Riefenstahl: A Triumph of the Bad Documentary

The documentary has slipped downhill in recent years. Not Ken Burns, bless him; we watched his latest on the American Revolution and he's still the best at the old-fashioned, long-form, talking heads doc. But otherwise, documentaries have gone to hell in a handbasket. Sometimes it's a problem of being "authorized" by the subject of the doc, and therefore inclined to leave out anything that doesn't fit the subject's view of themselves. This was a problem with recent docs about Jeff Lynne, Gordon Lightfoot, Paul McCartney (I guess I watch a lot of music docs). Recent films about Syd Barrett, Pee-Wee Herman and Billy Joel were better, though still constrained a bit by being "official." A Dionne Warwick documentary skipped over many years in her career which she apparently didn't want to cover. Sometimes it's the format that is at fault, as in Moonage Daydream, about David Bowie, which was terribly put together. 

But my biggest problem with 21st century docs is the disappearance of narration. I think directors believe that the absence of a guiding god-like voice makes the proceedings seem more objective, which is of course not true—someone is still choosing and editing and eliding and emphasizing. A narrating voice can bring a cohesion to a story and fill in stuff that was not elicited by the filmmaker. For example, the recent McCartney film, Man on the Run, which covers the first four years or so of his solo career, made good use of actual McCartney interviews, but most of the fascinating stories of the behind the scenes turmoil during the recording of the album Band on the Run was left out because no one spoke to it, something a narrator could have done at least in passing.

But the worst doc I've seen in a while is Riefenstahl by Andres Veiel. I happen to know a good bit about Leni Riefenstahl, a German actress and director whose most famous works, Triumph of the Will and Olympia, both documentaries themselves, were more or less made to order for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, a controversy that came to define her life and career in popular culture. Veiel's film is pretentious, boring, and muddled. In addition to being faux artsy and slow, it assumes that the viewer already knows who she was and what the controversies that surrounded her all her life were about. It's only sometimes chronological and much context for what is being presented, especially in her pre- and post-Hitler years, is missing. The director did dig up lots of previously unseen photos and footage but they add little to the content of the film, they just fill time. Though I'm not a Riefenstahl apologist—her claims of total innocence about what was going on under Hitler are baldly self-serving and mostly ring false—the filmmaker doesn't attempt a two-sided view here. He spends half his time making her look ridiculous and guilty without giving her own arguments any real exposure. The most interesting point that's made is that she desperately wanted to believe that her being an artist put her above political concerns, and that was a belief that led her to being combatively defensive all her life. Overall the film comes off as a bit amateurish. Don't bother with it; instead, read a biography of her or look for the much better movie, The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl from 1993.

Revisiting Jesus Christ Superstar (the 1973 movie)

This post assumes the reader has some familiarity with the title musical, as album or play or movie. It was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice and originated as an album in 1970, and was one of the first rock operas, after Tommy by The Who. The album was something of a revelation to me; I got Tommy for Christmas in 1969 and thought it was cool but didn't really play it much. In early '71, when I was 14, I got Jesus Christ Superstar. I’d bought the single "Superstar" the year before, mostly because it was controversial, and this long-haired teen was all about controversy. Luckily, my parents were never bothered by this streak in me; since I didn't act out in rebellious ways in real life, they didn't seem to mind that I did artistically. (My mom bought me the Hair album when I was 13 and was a bit startled when I asked her what "sodomy" meant, but otherwise she was fine with me listening to it.) I was Catholic and still went to church on Sundays, attendance mandated by my father, but I was basically an atheist even at that early age. I wouldn’t say the album changed my mind, but it gave the Gospel stories an emotional core that had been lacking for me, not to mention that I have yet to have anyone explain logically why Jesus had to die in order for God to offer us places in Heaven. Judas is portrayed as a tortured individual, thinking that Jesus has gotten sidetracked from his political anti-oppression message and is too wrapped up in his supposed divinity: "You really do believe this talk of God is true / And all the good you've done will soon be swept away." Jesus is similarly tortured, and I saw Judas' betrayal as something that he was forced to do, so that the mythic story of Jesus would play out as predestined. Unlike Tommy, I played this rock opera frequently, and saw a live concert-style performance of it that predated the Broadway production by a few months. 

