#the redford center | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

a-strange-inkling · 11 months

Text

If anyone would like a little jealous Eddie to go along with their plate of jealous Chrissy, here’s a little more of the jealousy one shot:

He knows with every fiber of his being that loving Christina Elizabeth Munson née Cunningham is the single greatest most difficult thing he will ever do in this life.

But she loved someone else first.

What were his past conquests? Why were they a cause of concern. She loved Carver. She was with him for three years.

Three years.

They haven’t even been freaking married for three years.

She was going to marry him.

Not like just move in with him at college or something no, fucking marry him. White dress, spring wedding at Olde North Chapel the next year. He had a ring for her. Chrissy had seen it herself, snuck a peek after her friends told her about it, where it was hidden in his dresser.

Eddie wondered if she pulled it out of the box. Tried it on. He could never bring himself to ask.

He takes her hand and finds his ring, the one he made her in his shitty garage. The one she’s wearing now. The one she accepted. The one she vowed to wear forever. He spins it around her finger, unable to forget that sweet, personal conversation he shouldn’t have heard her junior year when he was a second year senior.

It was a typical day… He’d been smoking with Jeff and Donnie after school in the back of his van when Jason Carver rode into Hawkins High on a motorcycle of all things. The deep revving of the engine was so rich and condescending that everyone had to look. Even he and the boys were unable to stop themselves from peering over as Carver did a full turn around the parking lot, doing a few wheelies before pulling up to the curb around the gym where the cheerleaders were just coming out after practice.

They all gasped and squealed in delight at the show.

All except Chrissy who stood stock still in the center of her squad, gaping in amazement and disbelief. They were all shaking her arm and pointing. Like, oh my God, look Chrissy! Look at your boyfriend! He’s on a motorcycle! Isn’t he just like the dreamiest ever?

Jason pulled off his helmet, gracing the world with his golden head of tousled hair, gleaming in the afternoon sunlight like Robert Redford. His eyes twinkled at Chrissy, grinning at her while she just stood there, too flabbergasted to move. The engine revved down so he could properly beckon her over.

“Surprise.”

“Oh my God!” she cried, shaking herself out of her stunned state as she bounded up to him, ponytail swishing back forth across her shoulders. Jason swung his leg over the seat, standing with the bravado of a man who knew for a fact he was getting laid that night, wrapping an arm around her. “Oh my God! Oh my God!”

“Oh my God… please don’t tell me that’s a Sturgis. It sounds like a Sturgis.” Donnie whined beside Eddie, covering his eyes, unable to look over and confirm it for himself. He was even more of a motorhead than Eddie.

“Sure is,” Eddie answered numbly. “1980 FXB with an eighty cubic inch square engine. Pristine condition.”

“Original paint job?”

“Looks like it.”

Donnie sobbed quietly, digging his fingers into his eye sockets. “Stupid lucky little fuck.”

There was no getting around it, it was a fucking gorgeous bike. Seemed like he and Carver had the same taste in motorcycles too.

Chrissy stared at the sheek black vehicle, completely mystified. “Jace, how on earth…”

“My dad let me have it for the afternoon to stretch its legs, just have to get it back in the garage by six or he’ll skin me alive… Nice huh?”

She nodded, her big blue eyes wide and round, something like a daze coming over her.

“How about it? You want that ride?” Jason asked again with a chuckle, holding up the second helmet that was hanging on the upper rider seat behind him.

“Really!?” she asked. “I can? It’s okay?”

“Of course it’s okay, c’mon.”

A happy little squeak escaped her as she jumped up and down in his arms, tugging on his shoulders so that he would hurry up and drive away with her into the sunset. Eddie had never seen her more enthusiastic outside of a cheer routine. She was always so poised and put together. Right now she could barely hold still long enough for Jason to get the helmet on her head and wrap her up in his letterman so she wouldn’t get cold.

It reminded him of the little girl he met backstage of the middle school auditorium all those years ago.

“Settle down, Chris.” Carver chuckled. “Gotta make sure this is on tight.”

Everyone watched them as Chrissy mounted the seat behind Jason, her arms slipping around him to hold his narrow waist. They looked… perfect together. Even more so than usual.

“Some guys really do get everything.” Donnie muttered with a shake of his head, having finally looked up.

Eddie smirked miserably at that, taking another deep drag. No fucking kidding.

Chrissy’s squeal of nervous, wild laughter could be heard even when Jason shifted gears and tore away from the school, kicking up loose gravel.

