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yegarts · 1 year

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“I Am YEG Arts” Series: Chris Dodd

Chris Dodd in Deafy, playing at the Citadel Theatre, photo provided.

Life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% of how you react to it. It’s a sentiment that Chris Dodd, a Deaf actor, playwright, and accessibility advocate, credits as the best advice he’s ever been given. In 2020, he trusted that advice again when he quit his full-time day job to become a working artist. How’s that working out? Well, let’s just say he’s been busy! Besides being cast in a feature film and published by Playwrights Canada Press, his most recent play, Deafy, can be seen at the Citadel Theatre, starting this weekend and running until February 12th.

Actor, playwright, and artistic director of SOUND OFF—this week’s “I Am YEG Arts” story belongs to Chris Dodd.

Tell us about your connection to Edmonton and why you’ve made it your home.

I’m an Edmontonian born and raised. I grew up on the south side near Mill Creek, and Whyte Ave has always been my lifeline. I travelled up and down that road for school and work, twice daily, for some 30 years before I finally moved further south. Now that I am an established artist, I am often working across Canada, but Edmonton is still always my home. You really can’t beat the artistic community here, so I’m always happy to return.

When you were first starting out, what was it about the arts that made you feel like it could be your community?

In my final year of my drama degree at the U of A, I met Ashley Wright, a local professional actor, when we were performing in an MFA project together. Ashley and I agreed to write a play together, which resulted in the show Silent Words, which was performed at the Edmonton Fringe the following year. The show turned out to be a critical success and was held over at Theatre Network. Later that year, we won three Sterling Awards for the show, and from that moment on I knew I had found a place in the community.

How did you get your start as a playwright?

I’ve been writing plays since my teens. I got my start when my drama teacher in high school asked me to write the year-end show for Grade 12. This resulted in a deeply personal show called Bridge to Nowhere about my feelings on hearing loss at that time. In my later teens and early adulthood, I took advantage of a number of opportunities for emerging young playwrights, including the Citadel’s Teen Festival of the Arts, NextFest, and workshops with Theatre Network and Workshop West, which included a writing class with Conni Massing. I later had the opportunity to take a workshop with the late Sharon Pollock at the U of A.

Top: Chris Dodd in Silent Words, photo provided. Bottom: Queen Seraphina and the Land of Vertebraat, photo provided.

What themes are you drawn to as a storyteller?

Naturally, I gravitate towards Deaf themes but also focus on inclusion, identity, the sense of belonging, and justice. However, I also love writing comedy, and I am particularly proud of my play, Deafy, especially as there are so many funny moments in it that always get big laughs from the audiences. Sometimes I write plays that use metaphors for deafness. For example, Big Ear, which I wrote for Concrete Theatre’s recent Sprouts Festival, has no Deaf characters in it. Instead, the lead character of Maggie sports enormous ears, which she tries to hide from her classmates, an allusion to my past use of hearing aids and how I always felt they made my ears conspicuous.

Tell us a little about your role with SOUND OFF and what makes it special to you and the city.

SOUND OFF, which I’m the founder and artistic director of, is Canada’s national festival devoted to the Deaf performing arts that takes place annually at the Arts Barns. It was founded in 2017 with support from Workshop West, and it previously operated alongside the Chinook Series Festival at the Arts Barns. As of last year, it became an independent event, and we will be celebrating our 7th annual edition at the end of March. We are fully hybrid, and we offer both live and online plays, readings, workshops, panels, plus our annual improv collaborations with Rapid Fire Theatre. It is a unique opportunity for Edmonton audiences to come out and appreciate Deaf talent from across Canada and their stories.

Tell us about the best advice you’ve ever received and the last time you called on it.

“Life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% of how you react to it.” In 2020, I stopped trying to juggle both a full-time job and my artistic pursuits, and I quit to become a working artist. Making a career switch is stressful in any circumstance, but it was especially challenging during a pandemic. But I pushed myself to adapt to working online and doing more filmed work, and I actually became quite busy during that period. My biggest project during that time happened to be a live event, where I was in Winnipeg during the spring of 2021 for a month shooting a feature film with careful COVID protocols in place. That was a huge opportunity that I would not have been able to take had I still been at my day job.

Who’s someone inspiring you right now?

Most definitely Troy Kotsur, a Deaf actor who won an Academy Award for the film CODA last year. He was the first Deaf actor to win the award in 36 years. In his acceptance speech, Troy credited his success as an actor to his many years of working within Deaf theatre. He has significantly elevated the recognition of Deaf actors and proven that Deaf actors are actors, period.

Chris Dodd in Deafy at the SummerWorks Performance Festival in Toronto, photo provided.

Tell us about your upcoming play, Deafy, and what the highs and the lows have been so far.

Deafy has been in development for the past five years. It started off with assistance from Vern Thiessen, who was then the artistic director of Workshop West. After a period of readings and rewrites, it was accepted to the SummerWorks Performance Festival in Toronto in 2019 and received critical acclaim. We had many plans to take the play further and start mounting a tour, but then COVID happened, and everything needed to be put on hold. We had a remount during the Fringe in 2021 and an Ontario tour in the spring of 2022, and now we’re excited about being able to present this again to Edmonton’s audiences at the Citadel Theatre this January (January 21st to February 12th).

How do you hope to help shape Edmonton’s arts community?

I hope to contribute to the cultural diversity in this city and make it a bit better, brighter, and more accessible. I love consulting, and I am always happy to connect with people, whether formally or informally, to talk about how we can make things better not only for Deaf audiences and performers but also for artists and audiences with disabilities. SOUND OFF is a great start for exposing Edmonton audiences to the talents and stories of our many wonderful performers from across Canada. I have even bigger plans ahead, and I can’t think of a more fantastic and vibrant city than Edmonton in which to do them.

Describe your perfect day in Edmonton. How do you spend it?

Obviously, you’ve got to start with a hearty breakfast. There are so many great local breakfast spots, but Tasty Tom’s on Whyte Ave is always a great bet. Then head to the river valley to burn off some of those calories on the trails, and then perhaps wind up at the Muttart Conservatory to take in the feature pyramid and breathe in some tropical air, especially if it’s winter. Next, a late lunch at Culina on-site before shopping on Whyte Ave. Then I’d head off to see a show at Workshop West or Varscona—or even Rapid Fire’s soon-to-be-opened digs at the old telephone museum. Then I’d finish up the evening with a local craft beer and a late-night snack at one of the many nearby breweries, such as Blind Enthusiasm or Situation Brewing.

Want more YEG Arts Stories? We’ll be sharing them here all year and on social media using the hashtag #IamYegArts. Follow along! Click here to learn more about Chris Dodd, and here to find tickets info to see Deafy at the Citadel Theatre, January 21 to February 12.

Elizabeth Morris and Chris Dodd star as Miranda and Alphonse in Adam Pottle’s Ultrasound at Theatre Passe Muraille. Photo by Michael Cooper.

About Chris Dodd

Chris Dodd is a Treaty 6-based (Edmonton) award-winning Deaf actor, playwright, accessibility advocate, and Governor General Innovation Award finalist. He is the founder and artistic director of SOUND OFF, Canada’s national festival devoted to Deaf performance. Chris holds a degree from the University of Alberta’s Drama program and has been working within Edmonton’s theatre community, and across Canada, for over 25 years. His play, Deafy, recently toured Ontario and will be presented as part of Highwire Series at the Citadel Theatre’s 2022/23 season. The play was recently published by Playwrights Canada Press as part of the anthology, Interdependent Magic: Disability Performance in Canada. Notable performances include the role of Alphonse in Ultrasound at Theatre Passe Muraille. Recent film credits include the role of Odin in the upcoming feature film, Finality of Dusk. In 2019 he was the recipient of the Guy Laliberté Prize for innovation and creative leadership by the Canada Council for the Arts.

#yeg #yegarts #yegtheatre #edmonton #edmontonarts #IamYegArts #artistfeature #disabilityarts

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andypantsx3 · 3 years

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shoto and 'when i find out who is responsible for this...' IM A SUCKER FOR OVERPROTECTIVE SHO LMAO

This one was one of my faves to write, I really hope you like it!

Damage | Todoroki/Reader

Prompt: “When I find out who is responsible for this...” Word Count: 1600 words Tags/Warnings: SFW, ye olde quirk accident trope Notes: Special thanks again to my lady love @bobawithpomegranate for beta-ing me!! Also, for anyone who hasn’t suffered a corporate job: KPIs = key performance indicators, which are a set of business metrics used to measure success in certain areas.

The first sign that something was wrong should have been in line for security.

Ayako—your favorite member of the Todoroki Agency security team—was waving a detector wand over your clothes when she asked casually, “How’s it going?”

Any other morning, your response was something along the lines of, “Oh, it’s going. How are you?” This morning, however, you blurted, “Good! Except that I bumped someone on the train and spent ten minutes trying to get a coffee stain out of this shirt, and I feel a little sick when I think about leading the KPIs review because Shouto’s property damage numbers are up again which doesn’t look great, so I skipped breakfast but honestly I’m super hungry right now, that was a bad choice, and—”

You cut yourself off, utterly bewildered. Ayako looked similarly nonplussed, raising a slim brow.

“Uh, nevermind. I’ll just be going,” you said, and hared off to the rest of the security checkpoints before she could give commentary.

So you might have known that something was wrong even before you let yourself into Shouto’s manager’s office, armed with your monthly spreadsheets and performance slide decks. But you hadn’t given it more thought since then, a move which proved to be a complete mistake.

Shouto was already there, lounging in the set of chairs in front of his manager’s desk, looking less like a hero waiting for a meeting and more like some airbrushed ad for his dark turtleneck or his close-fit grey slacks. Your heart shot into your throat at the sight of him, like it usually did, and you had to remind yourself to relax.

Though he was unbearably handsome to the point of distraction, Shouto was relatively easy to get along with, something that should have made you calmer in his presence. He was straightforward, possessed of very little ego, thoughtful, and a very linear and strategic thinker—you’d worked extremely well with him the past couple of years, and Shouto, though he had less to do with the daily operations of the agency, had helped push your promotion last year to Director of Public Relations. It should have added up to an easy and uncomplicated work partnership, but his personality only made your unfortunate crush on him even worse.

He was so horribly, horribly perfect. And you were an awful little metrics gremlin, called in to roast him over the open flame of public opinion once a month. Really not something Shouto might be interested in.

“Y/N,” he said, looking up from his phone and fixing you with an intent look. Your heart stuttered under those heterochromatic eyes.

“Hi, Shouto,” you said, setting down your bag and digging out your laptop for something to take your attention off of him. “How are you?”

“I’m well,” he answered in his deep tone. “How are you?”

And that was it. The damning question that sent it all to hell.

“My heart feels like it could explode any second, and I feel kind of faint, weirdly weak, and incredibly distracted,” you answered, naming the symptoms of his very presence.

There was a beat of silence. You froze, crouched over your bag, laptop halfway out of it. Then it hit you what had just been said, and you slapped a hand over your mouth in horror.

Shouto was up out of his chair in the blink of an eye, kneeling in front of you with cool fingers on your face, angling it towards him.

“You’re not well?” he asked, those eyes locking on you with an alarming intensity.

His attention only made things worse. “I feel like I might pass out,” you said, cringing even as the words left your mouth.

Fuck, what the hell were you saying? You were making it sound like you were some Victorian maiden, ready to swoon in the mere company of a gentleman. And why were you saying this shit? You’d worked with him for years and you’d never let slip the effect he had on you—what was wrong with you this morning?

You thought back to the coffee incident on the train this morning, the way the girl whose drink you had spilled had startled, the way she had weirdly apologized to you even as you were in the midst of your own apology.

A sense of foreboding settled over you.

Oh.

Oh fuck.

“I think I’ve been hit with a quirk,” you blabbed.

Shouto’s features shuttered, a hard look you’d never really seen before entering his eye. He went over to his manager’s desk, dialing a number on her office phone, and then he was talking in low tones, asking someone from medical to come up to her office immediately.

Then he was back at your side, easing you carefully to the floor like you actually were in danger of passing out, and not just a huge idiot with an incredibly fat crush that made you say the world’s most ridiculous things.

“When I find out who’s responsible for this,” he uttered, low and dangerous, “they might never be able to use a quirk again.”

For some reason, the threat warmed you, even as it sent a little shiver down your spine. Was it weird to find him hot when he was angry?

You clamped your mouth firmly shut, lest you tell him exactly what illness prevailed you, but your silence was all for naught.

Because when one of the medical staff made it up to the office, pressing a quirk testing strip to your skin, she pronounced, “A truth quirk.”

Shouto caught your hand before it could smack into your forehead, looking surprised that he had done so. And then even more surprised at the pronouncement.

“A truth quirk,” he echoed, looking down at you curiously. His fingers were gentle where they held your wrist.

You squirmed uncomfortably under his scrutiny.

“But then, you’re still not well,” he said. He looked up at the medical staffer. “She’s feeling faint, and having problems with her heart.”

“She’s fine,” the staffer confirmed, holding up a scanner with your vital readings. They were embarrassingly perfect—incredibly, perfectly, damnably normal.

You could have died. You literally could have died.

Shouto looked down at you with a little wrinkle on his perfect brow, obviously wondering how you could admit symptoms like that given a truth quirk, only for there to be no physical sign of them. You tried to hold down the truth, but another question from him doomed you.

“But how?” he asked, clearly concerned, cool fingers smoothing over your cheekbone.

“I have an insanely huge crush on you,” you blurted. Then you unleashed a string of colorful swears, flushing so hot you thought you might catch fire.

Those heterochromatic eyes went a little round at the edges.

The medical staffer looked like she was trying very hard not to laugh as she bade a quick farewell. She was out the door before you could catch her sleeve and hold her like a shield against Shouto’s incredibly penetrating stare.

“I’m. Um. You know, sorry and everything,” you added. “I won’t let it interfere with work. I mean, I haven’t, any of the past couple years—fuck, oh my god, I just said that—”

Shouto was watching your mouth like he couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of it.

“Say it again,” he said.

You paused, staring at him. “What?”

“Tell me how you’re feeling.”

“My heart feels like it could explode any second, and I feel kind of faint, weirdly weak, and incredibly distracted,” you answered obediently.

“Because of me,” he said, like it was a wonder.

You gave him an annoyed look. Obviously because of him, who the fuck else did he think wielded that combination of attractiveness and straightforward appeal like an S-class quirk of its own?

Shouto choked on a laugh, and you realized with some horror that you’d said all of that out loud.

Damn the fucking truth quirk.

“I don’t know,” Shouto said, sounding amused. “I think I rather like it. When I find out who is responsible for this, I might have to thank them instead.”

This stopped you short.

He what now?

“I’m sorry, what?”

Something a little like a smirk curled the corner of Shouto’s mouth. “It is generally gratifying to know one’s feelings are returned, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I wouldn’t know—” you started, feeling annoyed with him again. Then you choked when the implication of his words sank in.

Shouto’s fingers slid down to cup your chin, and suddenly it felt like every nerve ending in your body was concentrated there, the touch magnified a thousand-fold into an all-consuming sensation.

“Would you like me to kiss you?” he asked lightly, looking smug.

“Oh my god yes—” The answer was out of your mouth before he’d even finished the question.

Shouto laughed, and then he was leaning in. You could feel the smile still on his mouth when it met yours. Shouto’s kiss was careful and attentive, but you could sense something deeper beneath, the same kind of restrained sort of passion that underlaid his quirk. Having that kind of controlled intensity turned on you was something you could have never prepared for.

The kiss became deeper and more heated, and Shouto was just easing you backwards again, still pressed firmly to you, when the door opened and his manager blew in.

“This is a fucking office,” she said, stepping over the two of you like you were a grimy puddle in the street. “Now hurry the fuck up, we have KPIs to review. Shouto—don’t think this will derail me from your property damage numbers increasing.”

Shouto huffed into your mouth, slumping against you.