Every Easter since my teen days, I have revisited either the album or the movie (though some years, I substitute Godspell), and this year it was the movie. I first saw it in 1973 and was disappointed, but still I bought it when it was issued on DVD. This time around, for some reason, I was more disappointed than ever. The concept behind the movie is interesting: a troupe of actors arrive in an Israeli desert on a bus, unload props and costumes (see picture above), and proceed to perform the opera about the last week of Jesus's life in a variety of desert settings. Most of the songs are intact, with a few lyrical alterations. Two new songs were added, one to clarify the position of the Jewish elders, possibly to address charges of antisemitism, and one, "Could We Start Again Please?" which the apostles sing to Jesus before his crucifixion, and which actually works fairly well. I understand the desire to open the musical up to be less stagy, and this works best in the moneylenders scene where Jesus trashes the marketplace like Kane did to his wife's room in Citizen Kane, but some of the most effective scenes in the movie are ones that are actually a bit stagy even when opened up: the apostles in the cave at the beginning, the high priests conversations, Mary singing "I Don't Know How to Love Him." The actors are fine, especially Carl Anderson as Judas and Barry Dennen as Pilate, but the singing is not always top-notch (Dennen, Josh Mostel as Herod, Kurt Yahjian as Annas), substituting energy for pitch and tone. Maybe because my TV isn't attached to a fancy sound system, the music lost some power and punch. Some of the desert vistas are lovely, but when actors are put in them, as in the scene where the lepers beg Jesus for help, they are dwarfed and some impact is lost. The glittery “Superstar” number, on the other hand, doesn’t go far enough; it should be much more bombastic show-biz, though I do love the Supremes-style backing singers (see below). 

I only saw parts of the live TV Hollywood Bowl concert with John Legend and was not impressed, though I remember liking Alice Cooper as Herod. I also saw the touring company of the Broadway production during one of their reunion tours, with Carl Anderson and Ted Neely, and it was OK though Neely seemed to overdo the agony at times. There are other recordings, amateur and professional, on YouTube that I may explore later in the week. But ultimately, partly because of a nostalgia factor, I don't think the original concept album will ever be displaced as my #1 choice for experiencing this work. 

Does It Matter If AI Wrote It?

I've been thinking about three articles I've read recently. The New York Times has run two interesting pieces about the writing of fiction using AI (large language models). The first was about Coral Hart, a romance writer who, under pseudonyms, cranked out some 200 romance novels last year using AI. Today's article was a thinkpiece about the dangers of AI-created (or assisted) fiction and the harm it does to the author-reader bond. The New Yorker ran a piece last month which wondered what will happen if people actually like AI-written fiction--the large language models will only get better at what they do. Related to this, I belong to a Facebook group which is often used by authors to promote their work, and the group admins have banned any promotion for books with AI text or cover art. 

First, let me say that I, like many people, am left a bit queasy over the issue of the use of AI to create any kind of art. I hate "AI slop," especially when it is presented as nonfiction or as neutral information. I've recently read many articles or short pieces about movies and books and the theatre that are clearly written by AI. There are stylistic giveaways, but what bothers me more is that many of them include false or misleading information. (In the most egregious piece I've seen, a post featuring a photo of Carol Channing and Lucille Ball meeting backstage made reference to a play that Ball was in that never actually existed.) Because I am an arts and entertainment buff, I can identify the errors quickly, but readers less versed in the topic probably can't, in the same way that I would not notice erroneous information in a article about football or opera. In addition, I have never used generative AI to create anything and don't see myself doing so anytime soon.

I understand some of the concerns of creators. For example, if AI cover art comes to be used extensively, artists would lose work. The same goes for musicians in terms of AI-produced music, and for people who write the short essays I refer to above. But I'm less certain about the harm AI would do in fiction. As I have dipped into reading the occasional gay romance novel (M/M), a genre I'm discovering I don't really like, I've noticed that lots of readers are looking for very specific things in the books they read. They want only happy endings, or only sad endings, or a coming-out story that's not too traumatic, or two firemen falling in love. They want lots of sex, or, more often, not a lot of sex, just affection and cuddles. Vampires in an apocalyptic setting. To quote a recent request I saw, one reader wants stories in which "the protagonist falls in love and gets his heart ruthlessly broken [and] other adventurous elements." I've seen similar requests on Goodreads by readers of straight romances, fantasies, and mysteries.

In my 60 years of reading books, it never dawned on me to have such specific requests when it comes to reading matter. This seems to be related to the social media echo chambers we live in, where we can read only exactly what we want to hear. Obviously, I pick and choose books based on a number of criteria that involve genre, plotting, style, characters, and authors. I like mysteries and classic novels and WWII spy stories; I avoid fiction about sports or finance or teenagers. But I would never limit myself the way that many contemporary readers do. It feels like such a programmatic, mechanical way to read. So maybe AI fiction, which  I assume is programmatic and a bit mechanical, is the perfect solution for such readers. 