Eddie, because his favorite thing in life was to commit self sabotage, smoked way too much afterward and ended up falling asleep in the back of his van. The boys had been nice enough to clean up the scene, lock up the van… and tuck him in on the small cot. Someone even left him a bag of chips and some water. Probably Jeff.

He just laid there groggy as hell, kinda wanting to die, but kinda not. Sorta in this weird headspace that if he did die… that wouldn’t be too bad.

Images of Carver and Chrissy kept swirling in his mind… and he wasn’t sure why it was bothering him… okay, that was a lie… but he wasn’t sure why it was bothering him this much.

He was nothing if not a cynic. He knew how the world worked. Girls like Chrissy ended up with guys like Jason. And that was that. While guys like him drank or smoked themselves to oblivion because all they were good at was making their already shitty lives even more shitty.

His pathetic self pity party was interrupted by the sound of voices outside. He sobered up, quickly scrambling to the front seat, with the grace of a newborn antelope, half worried it would be Hopper swinging by to make sure he wasn’t loitering after school again… but no… God could never be so merciful.

It was the royal couple, back from their tour. Jason was just coming out of the gym with a duffle bag while Chrissy sat waiting for him on the motorcycle.

“You look really good on that.” Jason told her.

She smiled bashfully as she scooched up along the seat, holding the handle bars, eyes on the road ahead, pretending she was going to peel right out of town. “I think I want one now.”

“Oh yeah?”

She glanced up at him coyly, almost like she was waiting for a reprimand. Her smile grew wider when he only came to settle heavily behind her, his strong arms snaking around her waist.“Yeah… will you teach me to drive it?” Oh so bold. Oh so flirty.

“Sure.” Jason leaned forward, pressing his chest to her back, gripping his hands over hers as he spoke into her ear. “You know I love teaching you things.”

Chrissy flushed, a nervous little giggle escaping her. Jason laughed and kissed her cheek. “You really like it huh?”

She bobbed her head. “I love it… We should… we should get one.”

Jason laughed loudly again. “Yeah sure, maybe someday.”

“I’m serious!” she exclaimed, her eyes shining at this idea. “We can both save up the money and after graduation… we can just go.” She shot her hand off toward the setting sun like a rocket.

“Go?” He was smiling at her placatingly, like someone listening to the aspirations of a little kid. “And just where would we be going?”

“I don’t know,” she breathed, leaning back against him, pulling his arms back around her. “Everywhere, anywhere, Chicago, New York, Seattle, Sedona, wherever we wanted… we can, can’t we?” Eddie remembered hating the way his heart swelled at her plea, at the way she came to life for a moment and looked westward toward the future. A future. One that could be her own.

They wanted the same thing.

Jason pondered her question for a moment with a teasing frown. “Well I mean, there is that whole pesky college thing.”

“We’ll still go to IU,” she assured him quickly, as if it were a mortal sin to suggest otherwise. “There’s the summer and holidays… and college won’t last forever.”

“Yeah, but everyone else is here, our whole lives are here.” Jason reminded her. “Won’t you miss your parents and Mattie?”

She hesitated, only for a second. “We’ll come back and visit… there’s just so much out there, Jason… don’t you want to see it?”

“Well, sure but…” Jason shrugged one shoulder, looking a little taken aback by the question. Why leave your own kingdom where everyone hangs off every word you say? Where everyone loves you? He eventually smiled.“What are we going to do? Live like hippies on the side of the road?”

“No,” she shoved him playfully, but the idea seemed to thrill her nonetheless.“We’ll find a place, our own place, just you and me, then we can go wherever we want, do whatever we want…”

“Well, when you put it like that,” he said a little more quietly, his eyes fixed solely on her, while she stared off into the horizon. Solar fire blazing in the deep oceans of her eyes. Crazy, wild dreams in her head. “Doesn’t sound too bad.”

After a little while, she shifted in her seat to look back up at him. “Can we go, Jason? Please say we can go. Say we can go somewhere someday.” She became a little frantic, like her life depended on this agreement. “It doesn’t have to be on a motorcycle, just say we’ll go.”

His hand rose to her ribcage, just shy of her breast to cradle her against him, kissing her forehead. “Alright, alright, it’s a deal.”

Her enthusiasm faltered, but only for a moment. “You promise?”

He grew serious, looking her right in the eye as he stroked her cheek.“You know I’d do anything for you.”

