#the backwater contracts of this sport are one of the best things

[onelastbreath-writes]

I Spy

Pairing: Frankie “Catfish” Morales/Fem!Reader (AFAB, no y/n)

Word Count: 1.7K

Warnings: Brief mention of bad(abusive/manipulative) parents, general adult topics, swearing.

Summary: You meet a cute guy at a bar, you date, you fall in love, and oops, it turns out you’ve both been lying about your careers. Classified only stays classified until you get assigned a mission together. (SpecOps&Spies, with Young!Frankie)

A/N: Hey guys, I was bad and started another fic. Whoops. This one is for Triple Frontier because I love that soft boi Francisco. The flavour of this fic, the vibe if you will, is basically the spiderman pointing meme. I’ve vaguely set the timeline to like mid-2000s? so I’ll be trying my best to stay true to technology and aesthetic of the era. There was so much denim. Anyways, that means I’m trying to write for about a 27-33 year old Frankie and a similarly aged reader. I don’t see this series being more than a couple chapters at best, so it’ll be short and sweet. Also, like, very little angst if I can help it; I just want this one to be a good, cute, fun read. Hope y’all enjoy! Xoxo

[AO3][Masterlist]

“So, you’re coming out tonight, right? You’re not busy or anything?”

“Please don’t say it like that, you know how busy work actually is. And I’m a grown woman; if I didn’t want to go to a shady dive bar with you and your very loud friends from the office, I’d say so,” You loved your best friend, and you missed spending time together, but you really couldn’t say the same for her co-workers.

You had nothing against the women she worked with, and you found that they were all perfectly lovely and usually quite fun to be around… it was just that when the alcohol came out, the volume control and verbal filters disappeared.

You wouldn’t say that barhopping was what you’d prefer to be doing tonight, along with more or less babysitting your friend and her friends, but you didn’t know when you’d next be able to squeeze in a night off to just hang out and have fun, so this was happening. You would laugh and smile and keep the drunk secretaries from going home with questionable people, and then you would look back on your ladies’ night with fond memories until you could eventually attend another.

You had known when you picked your career that it would be an around-the-clock, all-day, every-day sort of thing. You never deluded yourself into thinking you would have much of a social life or long-term relationships. Most partners, hell even most friends, would have a problem with you jetting off for weekends, or disappearing for days at a time under mountains of paperwork and appointments.

It just made your best friend that much more important to you. You’d met as kids, went through years of school beside each other, hung out, did stupid teenager things and then stupid young adult things together. You’d cried and laughed and fought and made up a million times, you’d gone to different colleges and still kept in touch, moved away, moved back, and you were still going strong. She was your ride-or-die, your anchor and your parachute and everything in between, so if you could use some of your precious, hoarded, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it time off to see her, that’s just what you’d do.

“You should take some of that fire, and direct it at your boss. Tell him no for a change. I’d love to see his face at that!” She meant well, always trying to look out for you and your health when it came to your beyond demanding job. You weren’t even allowed to tell her a fraction of what you were doing in your professional life, and she knew it, but that didn’t stop her from being ready to throw fists at your employer at a moment’s notice.

“One does not simply tell the über-rich that they don’t need to fly to Paris, again. Being a PA is a full-time nannying gig, except your charge is an adult who can argue when you say no, and you cannot put them on timeout when they’re being a brat. Where he goes, I go, and unless something drastic happens, it will probably continue on like that for a while.” She laughed at your jokes, and your heart hurt a little less at her glee. You knew she would never give up on you or blame you for your work being unpredictable, but that didn’t make the sting of last-minute cancels and missed outings hurt any less, for either of you.

“But it must be nice, just getting on a plane and going somewhere amazing at the drop of a hat. Travelling the world like a superstar, meeting people, having amazing adventures with mysterious strangers…”

“Easy there, Mamma Mia, your wanderlust is showing. And I’d take you with me in a heartbeat if I could. You were born to be a jetsetter, not to be stuck in this town with nothing but the office cubicle beside you to stare at. And I still think you should apply for one of those immersive culture grants you keep mooning over. They’d be fools not to fund your writing expedition!” She was an incredible person, three full degrees to her name in the time it took a normal student to get one, and a brain that could run miles around the rest of the professionals in her field. But she was tethered to this quiet backwater town, and she wasn’t free to fly like she deserved.

“You know I can’t just… go, like you can. My mom, it’d just break her heart… I don’t want to leave her alone, not after Dad,” You honestly doubted that you’d ever meet a woman more horrible and undeserving of her own daughter’s kindness. Helen was a parasite full of lies and manipulations and greed, and she had attached herself like a bad rash to your friend after she’d chased away the rest of her family members.

Your friend searched for the good in everyone, but you wished she’d stop looking for it at that home.

“You deserve your own happiness and freedom, and she should be encouraging you to spread your wings if and when you’re ready.” Politicking your friend was never something you enjoyed. She was the last person you wanted to use your negotiating credentials and sly subterfuge tactics against, but you wanted, needed, her safety and health more. You considered it almost bribery; dangling her dream future in front of her in exchange of being rid of the garbage in her life.

“Hey now, we’re getting way too deep into sad-drunk night conversations, and this is strictly a happy-fun-drunk night. Please leave all baggage and woes at the door, thank you!” You admitted your defeat and surrendered your verbal power point on Why Helen Needs to Disappear. You would get her next time for sure, give her the accelerant to burn down that bridge. “Anyways, the reason I called was to remind you of our haunt for the night. One of the girls, Kelly, you remember Kelly, found this adorable little hole in the wall. A total boys’ club apparently: darts, pool, sports games on the TV, but Kelly’s sister’s friend’s brother Tyler said the place was a favourite of the local army guys. So, if nothing else, we’ll at least have some hunks to look at for a while. It’ll be great!”

You jotted down the directions to the bar as she listed them, and the time you were expected to arrive there.