As far as I know, I have never read AI-written fiction, but the male-male romances I've read recently might as well have been. I understand that genres have conventions--for example, I prefer my mysteries solved at the end in a roomful of suspects. But the recent romances I've read are so predictable, and often in trying to avoid triggering vulnerable readers, they are dull and vanilla with characters who don't remain in my imagination an hour after finishing the book. My point here isn't really to bash the genre but to note that AI might do just as good of a job as flesh-and-blood authors at providing entertainment and satisfaction for readers, specifically for genre readers. Someone will still make money. Coral Hart's AI books aren't bestsellers, but last year she sold some 50,000 books and made six figures in income. I can imagine an author seeing the request I quoted above for ruthless heart-breaking adventure, feeding in keywords to AI, getting a novel spat out which would probably satisfy that reader, and making a little money. While the author-reader bond is important to some readers, it's not to everyone, as the requests I've read by readers make clear. And I assume that authors who use AI would change and edit and add to the AI output. 

The current case of the book "Shy Girl," which was cancelled by its American publisher when AI content was found, highlights nicely two points. First, the author claims that an editor did any adding of AI content, which means that she must not have actually read her own edited book. Duh. Second, the problem came when the book was picked up by a mainstream publisher. I think, right now at least, it's in the world of self- and indie publishing that AI is showing up most obviously. I would not support nonfiction written by AI, though AI assistance is happening as we speak. But I come around to my title above, and the content of the New Yorker essay: if readers like the fiction they read that is mostly or wholly AI generated, what's the problem? I suspect there is a sense that we've been cheated when we read an AI novel, which hearkens back to the author-reader bond, in the same way we are displeased by accusations of plagiarism. But what if someday, a large language model writes a masterpiece?

To close with a related anecdote, I recently bought a book, an self-published M/M romance called Deep Dish. The cover, clearly AI generated, featured a very hot man and, to be honest about being shallow, that's why I bought it. Also, the idea of reading the adventures of a gay pizza boy was appealing. The book was terrible, the most amateurish piece of writing I've ever read (and I used to teach college writing). The guy delivers pizza after pizza after pizza and nothing happens except he gets tips, or doesn't get tips. A side romance develops that I didn't care an iota about. It was also poorly edited. AI could not have delivered a worse book. But that cover... Thank you, AI.

More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Bennett Cerf

The name of publisher Bennett Cerf is largely forgotten in 21st century pop culture, but this baby boomer has never quite forgotten him. He was, most importantly, the co-founder and public face of Random House, probably the biggest publisher in the country for much of the last half of the 20th century (rivaled only by Simon & Schuster). It still survives as part of Penguin Random House. He also wrote some best sellers of his own, mostly collections of jokes and humorous anecdotes. But he found pop culture fame as a panelist on the TV quiz show What's My Line for over fifteen years. By way of this show, Cerf was a visitor in our house when I was growing up every Sunday night in the sixties. Several years ago, my husband and I watched literally every episode that still exists (over 700) when the Game Show Network broadcast them, and most are still available on YouTube. Later, I worked in retail bookselling and became familiar with much of the publishing history of Random House and the houses that merged with it, like Knopf and Pantheon, and its imprints such as Modern Library and Beginner Books (publisher of Dr. Suess),

When I read that a new biography of Cerf was coming out, I knew I was the perfect audience member for the book, but first I went to my basement and dug out a copy of At Random, Cerf's own quasi-memoir, which I had been carting around for years. The book, published in 1977, several years after his death, is made up mostly of passages from an oral history he contributed to. You do get a fairly strong sense of his public persona (gregarious, smart, happy, but also quick to anger) as he recaps his career highlights and drops lots of names: Eugene O'Neill, Ayn Rand, William Faulkner, Truman Capote, James Michener. It's a fun read, but this was not the book he would have written if he hadn't died so suddenly in 1971 at the age of 73.

There has been little written about Cerf since he died with the exception of a few magazine articles and some mentions in books about American publishing. As soon as my copy of the book arrived (published by Random House—and sadly, with a spine that started deteriorating the moment I opened the book), I jumped right in. This book is welcome for the Cerf fan, but it has lots of problems. First, it's trying (as the author Gayle Feldman admits in an afterword) to be several things: the editor who signed the book up in 2002—who has since passed away—thought of it as a celebration of Random House; Feldman was thinking of it primarily as a biography; it also winds up being a pop culture history of the American book business. All of those are admirable goals, but at over 1000 pages (800 pages of text and 200 pages of footnotes and an admirably complete index), it's just way too much to plow through. I don't have much of a head for business so I skimmed most of the sections on mergers and such, but even just focusing on Cerf's life, there is so much minutiae here that I grew bored. It feels like we hear about every single business lunch he had, every party he and his wife threw, every celebrity he interacted with. Feldman did a huge amount of impressive research, but it seems like she couldn't decide what to leave in or take out, so having twenty years so put it together, she left it all in. (Not quite true, however, as she says she cut some 500 pages from her original manuscript!!)