You couldn’t do anything but laugh.

Current event masterlist in pinned!

#todoroki shouto x reader #shouto todoroki x reader #todoroki x reader #bnha x reader #todoroki shouto #bnha #garbage fest 2021 #garbage fest fics

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argentdandelion · 3 years

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Who’s Qualified for the Infinity Train? (June 27 Twitter Party Edition)

An excerpt released in time for the Twitter party on #InfinityTrainHBOMax. Limited to a few theatrical films made by Disney Animated Studios and Pixar, from 2000 and later, starring human protagonists.

(Yes, a six-year-old could have a higher number than a surly teenage boy.)

Lilo (Lilo & Stitch)

Jim Hawkins (Treasure Planet)

Lewis (Meet the Robinsons)

Tiana (The Princess and the Frog)

Rapunzel (Tangled)

1. Lilo Pelekai (Lilo & Stitch)

Severe Emotional Turmoil:

Lilo’s is a six-year-old girl whose parents died in a car crash. She gives peanut butter sandwiches every week to Pudge, a fish she supposes controls the weather, probably because rainy weather contributed to her parents dying in a car accident and she doesn’t want anyone else to suffer the same way. A classmate outright calls her crazy for her beliefs about Pudge, and Lilo hits and bites her. Lilo does not have friends: they’re evidently unnerved by her eccentricities and how she attacked a classmate. Nani, her 19-year-old sister, became her legal guardian after their parents’ death. As much as she tries, Nani is initially an inadequate caretaker, yells at Lilo, and is often busy with her job(s).

Crossroads:

When the tough social worker Cobra Bubbles shows up and concludes things have gone wrong.

On paper, Lilo's turmoil after this point isn't much different from that of the average strong-willed six-year-old arguing with an older sister put in charge or an unprepared or irritable mother. Still, the Train doesn't seem to discriminate between mundane, common, seemingly small problems and extreme loss. Amelia boarded after the death of her fiance, but Jesse boarded just because of his people-pleasing doormat tendencies. Lilo's turmoil is also compounded by multiple problems: not just Nani's unsuitability as a caretaker, but the loss of her parents and lack of meaningful relationships with her peers.

Can’t Fix Problems: While Lilo is not constantly sad about it, Lilo nonetheless is badly affected by her parents’ death. She outright claims her family is “broken”. Lilo cannot undo her parents’ death, nor stitch the wounded family together. Though going to grief counseling would be plausible in this setting, it doesn’t seem as if either went to grief counseling, possibly due to financial problems or Nani’s tight schedule.

Early on the in the film, Lilo has Nani, David (Nani’s boyfriend), and possibly the hula studio employees. (They don’t dismiss her beliefs about Pudge, apparently making the connection between her Pudge appeasement and her trauma)

Best pickup time: After Cobra Bubbles shows up: shortly after, Lilo goes up to her room and screams in her pillow.

Parallels: Grace has no friends. Tulip’s parents are divorced, which is also a parent-based and living situation problem. If Min-Gi and Tulip can get on the Train, despite having their loving parents inadvertently making things worse, then it is possible Lilo can get on the Train. Six is evidently not too young to get on the Train; three Apex members seem around that age, and Grace and Simon aren’t surprised at Hazel, who seems to be a Passenger who’s six-and-a-half years old (as of later in Season 3, when they’ve been traveling for some time).

Number: Above 202 (Min-gi and Ryan), below 337 (Amelia’s number).

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2. Jim Hawkins (Treasure Planet)

Severe Emotional Turmoil: A delinquent who has violated his probation by operating his solar vehicle in restricted areas. His father left them and he’s raised by a single mom having trouble operating an inn; he’s failing at school, constantly in trouble, sullen. Believes he has no future. After being caught again solar-sailing in a restricted area, the police-bots take away his solar sail.

Crossroads: If he trespasses one more time, he’ll go to “juvenile hall” (juvenile imprisonment). He probably knew the risks of going into the restricted area, since he’s done so before. His solar sailing is somewhat dangerous; he’s not even wearing a helmet. (Though it’s possible there’s some technology that keeps his feet attached to the sail, making it safer than it looks.)

Can’t Fix Problems: He seems sullen after being apprehended/arrested, and later on. It may be solar sailing is the only enjoyable activity for him, even if he tends to get in trouble from it, and without it, he may have no joy in his life left.

Since his mother seems to work a time-consuming, demanding job, she might not have much time to properly raise him. He doesn’t seem to have relationships with anyone but his mother and Dr. Doppler, a friend of the family.

Best pickup time: Right before the old turtle-pirate shows up.

Parallels: His problem seems to be somewhat small-scale but long-simmering. The closest parallel is Grace Monroe, who engaged in delinquency (specifically shoplifting) apparently just to get her parents to notice her.

Number: ~202, near Min-Gi’s and Ryan’s number.

3. Lewis (Meet the Robinsons) – NOT QUALIFIED.

Lewis had gone through substantial emotional turmoil. He mother left him at an orphanage, he had gone through 124 failed adoption interviews by age 12, he figured his adoption prospects when he turns 13 the following year are low, he could have killed a potential parent who was allergic to peanut butter after spraying him with peanut butter from an invention malfunction, and his public attempt to recover memories of his birth mother was a disastrous failure.

However, Lewis was never a crossroads, at least prior to the movie’s plot properly starting with its sci-fi elements, and he can fix his own problem. Lewis can just try again with the machine, or he can get adopted by different parents. (which he does: he finds the younger versions of the people he knows adopt him when he time-travels to the future year of 2037). He also has the support of his roommate Goob, the orphanage director Mildred, a supportive science teacher, and possibly other teachers and classmates.

4. Tiana (The Princess and the Frog) – NOT QUALIFIED.

As of the best time for pickup, at least, Tiana is doubly, perhaps triply, not qualified for the Infinity Train.

Firstly, Tiana's persistence, can-do attitude and great competence in accomplishing her goals (had prejudice not interfered) just makes her too well-adjusted for boarding. Though her father died in World War I, at the time of the film, it doesn’t seem to greatly affect her. Though she gets sad sometimes, but she's not some kind of dysfunctional wreck like the other Passengers.

Secondly, she's not qualified for the Train for similar reasons as Lake. Even if One-One agreed to give Lake a number, Lake's problems ultimately lie upon how others perceive her, the system separating denizens from Passengers, and the enforcers of parts of that system (the Flecs), not in issues that simply require emotional growth. Similarly, while not outright stated in the film (it’s implicit in how her “background” is mentioned), Tiana faces prejudice that hinders her long-term goal of starting a successful restaurant.

Arguably, Tiana’s support system is also too strong for her turmoil to be too severe, or to have a strong enough “crossroads point”. Tiana has her mother, her friend Charlotte, and at least five (unnamed) friends which meet with her at the beignet cafe.

If one were to write a work in which Tiana gets on the Infinity Train, one would need to amplify the problems she faces up to that point, or alter the events so Naveen doesn’t show up and then add more problems after that point.

5. Rapunzel (Tangled) – NOT QUALIFIED.

She must have a supernaturally sunny disposition due to the power of the Flower of the Sun or her hair healing her mentally, because she should not be this well-adjusted due to all the child neglect, abuse, and no healthy relationships (but for her pet chameleon) she’s had for practically her whole life. She’s melancholy and hates herself for disobeying her abusive mother figure’s orders to never leave her tower, but quickly just gets sunny and cheerful again.

#Infinity Train #Meta #Analysis #Character Analysis #Disney #Disney Movies #Lilo #Lilo & Stitch #Jim Hawkins #Treasure Planet #Lewis (Meet the Robinsons)#Meet the Robinsons #Tiana #The Princess and the Frog #Rapunzel #Tangled

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papermoonloveslucy · 4 years

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DESILU SOLD!

July 27, 1967

Desilu Productions was formed in 1950 by Lucille Ball and her then-husband, Desi Arnaz. The name was a portmanteau of the couple's first names and was originally applied to the Ball-Arnaz ranch.

Desilu was one of many television production companies that sprung up all over the Hollywood catering to the growing needs of the increasingly popular medium of television. The success of “I Love Lucy” enabled Desilu to expand throughout the 1950s.

When RKO Pictures went bankrupt in 1957, Desilu bought its studios and other location facilities. These acquisitions gave the Ball-Arnaz TV empire a total of 33 sound stages - four more than Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and eleven more than Twentieth Century-Fox had in 1957.

Desilu operated the physical facilities bought from RKO, which included the main Gower Street Studio in Hollywood, next door to Paramount Pictures. It also consisted of a studio in Culver City and the ‘40 Acres’ backlot – most famous for being Mayberry in “The Andy Griffith Show.”

On the lot there was a small theatre called Desilu Playhouse where Lucy hosted the Desilu Workshop, a training ground for new performers.

After the breakup of the Ball-Arnaz marriage in early 1960, Desilu remained successful.

In 1962, Ball bought out Arnaz and became the first female Hollywood mogul ever to run a major motion picture studio, albeit a reluctant one, as Ball never wanted to be a businesswoman. It was shortly after her second marriage to comedian Gary Morton in 1961, that she left the minutiae of the studio's business and financial affairs to her new husband by naming him Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors.

During Ball's time as sole owner, Desilu developed popular series such as “Mission: Impossible” (1966), “Mannix” (1967), “That Girl” (1966), and “Star Trek” (1966).

By April 1964, Desilu found itself in financial trouble – partly due to the fact that husband Morton was inexperienced at running a motion picture studio. “The Lucy Show” was their only remaining self-made production, even though other shows were still produced on the lot as consignments (rentals) from other production companies.

Ball’s success as an actress continued until February 1967, when Ball announced she would sell Desilu to Gulf+Western, a decision which was formalized on July 27, 1967. The act of selling Desilu to Gulf+Western brought the studio under the same parent company as its next-door neighbor Paramount Pictures. The event was commemorated the next day by a dramatic ceremony in which Ball cut a ribbon of film stock which had replaced a wall between the two production studios. Lucille Ball left the Desilu lot the very same day (taking her own hugely popular “The Lucy Show” with her, the only studio asset not included in the sale), directly after the ownership transfer ceremony.

After selling Desilu, rather than working for Paramount, Ball established her own production company, Lucille Ball Productions (LBP) in 1968. The company went to work on her new series “Here's Lucy” that year. The program ran until 1974 and enjoyed several years of ratings success. LBP continues to exist, and its primary purpose is residual sales of license rights for “Here's Lucy.”

Television shows produced by or taped at Desilu

The Jack Benny Program (CBS; 1950-1964/NBC; 1964–1965)

I Love Lucy (CBS; 1951–1957)

Our Miss Brooks (CBS; 1952–1956)

The Danny Thomas Show a.k.a. Make Room for Daddy (ABC; 1953–1957/CBS; 1957–1964)

Private Secretary (CBS; 1953–1957)

December Bride (CBS; 1954–1959)

The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (ABC; 1955–1961)

Meet McGraw (NBC; 1957–1958)

The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour (CBS; 1957–1960)

Whirlybirds (Syndicated; 1957–1960)

The Real McCoys (ABC; 1957–1962/CBS; 1962–1963)

The Ann Sothern Show (CBS; 1958–1961)

The Untouchables (ABC; 1959–1963)

The Andy Griffith Show (CBS; 1960–1968)

The Lineup a.k.a. San Francisco Beat (CBS; 1954–1960)

Sheriff of Cochise a.k.a. United States Marshal a.k.a. U.S. Marshal (Syndicated, 1956–1960)

Harrigan and Son (ABC; 1960–1961)

My Three Sons (ABC; 1960–1965/CBS; 1965–1972)

The Dick Van Dyke Show (CBS; 1961–1966)

The Lucy Show (CBS; 1962–1968)

You Don't Say! (NBC; 1963–1969)

My Favorite Martian (CBS; 1963–1965)

The Greatest Show on Earth (TV series) (ABC; 1963–1964)

Gomer Pyle, USMC (CBS; 1964–1969)

I Spy (NBC; 1965–1968)

Hogan's Heroes (CBS; 1965–1971)

Star Trek (NBC; 1966–1969)

Family Affair (CBS; 1966–1971)

That Girl (ABC; 1966–1971)

Mission: Impossible (CBS; 1966–1973)

Mannix (CBS; 1967–1975)

#Desilu #Lucille Ball #Desi Arnaz #RKO #Studios #Paramount Studios #Film #Television #Hollywood #backlot #Gulf + Western #lucille ball productions #The Lucy Show #Here's Lucy #I Love Lucy #Desilu Playhouse #Desilu Workshop #Star Trek #The Andy Griffith Show

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southeastasianhistories · 3 years

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It was May, 2012. Inside a gloomy, oak panelled courtroom in the Royal Courts of Justice in London, a group of bewigged British and Malaysian lawyers confronted a legal team from the British Foreign and Commonwealth office in front of a panel of judges. Led by John Halford of the Bindmans law firm and Dato Quek Ngee Meng, the legal team was in court to argue the case for a public enquiry into what they called “a grotesque, on-going injustice” committed decades earlier in British Malaya. This was the period of the ‘Emergency’: a war without a name fought in the Malayan jungles against communist insurgents who wanted an immediate end to British rule.

On the other side of the court sat lawyers for the defendants, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In that rather claustrophobic courtroom, British justice was being asked to make a judgement about history and moral responsibility.

For me as an historian and journalist, it was a highly charged moment. As they spoke, the words of the lawyers seemed to evoke the restless spirits of 24 Chinese workers shot dead in December, 1948 by British soldiers on a plantation close to the Malayan village of Batang Kali.

Just one man was left alive. His name was Chong Hong and he was in his 20s at the time. He had fainted in terror and the British soldiers left him for dead. By 2012, Chong Hong was long dead. But a handful of eye-witnesses remained alive. Loh Ah Choy, just seven when the soldiers rampaged through the plantation; Tham Yong, aged 17. In Court 3 that day in 2012, three of the villagers – now in their late 60s and 70s, who had long ago watched the slaughter of their menfolk – sat apprehensive and rather frail beside their lawyers. I talked briefly to Loh Ah Choy during a break in court proceedings. After so many years, there was still pain in her eyes as she talked about the men who had died.

The ‘Batang Kali massacre’ has sometimes – and not entirely accurately – been called ‘Britain’s My Lai’: referring to a Vietnam War atrocity when ‘Charlie Company’, led by Lt. William Calley, murdered hundreds of unarmed civilians on March 16th, 1968.

Since the killings, successive British governments refused to hold a public enquiry into what had taken place and why the men were killed. At the time, it was claimed that the victims were ‘bandits’. This was baseless. No apology was, it seems, considered by the British. For decades, the relatives of the dead men like Tham Yong and Loh Ah Choy kept their silence. They had been left destitute after the killings – and survival had more meaning to them than a search for justice.

In the end, the legal case failed. The lawyers’ arguments were rejected by the UK Supreme Court in 2015 – but for the British establishment, the Court’s judgement made uncomfortable reading. For Lord Kerr, one of the court’s justices said the “overwhelming preponderance of currently available evidence” showed “wholly innocent men were mercilessly murdered and the failure of the authorities of this state to conduct an effective inquiry into their deaths.” The problem for the Court was time. The killings may have been unlawful, Lord Neuberger concluded, but they occurred more than 10 years before the critical date when the right of petition to the Strasbourg court of human rights was recognised by the UK and created a duty to investigate.

The lawyers generated a great deal of new historically valuable information – not only about what happened in Batang Kali, but about how and why a ‘very British cover up’ was maintained for so long.It was thanks to the efforts of the legal teams that we now know what happened on that day in British Malaya. There is now no dispute that on December 11th, 1948 a 14-man patrol from the 7th Platoon, G Company, 2nd Battalion Scots Guards, led by two lance-sergeants, Charles Douglas and Thomas Hughes, entered Batang Kali where they encountered 50 or so unarmed villagers.