That seemed to satisfy her enough. A slow, bright smile lit up her whole face at the pact. She sunk her fingers into his golden waves and drew him down to her, kissing him deeply. “I love you.”

“Love you more.” He sighed, kissing her back, folding her up into his arms to lift her up. “Come on, we gotta get this back under the tarp before my Dad actually kills me.”

Chrissy nodded, putting the helmet back and climbing around him to the back seat. She held on to him tightly as he kickstarted the Harley.

Eddie watched them as they pulled out of the lot and disappeared down the road, Chrissy’s rose gold hair flying beneath her helmet.

Yeah. Some guys really did get everything.

#hellcheer #eddie x chrissy #this is probably the nicest i’ve written jason and he’s still an asshole #eddissy #munningham #chrissy just wants out so bad #chrissy x eddie #hellcheer fanfiction #hellcheer fanfic #old haunts #jealousy oneshot

45 notes · View notes

ilovewhiteroses · 1 year

Text

Hi darlings! As you all know, Justified: City Primeval is based on Elmore Leonard's novel, "City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit" (1980). I thought it would be interesting to pick out a few excerpts from it to get to know a little bit more of Clement Mansell, whom will Boyd portray in the series. Warning: contains sexual references and violence Spoilers, I guess:

- Clement liked views from high places after years in the flatlands of Oklahoma and feeling the sky pressing down on him. It was the same sky when you could see it, when it wasn’t thick with dampness, but it seemed a lot higher in Detroit. He would look up there and wonder if his mom was floating around somewhere in space.

- Clement sat back on the couch, exposing the pair of bluebirds tattooed above his pure-white breasts. When they had first met three and a half years ago at a disco, Clement had said, “You want to see my birds?” and opened his shirt to show her. Then he’d said, “You want to see my chicken?” When Sandy said yes he pulled his shirt out of his pants and showed her his navel in the center of his hard belly. Sandy said, “I don’t see any chicken.” And Clement said, “It’s faded out; all that’s left is its asshole.”

- ONE TIME CLEMENT WAS RUN OVER by a train and lived. It was a thirty-three-car Chesapeake & Ohio freight train with two engines and a caboose. Clement was with a girl. They were waiting at a street crossing in Redford Township about eleven at night, the red lights flashing and the striped barrier across the road, when Clement got out of the car and went out to stand on the tracks, his back to the engine’s spotlight coming toward him at forty miles an hour. Yes, he was a little high, though not too high. He was going to jump out of the way at the last second, turned with his back to the approaching train, looking over at the girl’s face in the car windshield, the girl’s eyes about to come out of her head. Instead of jumping out of the way Clement changed his mind and laid down between the tracks. The train engineer saw Clement and slammed on the emergency brake, but not in time. Twenty-one cars passed over Clement before the train was brought to a stop and he crawled out from beneath the twenty-second one. The train engineer, Harold Howell of Grand Rapids, said, “There was just no excuse for it.” Clement was taken to Garden City Hospital where he was treated for a bruised back and released. When questioned by the Redford Township Police Clement said, “Did I break a law? Show me where it says I can’t lay down in front of a train if I want?”

- Clement tucked Raymond Cruz’s business card into the elastic of his briefs and took hold of Sandy’s arms, sliding his hands up under the satiny sleeves and tugging her gently against him. He said, “What’re you nervous about, huh? You never been nervous before. You need one of Dr. Mansell’s treatments? That it, hon bun, get you relaxed? Well, we can fix you up.

- “That’s right,” Raymond said, “or he could be in that highrise over there, twenty-five-oh-four. If you remember Clement, he’s got very large balls. The papers at the time called him the Oklahoma Wildman, but he’s more like a daredevil, a death defier . . .” “Evel Knievel with a gun,” Herzog said. “That’s right, he likes to live dangerously and he likes to kill people.”

- Clement said, “Sugar, I told you I want a regular car. I ain’t gonna street race, I ain’t gonna hang out at the Big Boy; I just need me some wheels in your name till things get a little better. Now here’s seven one-hundred-dollar bills, all the grocery money till we get some more. You buy a nice car and pick me up over there—if I can make it across Telegraph without getting killed—where you see that sign? Ramada Inn? I’ll be in there having a cocktail.”