I don't want to sound too negative. I did make it to the end and I loved learning a lot about Cerf and Random House. In addition to the authors I mentioned above, all of whom had substantial contact with Cerf, we hear stories about friends like Arlene Francis, Moss Hart and Frank Sinatra; fellow publishers Alfred Knopf and Richard Simon; his gay uncle who served as a mentor to him in his youth; and Toni Morrison who started work as an editor at Random House under Cerf. But it's overwhelming. Feldman is fairly good at keeping things in chronological order, though there were times, especially in the last half, when I had to skip back 10 or 20 pages to find out what year we were in. Much of the first half amplifies anecdotes from At Random, which was welcome, but there is a lot of repetition of the theme of Cerf not being taken seriously by history. This was partly because the books he actually wrote were joke and humor books, and partly due to his need to be a celebrity (largely fed by What's My Line) being considered by some to be inappropriate for his lofty position. I had not realized how instrumental Cerf was in clearing the way for James Joyce's Ulysses, once banned for being obscene, to be published in the United States. The historical information here about American publishing is quite interesting. His life sounds like a merry-go-round that it might have been fun to hitch a ride on for a time. Ultimately, I would recommend this—if you want to know more about Bennett Cerf than Wikipedia will tell you, this is really the only place to go—but not for a casual reader who doesn't already have some background in the history of the publishing business. Below is a picture of the 2 books side by side: 1000 pages versus 300 pages. Cerf's memoir is still available from Amazon.

A McCartney Festival, Part 3

After my recent binges on books about Paul McCartney, an Amazon algorithm brought to my attention a new documentary about McCartney called Man on the Run. Interestingly for me, it covers much of the same period that the McCartney Legacy books did, from the Beatles breakup to the formation of Wings to the release of Band on the Run in 1973. Though this doc is "authorized," with McCartney, listed as an executive producer, providing some narration, it largely views those years in the same way the the Legacy books do: McCartney, wounded, unhappy and depressed, stumbles around trying to kickstart a solo career, and has ups and downs along the way to what is certainly his post-Beatles masterpiece, Band on the Run. Both projects wind up viewing Wings as a vanity project that was doomed to failure because McCartney was too controlling to allow any real freedom for his bandmates (in reality, sidemen). 

Of course, failure here may seem an odd term to use. Over ten years, Paul and various iterations of Wings produced eight albums, all of which went gold and most of which hit number 1 on the Billboard album chart, spinning off some twenty singles, most of which hit the top 40, twelve winding up in the top 10. Within four years of the Beatles breakup, all four of them would have top 10 singles and albums as solo artists, and from our vantage point today, it could seem like their successes were destined to happen. But if it hadn't been for the help of his wife Linda, Paul might have sunken into a much longer period of depression and drunkenness, though it seems doubtful that he would have given up music altogether. His first solo album was a somewhat ragged do-it-yourself project that someone in the documentary says makes Paul the grandfather of the lo-fi pop genre. The second album, Ram, was billed as by Paul and Linda and it's definitely a step up, with the glorious "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" sounding like a really good Beatles outtake. The first Wings album, Low Life, was a critical disappointment with no hit singles. Due to the critical drubbing it took, I didn't buy it back then and to this day have never heard it in its entirety. Luckily, the album Red Rose Speedway (credited to Paul McCartney and Wings) and the single "My Love" were commercial hits, even if the critics still weren't really warming to Paul's solo music. Band on the Run would change everything.

This film features lots of previously unseen photos and videos with background narration mostly from present-day interviews (we don't see faces but the voices are identified), and we hear from some of the Wings guys who are allowed to be mildly critical of Paul—they are more critical in the interviews collected in the Legacy books. What we don't get is much about the songs and albums themselves, which are covered in detail in the Legacy books and McCartney's 2-volume Lyrics book. One of my bugaboos about current day docs is that most do not use a single narrator who leads us along and ties things up (Paul comes close to providing this). I'm glad that Ken Burns still uses this style—see his latest series on the American Revolution. Doc makers may think that this lack of a godlike narrator gives their work a more authentic feel, but it also allows for the omission of anything that the interviewed people don't bring up. Still, I recommend this to McCartney and Beatles fans; viewers not already steeped in Beatles knowledge might find this rough going at times. I think I'm ready to bid farewell to Paul as an object of study for a while. I could see myself reading a third volume in the Legacy series, but frankly after the mid-80s, I lost interest in his music, even as I kept up on his output and his interviews. Seeing him sing "Hey Jude" at the 2012 London Olympics made me quite teary, and I can't promise that I wouldn't read more biographical material someday. After all, I'm still on the watch for new Beatles books (and, I'll admit, more unnecessary remasters and repackagings).

