Documentaries about Very Old People, 2018-2019

In May 2019, we have two new documentaries about very elderly people:  Werner Herzog's Meeting Gorbachev, and a new documentary Ask Dr. Ruth  / Ruth Westheimer.

But if we roll back a year, there have been several more documentaries about the very elderly. 

The most prominent by far was RBG, about Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  But see also Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, but Wim Wenders, and Wait For Your Laugh, about the remarkable life of actress Rose Marie, performing from age 4 until her 90s.

Links

Meeting Gorbachev here.
Ask Dr Ruth here.

RBG here.
Pope Francis here.
Wait for Your Laugh here.

Lez Miz - The Parody

(mini review)  May 12, 2019

We saw an INCREDIBLY funny show yesterday and I am sorry we saw it only on the closing day.  

For a month or two, in the Santa Monica Blvd HWD theater row, there was a parody of Les Miz called LES MIZ AND FRIENDS.    We knew one of the leads.   It was in a 99 seat theater. 

Click here:

https://www.lesmizandfriends.com/

The motife was that lead characters were gradually replaced by muppet-like puppet versions, but the use of the original Les Miz music, plus very funny parody lyrics, plus breaking the fourth wall, improv, etc, was really funny.   

Example.  Toward the end a couple of the actors paused and one asked, "Does anybody in the audience know what happens next?"  Several call-outs, "Javert commits suicide!"  "Javert jumps off the bridge!"   The actor double-takes, waves his arms, yells, "IT WAS A YES OR NO QUESTION !!!"

During the second act battle scenes, Epinome takes a love letter from Marius to Cosette, and when she hands it to Jean Valjean it turns into a "who's on first" sketch ("Marius is in love with me?   No?  Cosette is in love with me?   No?"    "Just give the letter to Cosette!"   "(turns letter upside down)...Marius is in love with Fantime...?")  

Another digression was on the weak roles of women relative to the several male leads, and then a comparison to Hamilton which is much more recent but has the same problem.  The finale started, and then was paused to point out that the melody and rhythm were almost identical to Battle Hymn of the Republic.

It's a little hard to extract but there's another section where they point out that they have arrested someone thinking he is Valjean, but the lyrics also tell us elsewhere that Valjean's number 24601 is branded on his chest.  "They found another guy the same height, same age, and same prisoner number tattooed on this chest?"  "How did Victor Hugo explain this?"  "He didn't!  The branded number occurs only in the musical lyrics and in a different act.  It's the biggest unforced error in the history of musical theater!"    

Or, an outtake, "That's right, folks: Jean Valjean has become mayor of the one town in France where the Chief of Police is Javert, a man who has dedicated his life to finding Jean Valjean.  But we digress, because this next scene depends on the mayor and chief of police never having met each other once in the previous five years."

___

The actors were very good as actors, as singers, and also as improve comedians which was a small but important part of the experience.  There were two sections where they bring audience members on stage as extras.

It's written and produced by two of the ensemble, Nathan Makaryk and Geneveive Flati.  Find some reviews through the links here.

Hear a 30 minute podcast with the creative team at LA Theater Bites online, here.

Thurman Arnold: Clarence Darrow Anecdote, Hard Work

Thurman Arnold (1891-1969) had a high profile career as an attorney, deputy attorney general for FDR, Associate Justice of the DC Court of Appeals, author, and founder of the firm Arnold & Porter.  (Wiki here).

Memorable Anecdote 

In his autobiography Fair Fights & Foul, he relays an anecdote from Clarence Darrow on how to build a successful legal career.

• PDF in cloud here.

##

Text of Arnold anecdote:

Clarence Darrow, whom I knew and admired, once told me of an
occasion when he was asked to state for a magazine article the 
principal cause of his success. He asked the interviewer what the
other successful people whose names were to appear in the article
had thought was the cause of their success. The interviewer in-
formed Darrow that most of them had said that their success was
due. to hard work.

“Put me down for that too,” said Darrow.

He continued, “I was
brought up on a farm. When I was a young man, on a very hot day
I was engaged in distributing and packing down the hay which a
horse-propelled stacker was constantly dumping on top of me. By
noon I was completely exhausted. That afternoon I left the farm,
never to return, and I haven’t done a day of hard work since.”

Darrow’s concept was accurate. I would advise any young man
who has an allergy toward hard work to train himself for the law,
where he can achieve reasonable affluence by writing, talking, and
thinking. Thus he will give the appearance of working hard, for
the hours are long and the law appears to the layman to be abstruse
and difficult. But, as I have observed before, legal learning
is the art of making simple things complicated, which should be an
easy task for anyone. Paradoxically, the great lawyer is frequently
one who can make simple and intelligible matters which lawyers
and judges regard as complex.

##



A 1974 one-man play about Darrow by actor Henry Fonda streams on YouTube, here.