The tiny settlement was part of the Sungei Remok rubber estate in the state of Selangor, which at the time was a British protectorate. By the time the platoon left the village the following day, 24 men had been shot dead. The first report of the killings in the Singapore-based Straits Times sounded a shrill note of triumph: ‘Police, Bandits kill 28 [sic] bandits in day … Biggest Success for Forces since Emergency Started’. It would not take long for the official story to unravel. ‘Good news’ like the Batang Kali operation was in short supply at the end of the first year of the Emergency. The roots of the conflict go back to the Japanese occupation of Malaya and Singapore, which began in February 1942. The traumatic loss of Singapore to a grossly underrated Asian foe shamed and humiliated the British and led many Asians to reassess their former masters.

In the first months of the occupation the Japanese slaughtered many thousands of Chinese civilians in Singapore and across Malaya. Japan had been waging a brutal war in mainland China since 1937 and alleged that the Chinese in Malaya were a security risk. Many young Chinese fled into the dense Malayan jungle, where they began to organise guerrilla units to fight back against the Japanese. The Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) was dominated by the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) and by the end of the war was backed by the British ‘Force 136’, a branch of the Special Operations Executive. After the Japanese surrender in 1945 the British honoured the MPAJA , awarding its future leader Chin Peng an OBE.

As India moved towards independence the chronically indebted postwar British government clung onto Malaya, with its valuable tin and rubber resources. Although the returning colonial power signalled that independence was on the agenda, it seemed to both a new generation of Malay nationalists and the Communists that it was ‘colonial business as usual’.

This was intolerable. The MPAJA now became the vanguard of anti-British resistance, as the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), turning their British-supplied guns on the returned colonial authorities. The MNLA was backed by a secret army of supporters known as the Min Yuen (People’s Movement). MNLA fighters depended on the Min Yuen and Chinese villagers, willing or unwilling, for essential supplies. This was the background to the events that unfolded in December 1948. It explains why, to begin with, the British could claim that shooting Chinese civilians on a rubber plantation was a ‘success’: in the eyes of British troops, any Chinese-Malayan villager might be a ‘bandit’ – and so ‘fair game’.

The ‘successful operation’ story crumbled rapidly. A few of the surviving villagers told their story to Li Chen, the Chinese consul-general, who held a press conference on December 21st. The following day the British owner of the Sungei Remok Estate, Thomas Menzies, who had serious clout in the British estate-owners’ community and was dismayed by the loss of 24 workers, publicly stated that his men had a long record of good conduct. By December 24th the Straits Times was calling for a public enquiry.

At the end of January the British Communist MP Philip Piratin demanded that Arthur Creech-Jones, the colonial secretary, explain the actions of the Scots Guards. Creech-Jones replied that an “enquiry by the civil authorities” had concluded that “had the security forces not opened fire, the suspect Chinese would have made good an escape, which had obviously been pre-arranged”. Creech-Jones’ ‘enquiry’ into a “necessary but nasty operation” quashed the debate about the killing.

But then there was an unexpected turn of events. In December 1969, a former National Serviceman called William Cootes confessed his role in the killings to a journalist from the People, then a British Sunday newspaper. Cootes said he was motivated by the furore unleashed by US journalist Seymour Hersh’s revelations about the My Lai massacre the previous year. The scandal provoked a debate about whether British troops would have been capable of committing such an atrocity. Public opinion resisted such slurs, but Cootes knew better. He had been one of the 14 Scots Guardsmen who had entered Batang Kali.

Cootes claimed that his commanding officer, George Ramsay, had briefed his men that they were going to a village and would “wipe out anybody they found there.” Other former members of the platoon also came forward and backed up Cootes’ allegations. Alan Tuppen testified that: “He [Ramsay] said we were to go out on patrol and that our objective would be to wipe out a particular village and everyone in it because, he said, they were either terrorists themselves or were helping terrorists in that area.”

Tuppen provided shocking new detail about the killings: “Instinctively, we started firing … at the villagers in front of us. The villagers began to fall. One man with bullets in him kept crawling … He was finally killed when a bullet went through his head.” Yet another former guardsman, Victor Remedios, testified that after the platoon returned to base “we were told by a sergeant that if anyone said anything we could get 14 or 15 years in prison.” No one had been shot trying to escape.

In the aftermath of the People story and the media storm that had followed on February 13th, 1970 Denis Healey, the secretary of state for defence, referred the matter to the director of public prosecutions (DPP). At the end of the month, DPP lawyers recommended further enquiries to be conducted by the Metropolitan Police – much to the dismay, as we learnt in court, of the Foreign Office.

All the former members of the Scots Guards platoon who had testified to the People were interviewed again under caution. Plans were made for the British police team to fly to Kuala Lumpur to continue with their enquiries. Then on June 18th, 1970 the Labour government was ousted by the Conservatives – and just weeks later the Batang Kali enquiry was stopped with a view “to uphold the good name of the army.”

The long battle for a public enquiry after determined efforts by the survivors’ legal team collapsed. This legal battle is unlikely to be joined again. Nevertheless, the UK Supreme Court was minded that the killings were unlawful and that “wholly innocent men were mercilessly murdered”. There was another disappointment for historians. When the UK National Archives announced a release of secret colonial papers in 2012, many of us rushed to Kew hoping that some of the reports made just after the killings had survived. There was bad news: it turned out that when the British pulled out of Malaya in 1957, any incriminating evidence about the events of December, 1948 had been destroyed.

For historians of the British Empire and the traumatic process of decolonisation that followed the Second World War, the discovery of new information about the tragedy that unfolded in Batang Kali casts new light on the longest war fought by British troops in the 20th Century, the Malayan Emergency – and the counter- insurgency techniques developed in Southeast Asia that influenced American strategy in Vietnam and impact bitterly contested campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan today.

#british colonisation #malaysia #malaya #batang kali massacre #malayan emergency #1940s

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myhahnestopinion · 3 years

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THE AARONS 2020 - Best Film

Believe it or not, there were movies released last year - 75 of them at the very least, as that’s how many I watched. That’s 30 less than last year, even though I spent approximately 300% more time inside my home, but I’ll cut myself some slack. 2020 may have been a loss, but there were still some real winners to come out of it. Here are the Aarons for Best Film:

#10. The Assistant

It’s a sin of omission: No name is spoken in the film. No crimes are labeled. The towering chair in the middle of the shot sits empty, and yet the dangerous jaw of the doorframe is unmistakable. Kitty Green’s office procedural is made more nauseating in its minimalism; loosely based on the Weinstein sexaul assault scandal, The Assistant counts on a viewer’s familiarity, not just with the broad strokes of abuse, but the minutiae that enables it. By following a junior employee, played by the always tactful Julia Garner, through a series of daily mundanities, Green’s film shifts the spotlight, questioning our collective culpability in creating toxic environments. Every act must be an act of rebellion, the film says, or else we are assisting.

#9. Happiest Season

Happiest Season hit a snag last year: what was set to be a landmark in wide-release studio rom-coms became another victim of a pandemic that pushed people apart for the holidays. The homey movie might have hit harder in its Hulu-Original release though, as a needed reminder of the power of patience during difficult times. Harper (Mackenzie Davis) waits too long after an invite home for Christmas to tell her girlfriend Abby (Kristen Stewart) that she’s not out to her parents, imploring they keep the relationship a secret for the time being. It’s an unreasonable ask, prompted by unjust circumstances. By honestly exploring that conflict in hilarious, heartfelt fashion, Happiest Season was the most wonderful time of an interminable year.

#8. Wolfwalkers

Wolfwakers doesn’t run in a pack with the output of other animation studios, despite sharing a similar gravitas to the best of the Disney Renaissance. The wild style of its swirling sensory colors shed realism for an immersive, uninhibited fantasy world. Formatted like a proper fairy tale, the film centers on a moral: as wolfhunter’s daughter Robyn gains the ability to transform into the animal at night, the film walks viewers through overcoming fear of “the other'' in order to identify the true monsters among us. The howl of its voice actors, backed by a repurposed single by singer Aurora, completes this captivating creation. Released on the Apple TV+ streaming service, the film can rightfully boast of being one of the best of the year, so there’s no need to buy a wolf ticket.

#7. Onward

Onward put Pixar back on a forward-thinking path after a series of skippable sequels. Like director Dan Scanlon’s previous effort, it’s a smaller-scale saga for the studio, riffing on a classic comedic conceit rather than voicing existential crises: in a modernized fantasy world, two brothers take a road trip to locate a mystical artifact that can bring their father back for one more day. The quest is Pixar at its most magical, tweaking traditional tropes and tugging at one’s heartstrings. Despite the pieces being present, the film circumvents the jealousy of “knowledge vs. natural talent” that fueled Scanlon’s Monsters University; its vulnerable, supportive, affectionate sibling relationship made Onward especially moving.

#6. The Vast of Night

The Vast of Night plays on the vastness of imagination, tracking a young radio DJ and a switchboard operator through interviews that untangle the extraterrestrial events of their small town. In effect, the film is the Super 8 of the podcast world, plugging into the particular power of its medium by way of a retro-sci-fi adventure. For those on that wavelength, the atmospheric indie is an equally eerie and enticing beacon to the thrill of discovery. This audial focus doesn’t come at the expense of its visual format, mind you: the film’s hypnotic hold is only broken once - by the absolutely stunning construction of its midpoint tracking shot, one for the record books.

#5. Tenet

A question of cause-and-effect: did Christopher Nolan’s newest blockbuster fall into my top five for the year, or was a new Nolan novelty destined to place there before the year even began? His filmography has been on a roll since its inception, and the director keeps that forward-momentum going with the twisty Tenet, a time-bending thriller about agents unraveling a temporal cold war. Any way you look at them, the innovative, physics-based action scenes astound. Meanwhile, the midpoint movement turns on wondrous, child-like glee. With this grand of a scale, it’s a shame that Nolan’s devotion to the big screen despite the pandemic hampered the release; it seems some of the director’s tenets are better than others.

#4. His House

The works of Jordan Peele will likely be at the forefront of a viewer’s mind during His House, but, make no mistake, the film has horrors all its own. It’s a similar set-up to Get Out: a South-Sudanese refugee couple endure the various racist micro-aggressions of trying to assimilate or accommodate to an unwelcoming environment, even before learning their government-mandated housing is haunted. While that’s the foundation, His House’s ultimate form is unexpected, linked not to the guises of progress, but to the guilt of the past. Its supernatural sequences are made more startling by the raw performance of stars Sope Dirisu and Wunmi Mosaku; they own His House.

#3. First Cow

Behind every successful man, there stands a cow. Director Kelly Reichardt continued her career-long deconstruction of the Western last year in her best bittersweet concoction, First Cow. Pioneers Cookie and Lu seek the promise of the frontier in 1800s Oregon Country, sneaking milk from a wealthy land-owner’s cow to start an oil-cake business. The camaraderie is lovely, but that contract is a lie: the truth is a world in which only capital begets capital, where the rich are more concerned with having something than using it. Reichardt doesn’t beef up this drama with overblown conflicts, instead milking the minimalism to ‘udderly’ devastating results: they were the first, but we’ll all be waiting on that Western promise of prospect ‘til the cows come home.

#2. The Invisible Man

Often, movies will ask viewers to look at their monsters as metaphors; sometimes, they’re just monsters through and through. The Invisible Man, an update on the classic Universal film, polishes up the original’s special effects, but makes its titular character much uglier. Bringing the invasive nature of invisibility to the surface, the film reinterprets the character as a domestic abuser, gaslighting his ex, Cecilia, from beyond his supposed grave. Elizabeth Moss makes it a must-watch, never letting the audience look away from the trauma and terror of that situation. It’s highly-disturbing horror, made more so by an ending that leaves viewers in the dark, and the craft is always phenomenal. Director Leigh Whannell clearly had vision since his very first film project, but after The Invisible Man, everyone will be saying, “Saw who?”

AND THE BEST FILM OF 2020 IS...

#1. Straight Up

Straight Up? One of the best rom-coms of recent memory, and my favorite film of an odd year. It’s a fittingly off-beat premise after all: a young gay man and an equally-witty young woman, each struggling with intimacy in different ways, explore an unusual romantic relationship with each other. In a time when we were all cut off from connections with other people, Straight-Up reexamined internalized phobias and millennial malaise to forge new ones, uncovering the rare occurrence of a platonic ideal. With whip-smart dialogue, reflective filmmaking, and two star-making central performances, you will surely fall as in love with Straight Up as I did, and that is nothing less than My Hahn-est Opinion.

NEXT UP: THE 2020 AARON FOR WORST FILM!

#film #TheAarons #best film #best picture #best of 2020 #top 10 #straight up #the invisible man #first cow #his house #tenet #the vast of night #onward #wolfwalkers #happiest season #the assistant #TheAarons2020

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buzzdixonwriter · 4 years

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CASTLE KEEP: An Analysis

Few movies resonate as deeply with me as Castle Keep.

It is truly sui generis.

It’s a deceptively simple story: In the waning days of WWII, eight walking wounded American soldiers occupy a castle in Belgium, a token sign of force as the war rages past them. The castle belongs to a noble family who owned it for generations and stocked it with a vast collection of priceless rare and irreplaceable classical art. The current count wants to keep his castle and his collection intact, but he also wants a son to carry on the family name and tradition. He is, unfortunately, impotent. And even more unfortunately, the castle is located in the Ardennes forest, on the road to Bastogne…

Now, those raw elements are more than enough to fuel a perfectly good run of the mill WWII movie, with plenty of bang-bang-shoot-em-up and some obligatory musings on the meaning of it all.

And I’m sure that’s the way they pitched Castle Keep.

But director Sydney Pollack and screenwriters Daniel Taradash and David Rayfiel (adapting the eponymous novel by William Eastlake) delivered something far more…well…phantasmagorical is as apt a way of describing it as any.

Because despite being solid grounded in a real time and a real place and a real event, Castle Keep moves out of the realm of mere history and into a much more magical place.

Not so much fact, as fable.

And as fable, it gets closer to the Truth.

. . .

Before we analyze the movie, let’s set the contextual stage.

First off, understand the impact WWII movies still had on audiences of the 1960s and early 70s.

For those who lived through the war years, it occurred scarcely more than 20 years earlier, a period that seems like forever to teenagers and young adults but flies past in the blink of an eye when one reaches middle age and beyond.

Not only were WWII movies popular, they were relatively easy to make. A lot of countries still used operational Allied and German equipment up through the 1960s (Spain’s air force stood in for the Luftwaffe in 1969’s The Battle Of Britain), and for low budget black and white films or pre-living color TV, ample archival and stock footage padded things out.

Most importantly, WWII was a shared experience insofar as younger audiences grew up hearing from their parents what it was like, and as a result there was some degree of relatability between the Greatest Generation and their children, the Boomers.

But the times, they were a’changin’ as Dylan sang, and the rise of the counter-culture in the 1960s and the civil rights, feminist, and ant-Vietnam War movements (and boy howdy, is that a hot of history crammed into one sentence but you’re just gonna hafta roll with me on this one, folks; we’ll examine that era in greater detail at some point in the future but not today, not today…) led to younger audiences looking at WWII with fresh eyes and to older film makers re-evaluating their own experiences.

So to focus on WWII films of the time, understand their were 3 main threads running through the era:

The epic re-enactment typified by The Longest Day (1961), The Battle Of The Bulge (1965), Patton (1970), and ending with A Bridge Too Far in 1977

The cynical revisionism of The Dirty Dozen (1967), Where Eagles Dare (1968), and Kelly’s Heroes (1970)*

The absurdity of How I Won The War (1967) and Catch-22 (1970)

Castle Keep brushes past all those sub-genres, though it comes closest to absurdity.

. . .

While released in 1969, Castle Keep started development as early as 1966 (the novel saw print in 1965). Burt Lancaster, attached early on as the star, requested Sydney Pollack as director.

Pollack, an established TV director, started making a name for himself in the mid-1960s with films like The Slender Thread and This Property Is Condemned; he and Lancaster worked together on The Scalphunters prior to Castle Keep.