A McCartney Festival, Part 2

As I was returning the 2-volume Paul McCartney Lyrics books (Dewey Decimal number 782.42 for 'songs') to the library, I happened to stroll past the biography shelf and two more volumes stood out to me: The McCartney Legacy, Volume 1 covering 1969-1973 and Volume 2 covering 1974-1980. Beatles scholar Allan Koznin was the motivating force behind these two books which began, I assume, as an attempt to do for McCartney what Mark Lewisohn did for the Beatles: to provide a day-by-day account of Paul and associates in the recording studio, beginning with his first solo sessions occasioned by the imminent splintering of the Beatles. But the project grew from just a record of the recordings to a record of McCartney's daily life during these years, hence its placement in the biography (though as a former library cataloger, I might have been inclined to put it in a popular music number (781.66 for 'rock music'). 

These two books are absolutely stuffed with interesting tidbits about McCartney, his music, his sidemen, his social engagements, his drug use, his run-ins (friendly and not-so-friendly) with journalists and with ex-Beatles, and his family life. I have always maintained that, when McCartney insisted that Wings was a real group and not just a shifting band of sidemen, he was lying, to the public and maybe to himself, and these books prove that. The testimony of the various members of Wings tells us that, despite telling the guys that they were in this whole hog, Paul rarely let any of them write material or even make suggestions about songs or performance style, except for Denny Laine, formerly of the Moody Blues, the only person besides Linda McCartney who stuck with Wings for the whole decade. They also weren't paid quite as well as you might have expected.

During the 70s, McCartney released his two best albums, Band on the Run and Venus and Mars, and the stories of those recording sessions are highlights of the books.  Wings Mark I broke up just before Paul and Linda and Denny went to Lagos, Nigeria to work on Band on the Run. Paul always put a good face on that experience but it was a wild and wooly ride, with Paul and Linda becoming the victims of a roadside mugging during which some demo tapes were stolen. They also spent much of the summer of 1974 rehearsing and recording in Nashville with Wings Mark II and met, among others, Dolly Parton, Chet Atkins, Vassar Clements, and Roy Orbison. The Wings fellas also did quite a bit of drinking and getting in trouble. The stories of Wings' initial informal concert trek in England also make good reading. The Wings Over America tour is dealt with, as is the rough handling of Linda in the press and by most of the Wings guys (deserved to some degree, but I always felt sorry for what she went through). The two books were exhaustively researched, and it's a little exhausting reading them, but for a McCartney fan, rewarding. Though, if there is ever a Volume 3, I'm not I'll need to read that one.

A McCartney Festival, Part 1

I was 7 when I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and I've been a fan ever since. After their breakup, I followed the careers of all four of them, but mostly Paul McCartney who certainly had the most commercial success of the four and who has maintained the respect and love of fans and critics to this day. Recently I had the occasion to consume three different McCartney artifacts. I'll start with the 2-volume hardcover set Lyrics, in which, over several hundred pages, McCartney presents the lyrics to over 150 of his songs, from the early days of the Beatles to his most recent solo albums, and writes brief commentaries about each.

Of course, he leaves out lots and lots of songs, and to my mind, he included too many from his 21st century works. But his commentaries are spotty. Some give us nice tidbits: Helen Wheels was the name of his Land Rover; Got to Get You Into My Life was about wanting to smoke dope, wanting literally to get more pot in his life; Picasso's Last Words was based on a bet with Dustin Hoffman; The Two of Us, despite seeming to be a bittersweet song about Paul and John, was actually written about Linda. But too often the commentary winds up being about a time or place or person, sometimes only tangentially related to the song under discussion. It feel like he started the project with energy and good intentions, and things eventually sort of sputtered out. Some fans have posted long lists of historical points that, based on previous evidence, he seems to get wrong. The bulk of the pages in the two large volumes are taken up with photos and drawings and handwritten lyrics. Much as I love the Beatles, and McCartney in particular, I'm glad I got this from the library and didn't spend $100.00 on it. Apparently there is now a paperback edition in one volume that costs $30.00 (pictured above), but still, though it was fun to flip through, this seems on the whole to be a non-essential work.