- Clement stared at his little partner, waiting for what she said to make sense. Finally he said, “Honey? . . . I want to talk to this man, I don’t want to dance with him.” “Well, what if he doesn’t want to go there?” “Hey, aren’t you with the good hands people?” Clement inched his own hand over as he said it and caught Sandy between her slender legs. “Aren’t you?” “Cut it out.” “Why, what’s this?” Clement closed his eyes as he felt around. “Whiskers? You growing whiskers on me?” “That hurts.” “Yeah, but hurts good, don’t it? Huh? How ’bout right there? Feel pretty good?” Sandy rolled toward him, pushing out her hips, then stopped. “I ain’t gonna do it less you brush your teeth.” “Come on,” Clement said, “we don’t have to kiss. Let’s just do it.”

- Clement grinned at him. “Well, it don’t matter. We’re here to talk about the basics of love anyway, aren’t we, partner?” He paused, cocking his head. “Listen. Hear what they’re playing? ‘Everybody Loves a Winner,’ ” Clement half singing, half saying it. “That’s a old Dalaney and Bonnie number.” “You’re sure full of platter chatter this evening,” Sandy said. “You ought to get a job at CXI and get paid for it.” “Well, I got nothing against work. I come a piece from the oil fields to the world of speculation, Clement said, seeing Sandy rolling her eyes as he tightroped along the edge of truth. “But I’d rather see my investments do the work than me, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

- “Clement, really, if you’ll stop and think for a minute . . .” His hands slipped inside the roughcotton garment, moved up her body and felt her elbows come in tightly, her eyes staring into his. “What you think I’m gonna do to you? . . . Huh? Tell me.” He moved his thumbs across her breasts. “Hey, your nobs’re sticking out . . . That feel pretty good? Juuuust brush ’em a little, huh? . . . They get hard as little rocks.” His right hand moved lightly down her side to her hip, their eyes still holding. “Now what am I gonna do? . . . That your belly button right there? . . . My, we don’t have no panties on, do we?” His voice drowsy. “Tell what you think I’m gonna do to you . . . Huh? Come on . . .” Clement drew his right hand out of the caftan, bringing it down past his own hip, curled the hand into a fist and grunted, going up on his toes, as he drove the fist into Carolyn’s stomach. Once he got her into the shower, the caftan off her shoulders, pinning her arms, Clement gave Carolyn a working over with a few kidney punches and body hooks, a couple of stinging jabs to the face before a right cross drew blood from her nose and mouth and he turned the shower on her. The job was trying to keep her on her feet, glassy-eyed and moaning, Clement doubting she had much air left in her. He gave Carolyn a towel and guided her back to the desk in the window bay, bright with afternoon sunlight. Opening the checkbook, Clement said, “Let’s see now how much you want to give me.

- “Clement’s only been to prison once,” Sandy said. “He’s been to jail plenty of times, but he’s only spent like a year in a regular prison. He says he won’t ever go back again and I believe him. God, he makes up his mind to something . . . but he’s so unpredictable.

#Elmore Leonard - City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit #1980 #Justified: City Primeval #boyd holbrook #clement mansell

14 notes · View notes

otome-asylum · 7 months

Text

Piofiore: Fated Memories Review

From the game box's summary: "Navigate a world of organized crime. Three mafia families fight for control of Burlone City, and Lili discovers she is in the center of their deadly turf wars. Her encounters lead to danger and distraction. Drawn into this shadowy world, she realizes there is no going back..."

Piofiore: Fated Memories is an Otomate game from Idea Factory, localized by Aksys Games for the Nintendo Switch.

Overall Score: 8/10. I really liked the game in general--romanticized mafia is super fun! I loved the mafia premise and the thrill of illicit activities, haha. The love interests and side characters were excellent, too. The voice acting is fabulous! Two of my favorite VAs voice love interests: Showtaro Morikubo as Gilbert Redford (also voices Souji Okita in Hakuoki and Impey Barbicane in Code Realize) and Ryohei Kimura as Nicola Francesca (voices Kageyuki Shiriashi from Collar x Malice). Even fell in love with the voice acting of a new guy--Nobuhiko Okamoto as Yang (also does a side character's voice in Collar x Malice).

What I was not expecting was the somewhat heavy emphasis on Christianity and religion. That makes it sound a little more intense than I mean, but considering I wasn't expecting it at all...well. It wasn't the way one might expect, but it was enough that it was completely out of left field when I was expecting, you know, mafia. Honestly, had I known it wasn't just straight mafia, I might not have bought the game, but it was easy enough for me to ignore most of the time. There were some very--I mean very--minor translation issues, mainly typos, but it was good overall.