“Oh! And wear that cute little blue number you bought last spring; I know you still have it so don’t you dare lie. It makes your ass and legs look divine, and I think you could stand to make a new acquaintance tonight.” That Little Blue Number was buried in the back of your closet where you had hoped it would remain forever, but luck was not on your side tonight it seemed. But it did make you look, and feel, fantastic.  It was just so… breezy. “And heels! Real ones, not your cute little personal assistant kitten heels. Those black strappy ones would work like a dream!” You just sighed dramatically into the receiver and agreed to her demands.

“I’ll let you go now, and yes, I suppose I can be presentable tonight, dress and all. See-ya later!”

---

Hole in the wall was right. This place was basically underground it was so on the D.L. It was warm inside though, and in the middle of autumn with so much skin on display, you could not be more pleased to get away from the chilled outside air.

You would describe the interior as comfortable with a hint of rustic; lots of warm dark wood and low lights, mixed with the soft Latin music crooning in the background and the few patrons’ conversations adding to the ambience.

All in all, it was probably the nicest dive bar you’d been to in your hometown.

Your party was easy to spot where they had claimed a group of pushed together tables towards the far side of the establishment, and you carefully made your way over to them in your tricky high heels.

You said your hellos to returning faces and introduced yourself to the new additions, and accepted the chair you were pointed to and the drink pressed into your hand.

And so, the hours rolled.

You had enjoyed two fruity cocktails and a flaming shot before you called it quits on the alcohol for the night. You still had a few hours to sober up enough to drive home safely, and you would be able to help the girls get to their rides and ways home too. You appreciated having a social drink or two, but you didn’t care for hangovers and would happily take slightly tipsy over party-hard drunk anytime. Plus, your contract stated you were on-call, always, and you could be required to navigate high-stress negotiations at the drop of a hat. It was just better to cut yourself off, then reap the consequences of your actions later.

You tapped your friend’s shoulder as you walked past and leaned over to talk into her ear. “I’m getting some water for the table; do you want anything else?”

“Mmmm, no I think we’re good for now, thanks!” She was plastered already, but she had a huge grin on her face and was laughing at her co-workers’ stories, so you considered it a win of a night. You gave her a pat goodbye and swayed your way to the bar.

But you just were not accounting for the uneven floorboards, or how much your heels affected your currently less than steady equilibrium, and before you could blink you were teetering over into a nasty fall.

“Whoa there, easy does it, muñequita” Arms wrapped around you and pulled you back into a warm chest. “Careful now, don’t go twisting an ankle in those fancy shoes.”

You certainly did not account for the man you turned around to face. Wow.

His hands glided respectfully from where he had caught you around the waist to your still bent and held out elbows, steadying you as you swayed dangerously again.

Warm brown eyes, soft brown curls, and the sweetest smile you’d ever seen. It felt like your heart was going to beat out of your chest, and you knew that it wasn’t left over adrenaline from your near wipeout. He was gorgeous and handling you so gently, and you wanted to spend forever in that moment.

“Hey there, palomita, I’m Frankie, can I buy you a drink?”

[Next Part]

[chiseler]

STEVE COCHRAN: The Rough and the Smooth

The Chase (1946) opens with a broke ex-serviceman finding a lost wallet, plump with cash and bearing the name and address of its owner, Eddie Roman. Being an honest guy—or, as Roman’s sidekick puts it, a “silly law-abiding jerk”—the vet goes to return it. As though wandering into an opium trance, he enters a classical-rococo-tropical mansion, a fantasy of vulgar magnificence. The front door is bedecked with cherubs’ heads (one of which swivels to reveal a peep-hole framing the unmistakable eye of Peter Lorre). The dazzling white interior is cluttered with marble statuary on pillars, crystal chandeliers, antique chairs, banana trees, all slashed by thin bars of sunlight falling through white shutters.

Eddie Roman, a Miami gangster, is at home amid this surreal decadence. We first see him sitting regally in a barber’s chair, crowned with a pearl-grey homburg, intently studying his pencil-thin mustache in a hand-mirror. He has reason to look pleased as he contemplates his handsome face, its square-jawed and thick-browed swarthiness lightened by limpid eyes and a deceptively sweet smile. Absorbed in admiring his appearance, he pays no attention to the girl kneeling at his side giving him a manicure, until her file slips and nicks his finger. “I’m sorry, Mr. Roman, you moved,” the frightened girl gasps. “Yeah, but you didn’t—fast enough,” he replies, knocking her to the ground with a casual blow.

With a different actor, this whole set-up—the flamboyant interior decoration, the classical allusions, the dandified sadism, the ever-present sidekick played by Peter Lorre—might come across as heavily lavender-tinted. But Eddie Roman is Steve Cochran, who plays it straight in more ways than one. Cochran grew up in Wyoming and had worked as a cowboy before trying his hand at acting, but Hollywood took one look at his oily black hair and arrogant poise and pigeonholed him as a mobster. He took to the role with a patented brand of velvety menace, concluding that the way to play heavies was to assume that his characters had done nothing wrong, as they themselves would no doubt believe. Not for him the noir torments of guilt or anxiety or haunted memory. His gangsters were slick and unfeeling, and when he came to play deeper roles in films like Tomorrow is Another Day, Private Hell 36, and Il Grido, he plumbed the specific melancholy of men whose inchoate vulnerability is forced through the conventional expressions of machismo.

He was born Robert Alexander Cochran in 1917 and adopted the name Steve while acting in stock. (It suits him, perhaps for the same reason Lauren Bacall assigns it to Bogart’s Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not, giving it a distinctive inflection that conveys, “You’re an overconfident jerk—if only I didn’t find you so attractive.”) Cochran left college and headed to Hollywood convinced he could be a movie star, but despite his looks and confidence he was no overnight success; it took seven years of provincial theater (including Shakespeare in Carmel) before he finally scored a contract with Goldwyn in 1945. The Chase was his first decent break, after a series of small parts in Boston Blackie programmers and Danny Kaye vehicles.