Brecht's Three Penny Opera: A New Film from Germany

Bertolt Brecht was Weimar Germany's version of Orson Welles - a young dynamo.  And Kurt Weill was the forerunner of Andrew Lloyd Webber, bringing homage-or-parody of diverse musical styles into the modern musical theater. 

See it all brought to life in a new German film, Mackie Messer: Der Dreigroschenfilm (The 3-Penny Film).

How I Ran Across This...

How I ran across this...the film hasn't played in the U.S. yet.  It had its run in October 2018 in Germany. 

I loved the 2018 Netflix series Babylon Berlin, a richly complex drama with intersecting plot lines set in Berlin in 1928.  (16 episodes, about 12 hours).   I wrote about it in great detail here.   One of the significant supporting players is the heir to an industrial fortune, Alfred Nyssen (rhymes with Thyssen?) played by Lars Eidinger. 

Lars Eidinger had a small but well-played role in the recent German film, Never Look Away, about German artist Gerhard Richter, set in the 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's.   (German title, Werke ohne Autor).  The director is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who directed the award-winning The Lives of Others (Das Leben des Anderen) in 2006.    I had to do some googling to realize that the character (a museum docent) in Never Look Away was the actor I recalled from somewhere - which was Lars Eidinger from Babylon Berlin.   This google search turned up the Youtube trailer of a 2018 German film, Mackie Messer: Der Dreigroschenfilm.  It stars Lars Eidinger.   (Trailer here).

Ok, So What is the "Mackie Messer" Movie?

Prior Films
Three Penny Opera was filmed by Pabst in 1931 (and banned by the Nazis in 1933).   There was a US version with Raul Julia in 1989 as Mack the Knife (here). 

New Film!
This is a stunning German production.

The DVD was released in early April 2019, and I got a copy from Amazon.de.    To my surprise it doesn't have any English subtitles, and I variably can follow 50%-80% in German. 

It's a big budget, big cast production.  It's also a whimsical film.  It opens on the afternoon of the premiere of Three Penny Opera, amidst crisis, screaming actors, edgy producers, and a bemused but unrelenting Brecht, as played by Eidinger.   Most of the movie takes place in either a fantasy world or in Brecht's imagination, as he consents to a film version and we see him in vignettes of his debates and fights with the film production company.

Eventually, we end up in a courtroom, as did the actual film effort in 1930.   Brecht had a mixed court victory - the 1931 version was produced and released, but an angry and dissatisfied Brecht won the right to make his own, improved, idiosyncratic version (which never happened). 

Brecht wrote a long essay about this, Der Dreigroschenprozess (The Three Penny Trial). 

Basically, the new movie allows us to see an elaborate highlights reel or abridged version of Threepenny, with all of its main songs brought to screen.   The acting and production values are excellent.

There's a creative bent, breaking the fourth wall a lot.  Brecht will be arguing with his producers in their office, and the camera pans left, and we're suddenly in a Dickensian street scene from the play.   At the end, the actors are dancing and singing across modern London rather than Dickensian sets.  The film closes with Eidinger, in costume as Brecht-1929, leaving the Theater am Schiffbauerdam into the Berlin of our modern day, surrounded by modern video cameras and reporters, and he sits by the (real) Brecht statue in the Brecht park and gives us his final thoughts on what we've seen.

As Brecht ("How Good is Eidinger as Brecht?")

_

In Babylon Berlin

In Never Look Away (Werke ohne Author)

IMDB here.
German: Wikipedia here, film website here.
It actually may have played one night only in NYC, in January 2019 - here.
YouTube trailer here.
For a review of the film in English, by Luisa Rollenhagan by LA Review of Books, January 2019, here.

Closing Thought

Around 1990, I was in Toronto and saw a small local-theater production about the making of Three Penny Opera, the young Brecht, the young Weill banging away composing on a piano, millennials of 1928 trying to bring their play together against the odds.

Threepenny Opera last ran commercially in 2015 in Los Angeles.  There was also a 2016 production at USC.

I mentioned that von Donnersmarck directed Eidinger in Never Look Away.   That film stars Tom Schilling, who starred in one of my favorite movies, 2014's "Coffee In Berlin."

For an article on Brecht's brief time as a medical student, here.

Maybe (?) English translation of the new 3PO film is absent from the DVD because it would run afoul of prior English translation rights and restrictions for the work.

I mentioned that I had seen Lars Eidinger in Babylon Berlin and in Never Look Away, which led me to triangulate his role in Mackie Messer.   Another actor, Hannah Herzsprung, plays the protagonist's brother's wife, Helga Rath, in Babylon Berlin, while in Mackie Messer she plays a double role as Polly (in the visualized drama) and as actress Carola Neher (in real life 1929; lifespan 1900-1942).  Carola Neher appeared in multiple Brecht works.  Sadly, she was arrested by the Nazis as a Communist in 1936, surviving 6 years in political prisoner camps, dying of typhus in 1942.