Heroine: 6/10. To start with, my opinion of the Heroine varied depending on the route. She was my favorite in Gilbert's route, and I liked her enough in Yang's, but she was kind of pitiful in the other three (not including the Finale/Henri endings; admittedly, I didn't read the Finale). Frankly, I found myself annoyed at her most of the time. It's annoying when a character that's meant to represent the reader (as a general rule) does, says, and thinks things that I never would. She has decent points at least once in most of the routes, but especially in the beginning of each route, she's so naive it makes me want to throw up. There are in-game reasons for why this is, so I understand it, but I still dislike it.

By the end of each route, she comes to terms with the fact that she's fallen in love with an incredibly dangerous man and gets over the fact that she's inadvertently complicit in organized crime, but the road to this acceptance is long and annoying. At the end of it all, she's still a bleeding heart. Not that I really thought that would change, but still. Progress.

I'm just bored to death of many otome MCs' main (and often only) strength being strength of will and/or character. Mental and emotional toughness are good, but could the MC also be useful and have more interesting qualities? Just once, I'd love to play a badass MC, who's a bit hardened, not a bleeding heart, and isn't shocked by the sight of blood... Yeesh...

Narrative: As is typical of these console games, the plot varies slightly from route to route, though there is an overarching plot. Without giving too much away, MC is Special™, and that comes out/is relevant in only 3/6 routes. All of the routes were well written, though I didn't find all of them that interesting. The overarching plot bored me to tears. I just wasn't into it. In a world of what I assumed was just your standard period mafia piece, there was a lot of weird mysticism and Christian mythology. There's not magic or anything like that, but there are sacred relics that can only be retrieved from their super secret locations with specific "ingredients," if you will. MC has one of those ingredients, and in a game where it really advertises the mafia (that's literal the entire pitch of the game, there's no mention of anything else on the game case), it feels very out of place.

I can tell they were trying to do something different with the mafia premise, and I commend the writers for that, but I think it fell a little flat. I found myself enjoying the routes where there was more of those organized crime attributes--smuggling, drug and arms dealing, counterfeiting, etc.--most, while the routes that heavily focused on MC's specialness were a slog to get through. Of course, this is my own personal opinion, so others may feel very differently. Despite that, I truly enjoyed the game and can't wait to play the sequel (fandisc)!

Love Interests: I adore these characters, period. They're all very unique and interesting, even if a few weren't my type. There are technically six love interests: Nicola Francesca, Dante Falzone, Yang, Gilbert Redford, Orlok, and Henri. Gilbert is locked until you completed Nicola, Yang, Dante, and Orlok's routes, and the Finale/Henri is locked until you complete Gil's. You don't get a feel for who Henri is at all until you play the Finale route, so I personally didn't care for him. I had no vested interest in him, so full disclosure, I mostly skipped his route...

The other characters were wonderfully varied, so I think there's a personality type to suit nearly everyone. I can honestly say that, although not all of them are for me, I can pick out a quality I like in all of them. Dante is the kuudere of the guys; Gilbert is gallant and chivalrous; Yang is selfish and craves violence (in the best way, though); Nicola is a flirt; and Orlok is the quiet, shy one. Henri is mysterious, though not in an interesting way for me, personally.

Game Mechanics: The "Status" page is difficult to understand, especially when you first start playing and have no idea what you're looking at. I had to look up how to interpret the status of the character. The more colorful the flower on the status page is, the higher the affection, and the clearer the page (in this case, how much blood spatter is visible) is related to the tolerance level. So, full-color flower and no blood spatters are very good.

I also don't love the Meanwhile side stories. While you're plaything through every story, periodically you'll get a pop-up that is sometimes automatic, sometimes optional, that takes you to a different perspective--something that's going on at the same time as the main story. I like the idea in theory, but it sometimes felt like they came at inopportune times and broke the story flow.

Music & Art Style: The music is jaunty and fun, very 1920s jazz, screams mafia, too. If that makes sense. If you decide to play it, you'll see what I mean. The art style is beautiful! It looks very similar to, if not outright the same as, Hakuoki. Since that's the game that started my love affair with these types of games, I love that it looks so similar. The CGs are gorgeous and worth collecting all of them, so 100-percenting the game is worth it. Some of them get pretty hot, too, like aaahhhhh. So 10/10 on the art!

#Piofiore: Fated Memories #otome games #otomate #aksys games #idea factory #english otome #review #dating sims #romance #visual romance

4 notes · View notes

hellcatinnc · 9 months

Text

How the Men Of Piofiore Would Be On Being Dating Apps

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Warning This includes: SFW(Read Tags Before Continuing)

Tags: sfw, dating apps, hookups, booty calls, smart phone, dating profiles, fluff

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(I have yet to get into Henri's story but I will update this as soon as I do.)