While his first three films were well received, Pollack’s career really took off with his fifth movie, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and after that it was a string of unbroken successes including Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were, The Three Days Of The Condor, Tootsie, Out Of Africa, and many, many more.

In fact, the only apparent dud in the barrel is Castle Keep, his fourth movie.

Castle Keep arrived at an…uh…interesting juncture in American (and worldwide) cinema history.

The old studio system that served Hollywood so well unraveled at the seams, the old way of doing business and making movies just didn’t seem to work anymore.

Conversely, the new style wasn’t winning that many fans, either.

For every big hit like Easy Rider there were dozens of films like Candy and Puzzle Of A Downfall Child and Play It As It Lays and Alex In Wonderland.

As I commented at the time, it seemed as if everybody in Hollywood had forgotten how to make movies.

It was a period rife with experimentation, but the thing about experiments is that they don’t always work. While there were some astonishingly good films in this era, by and large it’s difficult for modern audiences to fully appreciate what the experimental films of the era were trying to do -- and in no small part because when they succeeded, the experiments became part of the cinematic language, but when they failed…

Castle Keep is not a perfect film. As much as I love it, I need to acknowledge its flaws.

The Red Queen brothel sequences feel extraneous, not really worked into the film. Women are often treated like eye candy in male dominated war films, but this is exceptionally so. Brothels and prostitution certainly existed during WWII, servicing both sides and all comers, but the Red Queen’s ladies undercut points the film makes elsewhere.

Their participation in the penultimate battle shifts the film -- however briefly -- from the absurd to the ridiculous, and apparently negative audience testing resulted in a shot being inserted showing them alive and well and cheering despite a German tank blasting their establishment just a few moments earlier.

Likewise, an action sequence in the middle of the film where a German airplane is shot down also seems like studio pressure to add a little action to the first two-thirds of the movie.

Apparently unable to obtain a Luftwaffe fighter of the era, Pollack and the producers opted for an observation aircraft, then outfitted it with forward firing machine guns, something such aircraft never carried.

Once the airplane spotted the American soldiers at the castle, it would have flown away to avoid being shot down, not return again and again in futile strafing runs while they returned fire.

It’s action for the sake of action, and like the Red Queen scenes actually undercuts other points the film makes.

. . .

But when the film works, ah, it works gloriously…

Pollack used a style common in films of the late 1960s and early 70s: Jump cuts from one time and place to another, with no optical transition or establishing shot to signal the jump to the audience.

Star Wars brought the old school style of film making back in a big way, and ya know what? Old school works; it was lessons learned the hard way and by long experience.

Still, Pollack’s jump cuts add to Castle Keep’s dreamy, almost hallucinogenic ambiance, and that in turn reinforces the sense of fable that permeates the film.

For as historically accurate as Castle Keep is re the Battle of the Bulge, as noted above it is not operating in naturalism but rather the theater of myth and magic.

Pollack prefigures this early on with a dreamy slow motion sequence of cloaked riders galloping through the dead trees of the Ardennes forest, jumping a fence directly in front of the jeep carrying Major Falconer (Burt Lancaster) and his walking wounded squad.

It’s a sequence similar to one in Roger Vadim’s "Metzengerstein" segment of 1968’s Spirits Of The Dead, and while it’s unlikely Pollack found direct inspiration from Vadim, clearly both drew from the same mythic well.

The sequence serves as an introduction to the count (Jean-Pierre Aumont) and Therese his wife (? Niece? Sister? Nobody in the movie seems 100% sure what their relationship is, but she’s played by Astrid Heeren) and the fabulous Castle Maldorais.

The castle is fabulous in more ways than one. While the exterior was a free standing full scale outdoor set and some large interior sets were built, many of the most magnificent scenes were filmed in other real locations to show off genuine works of art found in other European castles.

This adds to the film’s somewhat disjointed feel, but that disjointed feel contributes to the dream-like quality of the story.

. . .

As mentioned, Maldorais is crammed to the gills with priceless art, and the count doesn’t care who prevails so long as the art is unmolested.

The same can’t be said about Therese, however, and as the film’s narrator and aspiring author, Private Allistair Piersall Benjamin (Al Freeman Jr.), notes “We occupied the castle. No one knows when the major occupied the countess.”

The count, as noted, is impotent. To keep Castle Maldorais intact for future generations, he needs an heir and is not fussy about how he obtains one. Therese’s function is to produce such an heir, and if the count isn’t particular about which side wins, neither is he particular about which side produces the next generation.

Despite being the narrator and (spoiler!) sole American survivor at the end of the film, Pvt. Benjamin is not the focal character of the film, nor -- surprise-surprise -- is Lancaster’s Maj. Falconer.

Falconer is evocative of Colonel Richard Cantwell in Ernest Hemingway’s Across The River And Into The Trees, in particular regarding his love affair with a woman many years his junior.

Falconer wears a patch over his right eye, the only visible sign of wounding among the GIs occupying the castle.

Several military movie buffs think they found a continuity error in Castle Keep insofar as Maj. Falconer first appears in standard issue officer fatigues of the era, but towards the end and particularly in the climactic battle wears an airborne officer’s combat uniform.

This isn’t an error, I think, but a clue as to Falconer’s personal history.

An airborne (i.e., paratrooper) officer who lost an eye is unfit for combat, and if well enough to serve would be assigned garrison duty, not a front line command.

Falconer figures out very early in Castle Keep the strategic importance of Castle Maldorais re the impending German attack and very consciously makes a decision to stand and fight rather than fall back to the relative safety of Bastogne.

Donning his old airborne uniform makes perfect sense under such circumstances.

If the count is impotent invisibly, Falconer is visibly impotent -- in both senses of the word -- and sees his chance to make one last heroic stand against the oncoming Nazi army as a surer way of restoring his symbolically lost manhood than in impregnating Therese.**

. . .

Before examining our focal character, a few words on the supporting cast.

Peter Falk is Sgt. Rossi, a baker. Sgt. Rossi’s exact wounding is never made clear, but it appears he suffers from some form of shell shock (as they called PTSD at the time).

He hears things, in particular a scream that only he hears three times during the movie.

The first time is after an opening montage of beautiful works of art being destroyed in a series of explosions. When a bird-like gargoyle is blow apart, a screech is heard on the soundtrack, and we abruptly jump cut to Maj. Falconer and Sgt. Rossi and the rest of the squad on their way to Castle Maldorais.

For a movie as profoundly philosophical as Castle Keep (more on that in a bit), Sgt. Rossi is the only actual philosopher in the group. His philosophy is of an earthy bent, and filtered through his own PTSD, but he’s clearly thinking.

Rossi briefly deserts the squad to take up with the local baker’s wife (Olga Bisera, identified only as Bisera in the credits). This is not adultery or cuckoldry; Rossi sees her bakery, knocks, and identifies himself as a baker.

“And I am a baker’s wife,” she says.

“Where’s the baker?”

“Gone.”

And with that Rossi moves in, fulfilling all the duties required of a baker (including, however briefly, standing in as a father figure for her son).

The baker’s wife is the only female character who displays any real personal agentry in the film, Therese and the Red Queen and her ladies are there simply to do the bidding of whichever male is present.

This is a problem with most male-oriented war films, and especially so for late 60s / early 70s cinema of any kind; for all the idealistic talk of equality and self-realization, female characters tended to be treated more cavalierly in films of that era than in previous generations. Olga Bisera’s character appears noteworthy only in comparison to the other female characters in the movie.

Pvt. Benjamin, our narrator and aspiring author, is African-American. There is virtually no reference made to his race in the film, certainly not as much as the references to a Native American character’s ethnicity.

Today this would be seen as an example of color blind casting; back in 1969 it was a pretty visually explicit point.

Again, it serves the mythic feel of the movie. At that time, African-American enlisted personnel would not be serving in an integrated unit.

While Castle Keep never brings the topic up, the film -- and Pvt. Benjamin’s narration -- indicates these eight men are bottom of the barrel scrapings, sent where they can do the least amount of damage, and otherwise forgotten by the powers that be.

With that reading, Benjamin’s presence is easy to understand. As the apparently third most educated member of the unit (Falconer and our focal character are the other two), he probably would not have been a smooth fit in any unit he’d been assigned to.

Whatever got him yanked out of his old company and placed under Maj. Falconer’s command probably was as much a relief to his superiors as it was to him.

Scott Wilson is Corporal Clearboy, a cowboy with a hatred of Army jeeps and an unholy love for Volkswagens.

Volkswagens actually appeared in Germany before the start of WWII but once Hitler came out swinging those factories were converted to military production. Nonetheless, the basic Beetle was around during the war, and commandeered and used by many Allied soldiers who found one.

Clearboy’s Volkswagen provides one of the funniest bits in the movie, and one that plays on the mythical / surreal / magic realism of the film. Clearboy’s obsession is oddly touching.

Tony Bill’s Lieutenant Amberjack tips us early on to the kind of cinematic experience we’re in for. Under the opening credits, Amberjack is asked if he ever studied for the ministry; Amberjack says he did.

“Then why aren’t you a chaplain?” -- and Amberjack bursts out laughing.

Amberjack does not go with the others to the Red Queen -- “That’s for enlisted men” -- and while he enjoys playing the count’s organ, by that I mean he literally sits down at the keyboard and plays music.

But as we’ll see, Castle Keep is not the sort of movie to shy away from sly hints. Amberjack’s specific “wound” is never discussed, so it’s open to speculation as to why he’s assigned to Maj. Falconer’s squad.

(Siderbar: Following a successful acting career, Bill went on to produce and direct several motion pictures, sharing a Best Picture Oscar for The Sting with Michael and Julia Phillips.)

Elk, the token Native American character in every WWII squad movie, is played by James Patterson. Elk doesn’t get much to do in the film, though Patterson was an award winning Broadway actor. Tragically, he died of cancer a few years after making Castle Keep.

Another character with little to do is Michael Conrad’s Sergeant DeVaca. Most audiences today remember him for his role in Hill Street Blues.

Astrid Heeren (Therese) gets a typically thankless role for films of this type in that era. She possessed a beautiful face that’s so symmetrical it gives off an unearthly, almost frightening vibe. A fashion model in the 1960s, she appeared in only four movies -- this one, The Thomas Crown Affair, and two sleaze fests -- before quitting the business.

As noted above, no one is ever quite sure what her exact relationship to the count is. Towards the end it’s speculated she’s his sister and his wife, but since the count is impotent, does that really constitute incest?

Whatever she is, it’s clear the count considers her nothing more than an oven in which to bake a new heir, and in a very real sense she possesses less freedom and personal agentry than the ladies of the Red Queen.

At least she survives at the end of the film, pregnant with Falconer’s child, led to safety by Pvt. Benjamin.

Finally, Bruce Dern as Lieutenant Billy Byron Bix, a wigged out walking wounded who is not a member of Falconer’s squad.

Bix leads his own rag tag group of GIs, equally addled soldiers who proclaim their newly found evangelical fervor renders them conscientious objectors. They wander about, singing hymns and scrounging for survival, until the penultimate battle of the film.

Falconer, trying to recruit more defenders from the retreating American forces, dragoons Bix and his followers into singing a hymn in the hopes of luring some of the shell shocked GIs back to the keep.

Bix agrees -- and is almost immediately killed by a shell, not only thwarting Falconer’s plan but also raising the question of whether this was divine punishment for abandoning his pacifist ways, fate decreeing Falconer and his squad must stand alone, or pure random chance.

Dern, as always, is a delight to watch, and he and Falk get a funny scene where they argue about singing hymns at night.

. . .

So who is our focal character?

Patrick O’Neil was one of those journeymen actors who never get the big breakout role that makes them a star, but worked regularly and well.

He worked on Broadway, guest starred on TV a lot, starred in a couple of minor films (including the delightful sci-fi / spy comedy Matchless), but spent most of his movie career supporting other stars.

Castle Keep is his finest performance.

He’s supposed to be supporting Lancaster in Castle Keep, but dang, he’s the heart and soul of the film.

O’Neil plays Captain Lionel Beckman, Falconer’s second in command, a professor of art and literature whose name is well known enough to be recognized by the count.

Besides Falconer, Beckman is the only character explicitly acknowledged as having been wounded; this is revealed when Falconer mentions Beckman won the Bronze Star (the second highest award for bravery) and the Purple Heart.

Beckman is enthralled by Castle Maldorais; he and the count strike up a respectful if not friendly relationship.

He sees and appreciates the cultural significance of Castle Maldorais’ artistic treasures and futilely tries to share his love of same with the enlisted men.

He also understands how little Falconer can do at the castle to slow the German advance, and makes the entirely reasonable suggestion that perhaps it would be best for the squad and the castle to retreat and let the treasures remain intact.

Lancaster reportedly wanted to make Castle Keep a comment on the Vietnam War, but the reality is there’s no adequate comparison.

History shows the Nazis were a brutal, aggressive, racist force determined to conquer all they could and destroy the rest.

Beckman is not a fool for wanting to spare the castle and its art, and that’s why he’s vital as the film’s focal character.

He sees and feels for us the horror at what appears to be the senseless waste about to befall the men and the castle. His voice is necessary to express there are ideals worth fighting for, and there are times when not fighting is the best strategy.

But Maj. Falconer is shown as a good officer. While he maintains an aloof attitude of command, he’s interested in and concerned about the men under him, he’s willing to be lenient if circumstances permit, and he keeps them openly and honestly informed at all times of the situation facing them.

He figures out the meaning of the flares seen early in the film, anticipates what the German line of attack will be, but most importantly realizes more will die and more destruction will occur if the Nazis aren’t resisted.

He and Beckman’s difference of opinion is not simplistic good vs evil, brute vs beauty, but a deeper, and ultimately more ineffable one over applying value in our lives.

Falconer and Beckman represent two entirely different yet equally valid and equally human points of view of when and how we decide to act on those values.

Falconer by himself cannot tell the story of Castle Keep, he needs the sounding board of Beckman, and only Beckman can bridge the gap between those opposing values for the audience.

. . .

Before we go further, a brief compare & contrast on an earlier Burt Lancaster film, The Train (1964).

It touches on a theme similar to Castle Keep: As Allied armies advance on Paris, the Germans plan to move a vast collection of priceless art by rail from France to Germany. Lancaster, a member of a French resistance cell, doesn’t see the military value of stopping the train, but when other members of his cell decide to do so in order to save French culture, he reluctantly joins their efforts.

The film ends with the train stopped, the French hostages massacred, the art abandoned and strewn about by the fleeing Germans. Lancaster confronts and shoots the German officer responsible then leaves, dismayed and disgusted by the waste of human life over an abstract love of beauty.

The French resistance fighters who died trying to stop the train did so of their own fully informed consent; they knew the risks, we willing to take them, ad faced the consequences.

The civilian hostages massacred at the end had no knowledge, much less any say in the reason why their lives were risked. Lancaster, in successfully derailing the train to prevent it leaving France, also signs their death warrants when the vengeful Nazis turn on their victims.

The Train proved a critical success and did well at the box office, yet while it raises a lot of interesting points and issues, it ultimately isn’t as deep or as humane as Castle Keep.

The Train ends with a bitter sense of futility.

Castle Keep ends with a bittersweet sense of sacrifice.

. . .

All of which brings us to the screenplay of Castle Keep, written by Daniel Taradash and David Rayfiel off the novel by William Eastlake.

I read Eastlake’s book decades ago and remember it to be a good story.

The screenplay kept the basic plot but built wonderfully off the complexity of the novel, reinterpreting it for the screen.

It’s one of the few cinematic adaptations of a good literary work that actually improves on the original.

Taradash was a classic old school Hollywood screenwriter with a string of bona fide hits and classics to his credit including From Here To Eternity (1952), Picnic (1955), and Hawaii (1966). He also scripted the interesting misfire Morituri (1965), about an Allied double-agent attempting to sabotage a German freighter trying to get vital supplies back to the fatherland.