Directed by Arthur Ripley and gorgeously shot by Franz Planer, The Chase is a baroquely convoluted adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s The Black Path of Fear. The centerpiece is an extended dream sequence that eschews the usual cinematic clichés but unsettles through jarring plot discontinuities; a maze of dark, disorienting spaces; and inexplicable poetic images like the woman weeping at a table bearing the half-eaten carcass of a watermelon, like something out of a 17th century Spanish painting. The film’s seemingly normal hero (the ex-serviceman, played by Robert Cummings) turns out to have a fragile mind prone to sudden white-outs. He’s almost as passive as Eddie Roman’s imprisoned wife (Michèle Morgan), who drifts around the mansion in draped Grecian gowns and a fog of hopeless terror. What she’s terrified of is her husband, and Cochran makes you believe that Roman is capable of even worse cruelty than anything we see him do. The calmer he is the more anxiously we wait for his outbursts of violence. His light voice, sweet smile, and hypnotic stillness create a deliciously sinister effect. Here and elsewhere, there’s something about the way Cochran’s hazel eyes catch the light, with a gleam that can register as tenderness or threat. It’s hard to pin down this luster, and that’s one of the best assets a movie star can have—some small thing that can’t be explained.

Though the bulk of his work was in B movies, Cochran appeared very briefly in Goldwyn’s great triumph, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Near the end of the movie, the beleaguered former airforce captain played by Dana Andrews—an intelligent, serious man stymied by a bad marriage and a humiliating job as a soda jerk—walks into his apartment to find another man lounging around in his shirtsleeves. It takes only moments to register the kind of heel he is: a self-satisfied, flashily handsome guy in a loud pinstripe suit, smoking and chewing gum and condescending to his married girlfriend’s husband. It’s his job to embody the crass, unscrupulous side of postwar life, the veterans who aren’t haunted by what they’ve seen, the operators who see money “lying around” for the taking. Cochran nails the type in under five minutes of screen time.

Virginia Mayo plays the wife he’s fooling around with, and they were paired frequently in the late forties, both typed as low-class, sexy but vulgar. They’re forgettable in A Song is Born (1948), Howard Hawks’s lifeless musical remake of Ball of Fire, but wonderful as a pair of greedy, backstabbing lovers in Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949). Cochran is “Big” Ed, a discontented second-banana to Cody Jarrett (James Cagney), who taunts him with sneering air quotes around his moniker. Cagney’s majestically psychotic performance fills the movie like a bellows, as he crumples inward under the pressure of his migraines and then explodes in gleeful violence. Big Ed is his opposite, cool and smooth, his stolid repose off-setting Cody’s trip-wire sensitivity. Cochran looks fantastic in a dark suit with a black shirt and light tie, and his best moments are tiny touches like the way he loudly spits out his gum before kissing Mayo, or blows smoke sideways in a beautifully nasty, smirking close-up as he quietly threatens to tell Cody who killed his mother if she walks out on him. If Cagney is white heat, Cochran is black ice.

He played a variation on Big Ed the next year in The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), one of those fun, full-throttle Joan Crawford vehicles that follows a woman as she claws her way out of dreary poverty, attains a pinnacle of penthouse luxury, and plunges from there into the abyss. Starting in the Texas oil fields, she winds up as the mistress of a racket boss (the terrifying David Brian), who sends her on a mission to spy on one of his regional under-bosses, whom he suspects of plotting to take over. That would be Cochran, who is not satisfied with the desert fiefdom where he lounges around swimming pools in white terry-cloth robes and saunters around nightclubs in loud sport jackets. He’s not a bad guy here, especially compared with Brian, but he remains devoted to the one Big Ed calls, “a very good friend—me.”

Cochran’s philosophy of playing heavies as though they were blameless did not mean he tried to make them sympathetic; indeed, it’s the utter remorselessness of his bad guys that makes them so bad. Still, it can be hard not to root for him in formulaic “crime does not pay” flicks like Highway 301 (1950), which opens with not one but three state governors solemnly addressing the camera, and then smothers all the action with heavy-handed voice-over. It’s tempting to just turn the sound off, because the film looks terrific, darkly glistening with rain-wet streets, sleek curves of forties cars, the matte sheen of good suits and perfect fedoras. Cochran, as the leader of a heist mob, wears an arrogant sneer as stylishly as his overcoat. When his girlfriend whines about feeling bored and neglected, he says coldly, “Why don’t you do something about your face? That ought to keep you busy for a few hours.”

He took a break from suave gangsters to play a cowardly redneck lout in Storm Warning (1950), an “exposé” of the Ku Klux Klan that proves nothing is more pusillanimous than Hollywood when it thinks it’s being courageous. Cochran cited the role as a favorite; he recalled being terrified by Klan demonstrations as a child and spoke of wanting to show how “shabby” they really were, of his pride at striking a small blow for racial tolerance. He was clearly sincere, and he later attended the 1963 March on Washington with fellow progressives like Marlon Brando; unfortunately, Storm Warning makes no mention whatever of the Klan’s attitudes towards blacks or Jews, depicting it as merely a racket to extort money from gullible hicks.

The film is further compromised by shameless plagiarism of A Streetcar Named Desire, with Ginger Rogers visiting her pregnant sister (Doris Day), who dotes on her crass but hunky working-class husband. Cochran, wearing a white t-shirt and sucking on a bottle of beer, lays on the dumb rube act a little thick, though at least he does not come off as a Brando impersonator. After a beautifully filmed opening in which Rogers witnesses a Klan killing in the deserted streets of a Southern backwater, and a powerful scene in which she is bullied into lying under oath about what she saw, the film turns luridly exploitative. Rogers is spied on and assaulted by her drunken brother-in-law, then publicly whipped at a Klan rally. This pushes the film’s wrong-headedness to absurdity: the culmination of the Klan’s evil is an attack on a beautiful blonde white woman.