I marked this SFW since there is no actual sexual acts in it just the booty calls and dating apps

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dante Falzone

Nicola talks him into doing this in hopes Dante will find a good woman for him or hopefully at least a fling however he knows Dante isn't that kind of guy. He would be the one with a romantic outlook something like CapoNeedsLove, DFalzone or SadMafiaGuy and his profile would be centered around writing as much as he can about what his likes and dislikes are. If he is going to go through this then he is definitely goin to make sure there is a chance for him to find the love of his life. He would stay clear of apps like tinder for hookups and go more for the ones like christan singles. He is very upfront about being the boss of the Falzone's and that his family has watched over Burlone for centuries, he is proud of it in away. Sadly this sad boy as well would get hurt easily if he was cat fished, he would easily give up and delete his account.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nicola Francesco

This man is the king of dating apps especially hot or not, tinder, and bumblebee. He knows how to swipe so fast that he can have 7 dates lined up for every day of the week in less than 5 minutes. He is smooth and charming and gets all the girls attention with his suave profile. His profile really be in the end more towards his booty calls with some possible relationships but they will all be short lived.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yang

Oh he is straight to the point on his because he really can't be asked to mess with them. He will make it blunt and clear and then he will forget to check his messages because he would rather go to a bar grab any woman he wants and make her his for the night at least. He don't care about the idea of being in our day in time with dating apps just doesn't faze him.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gilbert Redford

When it comes to dating apps you would think with the charm and how charismatic he is he would would be perfect at this. However Gil is more about up-close person to person chats. Anyways his wink here and there and kissing your hand well that would go unnoticed if he had to try to prove he can be your prince charming, gentleman. He makes a profile eventually cause Oliver pressures him to but you will find he is more the speed dating type and may check his messages once a week on the app mainly cause Oliver bugs him too.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Orlok

Oh he is still trying to figure out how to use the phone. He has a smart phone that was given to him and he can't get past the lock screen sometimes because its just too hard to figure out so he ends up getting mad at it one day and breaks the phone. He did eventually get his profile put up but thats only cause in the end someone showed him how to get to his page and set it up. However after forgetting how to run the app, get his phone unlocked and be able to use it he said the heck with it and tossed it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#x reader #fanfiction #fanfic #fan fiction #Scenario Fanfics #scenarios #otome #piofiore #orlok #yang #dante falzone #nicola francesca #gilbert redford #x !female reader #!female reader #sfw #fluff

4 notes · View notes

sweetsmellosuccess · 1 year

Text

There is a delightful scene near the beginning of Barry Levinson's "The Natural," where Roy Hobbs (played by Robert Redford), a neophyte baseball prospect taking a train on his way to try out for the Majors, gets into an impromptu pitching contest with "The Whammer" (John Don Baker), a Babe Ruthian figure, and already a superstar.

They exit the train and head to an open field, where Hobbs burns fastball after fastball past an unbelieving Whammer, who strikes out ignominiously. It's a great way for the film to introduce this quietly confident character, undaunted by the challenge of facing the most heralded ballplayer of his day. Hobbs, famously, wants to eventually become the "best that ever was," so as far as he's concerned, it's all sort of pre-ordained for him anyway (as anyone who has seen the film can attest, Hobbs' career doesn't go exactly according to plan).

There's a similar moment early in "Chevalier," Stephen Williams' quasi-biopic of the composer and wunderkind musician Joseph Bologne (Kelvin Harrison Jr.). The film opens mid-concert, with an appreciative audience staring rapturously at the spritely young man in the center of the stage, leading his orchestra on a merry swing of melody, as he hops about, playing his violin with extreme flair.

#sweet smell of success #ssos #piers marchant #films #movies #chevalier #kelvin harrison jr.#joseph bologne #music #france #paris #opera #Samara Weaving #Lucy Boynton #marie antoinette #Ronke Adékoluejo #arkansas democrat gazette

2 notes · View notes

defensefilms · 2 years

Text

Either Gaslit Is A Good Show, Or I’m Just Getting Old

*This Here Blog Post Contains Mad Spoilers*

Gaslit was not made for me.

Demographic-wise, theme-wise, and in as far as the contents of the show, and the period in history that they are talking about, this is not a show that was created to appeal to, or entertain, an early thirties, black, male, South African.