I suspect Taradash was the studio’s first choice for adapting the book, and as his credits show, an eminently suitable one.

But when Pollack came on as the director, he also brought along David Rayfiel, a frequent collaborator with him on other films.

Rayfiel’s career as a screenwriter was shorter than Tardash’s but more intense, vacillating between quality films and well crafted potboilers. Rayfiel and Pollack doubtlessly shaped the final form of the screenplay, and despite what appears to he studio interference, turned in a truly memorable piece of work.

As I said, Castle Keep is truly sui generis, but there are other films and screenplays that carry some of the same flavor.

The Stunt Man (1980; directed by Richard Rush, screenplay by Rush and Lawrence B. Marcus off the novel by Paul Brodeur) bears certain similarities in tone and approach to Castle Keep. It represents an evolution of the cinematic style originally found in Pollack’s film, now refined and polished to fit mainstream expectations.

True, it has the advantage of a story that hinges on sudden / swift / disorienting changes, but it still managed to pull those effects off more smoothly than the films of the late 1960s did.

As I said, some experiments work…

Castle Keep’s screenplay works more like Plato’s dialogs than a traditional film script.

Almost every line in it is a philosophical statement or question of some sort, and underlying everything in the film is each character’s quest for at least some kind of understanding if not actual meaning in life.

As noted, Sgt. Rossi is the most philosophical of these characters, though his philosophy is of a far earthier, more pragmatic variety than that of the count, Falconer, or Beckman.

All the major characters have some sort of philosophical bent, even if they’re not self-aware enough to recognize it in themselves.

The dialog is elliptical, less interested in baldly stating something that in getting the audience to tease out its own meanings.

Pollack directs the film in a way that forces the audience to fill in many blanks.

Early in the movie, Falconer and the count find themselves being stalked by a German patrol. They take refuge in a gazebo, duck as the Germans fire the first few shots --

-- then we abruptly jump to the aftermath of the firefight, with Falconer and the count standing over the bodies of four dead Germans.

Falconer, seeing they’re all enlisted men, realizes they wouldn’t come this far behind enemy lines without an officer.

There can be only one destination for the officer, one goal he seeks…

Pollack then visually cuts away from Falconer and the count to Therese in the castle, but keeps the two men’s dialog going as a voice over.

In the voice over, we heard Falconer stalk and kill the German officer as he approaches the castle…

…and without ever explicitly stating it, the audience comes to realize the count and Therese are not allies of the Americans, that they are playing only for their own side, and that their values are alien to those of both the Allies and the Germans.

The count is using Therese -- with or without her consent -- to produce an offspring for him, and if the Germans can’t do the job, let the Americans have a go at it…

This theme provides an undercurrent for Beckman’s interactions with the count. Beckman would like to believe the count’s desire to keep the war away from Castle Maldorais is just a desire to preserve the art and beauty in it, but the count’s motives are purely selfish.

He doesn’t desire to share his treasures with the world but keep them for his own private enjoyment.

The works of art are as good as gone once they pass through Castle Maldorais’ gate.

Later, at the start of the climactic battle for the castle, the count is seen guiding German troops into a secret tunnel that leads under the moat to the castle itself.

Falconer, having anticipated this, blows up the tunnel with the Germans in it. Through Falconer’s binoculars, we see the Germans shoot the count in the distance, his body collapsing soundlessly into the snow.

A conventional war film would show his death in satisfying close up, but Pollack puts him distantly removed from the Americans he sought to betray, and even the Germans he inadvertently betrayed.

It shows him going down, alone, in a cold and sterile and soundless environment, his greed for beauty scant comfort for his last breaths.

The film portrays the Germans as mostly faceless, seen only in death or at a distance, rushing and firing at the camera.

The one exception is a brief scene where Lt. Amberjack and Sgt. Rossi patrol the forest around the castle.

Amberjack, playing a flute he acquired at the castle, catches the attention of a German -- a former music student -- hiding in the nearby bushes.

The unseen German compliments Amberjack on his playing, but says if he’ll toss him the flute he’ll fix it so it plays better.

And the German is true to the word. Unseen in the bushes, he smooths out some of the holes on the flute and tosses it back to Amberjack.

Amberjack thanks him --

-- and Sgt. Rossi shoots him.

“Why did you kill him?” Amberjack demands.

“It’s what we do for a living,” says Rossi, ever the philosopher.

. . .

Castle Keep isn’t a film for everyone.

It offers no pat answers, no firm convictions, no unassailable truths.

It’s open to a wide variety of interpretations, and the audiences that saw it first in 1969 approached it from a far different worldview than we see it today.

It isn’t for everyone, but for the ones it is for, it will be a rich meal, not a popcorn snack.

Currently available on Amazon Prime.

* I’d include M*A*S*H (1970) in this group even thought (a) it’s set in the Korean War and (b) it’s really about Vietnam. Except for the helicopters, however, M*A*S*H uses the same uniforms / weapons / vehicles as WWII films; for today’s audiences there’s no discernable difference from a WWII-era film. It was a toss-up between putting this in the cynical revisionism or absurdity class, but in the end M*A*S*H is just too self-aware, too smirking to fit among the latter.

** Falconer’s relationship with Therese and (indirectly) the count and the castle also harkens back to a 1965 Charlton Heston film, The War Lord, arguably the finest medieval siege warfare movie ever made. Like Falconer, Heston’s Norman knight must defend a strategic Flemish keep against a Viking chieftain attacking to rescue his young son held hostage by the Normans; complicating matters is Heston’s knight taking undue advantage of his droit du seigneur over a local bride which leads to the locals -- whom the Normans are supposed to be protecting from the Vikings -- helping their former raiders. Life gets messy when you don’t keep your chain mail zipped.

#Castle Keep #Sydney Pollack #Burt Lancaster #war #World War II #movies #movie stars #philosophy #morality #ethics #art #beauty #Daniel Taradash #David Rayfiel #screenwriting #writing

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hallmark-movie-fanatics · 4 years

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Natalie Hall on Hallmark Channel's "You're Bacon Me Crazy" (Best Title Ever)

Author - Steve Gidlow

The last time Hallmark Channel favorite Natalie Hall graced the network, she portrayed an incognito princess in the heartwarming A Winter Princess. Fast-forward 12 months and the engaging actress is returning to the Hallmark this weekend in You’re Bacon Me Crazy as part of the network’s Spring Fling programming event. The movie finds Hall (pictured at top) in a very different role (and environment) as Cleo Morelli, the proprietor of a successful Portland-based food truck, whose hopes of winning $100K in a competition are squelched when competing food truck operator Gabe (Michael Rady) also enters the contest. After filming at a sprawling ski resort in A Winter Princess, Hall was excited to accept the challenges that come working within the confines of a food truck. “I went from a princess to a food truck owner," she laughed during an exclusive interview with MediaVillage. "Two very different roles, and very different characters. Cleo is a girl with a small business, and that's something we wanted to bring attention to. Small businesses are very important -- especially now with what's happening. It's such a hard time for [them]. Hopefully, this movie will provide a little bit of entertainment and relief and ignite some excitement for restaurants when life gets back to normal.

"I have to give thanks to Hallmark for always [entertaining] people," she continued. "Be it during the holidays or any of the other special programming events. I admire that they’ve always provided these love stories; that’s why they’re the No. 1 network. People love to sit down with their families and watch a sweet Hallmark movie. I’m thankful to them for letting me be a part of that, and these totally sweet, lovely stories that people like to immerse themselves in."

Hall said it was while working on a project in Canada that she became aware of You're Bacon Me Crazy. The title alone was enough to excite her. "My manager called to say, ‘There’s a script called You’re Bacon Me Crazy,’” she recalled. "I thought great! I’m going to be baking. He said, ‘No, bacon!’ I was still thinking of pies and being a baker and he said again, ‘No, bacon!’ I thought it was really funny. Would I be making bacon? But it’s based on a book, and while Hallmark often changes movie titles, there is no better title than [this one]. Who doesn’t love a good pun?

"When I read the script I fell in love with Cleo and the story," she added. “Her joy and passion for her work, her enthusiastic personality, her love and passion for the people around her. We had great fun filming outside in an actual food truck which was very interesting. I’d also worked with the director Allan (Harmon) on A Winter Princess and we really became a team, so I’m grateful to have had this experience."

According to Hall, everything from working with Rady (pictured above), whom she describes as "a genuinely great, talented and funny guy," to the sets Hallmark provided, made this project one of her favorites. "We actually filmed in food trucks," she explained. “No cutaway trucks, no sets, which I loved. I got to experience what it was like to have a food truck and learned to make sandwiches from some great chefs. I do love movies where you get to eat, and I never ate any of the catering because I was getting these delicious sandwiches handed to me.

"Filming in the truck was challenging, but also made it exciting and fun," she continued. "It felt like I was in a play because we had a lot of steadicams, which involved cameramen holding the cameras. It was very tight and there was a lot of choreography regarding movement, hitting your mark and moving around the camera while acting. It was almost like being back in New York again doing musical theater. We just had the best time! I wouldn’t have changed a thing."

The change of scenery and enjoyable performances from Hall and Rady, combined with the film's message -- "Above all, have a passion for what you do and do it with love" -- form the perfect recipe and make You’re Bacon Me Crazy the perfect distraction during our current situation. "That message is something I've always believed in and resonated with me," Hall said. "It’s so strange that just a few weeks ago I was on a food truck serving people sandwiches. [This is] an unusual time for everyone and I feel so much for the families and parents who have lost their jobs.

"I work with a nonprofit called Kid Works, and so many people are going through stuff right now," she added in closing. "I wrapped a movie that a friend of mine wrote called Christmas in Solvang, and this current situation has impacted a few things I was in talks to do. But with everything that’s going on what's most important now is following protocol. We’re all in this together, so stay inside! Stay safe and stay healthy! Hopefully, we can return to our normal lives at some point soon."

You’re Bacon Me Crazy will be telecast Saturday, April 4 9 p.m. on Hallmark Channel as part of the network’s annual Spring Fling programming event.

LINK TO ARTICLE ON mediavillage.com HERE

#interviews #natalie hall #link #hallmark movies #you're bacon me crazy #spring fling #hallmark channel

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alexsmitposts · 4 years

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The “Corruption” Narrative: Who’s Afraid of Isabel Dos Santos? And Why? The words they use to describe her are nasty, cliché, but all too familiar. They call her “Princess,” “Oligarch,” and accuse her of “embezzlement” “peddling influence” etc. The truth is that Isabel Dos Santos, the richest woman in Africa, has for decades been on the hit list of the most powerful people in the world. In the first month of 2020, the international media has doubled down, taken aim, and decided to go for the kill. And who are the hitmen? The same folks who brought you the Panama Papers, the shady International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The outlet with ties to the Democracy Fund of the United Nations, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation is repeating their same old mantra. They accuse independent leaders around the world, from Russia, China, Latin America, and Africa of being “corrupt.” They display in rather convenient “leaks,” as if it is somehow shocking, that the leaders of countries with massive populations and resources in-fact possess lots of wealth. The international audience is led to the conclusion that the targeted leader should be removed. Misuse of government funds and other malpractice is certainly a plague rampant in many developing countries. When nations are working to raise themselves out of poverty, shady practices often become a kind of way of life as the population learns to “take care of each other.” The result is often widespread inefficiency. But what is the obvious goal of these Soros, USAID backed ICIJ operations? To keep intact the corrupt, monopolistic global financial order that exists by selectively targeting those who challenge it. The deeply corrupt global order where Wall Street and London bankers rule the world, keeping it poor so they can stay rich, pushing policies of “de-regulation” and “free markets” that have failed over and over, never gets called into question. “Corruption” charges were used to oust Dilma Roussef, to imprison Lula Di Silva who would have won the 2018 election according to every poll, and install autocratic free market demagogue Jiar Bolsanaro in Brazil. “Corruption” allegations are constantly used to stir up opposition to the Putin government by forces who were quite satisfied with the free market looting during the Yeltsin-era, and dislike that Russia has been restored as an economic power and energy exporter. Leftist Vice President Christina Kirchner in Argentina was also hit with a series of “corruption” charges by supporters of the IMF and the free market policies, who attempted to undo her progressive reforms during the Mauricio Macri. Meanwhile, many politicians in the “free” western capitalist countries have offshore bank accounts, take care of their relatives and business associates, and otherwise engage in notably corrupt behavior. The President of the United States is pretty obviously tied to a chain of “Trump Hotels” around the world, and many questions have been raised about that since the 2016 elections. Former Vice President Joe Biden’s son conveniently got a well paying job at a Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian Natural Gas corporation, at the very moment when the USA was backing the “EuroMaiden” events that toppled President Yanukovych. An Oil Rich Country, Kept Poor by Western Capitalism Angola is not a poor country. It has lots of oil. Its natural gas potential is just being realized. It has minerals and a vast population. However, poverty is widespread in this southern African nation. Until 1975, Angola was a colony of Portugal. The population lived as colonial slaves, worked to death, kept in poverty, as their resources were utilized to line the pockets of Portuguese businessmen. The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) was formed in 1956 to throw off the colonial chains. The MPLA was a Marxist-Leninist political organization backed and armed by the Soviet Union. It waged a guerilla insurgency, fighting Portuguese troops, right up until the Carnation Revolution. When the fascist government of Portugal fell in 1975, colonial territories were granted independence. The MPLA took power as the elected government of a newly free Angola. Immediately following independence, the apartheid government of South Africa invaded Angola. Over 65,000 Cuban soldiers were sent to support the MPLA in fighting off this and subsequent invasions by the apartheid regime. Cuba continued to maintain a military presence in Angola to support the MPLA. At the time of independence, the United States government had already been arming and training a group of terrorists and extremists called the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) that conducted assassinations and other acts of violence against the MPLA. UNITA at first claimed to be Maoist Communists and had relations with China, but by the late 1970s they were Evangelical Christians and advocates of western capitalism. The United States was their primary supporter, and anti-communism was their rallying cry. The leader of the CIA trained and armed UNITA terrorists like Jonas Savimbi. Savimbi murdered civilians, bombed schools and hospitals and committed horrendous atrocities. Savimbi was a practitioner of witchcraft and a literal cannibal, who ate the corpses of MPLA soldiers. The horrendous atrocities of Jonas Savimbi has been well documented, but this did not stop the Reagan White House and other US administrations from embracing them as freedom fighters. The goal of the MPLA was to peacefully develop Angola into a prosperous socialist country. This was not possible in a state of total civil war, as US-backed terrorists ravaged the country for 27 years. Even when peace was finally declared in 2002, the United Nations noted that Angola was littered with landmines, and most of its bridges and essential infrastructure had been destroyed. “Angola Starts Now!” In 2002, with peace declared, the MPLA declared “Angola Starts Now!” and began to eradicate poverty and economically develop the country. Their efforts were aided significantly by the highest oil prices in world history. The GDP increased at a staggeringly high average of 11.1% from 2001 to 2010. China worked with Angola to build new railways connecting previously isolated parts of the country. The capital city of Luanda became a prosperous business center. Millions of Angolans were lifted from poverty. Who was key in making all of this happen? Isabel Dos Santos. Isabel is the daughter of the country’s first elected President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos. It is largely because of her efforts that Angola now has a state controlled mobile telecommunications corporation, Unitel. She also helped to set up Banco de Fomento Angola and Banco BIC, two private banks based in Angola. These are banks subsidized with state oil profits, that have provided loans allowing the domestic economy of Angola to flourish. Isabel Dos Santos has traveled around the world working to bring foreign investment into her homeland. In 2016 Isabel Dos Santos moved out of the private sector and was named as the director of Sonangol, the state-run oil company that remains at the center of the Angolan economy. Much like Putin did in Russia with Gazprom and Rosneft, Sonagol is a “national champion.” It is a state-controlled energy corporation utilized to create economic growth and stabilize the market. It was with Sonangol’s proceeds that the mining and agricultural sectors were stimulated. Nigeria is now the top oil exporting country in Africa. It has been a playground for Chevron, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and Exxon-Mobile for years. Nigeria has a few billionaires, but the population is overwhelmingly poor and illiterate. While lots of oil is extracted and lots of profits made by western corporations, nothing like Angola’s economic boom of 2002-2014 has ever happened in Nigeria, despite decades and decades in the oil business. The successes of Angola cannot be blamed on high oil prices alone, but rather on state central planning, utilizing oil proceeds to eradicate poverty and construct. Isabel Dos Santos has spent very little time working in government. She prides herself on her success as a businesswoman in the private sector. Her dynamic leadership and strategic management of private companies, in coordination with state central planners, created all kinds of spectacular results. “There are thousands of people whom we gave their first job,” she told BBC. When a new President took office in 2017, the Wall Street Journal celebrated Isabel Dos Santos’ departure. It accused her of running “turgid bureaucracy.” American oil companies were angry that she “required that they buy supplies from select domestic firms.” Dos Santos enforced environmental laws, and would not privatize the newly discovered natural gas resources that “by law belongs to the government.” Immediately before the ouster of Isabel Dos Santos from Sonangol, Total, BP, Haliburton, and Exxon-Mobile had terminated their relationship with the state-run firm. It appears that the big oil bankers almost demanded her ouster from the new administration of President Juan Lourenço and their wish was granted. A Failed Administration Scapegoating Its Predecessors Lourenço promised to usher in an “economic miracle” with his free market reforms once elected. The opposite has occurred. Unemployment has risen. Strikes and social unrest are also increasing. 28% of Angola’s population lives on less than $1.90 per day. Lourenço has signed on with the International Monetary Fund, known for pushing deregulation and Milton Friedman style economic reforms in exchange for “development loans.” Since he cannot fix the economy, Lourenço seems to be focused scapegoating his predecessors, who presided over huge economic achievements. President João Lourenço calls himself “the terminator,” and he has worked hard to single out members of the Dos Santos family and their allies for prosecution. 45 cases are currently in court, and Isabel Dos Santos is now among those facing charges, as is her younger brother. However, a BBC article published on January 16th seems to have revealed that the campaign against Santos isn’t simply about retaliation against the Dos Santos family. During an interview, Isabel Dos Santos “declined four times to rule out” running for the Presidency. Later she told a Portuguese network “it’s possible” that she may intend run for head of state in 2022. And what else, she could very well win, despite massive huge efforts to besmirch her reputation with the convenient “Luanda Leaks” presented by the Soros, USAID tied outlet. To Angolans who have endured decades of civil war followed by miraculous amounts of growth, the name “Dos Santos” is associated with the legacy of the anti-colonial struggle, as well as a decade of exciting hope. The “Iron Lady” Southern Africa Needs? Indicating why she might consider a Presidential run, she told BBC “President Lourenço is fighting for absolute power. There’s a strong wish to neutralize any influence that [former] President Dos Santos might still have in the MPLA…. If a different candidate would appear [ahead of the 2022 presidential election] supported by former President Dos Santos or allies linked to him, that would really challenge [Mr Lourenço’s] position because his current track record is very, very poor.” In fact, Isabel Dos Santos could be the kind of leader that Southern Africa desperately needs. Her father was a guerilla fighter who fought the Portuguese and went into exile. Her mother was a Russian Communist. While the MPLA backed away from Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism in 1991, it remains a Democratic Socialist Party, and its members are dedicated to building a society where all Angolans have what they need. Already, from both the private sector and as the head of Sonangol, Dos Santos has put into practice a successful implementation of policies that could be called “petro-socialism” i.e. using state-run oil profits to centralize and build up an economy. On the northern end of the continent, Libya flourished under such policies. The Islamic Socialist government of Moammar Gaddafi built the world’s largest irrigation system, “the man-made river.” Libya had the highest life expectancy on the African continent until 2011 and had achieved universal housing and literacy. Libya worked hard to suppress Al-Qaida and terrorist groups and provided financial support to the Irish Republican Army, the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers, and many other socialist and anti-imperialist forces around the world. In his final year, Gaddaffi openly spoke of establishing an African currency and an African bank, laying the basis for independence from western financial power. All of this culminated in the USA funding an uprising against him, and NATO bombing campaign that destroyed the country. During Gaddaffi’s leadership, Africans from across the continent piled into the Libya where the state provided them with employment. Now, in a war-torn, newly impoverished and destroyed post-Gaddafi, pro-western Libya, Africans are trying to get out on rafts, and drowning in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe. Russia and China were both deeply impoverished countries at the beginning of the 20th Century, but it was with state central planning, mobilizing the population and rationally organizing the economy that they became superpowers. Both countries have learned the lessons of the Soviet Union’s demise, and recognize the need for foreign investment and a private sector, which will allow more entrepreneurialism. However, Russia and China continue to get stronger because they have not fallen into the trap of “profits in command” and the chaos of the market. All across the developing world, the absolute failure of Milton Friedman-style economics can be seen. Even the Bretton Woods institutions now admit that they have been “too Neoliberal.” All out “free trade” Adam Smith-style capitalism is not the answer, for Angola or any other country. If Isabel Dos Santos, a savvy businesswoman was elected, carrying with her a family name that is associated with better times, and resilient leadership, she could very well turn things around. As Russia becomes more involved in helping strengthen African countries, and as China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank works to build infrastructure to help the development of independent economies, Isabel Dos Santos has great potential as a leader. With her strength and boldness, she could bring economic growth, financial independence, and hope to millions of people, not just in her own country, but throughout the region.