Do You Recognize Betteridge's Law of Headlines?

From time to time, journal articles and Op Ed's are titled with a question and a question mark.   There's a name for that.

I ran across this topic while reading the genomics blog at CDC, in a July 2017 article by Scott Gross and Dave Dotson.   Here.   As they discuss an article called, "Cost effectiveness of pharmacogenetic guided treatment: Are we there yet?" (Verbelen et al., 2017, here), they opened by citing Betteridge.

The gist of Betteridge's Law: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word, NO."

For more on Betteridge, see Wikipedia here.  Calling this principle Betteridge's Law dates to about 2009.  Wikipedia also dates it to Marr in 2004 and earlier examples.

Here's a headline that would invite puzzlement:  "Is Betteridge's Law True?"

From Lancet Oncology today: Op Ed title and question mark

___

Footnotes.

Not to be confused with (William) Beveridge, a father of the UK NHS.   

In Gross and Dotson, they believe that "cost effectiveness of PGx" is too broad a topic, and it's better to ask when and where PGx is cost effective, not "if it is."

There are exceptions.  For example, MedPage Today "Are Medical Meetings Skewed Toward Big Pharma Trials?"  (Yes!)  Here.   This headline was highlighted I believe on Twitter by Vijay Prasad at OHSU circa 10/1/2019.

A Brief Encounter with Dame Edna (Barry Humphries)

I lived in the Bay Area from 1978 to 1988, and I have a memory of occasionally seeing theater advertisements for "Dame Edna Everage," a middle-aged man in a sequined dress with outlandish wig and eyeglasses.   "Dame Edna, Strand Theater, May 1-10."   I never paid any attention.

Youtube Presents...Dame Edna

Recently, the cornocopia of Youtube and its algorithms have served up, for my interests in comedy, clips of Dame Edna. 

It turns out, she was very, very funny.   She had prepared anecdotes that were a hoot, often with multiple layers of double entendres, but her ad lib skills were just as stellar.   There seem to be hundreds of clips spanning decades - from mid '80s clips where she interviews Cher or Burgess Meredith or Tony Curtis, to the most recent ones, up through 2017, where the now mid-80s-aged Barry Humphries is interviewed about his remarkable career.

A Complex Act

Not to be too deconstructionist, but I think she's so interesting because it's a complex act.

Usually with stand-up comics, they are either to be taken as "themselves" (e.g. Jerry Seinfeld) or a consistent exaggerated persona (Rodney Dangerfield.)   Dame Edna is clearly a man in a dress, knowing he is a man in a dress, and knowing he has a nonpareil library of brilliant double-entendres to share with you.  (He knows that we know that she knows that the interviewer knows that we know that...) 

And she's also glowing with joie de vivre.  Even in the most recent recent interviews, well into his mid-80s, Humphries simply exudes vitality and charisma when he slips into his Dame Edna posture and voice.

Insult Comedy With A (Knife) Twist 

And most often, the style of comedy is insult comedy, like Don Rickles, except with Rickles, he knew, you knew, and we knew he was insulting you, and with Dame Edna, the insults rain down like two-sided gems from her self-involved fog.   For example, she tells one deskbound interviewer, in her shrill falsetto, "When I was just starting to become a bit successful for the first time - and you may experience this, one day, yourself...." 

She has a closet full of unseen characters for her recurring anecdotes - her late husband, her gynecologist, her son Kenny.  (In one winding anecdote (here, 4:30), she describes current events in Kenny's life, slowly becoming clear he is gay and living with his partner, as Dame Edna soldiers on obliviously and her interviewer nearly falls out of his chair.)

I've assembled a few informal links below.

Barry Humphries

Humphries is an Australian author, actor, and comedian, born 1934 (age 84 in 2019).  In a diverse career, he's been playing Dame Edna, among other characters, since the 1950s.  He has been married four times and is a bibliophile with a huge library.  He retired traveling as Dame Enda in 2014, but continues to appear occasionally in interviews.  He had several other stock characters, one an enormously boorish man (Sir Les Patterson) and one an enormously elderly man (Sandy Stone).

He authored over a dozen books (see Wikipedia.)  He's been the subject of both biographies and a documentary.   He had to turn his career around after nearly dying of alcoholism in the late 1960s.

Dame Edna

Always dressed in an outlandish gown (sequins, feathers), wearing bright lavendar (mauve) hair, and colossal rimmed glasses.   She had both some television "series," and international touring theatrical shows.   Tours included, "Dame Edna: The Royal Tour," which won a "Special Tony Award" in 2000.  Other titles include "An Evening's Intercourse with Dame Edna," and "Back With A Vengeance."  There are countless clips on Youtube.