In the 1950s, Cochran got tired of playing heavies and biting the dust in every movie; unhappy at Warner Brothers, he left in 1952 to form his own production company, producing a few change-of-pace films like Come Next Spring. But one of his very best roles came at Warners in Tomorrow is Another Day (1951), an unusually subtle and character-focused B noir directed by Felix Feist. Here he sheds his usual self-assurance to play a rough, unfinished man, drastically inexperienced and socially awkward—and does it beautifully. His character, Bill Clark, was sent to prison at age 14 for the murder of his abusive father. Released at 31, he’s a child in a man’s body, touchingly naïve but also insecure and truculent, readily falling back on violence.

Like Rip Van Winkle waking to an unfamiliar world, he wanders around town in a cheap, unfashionable suit, carrying his few belongings in a cardboard box. He’s drawn first to the new cars, studying one with boyish wonder; then to girls, hesitantly trying to follow one in the street. His uncertainty and sulky defensiveness are painfully exposed, whether he’s being teased for ordering three pieces of pie in a diner, or stumbling sheepishly into the dime-a-dance Dreamland, where ten cents buys sixty seconds of feminine company. Here he is easy pickings for Kay (Ruth Roman), a gorgeous, hard-shelled bottle blonde who demands trinkets in exchange for her time. When he obediently returns with a wrist-watch, she rewards him with a peck on the cheek and a “Thanks, Jim.” Still smitten, he shyly kisses her hand, and on learning she doesn’t get off work for hours, mutters, “I’m used to waitin’.”

When Bill and Kay are mixed up in a killing, he panics, knowing that with his record he’s a “dead pigeon.” They go on the lam, but their route takes them far from the usual lovers-on-the-run formulas. Without a car of their own, they sneak into one of the vehicles being towed on a tractor-trailer, hop freight trains, and hitch a ride with a Joad-like family on their way to a lettuce-picking camp in Salinas. They start out hostile and bickering, and when Bill proposes in a motel room he does so by handing her a ring and saying churlishly, “Pawnbroker gave me a good deal.” But though he implies that marriage is a sacrifice to necessity, the truth is that he desperately wants her and has decided this is the only way he can get her. In the scene that follows, as they lounge on a bank above the railroad tracks, he tells her about the murder of his father and about his years in jail, where he earned ten cents a day as a welder. “You worked a whole day,” she says wonderingly, “Just to dance a minute at Dreamland.”

Bill asks his bride if she thinks people change, “I mean, inside.” She does: dying her hair back to brunette, switching her name to Kathy, she emerges from her cynical shell. But Bill never seems to change; in the end, when he’s betrayed by a friend and threatened with going back to jail, he reacts with blind anger and panicked violence. This incorrigibility coexists with his gentleness: when Kathy tells him she’s pregnant, his sullen face delicately opens into an angelic smile, but not long after she has to shoot him to stop him from killing the sheriff who comes to arrest him.  The ending of the movie is a cop-out, but the revelation that the whole saga has been driven by mistakes, lies, and misunderstandings has a certain fitting irony.

Cochran drew even more deeply on this strain of confusion and sorrow in Antonioni’s Il Grido (1957), another movie about life on the road. The title translates as “The Cry,” and the film is essentially one long, muted howl of loss. Dubbed in Italian, Cochran plays Aldo, a simple working man who has lived for years in a common law marriage with Irma (Alida Valli), with whom he has a daughter, Rosina (Mirna Girardi). The movie opens as Irma, without warning or explanation, tells Aldo she’s leaving him for another man.

Like Bill Clark, Aldo is a muddled mixture of gentleness and violence, an aching wound papered over with inarticulate masculine pride. His reaction to Irma’s rejection is baffled and ineffectual; his instinct is to lash out, but he pulls back from hitting her. Later, desperate to assert his authority, he beats her in front of a crowd of townsfolk, but it’s he who comes away looking weak and defeated, having now sealed their estrangement. Taking their daughter, he sets out on an aimless journey, a futile search to replace what he’s lost.

The real star of Il Grido is the wintry landscape of the Po Valley. Nothing could be further from the Italy of vacation fantasies than this grey, muddy, industrial wasteland. Thin, bare branches are traced on the fog, sprouting from pollarded trees like amputees’ stumps. Desolate fields of rocks, marshes, and flat sodden riverbanks are made even bleaker by factories and construction sites, gas stations and refineries. The relentlessly overcast, drizzly weather is like an expression of Aldo’s numb, mournful mood. Cochran’s face, beginning to look worn, blends in with the landscape; he’s still ruggedly handsome, but stripped of all glamour and self-assurance, an ordinary man suddenly adrift with no bearings.

Aldo is hardly a model father, as he subjects his little girl to a tough and lonely life on the road, but there are moments when he comforts her with heartbreaking tenderness, and you always feel that in his fumbling way he is doing his best for her. (Still, it’s a relief when he finally sends her back to her mother.) The structure of this episodic film comes from Aldo’s encounters with three different women, each a possible but ultimately inadequate substitute for Irma. A former girlfriend (played by Betsy Blair) and a sexy young widow who runs an isolated service station both offer him refuge, and he has a torrid affair with the widow, but both times he drifts away. He has the chance to go to Venezuela, but inexplicably tears up his papers. He winds up with a prostitute who suffers from malaria, huddling in a leaky hut made of reeds and filled with acrid smoke. Amid this wretchedness, he remembers visiting a museum with Irma, a poignant revelation of what she represents in his barren and messy world.

He is inconsolable, and the life and purpose just drain out of him, leaving him an empty husk. In the end, Aldo returns to the town he left, to find it roiling with mass meetings over land seizures, a chaos of bulldozers, ruins, blazing fields and armed police. But for Aldo, the last straw is seeing, through a window, Irma with her new baby, annihilating his hopes. It’s hard to think of another movie in which someone essentially, and convincingly, dies of love.