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riddlethriftpinkcoats · 4 years

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A quote from the November 1961 Riddlegram: "Thrift Shop Is In The Saddle, Leaves Starter's Gate December 1st."

The Riddle Thrift Shop was a solid fact in November of 1961. The location was 315 Monroe Street in Media PA. A lease for one year was signed with the cost of rent at $125.00 per month and an option to renew for two additional years at the same rent.

A paid worker, Mary Hibberd of Media was hired and volunteers from the various auxiliaries were assigned to help with the running of the shop. The shop committee, headed by Rose Tree's Ruth Graham and Lillian Hinson of Springhaven, received unanimous approval from the Women's Board to spend up to $7,000 of the Associated Auxiliaries funds to finance the first year of operation.

A working schedule was set up from each of the auxiliaries to man the shop. There were two co-chairmen appointed from auxiliary members to help with the scheduling of workers and make decisions. The first co-chairmen were Ruth Graham of Rose Tree Auxiliary and Lillian Hinson of Springhaven Auxiliary.

By January 22 of 1962, the new Thrift Shop had already paid out $1,837 to consignors, and the shop showed gross earnings of approximately $800. In February of 1962, Alda Knox became the new professional worker for the Thrift Shop and in November of that year, Saige Macauley replaced Lillian Hinson as one of the co-chairmen.

The Thrift Shop was open to customers from 10 am to 4 pm, Monday through Friday and on Saturday from 10 am to 1 pm. Consigning hours were 10 am to 1 pm, Mondays through Friday. Consignments were 75% of the selling price for the customer and 25% for the shop. Consignment fee was $1.50 per week, per consignor. The Thrift Shop was open from September until mid June, when it closed for the summer.

1965 found the Thrift Shop at a new address in Media. They moved to the site of the old post office at State & Jackson streets. The move took place in December over a weekend. Paint for the new location was donated by MAB Paint and a truck was loaned to them for moving merchandise and fixtures. Within 3 days they were back in business. They moved a third time to South Avenue in Media. Rosemary McClatchy and Irma Scholten were co-chairmen at that time.

In the years of 1969 to 1970 they realized a profit of $9,000.

At the September 13, 1971 Women's Board Meeting, the announcement was made that the Board of Directors for the Hospital were willing to consider approval of putting the Thrift Shop on Hospital grounds. By this time, the Thrift shop had made a profit of $69,800.00 for the hospital. A resolution was drafted by the Women's Board to be presented to the Hospital Board. At the October 11, 1971 Women's Board meeting, it was announced that the hospital had accepted the resolution to relocate and had provided the space.

The new building was to be 40' by 70', a two story building similar in design to a Wawa food market. Building would start after finishing the hospital.

At the Women's board meeting in April of 1972, it was agreed that $25,000 be set aside for the down payment and hold $5,000 in escrow for payment of lighting, heating, equipment, etc. In June of 1972 the Auxiliary met with an Architect, Mr. Edward E. Robinson, for final plans on the new building. Construction started in the fall with a $30,000 loan from the Women's Board and $100,000 five year loan from Southeast National bank.

The doors of the new Thrift Shop opened on March 13, 1973. The $100,000 was paid in full by February of 1975 with the help of the Women's Board. By the end of 1975 the Riddle Thrift Shop had actually paid for itself, all loans included. The total cost of the 6,000 square foot building and the 24 car parking lot area was $143,087.00.

On March 3, 1973, there was an Art Show and Cocktail Party for the purpose of introducing the new Thrift Shop. This event was not only a social success but also a financial success as well. Over 60 local artists showed their art work and about 700 people attended.

For several years, the Thrift Shop held a Fashion Show. These shows were always very well attended and fun was had by all.

There were many different Auxiliary members who were either chairmen or co-chairmen of the shop over the years. April of 1973 saw Marge Zultewicz as Chairman of the new shop. Alice Wilkinson became chairman in 1981. Our current Chairman is Janice Duryea.

A Fire Alarm system was added in 1976 for $831 and in February of 1982, the Associated Auxiliaries approved drawings by an architect for an addition to the shop. The second floor addition was completed by 1983 at a cost of $160,797.30. 1997 saw another addition to the shop, a much needed elevator.

The computerization of the shop occurred in the Fall of 1995. We trained our volunteers and employees over the summer and went "live" August 28, 1995. What a difference. Our consignments were typed into the computer. Tickets were printed rather than hand-written. Items were scanned at the register eliminating the time consuming "punching-in" of the numbers. This new system allowed us to do away with the manual posting of sold items and the handwriting of the checks. We were able to cut time in the office and utilize personnel on the selling floor and in consignment where they were needed.

We continued with this "DOS" system after a slight upgrade for the year 2000 until the summer of 2005 when we converted everything to a Windows based system. On-line credit cards, gift cards, touch screens and all kinds of bells and whistles accompanied the upgrade making us one of the most technologically advanced thrift shops in the area. Our Web Page is set to debut in the Fall of 2008.

Nina Cruice joined the Thrift Shop as an Assistant to manager Helen Corace in May 1982. She became manager of the Thrift Shop in November of 1984 when Helen Corace retired. In 2001, The Merry Token Gift Shop was added to the Retail Operations Department. As Director of Retail Operations, Nina is responsible for a staff of four full time employees, two part-time employees and approximately 190 volunteers.

The Manager of the Thrift Shop is Peg Stacy. Peg came to the Thrift Shop as a new employee in 1996. Peg has two assistants today, Jean Akers and Karen Hagan. There are 130 volunteers that help to keep the Thrift Shop running so smoothly today.Our Chairman is Jan Duryea and her co-chairmen are Karen DiPaolo, Audrey Lesky and Bette Smith.

The Thrift Shop is open in the summer, but on a modified schedule. It is open 4 days a week as opposed to 6 days. It has been found that it pays to remain open during the summer months.

The shop continues to evolve in an effort to serve the community and to fulfill its mission as a major fundraiser for the Associated Auxiliaries of Riddle Memorial Hospital.

The shop that began in a small store on Monroe Street in Media grew into a 10,000 square foot two-story building on the grounds of Riddle Memorial Hospital. Along the way it has contributed over $3,274,900 to the Associated Auxiliaries of Riddle Memorial Hospital.

#Riddle Thrift Shop #Riddle Thrift #Pink Coats #Ladies In Pink #Save Riddle Thrift Shop #Save Riddle Thrift #The Pink Ladies #Pink Ladies #Thrift Shop #Media PA #Media #Pennsylvania

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thedcdunce · 5 years

Text

Lucius Fox

“I hope you don't mind me saying so, but you look like hell, Bruce.” - Lucius Fox

Gender: Male

Height: 5′ 11″

Weight: 180 lbs (82 kg)

Eyes: Brown

Hair: Black (Graying at temples)

Abilities:

Business Management

Leadership

Military Protocol

Weaknesses:

Detoriating Health

Universe:

Earth-One

New Earth

Base of Operations: Gotham City

Citizenship: American

Marital Status: Married (Tanya Fox; wife)

Occupation:

CEO of Wayne Enterprises

Atwater Air

Education: Graduate of the Morton Business School

First Appearance: Batman #307 (January, 1979)

Last Appearnace: Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes! #1 (February, 2012)

Abilities

Business Management: Lucius Fox is unparalleled in the world of business and finance.

Leadership: He commands the respect and attention of those under his charge and is largely responsible from rescuing Wayne Enterprises from ruin and forging it into the multinational corporate giant that it is today.

Military Protocol: Lucius Fox has mentioned serving active duty in the U.S. Military during the Korean War.

Weaknesses

Detoriating Health: Lucius's health has greatly deteriorated after suffering a stroke.

History

Lucius Fox was the CEO of Wayne Enterprises and a sought after businessman all over the corporate world.

Origin

As a young man, Lucius Fox became a member of La Resistance during World War II, on behalf of the Office of Strategic Services, later called CIA. During this time, Fox worked with the legendary French hero, Mlle. Marie.

Later, Lucius graduated magna cum laude from the Morton School of Business. After school he took a position at Atwater Air and saved it from near bankruptcy to success.

Lucius first met his future employer Bruce Wayne in Paris, when Wayne saved him from a mugger's attack. The two became fast friends and Bruce invited him to help him start a charity organization that later became known as the Wayne Foundation. Lucius started working at the Finance Division, where he was in charge of dealing with Wayne Enterprises' financial and stock management. But Bruce soon recognized Lucius's strong business knowledge and ethics, and Fox was promoted to Bruce's personal assistant and financial adviser for Wayne Enterprises.

One of Lucius' first private assignments for Bruce was to make a background check on a new investor called Selina Kyle. Eventually, Lucius met with Selina but made the mistake of telling her about the background check, which caused Selina's anger towards Bruce Wayne, shortly after they had started their relationship. The mistake caused Lucius to lose concentration on his daily chores and he lost a big deal for Wayne Enterprises.

Lucius was soon approached by one of Gregory Falstaff's men. Falstaff was the primary competitor of Wayne Enterprises and he wanted to make a deal with Lucius. Despite his best judgement, Lucius agreed to meet with Falstaff and after listening to his job offer, Lucius turned him down in favor of keep working for Bruce at Wayne Enterprises. After this event, Lucius had a breakdown due to his personal troubles and tried to resign, but Bruce gave him a leave of absence until he found a solution for his troubles.

When Bruce decided to resign to his position as CEO of Wayne Foundation and Wayne Enterprises, he handed the job to Lucius, who was shocked at first, but was grateful for the trust.

Facing Danger

As a renowned public figure and close to Batman's affairs, Lucius Fox was target of several criminals during his career as CEO of Wayne Enterprises.

While working late one night at Wayne Enterprises, Lucius was attacked and kidnapped by the Mad Hatter, who used Lucius to claim a two million dollar ransom. However, Hatter was not going to return Lucius safe and sound, but instead, he would've wiped out his memories using a special machine of his own device. Lucius was saved by Batman's arrival. A short time later, Lucius was attacked by members of the Ku Klux Klan, who were unleashed by the magic of Dr. Zodiac and Madame Zodiac.

After a while, the members of the board at Wayne Enterprises suggested that Lucius run for Mayor of Gotham City and he considered the option, which would mean he would have to stop working for Bruce Wayne.

While traveling through Europe, Fox was kidnapped by Baron Bedlam in Markovia. Batman asked the Justice League to launch a rescue mission, but they refused because it would violate U.S. diplomatic policy. Batman quit the League and launched his own rescue mission with Black Lightning posing as Fox's brother. They break Fox out of his cell, and leave him with a gun to take charge of the prison guards. This mission caused Batman to create the Outsiders.