Her Wikipedia is here and her official website here.

"I found the secret to my happiness has always been my ability to take pleasure in the misfortunes of others." 

Dame Edna and Cher, 1991

A Few Clips

Interviewing Celebrities
  With Whoopie Goldberg, 1988.  Here.
  With Cher.  1991.  Here.
  K.D. Lang. 2007.  Here.
  Interviewing Dave and Matt of Little Britain.  Here.

Being Interviewed

  Conan O'Brien 2005.  Here.
  "The Project" 2012.  Here.
  Jonathon Ross 2013.  Here.
  On the UK Michael Parkinson Show (undated).  Here.

  Co-interviewed with Donald Trump & Ivanka (1990; at 15m0s).  Here.
  Novelty interview with Edna, Les, Barry together 2012.  Here.

Shows
   1976.  Here.
   Also 1976, "Barry Humphries Show" (24 min).  Here.
   UK Christmas Special 1988 (in large part audience questions).  Here.

Biography
  The Man Inside Dame Edna.  2008.  (Hour).  Full video on Youtube.  Here.
  60 Minutes Australia.  Here.
  Heroes of Comedy: Barry Humphries.  Here.
  Interview by Clive James, as Barry Humphries, with Peter Cook, 1987.  Here.
  Dinner Speech, Barry Humphries, 2017.  Here.
  Lengthy newspaper interview in The Guardian, 2018.  Here.

How Tresidder Union at Stanford Got Its Name

Recently, we watched the 1999 documentary, One Day in September, about the 1972 Munich hostage crisis (99 cents, Amazon), composed almost entirely of archival TV footage. 

Alongside that Germany topic, I just finished reading Brit author Julia Boyd's Travelers in the Third Reich, a very impressively researched collection of diaries and letters and memoirs from diverse people making diverse visits to Germany in 1930s (politicians, actors, authors, journalists, tourists).  In 2018, the book was a London Times non fiction bestseller.

In the 'Travelers" chapter on the 1936 Olympics, we have some paragraphs on "Californian Mary Tresidder's" and visit to Garmisch-Partenkirchen for the February 1936 winter Olympics.

Tresidder?  Related to Stanford Student Union???

Quick to Wikipedia.

Mary Curry (1893-1970) was the daughter of the Curry's who owned Camp Curry at Yosemite.

Web sources vary, but Mary Curry married Donald Tresidder around 1920.  She was in her early 40s in 1936 in Germany.   She wrote a book, Trees of Yosemite in 1932.

 Donald Tresidder (1894-1948, here, here, here) was a kid from rural Indiana  - Tipton, pop. 5000, about 50 miles north of Indianapolis.  He taught school for a year before matriculating premed at University of Chicago. 

After that freshman year at U Chicago, Tresidder ended up with his sister on a trip to Yosemite because the railroad to their original goal, Southern California, was washed out.

At Yosemite, Tresidder met a professor who invited him to come to college at Stanford.   He had service in WW1, then finished both college and med school at Stanford.  He continued to work summers at Yosemite, and never practiced medicine, becoming instead president of the Yosemite Company.   He was involved in the 1920s buildout, such as Ahwanee Hotel.   He met Mary Curry during his Yosemite summers.

Tresidder ended up back at Stanford in 1943 as President, was a success at fund raising, and supervised the founding of SRI /Stanford Research Institute.   He died at age 53 of a heart attack in NYC in 1948.    Tresidder Union is named after him.

Mary Tresidder outlived her husband by many years and died in 1970 in her permanent suite at the Ahwanee Hotel at Yosemite.

How Did Tresidder Get Into Boyd's Book on the 1930s?

Boyd quotes a couple paragraphs from Mary Tresidder's diaries of her 1936 trip to the Winter Olympics.   Growing up around Yosemite, the Bavarian Alps must have felt familiar.  The quotations in Boyd's book are sourced to the Tresidder diaries online at the Stanford Digital Archive.

In the book, the next section is on journalist William Shirer's notes on the same February 1936 Olympics.

More Biographic Details

According to Stanford Daily (here), Mary Curry graduated Stanford in 1915 in English (Donald graduated in 1919).  Mary also got a Stanford M.A. in English  in 1916, and she started work on a PhD at Yale, which was broken off based on Donald's marriage proposal.  They married in 1920.  The Stanford Daily obit says Donald did med school "1922-1925" and "graduated in 1927."  He may have been doing med school part time while working as a researcher on botulism and public health.

In 1939, Tresidder had an illness that required him to come down from Yosemite, and he became a member of the Stanford Board of Trustees, then the Board's President, then the University's president.

Tresidder was a private pilot (pic):

click to enlarge

Mary's 1936 diary is in a difficult to read script.