Steve Cochran had a great deal of practice at dying; having succumbed onscreen to many predictable violent ends, he topped them in 1965 with one of Hollywood’s most legendarily bizarre deaths. That he was only 48 is tragic, but that he died aboard a yacht with an all-female crew is irresistibly titillating. None of the young Mexican women (whom he had hired, allegedly with a view to making a movie about a real yacht captain who had an “all-girl” crew) knew how to pilot the boat, which drifted for ten days off the coast of Guatemala after Cochran unexpectedly fell ill and died of a respiratory ailment. This story left a somewhat lurid stain on his life, though it seems to have been nothing but a publicity stunt gone terribly awry.

Alas, Cochran’s off-screen behavior rarely enhanced his reputation for seriousness. He seems to have been amiable and well-meaning, and neither his chronic womanizing nor his penchant for reckless driving and flying were anything out of the ordinary in Hollywood. More damningly, Don Siegel claimed he had trouble catching Cochran “even slightly sober” during the filming of Private Hell 36 (1954), though you’d never guess this from his sharp, nuanced performance as a corrupt cop in love with a nightclub singer (Ida Lupino, who co-wrote the script). His character, Cal Bruner, is callous, vain, and morally shifty—a plainclothes dick who tackles and fatally shoots a robber, then readies himself for a date with perfumed aftershave while complaining that the “miserable creep” ruined his new suit. He’s a guy on the make, lightly detached from everything except his own concerns. Yet when Cal falls for Lily, a canary with an exhausted voice and bone-dry sense of humor, he becomes someone we care about. He has better taste than we would have expected (Lily—who seems older than Cal, though Lupino was a year younger than Cochran—is no brainless babe), and more substance.

“You know, somewhere in my dim past I seem to have heard this before,” Lily deadpans when Cal makes a pass. “I’ve said it before,” he replies readily, “To all shapes and sizes. Only this time I mean it. Don’t ask me why.” Cochran and Lupino have serious chemistry (the scene where he unties the halter neck of her dress and massages her naked shoulders is a classic of Code-era steaminess), but Cal and Lily also connect on some deeper level, making us believe these two what’s-in-it-for-me types surprise themselves with genuine feeling. When he sits at the bar watching her croak out a hard-hearted ditty called “Didn’t You Know,” his eyes brim with a clear, soft light. In this part, Cochran layers cool selfishness and tender warmth so closely, nothing thicker than a razor could separate them.

by Imogen Sara Smith

[dubsism]

Today’s Movie: The D.I.

Year of Release: 1957

Stars: Jack Webb, Don Dubbins, Jackie Loughery

Director: Jack Webb

This movie is not on my list of essential films.

NOTE: This installment of Sports Analogies Hidden In Classic Movies is being done as part of something called the Send In The Marines Blog-A-Thon being hosted by J-Dub from Dubsism and Gill from RealWeegieMidget Reviews.  The premise is simple.  Since this event coincides with the anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Marine Corps, this blog-a-thon is dedicated to films or television programs either about the USMC, those in which actual Marines appear, or feature actors who served in the Marine Corps.

The Story:

Like most of the productions he’s most known for, 1957’s “The D.I.” was produced by Jack Webb’s production company Mark VII Limited.  It was also directed by Webb, who just so happens to play the lead role of Technical Sergeant Jim Moore.  And like Jack Webb’s “Emergency!” which starred his ex-wife Julie London, “The D.I.” features  former Miss USA Jackie Loughery, who Webb would marry in 1958.

“The D.I. ” was the first screenplay by James Lee Barrett; it was adapted from his play “The Murder of a Sand Flea” which was based on his experiences as a Marine recruit on Parris Island in 1950.

Webb’s “Sergeant Moore” is a hard-nosed drill instructor on Parris Island who has a problem recruit named Private Owens (played by Don Dubbins). Moore believes Owens has “the right stuff” to be a Marine.  But for reasons Moore can’t fathom, Owens has a bad habit of caving in under pressure. But Moore believes he can drive Owens to pass muster if continues to push him. But the harder Moore pushes, the more Owens fails.  As a result, Owens attempts to desert.

A subsequent discussion between Owens, Moore, and the company commander Captain Anderson (played by Lin McCarthy) yields the discovery that Owens had two older brothers who were Marines, and they both were killed in action in Korea.  Anderson has had enough of Owens and is ready to discharge him.  But then Owens mother (played by Virginia Gregg)  makes an announced visit to Parris Island.  She tells Sergeant Moore that Owens’ father was also a Marine who was killed in action during the invasion of the Marshall Islands in World War II.  She also tells Moore that she made a mistake coddling her only remaining son, and that if he fails to make it as a Marine, it will destroy him. Owens’ mother then begs Moore not to give up on him,. assuring Moore that Owens can take whatever Moore can offer, and to keep driving him.

At this point Captain Anderson changes his mind and tears up Owens’ discharge paper, and the film ends with Owens well on his way to earning his eagle, globe and anchor.

The Hidden Sports Analogy:

When National Football League scouts look for a quarterback, they have particular things in mind.  They either want an athletic guy who can extend plays with his ability to evade tacklers, or they want a tall guy with a cannon for an arm. If they find a guy who has both, they will collectively salivate over him. But if you are a quarterback who is neither of those things, you may never get the chance to show what a great football player you really are.

That brings us to the tale of Drew Brees.

If you are a current NFL fan who hasn’t suffered a traumatic brain injury, you know not only is Drew Brees one of the best players in the game today, he’s one the greatest quarterback to ever step on the gridiron. He’s a first-ballot lock for the Hall-of Fame, and he’s re-written the record books for passers; as of this writing nobody has amassed more passing yards in the history of the NFL than Brees. The Dubsism list has him ranked at #5 all-time.

But there was a time when nobody thought he could play in the NFL, because he’s not one of the two things scouts are looking for.

The skepticism over Brees began back in his high school days.  Despite the fact he shredded the record books in the hotbed of high-school football known as Texas, the big-time college programs both in and out of Texas weren’t interested in a short, slow quarterback who didn’t have the “big arm.”

