in the direction of the elite tail of the income distribution as they care to go. This notion of capitalistic opportunity and movement within the income distribution according to merit is an important facet of American Exceptionalism. Lady GaGa is probably not the Postmodern Rhodes, but I’m confident I’ll never know for sure, as my interest really does not extend past a running gag in a blog post.
Dan Riehl might actually find himself agreeing with Keith Olbermann’s point about Glenn Beck.
Mentioned in this post:
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Portrait of an Asshole - Live at Squamish 2011
Image by cabbit
August 21, 2011 -- SQUAMISH, BRITISH COLUMBIA, Canada -- Brian Bell of Weezer takes issue with having his photo taken. -- PHOTO BY ANDREW FERGUSON
EDIT: Turns out this is Brian Bell of Weezer. Not sure how I missed that, considering I shot their concert later that night.
What happened:
I was standing around with Aaron & started lining up a shot of a guy that I thought looked interesting. He was texting on his cell phone & standing in a reasonably open grass area, making for a good isolated subject. Brian noticed me, gave me the finger, and aggressively walked toward me shouting as I shot this photo. He rudely demanded, not asked, that I delete my photo & that I give him my film when I explained it was a medium format film camera.
He had a gutterpunk-looking guy with him, not in the shot, who I can only assume was one of his roadies or festival escorts. Both of them got really aggressively in my personal space, demanding that I delete the shot. After I explained it was film, they rudely demanded that I give them the film and that I stop taking photos.
Of course, I refused. I calmly explained that it was legal for me to take photos of them in public & showed them my press pass (which says 'MEDIA' and 'I'm taping this conversation' on it in huge letters). I explained that I took his photo because I thought he looked interesting, they were being rude, & while I wouldn't be taking any further photos of him, I was not going to be giving them my film.
They continued to be aggressive with me for a few minutes until the gutterpunk guy decided to try and get me to come talk with him about the situation somewhere else. I refused to follow him and told him he could talk to me right here where we were standing, with the man whose photo I'd taken. The roadie didn't listen and kept trying to get me to go somewhere else with him, Eventually I said that this was a waste of my time and I was leaving. As I walked around them, he said something along the lines of "Yeah, maybe you better leave."
I rejoined Aaron and we went to the beer tent. Spent the rest of the weekend trying to figure out who that asshole was and why he thought he could be such a prick to people. I was even half-tempted to file a complaint with security about these two. I never did figure out who it was and promptly forgot about it, I was having a fantastic time shooting a fantastic festival and some aggressive rude jerk wasn't going to ruin that for me.
It wasn't til I posted this photo to Flickr that my friends identified him as Brian Bell.
Not recognizing him is what makes the story funny to me, because of his celebrity-diva behaviour. It's worth noting though that his behaviour is just as awful even if I had gone 'oh hey, it's that guy from Weezer. I am going to take his picture'. I believe I would have reacted similarly as well.
If he ever happens to see this: Feel free to apologize to me anytime for your shameful behaviour, Brian.
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Film EXIF
Camera: Hasselblad 501C
Film: Fuji Velvia 50
Focal Length: 80mm
Aperture: f/4
Shutter: 1/125
Metering: Guessed
Handheld
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