And yet, for as old as the medium of television is, and for all the historically great entertainment it’s served up through the decades, you just know when a show has nailed it.

Gaslit is a non-fictional re-telling of Richard Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, and how his strained relationship with his wife served to exasperate Nixon’s problems during the public dissemination of Watergate scandal.

That’s among the show’s first risky decisions.

The decision to tell one of the major stories at the heart of the Watergate scandal, in as historically accurate of a way as possible, was risky. Consider that these events took place more than 50 years ago, and for the most part, you know how it’s supposed to end, because you know how Nixon’s time as president ended.

Keep in mind, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman have already made the film “All The President’s Men” in 1976, and that film’s release had the advantage of the Watergate scandal being fresh in the minds of the American public.

So this show has to sell the detail rather than the narrative itself. It has to sell process over outcome, and it has to sell the journey over the destination. An interesting challenge that I think the producers and artisans involved took to very well.

The casting of Julia Roberts as Martha Mitchell, does wonders for the part of the show that gets the most narrative and thematic attention. Sean Penn plays her husband, John Mitchell, who gets himself in a bind when he undertakes and fails, an operation to bug and gather intelligence from the Watergate building.

Those are just the casting choices at the top of the marquee.

Craig Bauer is phenomenal in his performance as the incompetent, John McCord. Shea Whigham is awesome in his role as the acerbic Gordon Liddy, Dan Stevens is the show’s understated comic relief in his role as John Dean, and ofcourse Brian Geraghty finds a way to show his face, like he does every other crime drama show in North American television.

Thing of it is that, that’s just the casting, and as important as that is, and as well done as it was, it still doesn’t quite account for all of what we’re seeing. I simply cannot accept that as the sole reason for the show being what it is.

The focus on the relationship dynamics between the show’s power couple is interesting, well written, well layered, and well portrayed by the performers in question, however, if it was the only thing the show offered, it would be less impressive.

That, and the fact that marital dysfunction is not new to television drama.

The show also pulls off something that a lot of great shows will also do, by not being held to genre conventions. Instead opting for a kind of blending of genres that include historical drama, comedy/dark humor and political intrigue, to create a kind of thematic cocktail.

The core conflict at the center of the show is nicely ratcheted up when John Mitchell’s henchmen’s attempts at bugging the Watergate building are foiled by local police detectives, and in a kind of pre-emptive, paranoid and distrustful move, he opts to have his wife temporarily imprisoned, in fear that she might divulge both John and Richard Nixon’s involvement in Watergate to the media.

The best television drama shows have always relied on a strong paring like this.

Tony and Carmela Soprano quickly come to mind, Walter and Skyler White had a similar dynamic in Breaking Bad, and when the traumatic effects of Martha Mitchell’s 24 hour imprisonment at the hands of Peter (played by Brian Geraghty), are completely lost on John Mitchell, Martha realizes John is going to be the “fall guy” for Nixon’s scandal, and she resorts to subtly making herself more available to the media and publicly protesting his innocence on his behalf.

It was crucial that the show nail Martha and John’s marital tension, or risk the entire show falling on it’s head. However, something can be vitally important without being the biggest reason for success, especially in the medium of audio-visual storytelling.

No, what makes this show successful, is a commitment to absurdity.

Absurdity was what made Watergate the spectacle that it was.

The absurd idea that Richard Nixon thought he could get away with KGB-style intelligence tactics against his political opposition, and the idea that it almost worked because he won his re-election campaign.

The absurdity of the idea that they thought they would be able to keep the story quiet even after their henchmen were caught in the act.

The absurdity of a man with as much conviction as John Mitchell, having a cult-like devotion to Richard Nixon. A devotion no different to that which some Kremlin members had for Josef Stalin in the decade before, and all made more absurd by the fact that Mitchell is willing to take the fall for a crime he was instructed to commit.

In episode 4, a hungover Martha walks in to her living room after the Mitchell’s had just hosted a birthday party, and sees her husband seated on the floor like a child, watching Nixon address the American public with eyes entranced by his television screen, and at that point she realizes her husband does not have the will, the capability, nor does he see the need to defend himself from what’s going to happen to him next.

However, the most absurd of all, are the henchmen that were caught in the deed, and their belief that somehow, President Nixon would save, pardon, exonorate or bail them out, in any way, in the event that they were caught.

Moreover, Gaslit is a story about what happens when powerful people manage to surround themselves with only loyalists, and it’s a story about what happens when abuse of power becomes the norm.