But there was one football coach who believed in Drew Brees.  His name was Joe Tiller, and he was the head coach at the University of Wyoming. To be honest, Brees wasn’t exactly thrilled about trading in football-crazy Texas for Laramie, Wyoming, a cow-town 7200 feet up in the Rocky Mountains, but Tiller was the only coach interested in him.  But then fate stepped in when Joe Tiller became the head coach at Purdue University.

That meant instead of being in the backwaters of college football, Brees had a shot to ply his wares in the heart of Big Ten country.  Granted, the Purdue Boilermakers weren’t very good at the time, but being in the Big Ten still meant the biggest stages and brightest lights college football has to offer. Together, Tiller and Brees put Purdue football back on the map, taking the Boilermakers to their first Rose Bowl in over 30 years in 2001.

Later that same year, NFL teams were still skeptical of Brees when Draft Day rolled around.  Despite his stellar career at Purdue and having just finished third in that season’s Heisman trophy voting, every NFL team passed on him in the first round.  Brees was selected with the 1st pick of the second round by the San Diego Chargers.  In contrast, the two guys who finished ahead of Brees in the Heisman voting, quarterback Chris Weinke of Florida State and Josh Heupel of Oklahoma weren’t selected until the 4th and 6th rounds respectively. Weinke won two NFL games in his career, with 17 straight losses in between them, and Heupel never played a single down in an NFL regular-season game.

However, Brees struggled in his first three seasons with the Chargers.  He threw only 29 touchdown passes against 31 interceptions and notching a 10-17 record as a starting quarterback. Brees was so bad the Chargers drafted a quarterback with the 1st overall pick in the 2004 Draft.  Brees hung on to the starting job for two more seasons in San Diego, all the while with young gun Philip rivers waiting on the sideline.

All bets were off when Brees injured his throwing his throwing shoulder late in 2005. The Chargers wasted no time handing the ball to Philip Rivers, and made it known Brees’ contract would not be renewed. That meant the quarterback nobody wanted was now without a job, and to make matters worse, he now had an injury which only added to the questions about him.  Originally, only the Miami Dolphins showed any interest, but ultimately they did not offer him a contract.

But in another intervention of fate, the New Orleans Saints hired Sean Payton as their new head coach; he was previously the Dallas Cowboys’ offensive co-coordinator. Payton himself was also an ex-quarterback nobody wanted, having been in the Arena Football League, who then sold his rights to the Ottawa Rough Riders of the Canadian Football League.  But most notably, Payton was the replacement quarterback of the Chicago Bears during the player’s strike in 1987.

In any event, Payton was not a believer in Aaron Brooks, the quarterback he inherited.  Instead, Payton was the driving force behind the Saints locking up Brees with a six-year, $60 million contract.  At the time, that was considered to be a huge gamble, but it has clearly paid off.  Just look at the list of Brees’ accomplishments since then:

Super Bowl Champion (XLIV)

Super Bowl MVP (XLIV)

First-team All-Pro (2006)

Second-team All-Pro (2008, 2009, 2011, 2018)

NFL Offensive Player of the Year (2008, 2011)

Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year (2010)

Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year (2010)

Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year (2006)

NFL passing yards leader (2006, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2014–2016)

NFL passing touchdowns leader (2008, 2009, 2011, 2012)

If that weren’t enough, Brees holds several NFL records:

Most career passing yards

Most career pass completions

Highest career pass completion percentage

Highest single-season completion percentage

Most consecutive games with a touchdown pass

Most pass completions in a season

Most 5,000 yard passing seasons

Most touchdown passes in a  single game (tied)

Now, one might think that a guy who has reached the top of the mountain like Brees has would be happy just to enjoy the spoils of success.  That would not be the case.  In fact one of the reasons Brees was featured in this installment of Sports Analogies Hidden In Classic Movies is he has been known to hang out and train with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Djibouti.

The Moral of The Story:

Another post in this Marine blog-a-thon featured a moral about people really don’t know what they have inside of them until somebody drags it out. But for that to happen, the “dragger” has to believe in the “draggee.”

Check out Dubsism’s Movies and Blog-A-Thons page for a full schedule of projects past, present, and future!

Got a question, comment, or just want to yell at us? Hit us up at  dubsism@yahoo.com, @Dubsism on Twitter, or on our Pinterest,  Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook pages, and be sure to bookmark Dubsism.com so you don’t miss anything from the most interesting independent sports blog on the web.

Sports Analogies Hidden In Classic Movies – Volume 60 “The D.I.” Today's Movie: The D.I. Year of Release: 1957 Stars: Jack Webb, Don Dubbins, Jackie Loughery Director: Jack Webb…

[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

Brand storytelling with content marketing, Colin Kaepernick and Nike

Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign is perhaps 2018’s highest profile example of brand storytelling. And while multi-million dollar, celebrity-vehicle campaigns can feel like something happening on another planet, there are some good lessons here for regular content marketers who want to leverage storytelling for their own brands.

In this post, we’ll pick out our 3 takeaways from the Kaepernick-fronted Dream Crazy campaign, focussing on the storytelling elements. But let’s start with a quick definition of what we mean by “brand storytelling” and why it matters to your content marketing strategy.

What is brand storytelling?

Brand storytelling is about taking the “why” behind your business and using it to create interesting, engaging and authentic content. The aim is to build a genuine bond with your target audience that leads not just to short-term sales but to long-term loyalty. Brand stories help your customers stick with you not just because they like your products, but because they identify with you and how you present yourself to the world.

How does brand storytelling help your bottom line?

Like content marketing more generally brand storytelling can be effective at every stage of the sales funnel. From introducing your business to people for the very first time to helping them choose you over the competition when they make a purchase decision, the stories you create and share really matter.

Where’s the brand story in Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign?

If you take a cynical view of global sportswear brands attaching themselves to zeitgeist-topping superstars, then Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign is opportunistic, or even exploitative. After all, Nike kits out all 32 teams in the NFL, the very organisation Kaepernick claims has blacklisted him over his national anthem protests. And according to the New York Times, Nike considered dropping him as recently as last year.