Lucius Fox was eventually kidnapped by Black Mask and forced to reveal information about Bruce Wayne, until he was saved by Bruce himself, disguised as "Skullface".

A short time later, Fox was targeted by Cypher, a criminal with hypnotic powers that wanted to sabotage a project in which Fox was involved. Cypher hypnotized Fox and commanded him to jump off a bridge and commit suicide, but Fox was saved by Batman, Robin and Jean-Paul.

Lucius next attended a Charity Function at Gotham's Civic Center, where he was joined by Leslie Thompkins, Sondra Kinsolving and Bruce Wayne. Lucius asked Bruce about his absence from business, but before they could talk more, Lucius and all the people at the event were hypnotized by Poison Ivy. Ivy kidnapped all the men from the event and took them to her secret greenhouse in order to take away their wealth and their lives. She was about to give Lucius her deadly kiss when Batman saved him and stopped Ivy.

Superhero Business

After Black Mask became the undisputed crime lord of Gotham, Wayne Enterprises was the target of a hostile takeover that caused the Research and Development Division to be sold to a foreigner company and Bruce Wayne was removed from the board of directors. Lucius tried to tell Bruce about the situation, but he was always unavailable and Alfred would make up stories for Lucius to stop calling. However, when Fox researched one of Alfred's lies, he learned that Bruce wasn't out of the country and he went to Wayne Manor and told the whole story to Bruce Wayne.

Some time later, after Bruce's disappearance, Vicki Vale approached Lucius asking for Bruce, and he managed to avoid giving her a straight answer. This is most likely because even he didn't knew about Bruce's whereabouts.

When Bruce returned after his long absence, he approached Lucius and informed him of an official partnership between Wayne Enterprises and Batman. Wayne told Fox to start the development of technology to help the crime fighter on his crusade and Fox started working on remote control androids and high-tech mechanical suits for Batman and Robin.

Personal Life

Lucius Fox was married to Tanya Fox with whom he had two daughters, Tiffany and Tamara and a son called Timothy.

Unlike his sisters, Timothy was a young rebel in his teen years, which is why Lucius worried about him. After Lucius was given leave of absence from work, he learned that Tim was involved with some street gangs and when he tried to confront the thugs, he was badly beaten and taken to the Gotham General Hospital to recover. After his recovery, Lucius told his won the truth about his "friends" and a regretful Timothy apologized to his father.

#lucius fox #dc #DC comics #thedcdunce #Wayne Enterprises #batman #bruce wayne

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rapeculturerealities · 6 years

Link

On Nov. 1, when the Los Angeles Times first published allegations of sexual misconduct against Brett Ratner, Sil Lai Abrams thought, "Russell's next."

Abrams, 47, is an author and domestic-violence activist who, like many accusers in the hectic aftermath of major exposes about Harvey Weinstein, felt an urgent need to speak out. She had already told her own story of not one but two alleged sexual assaults — 12 years apart — in her 2007 book, No More Drama. But she had not dared to use real names.

Then everything changed. Abrams felt emboldened by the #MeToo movement to reveal that "Ronald," described in the book as "well known for only dating models and for his hard-partying lifestyle funded by his very successful record label," was Russell Simmons, who Abrams alleges raped her in 1994. "Well-spoken B-list celebrity Ray," who Abrams says assaulted her in 2006, was A.J. Calloway, a host on the entertainment show Extra, which is produced by Warner Bros. and airs in major markets on NBC owned-and-operated stations. Both men deny the allegations.

Events unfolded as Abrams had predicted: The Ratner stories were soon followed by claims against his close friend, Simmons. On Nov. 19, model Keri Claussen Khalighi accused Simmons, now 60, of assaulting her in 1991, when she was 17, while Ratner looked on. Writer Jenny Lumet then wrote a guest column in The Hollywood Reporter detailing her own allegations of sexual abuse by Simmons, after which he stepped down from his various businesses. At this point, more than a dozen women have accused Simmons of rape or assault.

By the time Khalighi came forward, Abrams had already made contact with a journalist. On Nov. 2 — the day after the Ratner allegations were published — Abrams approached MSNBC host Joy Reid, a professional acquaintance who Abrams knew because she had been a guest on Reid's show speaking about domestic violence.

"I needed to tell my story, to say his name out loud, to let people know what he had done to me," Abrams says. And she had allegations not just about Simmons but about Calloway, which she believed would dispel "this one-and-done idea of assault." Many people experience more than one attack in their lives, she explains, but "it's just not spoken of."

Reid started to dig into the story. In mid-December, MSNBC's standards and legal departments began putting Abrams through a grinding vetting process. She responded to their requests, providing documents from years earlier, including several court orders issued in New York against Calloway. She supplied contact information for sources who could verify aspects of her past, including some who had been told of the alleged assaults in the immediate aftermath.

In January, Reid taped an on-camera interview with Abrams at MSNBC's New York studio. But a process that had begun in December dragged on frustratingly for weeks and then months. At times, Reid texted or emailed Abrams about her sense that the network was "slow walking" the story with "stupid" requests. Finally, in April, Abrams says Reid told her that the network was no longer responding to her queries as to when the segment might air.

MSNBC's decision to pass on the story came in the midst of the Time's Up movement, even as other publications and outlets were revealing allegations of misconduct against high-profile men at an unprecedented pace. It also occurred amid heightened scrutiny of NBC News (MSNBC president Phil Griffin reports to NBC News chief Andy Lack) in the wake of the NBC's decision to let go of what became Ronan Farrow's Pulitzer Prize-winning expose of Harvey Weinstein. (Farrow has promised to reveal the backstory of his experience at NBC in a forthcoming book.)

NBC also has been criticized for its handling of the Billy Bush-Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape — a story that ultimately was broken by The Washington Post. And the network has faced questions about its own internal culture. In the wake of allegations against Matt Lauer, NBC exonerated itself after conducting its own "culture assessment" without hiring outside investigators. (Deborah Rhode, a gender expert and director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford Law School, said of the probe that "experts think the best practice is to hire outside investigators.")

Asked about MSNBC's handling of Abrams' story, a rep for the news division responded with a statement: "When MSNBC pursues any investigative story our mission is always to be as thorough as we can, to scrutinize sources and corroborate information before we report. Anything else falls short of our journalistic standards." A spokesman added that NBC News had enlisted seasoned investigative journalists to assist Reid and certain aspects of the story did not meet its standards. The Hollywood Reporter has conducted its own investigation of Abrams' claims.

The network also provided a statement from Reid. "Investigative reports like these take time, and not surprisingly, sometimes journalists get frustrated as well," the statement reads. "I inappropriately shared that frustration privately with Sil Lai. I completely respect MSNBC's standards and practices. Meticulous research to get the facts right was the only option, especially given the seriousness of the allegations."

At this point, Abrams says, her story is not just about her claims against two high-profile men but about the hurdles she has faced in trying to coming forward. Despite the wave of post-Weinstein accusers and the Time's Up moment, Abrams believes "the system is working as it always has. Stories are being silenced and it doesn't matter how much information, how much corroboration and evidence that you have. You can do everything the right way and you'll still be shut down because a news organization doesn't want to take a risk and face a potential lawsuit, which perpetuates the abuse of power and empowers men like Simmons to say they're going to be OK."

read the full story here

#MeToo #Simmons #Weinstein #Ratner #Abrams #victim blaming #Calloway

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theliberaltony · 6 years

Link

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Art by Emily Scherer

In the days following the 2016 election, a large group of Russians gathered in New York to watch one of their own wage war in miniature.

They were at the World Chess Championship, where a patriotic Russian grandmaster was challenging the Norwegian defending champion in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport. Members of Russia’s business and political elite gathered in the venue’s dimly lit VIP lounge and whispered over martinis as their countryman tried to restore Russia to its former chess glory.

One person was especially conspicuous, and he wasn’t even there.

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov has lorded over the sport as the president of the World Chess Federation, more commonly known by its French acronym FIDE, for more than two decades. But the game’s most powerful figure had been barred from the country hosting its highest profile event. Ilyumzhinov was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2015 for providing financial assistance to Bashar Assad’s government in Syria as the regime inflicted a shocking degree of violence upon its citizens and purchased oil from the terrorist group ISIS.

The sanction was an extraordinary allegation to level against a sports chief, but Ilyumzhinov is no ordinary chief, and chess is no ordinary sport.

For years, he served simultaneously as the president of a Russian region and the steward of its national pastime. His authoritarian rule in those dual posts established him as a uniquely valuable Kremlin asset and has led his critics to bestow him with other, less flattering titles. Stooge. Spy. Madman. And perhaps worse.

Now, after a 23-year reign atop the game, Ilyumzhinov is days away from the end of his colorful tenure. An election to replace him takes place this week.

In a series of interviews with ABC News and FiveThirtyEight, former U.S. government officials, political rivals, criminal investigators, Russia experts, chess insiders, and top players dissected Ilyumzhinov’s career, revealing new details about the mysterious provenance of some of his wealth, the Kremlin connections that critics say kept him in power, and the ongoing battle for the sport over which he presided.

Vladimir Putin speaks with Ilyumzhinov during a meeting in the Kremlin in 2006. Like in other elections around the world, Russia has been accused of meddling in FIDE’s election for the top spot in international chess.

DMITRY ASTAKHOV / AFP / GETTY IMAGES

The portrait that emerges offers a window into how Russia has used sport as statecraft, allegedly currying favor and peddling influence around the world under cover of an ancient board game.

Dmitry Peskov, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, denied that Ilyumzhinov had ever acted on behalf of the Kremlin.

“He never represented Russia and the Russian Federation as a kind of envoy,” Peskov told us. “Of course, we’ve been proud of our citizen to be such a successful head of FIDE.”

In a wide-ranging and often baffling one-on-one interview, Ilyumzhinov disputed or deflected the allegations against him, portraying himself as a builder and benefactor whose career defies easy classification.

“I am simply a citizen of Russia and a simple person,” Ilyumzhinov said, “who sort of travels around the whole world.”

Kalmykia, where Ilyumzhinov was born in 1962, would seem an unlikely springboard to power, but that’s where his rapid rise began.

One of Russia’s harshest and poorest regions, it is a sweeping stretch of arid grassland home to a largely Buddhist population that was once targeted for exile and extermination by Joseph Stalin.

In his childhood years, Ilyumzhinov wrote in his autobiography, he “seemed to be living two lives,” one as a troublemaking child, the other (after a lesson from his grandfather) as a chess obsessive.

“I became fascinated by chess; I would sit at the checkerboard for hours forgetting everything,” Ilyumzhinov wrote of his childhood. “The 32 white and 32 black checks on the board seemed to me to encompass the duality of the whole world.”

After a stint working in a factory and then military service, Ilyumzhinov entered the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, one of Russia’s most prestigious universities and widely known for producing two types of graduates — diplomats and spies.

He graduated in 1989, having studied diplomacy and Japanese in the midst of perestroika, an era when the Soviet authorities began to allow limited types of private enterprise.

“I wanted to become a millionaire,” he said. So rather than enter, say, the foreign ministry, he became a car salesman. Ilyumzhinov said he made a small fortune importing Japanese and other luxury cars and wrote that he turned some “huge profits” on various high-risk, high-reward ventures.

According to Michael Khodarkovsky, a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago who has both studied in and written on Kalmykia, Ilyumzhinov quickly established himself among a new breed of post-Soviet powerbrokers.

“His early biography is very murky,” Khodarkovsky said. “After the Soviet collapse, people [like Ilyumzhinov] knew what strings to pull and quickly accumulated sizable fortunes.”

With wealth came power, as impoverished institutions looked to Ilyumzhinov and his considerable resources for a financial bailout.

He was elected to the Russian parliament in 1990, at which point, he wrote, he “began to allot money from [his] personal funds” to fill the gaps in the state’s budget. A few years later, in 1993, he was elected president of Kalmykia.

He was 31 years old. His first decree was to make chess obligatory in Kalmyk schools.

FIDE came calling shortly thereafter, and Ilyumzhinov harbors no illusions about the reason behind the sudden interest in his leadership.

“Why was I elected? Because FIDE was bankrupt then,” Ilyumzhinov told us. “There was no money. And so they asked me.”

In 1995, he was unanimously elected president of FIDE, giving him control of the sport that had long ago captured his imagination. He immediately moved to close FIDE’s debts, spending $2 million, he said, from his personal fortune.

It would become apparent, however, that both Kalmykia and FIDE had traded a short-term problem for a long-term ruler whose alleged activities were destined to make headlines around the world for more than two decades.

Some headlines were just weird — he has repeatedly claimed he was abducted by aliens in 1997. Others spoke to something more wicked.

Ilyumzhinov’s dual tenures in Kalmykia and at FIDE were dogged by scandal.

Once dubbed the “King of Kalmykia,” Ilyumzhinov allegedly used his homeland as a base of operations for illicit activity and intimidated those who stood in his way.

In expert witness testimony submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice and obtained by ABC News and FiveThirtyEight, Louise Shelley, the founder and director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University in Washington, D.C., wrote that, “Under the Ilyumzhinov regime, the Kalmyk public and law enforcement agencies were repeatedly accused of interfering in election campaigns, engaging in corrupt activities, [and] covering up and profiting from organized crime.”

The allegations, which Ilyumzhinov denies, go beyond corruption. Shelley testified that Ilyumzhinov’s regime “was tainted with gross human rights violations, including suppression of political opposition and harassment of human rights activists.”

Perhaps the “grisliest,” she noted, was the assassination “linked to Ilyumzhinov’s name.”

“But when you start to touch the purse, when you start to uncover concrete things that touch on money and concrete people, then they kill.”

As Ilyumzhinov prepared to welcome players and delegates from more than 100 countries to Kalmykia for the 1998 Chess Olympiad, the mutilated body of a local journalist was discovered in a pond on the outskirts of Elista, the region’s capital city.

Larisa Yudina had been the editor of Sovietskaya Kalmykia, an opposition newspaper affiliated with Yabloko, Russia’s most prominent liberal party. According to two of Yudina’s former colleagues, Valery Badmaev and Batyr Boromangnaev, Yudina had discovered details about a scheme involving Kalmykia’s so-called “offshore zone,” a tax haven from which many of Russia’s best-known oligarchs benefited.

Yudina’s colleagues said she was poised to report that money paid by companies registered in the offshore zone was flowing into a presidential fund and foreign bank accounts instead of Kalmykia’s budget.

“In Russia, you can criticize about some kind of general questions as much as you like,” said Badmaev. “But when you start to touch the purse, when you start to uncover concrete things that touch on money and concrete people, then they kill.”

The subsequent federal investigation into Yudina’s murder quickly yielded three suspects — Sergey Vaskin, Vladimir Shanukov and Andrey Lipin — and uncovered a direct link to Ilyumzhinov. The leader Vaskin, a former police officer, was a onetime member of his campaign team.

The three men were convicted, and in a Russian court filing detailing their sentences, the judge presiding over the case described how one of the men posed as a disgruntled former employee of an Ilyumzhinov-controlled agency that Yudina was investigating. He appeared to be eager to provide Yudina with compromising documents, luring her to an apartment where she was beaten and stabbed to death.

“Her professional activities are creating headaches for some influential people in the republic,” Shanukov testified Vaskin told him. “In connection with that, she needs to be removed.”

But in the end the authorities and the court found that “the involvement of other persons in the commission of the crime is not established.”

Almost immediately after Yudina’s body was discovered, Yabloko launched its own investigation into the murder, fearing a cover-up by local authorities loyal to Ilyumzhinov. Valery Ostanin, a former police officer with 20 years’ experience, was given full access to the case materials.

He called the murder the most “bestial” he had ever encountered. “There was blood on every wall and even on the ceiling,” Ostanin said.