But the Dream Crazy ad that Kaepernick narrates taps into a common theme in Nike’s advertising and marketing strategy. Look back at previous campaigns and you’ll see heroes facing down adversity. That hero might be a famous sports star like Kaepernick or Serena Williams or Neymar.

Often though the hero of the story is someone easier for Nike’s regular customers to identify with. The idea is to induce an emotional response and not always a positive one. Nike ads can be inspiring but they can also make you feel guilty, lazy and inadequate. Don’t be such a loser. Get off the sofa, buy some new running shoes and be the hero of the story.

The Kaepernick campaign has all these elements. Kaepernick is the hero. The man who gave up a gilded career as a professional football player to fight for a just cause. To paraphrase the tagline of the campaign, he believed in something even though it meant sacrificing everything. He faced challenges – the loss of his career, death threats, presidential tweets – and is living the hero’s journey, a narrative arc that has served traditional storytellers for centuries.

3 brand storytelling takeaways from Nike and Colin Kaepernick

So. what can us real-world content marketers learn from Nike’s Kaepernick campaign? Here are our 3 takeaways:

1. Emotive content generates a response (but not always a good one)

Something we can cling on to while waiting to be replaced by robots is that we’re emotional beings. How we feel has a significant bearing on how we act. This means content that triggers an emotional response can capture the attention of your target audience and prompt them to take action.

A 2015 study featured in the Journal of Marketing Research found that people who saw pictures of celebrities they liked were more inclined to buy nearby products even if they were not being directly endorsed or promoted. But seeing celebrities they didn’t like had the opposite effect.

Nike knew that a marketing campaign built around Colin Kaepernick would trigger both positive and negative emotions. While some were burning their own Nike gear on social media in protest, a great many more were buying Kaepernick’s new line of #IMWITHKAP jerseys, which sold out a few hours after they launched.

Thank you 2 each & every 1 of you that supported this journey. The Official Limited Edition #IMWITHKAP jersey released today instantly sold out! ALL PROFITS will go 2 support @yourrightscamp! Sign up 4 our newsletter at https://t.co/aK6dKa5Boa & be the first 2 know what’s next! pic.twitter.com/EDos7ZyvoJ

— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 11, 2018

2. Some stories never get old (even after 30 years)

Not everyone buys Nike products. Some people don’t like how Nike operates as a business. But the success of its brand-building efforts are impossible to ignore. According to Forbes, the business magazine, Nike’s brand ranks 18th most valuable globally and is number one in apparel.

The consistency of the stories Nike tells in its advertising and marketing campaigns has been a huge part of this success. Dream Crazy marked the 30th anniversary of Nike’s iconic “Just Do It” campaign, which launched the tagline the company still uses today.

Look back three decades to the very first Just Do It ad and you’ll see those familiar themes we highlighted earlier in this post. The guy is 80. He runs 17 miles every day. Maybe you should do that too. In some new trainers.

Now, Nike obviously has the money to keep telling that story, And not just on some backwater company blog. They can put it on television, splurge millions on social media ads and pay for celebrity endorsements. But consistency in brand storytelling applies to your real world campaigns too.

If you’re more experienced, more local, more environmentally-friendly than the competition, that needs to be a recurring theme in the content you create. It is only by repeating consistent messaging that you will get your audience to associate you with the themes you care about.

3. Brand stories always have to be true (or at least believable)

Critics of Colin Kaepernick would argue that he was an unremarkable quarterback who had lost his starting place before his kneeling protests gained him notoriety and two million followers on Twitter. Has a millionaire former football player fronting a marketing campaign for the 18th most valuable brand in the world really sacrificed everything?

His supporters would counter that at 30, Kaepernick could have expected at least one more highly lucrative contract. And while it’s true Kaepernick was no Tom Brady he was still an elite athlete who played in a Superbowl and was deemed worthy of a USD 126 million contract just four years ago.

The dedication and the emotional and physical toll required to make it to the NFL should never be underestimated. Once achieved, only the tiny minority who have been among the very best in their field know what it’s like to have that taken away. To not be able to do the one thing you’re best at is indeed a significant sacrifice.

Where you stand on that argument will determine how you feel about Colin Kaepernick’s part in Nike’s brand story. He is either the hero or the villain. Early indications from sales and the free media Nike has earned would suggest this calculated risk has paid off. Kaepernick has become a focal point of the resistance to the resurgent right under the Trump presidency. It would seem that people are either willing to accept or ignore Nike writing in a part for itself.

The brand’s association with the NFL, while contradictory in many ways, has also helped make Nike’s Kaepernick story more authentic. In the viral images of his kneeling protest Kaepernick’s uniform and helmet are adorned with the Nike swoosh. In many ways it felt like Nike was sponsoring his fight against social injustice before Dream Crazy.

The takeaway here for any brands using storytelling is that the story – and their part in it – has to be believable. The story of your brand isn’t just something for your blog and your social media. It has to be evident in how you run your business every day.

Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoIt pic.twitter.com/SRWkMIDdaO

— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 3, 2018

from http://bit.ly/2C7Vydi

[nofomoartworld]

How Olivier Assayas' Unofficial "International Trilogy" Did the Impossible

Only as I step back out into Saturday night do I feel the denouement of French director Olivier Assayas' unofficial "International Trilogy," which I had spent the past six hours screening at Lower East Side film haunt, The Metrograph. The stillness that betrays death in 2004's Clean cold-calls down an empty stretch of Ludlow Street. A model's desultory gaze on a torn-up fashion ad beckons fulfillment at the cost of agency, the pharmacopornographic pact of 2002's Demonlover. My pocket-weight, which had been, for a quarter of a day, disallowed to disturb me, now drags like an anchor with its cut-off contact; the paradox of interconnectedness in 2007's Boarding Gate. Altogether, it makes me wish I were back inside my cinematic chrysalis, inside that bubble outside of everything, watching the films back-to-back all over again. I'd rather watch multinational capitalism subsume the world, as, over the course of three films, Assayas illustrates, than have to face it.

Olivier Assayas (L) in conversation with Greta Gerwig (R) following the screening of Clean. Image: Metrograph LLC

"Assayas' unofficial 'international' trilogy tracks the frictionless movement of bodies and capital (currency, culture, sex) across continents, through a sinister landscape of hotel rooms and business parks that are everywhere the same," is how The Metrograph bills it. But Assayas himself, live and in conversation with the actress and filmmaker Greta Gerwig following the 3:30PM screening of Clean, goes into little detail about the trilogy's 'unofficial' business. How Clean came about after his divorce from the film's star, Maggie Cheung; how Demonlover was his answer to a millennial cinema lacking the bite of DeLillo books; and how Boarding Gate just wanted to be a B-movie; are all more important than the films' critical theory, of which they've generated an abundance. Instead, Assayas and Gerwig gab about the then-real-life indie rock scene immortalized in Clean, about the peripheral importance of blocking a scene, and about "Kristen [Stewart] the person, not Kristen the movie star." (Stewart leads Personal Shopper, Assayas' latest film, in theaters now.) I get the impression that discussing the theoretical implications of his films bores Assayas; he'd rather say it on celluloid than into a cordless mic. "Filmmaking," he contends, "is all about freedom and the boundaries you create for yourself." Having to explain yourself later, I gather, isn't very liberating.

Maggie Cheung stars as Emily Wang in Clean.

What's interesting, then, is how each film deals with boundaries and/or the modern world's lack of them. Clean, for example, separates the world of movement from the world of stillness. When aging rocker Emily Wang (Maggie Cheung) gets released from jail following the junkie death of her partner, Lee Hauser (James Johnston), she faces two worlds: one, as a singer-songwriter revered and reviled for her hard-living ways, and the other, as the single parent of an estranged, now fatherless, young son. For Emily, staying put signals death—both the death of her dreams and of Hauser, as a reliable heroin sale quickly demonstrates. Movement, on the other hand, means living, both in terms of road tripping and crossing continental lines in pursuit of life after losing the person who kept her in motion. But when her father-in-law Albrecht (played with striking tenderness by a grizzled Nick Nolte) arrives in Europe to settle Hauser's affairs, he presents our heroine the opportunity to reconnect with her son and renegotiate her own borders in the process. She can mother her child and remain a globe-trotting songstress, provided she kicks the thing that's been blurring her lines throughout the entire process: her drug addiction.

In Demonlover, however, the importance of lines is that they're all torn wide open. Lines of communication, lines of thinking, and even the lines between the digital and physical worlds are forcibly violated in the cautionary tale masquerading as a crypto-caper. Corporate double-agent Diane de Monx (Connie Nielsen) crosses company wires and double-crosses her coworkers in pursuit of a lucrative internet porn company portfolio. But as the world of hand-drawn hentai is ravaged by the emergence of 3D CGI animation, so, too, are Diane's devices by an even more ruthless network of independent power players. The narrative "glides from Paris to Tokyo to backwater Mexico to the American suburbs, all with the speed of a broadband signal," writes The Metrograph. As opposed to Clean's Emily Wang, Diane de Monx's comeuppance (and perhaps her salvation?) arrives when she is finally—and quite literally—tied down.

Asia Argento as Sandra in Boarding Gate.

Where Clean deals with setting boundaries and Demonlover with breaking them, Boarding Gate presents a world of boxes, bubbles, and cages of our own creation. It is a tale that pits those who survived the ontological shift ushered in by the new millennium against those who didn't, as "cliché of a bygone era" underworld magnate Miles Rennberg (Michael Madsen) soon discovers. Following a visit from old girlfriend Sandra (an inimitable Asia Argento), his attempt to reignite their former flame consumes him like kindling but sets her off on a blaze of bullets, drugs, and contract killings all the way from Paris to Hong Kong. If Miles is a sheep in a wolf's sport jacket, the film is a Deleuzian hot-take, high on GHB and not wearing any panties. Of Boarding Gate, philosopher-critic Steven Shaviro writes, "[the film] presents the world of global capitalism as a loose ensemble of lateral connections among contiguous but separate spaces. [...] Some of the spaces through which Sandra passes are nearly empty, and others are filled with crowds. Some of them are run down, and some are luxurious. But none of them is home; none of them is a place where Sandra might be able to stop for a moment and take a breath—let alone a place where she might actually feel that she belongs." It exposes the simple, eviscerating fact that we now live in a world where our identities are determined by our cell phones, credit cards, and passports, and not the other way around.

Seen together, the three films tell the story of a world in transition—from one in which what was shared was private, to one where nothing could be private, to one where intimations of individuality reflect over the skins of customizable identity-bubbles that pass over each other like temporary Venn diagrams, but with more choke sex and cell phone interruptions (Boarding Gate, in fact, features watershed moments in both).

"Such is our postcinematic condition: the fantasies that used to be manufactured specifically by the movies can now be found more or less everywhere," writes Shaviro. "This is why Assayas, for all his daring, seems to be making films under a sort of constraint. In an age of ubiquitous recuperation, he cannot hope to display anything like the exuberance, caprice and freedom of invention of his predecessors in the French New Wave." But for six hours at The Metrograph, immersed in Assayas' worlds of fantasy, I escape the all-consuming fantasy of whatever it is we call the "real world" today. In a funny-backwards way, the experience gives me the hope that there just might be something that comes after multinational capitalism—the caveat being that the only one way to proceed is to continue plowing through. So, invest in a coat that will last you; learn how to grow your own food; start reading the classics; whatever it takes, do you. For what it's worth, which is no more or less than everything, I'll be at the movies.

Olivier Assayas' "International Trilogy" screened in full on March 11. Click here to learn more about The Metrograph.

Related:

Watch the 19 Best Films About Artificial Intelligence at This Indie Movie Theater

A Private Moment with 'Elle' and 'Robocop' Director Paul Verhoeven

Everything We Know About the Art in 'Nocturnal Animals'

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