According to Ostanin, there was credible evidence linking the murder to Ilyumzhinov, including a flurry of communications between Vaskin and members of Ilyumzhinov’s administration shortly after Yudina’s body was discovered. Yet the investigation stalled, he said, as case materials went missing and key investigators were transferred away.

In an interview, Ilyumzhinov acknowledged his acquaintance with Vaskin and his familiarity with Yudina’s reporting, but he dismissed the accusation he had any involvement in the tax scheme or her murder, claiming that he “investigated it specially so that there wouldn’t be conversations” and personally invited the federal agents from Moscow to launch their probe.

“There was a trial, there was an investigation, it was proved. The issue is finished,” Ilyumzhinov said. “Let me accuse you or your father of killing John Kennedy or Martin Luther King. It’s absurd.”

No charges were ever brought against Ilyumzhinov.

Whatever lingering suspicions surrounded Ilyumzhinov following the murder investigation, they don’t appear to have loosened his grip on power. He remained firmly entrenched in his Elista headquarters for more than a decade after Yudina’s killing, where throughout his rule a trio of flags waved overhead — one for Russia, one for Kalmykia, and one for FIDE.

In the months following the murder, Ilyumzhinov was re-elected president of FIDE. He ran unopposed.

According to Garry Kasparov, then the world’s top player and now an outspoken critic of both Ilyumzhinov and the Kremlin, chess insiders were more than willing to look the other way.

“[It] just put on display the indifference of the world of chess,” Kasparov said in 2017, “for the source of money that was being used to fund chess activities.”

“It’s not a secret. He can go like he is just there for chess, for the chess tournament, but he can deliver a message. And the message won’t get screwed up.”

Ilyumzhinov maintained a packed travel schedule that saw him unexpectedly but repeatedly appear beside some of the world’s best-known strongmen leaders, typically under the auspices of promoting the game.

In 2003, Ilyumzhinov flew to Iraq, less than two days before the start of the U.S. invasion, where he reportedly met with Saddam Hussein’s son, Uday. In 2011, he flew to Libya, amid an ongoing NATO bombing campaign, where he played a chess match against Moammar Gadhafi. And in 2012, he flew to Syria, shortly after the outbreak of civil war, where he met with Bashar Assad to, in Ilyumzhinov’s telling, deliver chess textbooks to Syrian schoolchildren.

At times, he appeared to be doing much more than promoting chess. Over the years, Ilyumzhinov has repeatedly been alleged to act as an informal envoy for the Russian government.

His son David confirmed that Ilyumzhinov served a unique role. “It’s not a secret,” David told us. “He can go like he is just there for chess, for the chess tournament, but he can deliver a message. And the message won’t get screwed up.”

With 188 national chess federations scattered across the globe, Ilyumzhinov’s opportunities for chess diplomacy were all but endless.

“It offers unique opportunities to be used as the unofficial embassy,” Kasparov said. “So Ilyumzhinov can go to different places as the president of the chess federation. … He’s a very useful ambassador. If you can call it ambassador.”

Ilyumzhinov, however, scoffed at questions about his association with other autocrats.

“If tomorrow Kim Jong Un from North Korea [contacted me],” Ilyumzhinov said. “I would also travel there and develop chess.”

He denied working directly for the Kremlin but acknowledged that his trips served a dual purpose. He described himself as a “people’s diplomat,” one who promoted not only chess but also “peace and stability.” He became “friends,” he said, with businessmen and politicians around the world with whom he might have casually shared information over lunch.

Peskov, who also serves as the chairman of the board of trustees of Russia’s national chess federation alongside other senior Russian officials, denied any connection between the Kremlin and Ilyumzhinov.

“He used his influence, and he used his authority to promote chess globally,” Peskov said. “And he’s got certain results. He was very successful.”

But Ilyumzhinov’s globetrotting — which his longtime deputy Georgios Makropoulos said was often the largest line item in FIDE’s annual budget — contributed to another fiscal crisis for the federation.

Several chess insiders agreed that the FIDE president’s well-publicized association with oppressive regimes made would-be sponsors increasingly wary of association with FIDE.

Rex Sinquefield, an American philanthropist and the biggest benefactor of American chess, bankrolls his own tournaments rather than doing business with FIDE.

“It’s not a group we could work with,” Sinquefield told us. “There’s a fundamental question of integrity and honesty, and it’s pretty clear to me the mess they’re in.”

But just as in Kalmykia, Ilyumzhinov’s money and Kremlin connections would make him especially difficult to remove from his perch atop chess.

The first serious challenge to his presidency came in 2010, when the Russian former world champion and onetime Communist Party apparatchik Anatoly Karpov ran against him. Karpov initially managed to win the support of the Russian Chess Federation until an armed raid of its headquarters, reportedly ordered by a then-senior Kremlin advisor Arkady Dvorkovich, appeared to persuade its officials to reconsider.

The second serious challenge came in 2014, when Kasparov ran against him. He appeared to attract significant support to his reformist agenda until what Kasparov described as “direct interference” by the Russian Foreign Ministry and the network of Russian embassies, including, he said, threats of retaliation and outright bribery, accusations Ilyumzhinov dismissed.

“What do I need votes for,” he asked us, “if I practically kept that organization running for 23 years?”

It would ultimately take an intervention of the highest order to precipitate Ilyumzhinov’s downfall — and it came from President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department.

In 2015, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Ilyumzhinov “for materially assisting and acting for or on behalf of the Government of Syria,” which had employed brutal measures to maintain control of its territory amid a popular uprising.

U.S. officials provided few details about the exact nature of the activity that led to the sanction but alleged that Ilyumzhinov owned or controlled the Russian Financial Alliance Bank alongside Mudalal Khuri, its chairman, who “has had a long association with the Assad regime and represents regime business and financial interests in Russia.”

According to a former U.S. Treasury Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, being placed on the U.S. list of sanctioned individuals not only freezes all U.S.-based assets but “really is a scarlet letter in the financial system.”

“Banks around the world will stop doing business with those people,” the former official said. “I mean a lot of banks, even non-U.S. banks.”

Ilyumzhinov vehemently denied allegations that he had assisted the Assad regime, but the sanction created a legitimacy crisis for him at FIDE. Despite that, Ilyumzhinov continued to enjoy a level of state support that revealed how important chess remains to Putin and his inner circle.

Peskov called the sanctions “illegal,” pointing out that Ilyumzhinov has never been convicted of any crime.

“We’re living in a world of allegations and fake news,” Peskov said.

Ilyumzhinov did all he could to combat the sanction. He wrote letters. He hired a lawyer. He even appealed directly to “His Excellency” President Donald Trump, whose alleged affinity for Russia had been dominating headlines for months.

“I know that you are completely and utterly committed to the principles and ideals of America,” Ilyumzhinov wrote to Trump in September 2017 in a letter obtained by ABC News and FiveThirtyEight. “I ask you to use your power and authority to allow me to come to New York and face law enforcement … Mr. President! What I’m asking is not vital for either FIDE or Ilyumzhinov. This is required by the principles of justice and human rights.”

None of his efforts appeared to make much progress, so with his colleagues within FIDE urging him to step down, he focused on doing what he did best.

Running for reelection.

“You are managing the responsibilities well,” Putin said. “You have accumulated lots of experience and have every chance to win … and I’d like to wish you success.”

By 2017, he appeared set to face his own deputy Makropoulos and English grandmaster Nigel Short, each of whom sought to cast themselves as reformers of a corrupt federation too close to the Kremlin.

In response, Ilyumzhinov began mobilizing state support behind his candidacy. In July, he secured Putin’s endorsement in a segment on Russian state-owned television. “I feel that Russia should not concede this position,” Ilyumzhinov told Putin. “And I have decided to run again for the post of the president of FIDE.”

“You certainly deserve this position,” Putin replied. “You are managing the responsibilities well. You have accumulated lots of experience and have every chance to win. In any case, you have deserved the right to present your candidacy and fight for the position, and I’d like to wish you success.”

In October 2017, the U.S. Chess Federation received a letter, which was obtained by ABC News and FiveThirtyEight, from the Russian Embassy in the U.S., urging the federation to support Ilyumzhinov’s candidacy.

“Chess is developing steadily,” wrote Russian Minister-Counselor Denis Gonchar. “And Mr. K. N. Ilyumzhinov enjoys high credibility according to his merit in the chess world.”

But just as a financial crisis gave Ilyumzhinov power, it would ultimately be a financial crisis that took it away from him.

In January of this year, the Swiss bank UBS moved to close FIDE’s accounts, notifying the federation of the “termination of [its] business relationship.” Bank officials, Makropoulos told us, made it clear in private meetings that FIDE’s accounts had become toxic.

Despite the financial problems, Ilyumzhinov remained undeterred. He bolstered his presidential ticket with an American named Glen Stark. But this would-be chess official, it was soon discovered, was neither named Glen Stark nor was he American; he was, in fact, a Russian named Igor Shinder allegedly peddling inflated credentials.

This strange scandal appeared to be too much, and Ilyumzhinov’s candidacy suffered an abrupt end — he stepped aside in favor of the Kremlin’s new chosen candidate, former deputy prime minister Arkady Dvorkovich.

Ilyumzhinov characterized his departure differently. He is merely stepping down, he said, because he has already “fulfilled all the tasks” before him and, like an undefeated boxer in his heyday, he has “already beaten the strongest.”

“If you have beaten Tyson and everyone, why go on, right?” Ilyumzhinov said. “You’re already top.”

The end of Ilyumzhinov’s reign

Results for World Chess Federation (FIDE) presidential elections

Year Candidate Country Vote share 2018 Arkady Dvorkovich

Russia TBD

–

Georgios Makropoulos

Greece TBD

–

Nigel Short

England TBD

–

2014 Kirsan Ilyumzhinov

Russia 64%

–

Garry Kasparov

Russia 36%

–

2010 Kirsan Ilyumzhinov

Russia 63%

–

Anatoly Karpov

Russia 37%

–

2006 Kirsan Ilyumzhinov

Russia 64%

–

Bessel Kok

Netherlands 36%

–

2002 Kirsan Ilyumzhinov

Russia —

–

1998 Kirsan Ilyumzhinov

Russia —

–

1996 Kirsan Ilyumzhinov

Russia 65%

–

Jaime Sunye Neto

Brazil 35%

–

1995 Kirsan Ilyumzhinov

Russia —

–

Ilyumzhinov replaced a resigning president in 1995, and in 1998 and 2002, he was unopposed. The 2018 election is scheduled for Oct. 3.

Source: FIDE

Whether he’s on the ballot or not, the upcoming chess election, like every chess election since 1995, is about one thing: Ilyumzhinov.

And like so many elections around the world, the Russians are allegedly meddling in it.

Chess leaders have convened in Batumi, Georgia, this week to elect the federation’s first new leader in 23 years. On Wednesday, they will choose between three men — Greece’s Georgios Makropoulos, England’s Nigel Short, and Russia’s Arkady Dvorkovich.

Makropoulos, Ilyumzhinov’s longtime deputy, is the de facto incumbent put in the awkward position of running on reform, framing the election as a choice between the federation’s political independence and continued “Kremlin control.” And Short, the longshot challenger, appears to have made more accusations than progress — he hoped for “the removal of the Makropoulos administration, which is nothing but a giant cancerous tumour on the body of chess.”

But the Kremlin-preferred candidate is the late-entrant Dvorkovich, the former deputy prime minister, who oversaw Russia’s staging of the FIFA World Cup earlier this year. Dvorkovich has supported Ilyumzhinov in the past — he reportedly ordered the raid on the Russian Chess Federation in 2010 — and in many ways represents a continuation of the sport’s alignment with the Kremlin.

The contest is facing mounting allegations of Russian interference, including an intervention by Vladimir Putin himself.

In a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in July, Putin appears to have offered Netanyahu a deal to shore up support for his chosen candidate.

“The Russian president asked the prime minister for Israel’s support in favor of former deputy prime minister Arkady Dvorkovich’s candidacy,” wrote an Israeli official in a cable obtained by ABC News and FiveThirtyEight. “Putin, in turn, said he would support Israel as the host of the next world championship.”

Dvorkovich disputed the interpretation that Putin was pressuring the Israelis to support him, telling the BBC that the Russian president “didn’t do anything wrong” and was merely “informing” his counterpart of an “important” election.

Makropoulos has also accused Russia of trying to boost Dvorkovich’s candidacy by promising money, positions of power and gifts — including 2018 FIFA World Cup tickets — to officials who have a vote in FIDE’s election.

Dvorkovich acknowledged inviting chess officials to the World Cup but denied providing them with tickets, and responded to Makropoulos’s claims by filing a defamation suit.

Peskov said the Kremlin has had no involvement in the candidacies of either Ilyumzhinov or Dvorkovich and rejected any allegations of interference.

“It’s a free vote,” Peskov said, “and we simply don’t have any means to interfere and we don’t have the slightest intention to interfere.”

So Ilyumzhinov’s legacy-defining battle rages on without him. Chess has been established as an effective instrument of “soft power” for the Russians, the former Treasury official said, and a “feather in the cap” like the Olympics or the World Cup that allows Russian leaders to project a polished image to visiting politicians and businessmen.

Ilyumzhinov has endorsed Dvorkovich, hopeful that under the former deputy prime minister, the “status” he says he brought to the organization will be “maintained,” but he dismissed the suggestion of holding a position under the new administration should a Russian keep the post.

“For what?” he scoffed. “I’m not a bureaucrat.”

But what’s next for Ilyumzhinov? His work, he said, is far from over. He said he will focus on philanthropic efforts to further his new goal of “teaching 1 billion people to play chess.”

He also suggested he might play a role in the reconstruction of war-torn Syria.

“Maybe I will do business there,” Ilyumzhinov said. “They are inviting me to get into it.”

According to Ilyumzhinov’s son, David, Ilyumzhinov’s “connections” remain valuable, and his presence can provide a measure of protection and influence in Russia’s notoriously ruthless business environment.

“He just partners,” David said. “Sometimes he goes in as cover, so that people won’t have problems. … It’s kind of lobbying but in a different way.”

Ilyumzhinov wavers between aggrievement and acceptance. He laments that the institutions he believes he saved have now turned on him, calling him “a fool” and telling him to “get out of here.” But he also adopts a kind of Buddhist serenity, claiming he “never look[s] back” and declaring “what’s past is past.”

“When people do nothing, just criticize, then I’m silent,” he said. “Because I have nothing to say to them. Like with the aliens. Why do aliens not argue with us? Because they are on a different level. I am on a different level to people. Why should I discuss or talk?”

He points to the Buddhist temples and “chess palaces” he built in Kalmykia and in countries around the world, monuments to the money he poured into his passions.

“Is that corruption?” he asked. “It’s a gift from me. Look how many I have built. I built that with my own money. In every region. They are real. They stand. Is that corruption? You Western people, you don’t know. You Western people don’t understand. You are a different mentality. I give.”

The actual Chess City in Elista, on the left, and a model of its original, grander plan, featuring a chess-decorated castle, on the right. The neighborhood sits largely neglected in the Russian desert.

PATRICK REEVELL

Elista’s Chess City is one such gift, a relic of the city’s once-favorite son. Built by Ilyumzhinov to host international chess tournaments, it is a convention center surrounded by a semi-gated community that is now home to the city’s small upper class. Its tidy suburban streets are lined with about 150 houses, many of which appeared to be empty, with crumbling facades and broken windows.

It is a rundown fantasy sitting neglected in the desert.

As his tenure with FIDE comes to a close, Ilyumzhinov envisions a different fate for himself. Asked directly why he was useful to the Kremlin, he bristled at the suggestion that his useful days are behind him.

“Why ‘was’? Have I flown away to the moon?” he asked. “I’m staying around!”

Halley Freger, Emily Ruchalski and Jinsol Jung also contributed to this report.

This story was initially developed with the support of The Hatch Institute, formerly The Contently Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit that offers editorial guidance and financial support to aspiring investigative reporters. Madden has since joined its board of advisers.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Pete Madden #Patrick Reevell and Oliver Roeder

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