In Episode 1, John Dean is walked into John Micthell’s office and offered the task of overseeing the bugging of the Watergate building.

At first he balks at the obvious bad legal implications of such an idea. He is then challenged by the Attorney General, and has his capabilities, ambition and loyalty questioned, after which Dean begins to put forth ideas on the best way to go about the operation.

While the episode 1 interaction between Dean, A.G John Mitchell and Mitchell’s fixer, Jeb Macgruder is hilarious, it is also the kind of interaction that cannot happen in an atmosphere where abuse of power isn’t the norm.

At the heart of most of Gaslit’s dark humour is how this kind of belief in power and the ambivalence towards the injustices it commits, is it’s own kind of delusional, and even it’s own kind of mental illness.

This is best exemplified by the men that were caught in the act of actually bugging the building itself.

Gordon Liddy is a case study in how religious zealotry and belief in a higher purpose can go wrong, and how religious and cultural backgrounds that teach adherence to authority, are like breeding footsoldiers for corrupt leaders. Liddy proves this to the extent of using violence to maintain the silence of the others when they are tried and convicted for breaking and entering.

John Dean’s belief that he is somehow “close to the President”, shows the kind of benign dishonesty that a cult of personality like Nixon’s breeds because proximity to him is like it’s own social currency, and that can easily be corrupted when careerists like Dean decide to “play the game” and use that to thier advantage.

James McCord, is really the worst victim of this. He was a bad fit for the operation from the start and the realization that John Mitchell, whom he served personally, is not going to save him from a lengthy prison sentence, is the beginning of the end of the collective belief in Nixon.

Whether it’s John Mitchell, way up in the hierachy of Washington, or poor old James McCord down at the bottom, all the men in this show suffer from a belief in the cult and power of a President that, for all intents and purposes, only cared about being in power.

Among the show’s sub-narratives is allowing you to revel in the shattering of the collective and unquestioning belief in their leader, but the biggest casualty of standing in that truth was Martha Mitchell.

youtube

#tv #tv shows #series #drama #julia roberts #sean penn #chris bauer #dan stevens #shea whigham #starz #watergate #nixon #richard nixon #scandal #all the president's men #gaslit #dark comedy #dark humour #long post

2 notes · View notes

fandomsandfears · 1 year

Note

💖🤮❤️💜🃏?

💖 favourite character?

obligatory Chase Redford answer. Does he deserve this placement? based on canon probably not but I was obsessed and I have a lot of fun with my own fanon of him. Same idea with Alistair tbf.

More legitimate though out answer? Probably Cerise or Maddie? They get the screen time deserving of favoured spot. Cerise has a good arc and had a lot of potential. Maddie screen time just never misses lol.

🤮 least favourite character?

Easy pick on Headmaster Grimm. Both because he's a dickhead but also in canon I just don't think he even lives up to his full potential? Like he's decently intimidating and pretty bad, but then they just let him off? Hate that man should have lost his job. As character his arc would have benefited from some fuckin consequences

of the students I'm saying Crystal. The hate defo rubbed off from gummy lol but also wtf was her character she didn't even go well with her story origins what happened.

❤️ top 3 royals?

Hard because yknow, most of them end up rebel by the end there. ANYWAYS if Briar counts which she doesn't I pick her. She's technically royal but I like her for all the reasons that make her a rebel. her arc with the book, rejecting her future, snapping at Apple. God Briar had so much potential and even besides that she's just a genuinely fun character <33

Faybelle pissed me the hell off sometimes but by god I respect her commitment to being a bad bitch. I love a character who is unapologetically mean, knows they're mean, and revels in it. I think having an evil destined character like Raven but who really was into it was such a good narrative choice.

Tough choice, gonna say maybe... Daring? If they hadn't ruined his character in epic winter he was honestly jus ta very fun character but also the moments of genuine care for the people around him. idk he has high himbo energy and I respect that. Is he self centered? yea but not nearly to the extent epic winter seemed to think. His date with Lizzie? his respect for Cerise? his concern and care for Apple? sibling moments with Daring and Darling? this man had fuckin layers and i think he's neat

💜 top 3 rebels?

Maddie my girliepop you never miss not in canon not in Gummys rewrite which should be canon, literally never a miss with Maddie I think she deserves top spot

Cerise I respect. She had a lot of potentially and what they did end up doing was very good fun. One of the characters who I think had the most interesting relationship with the rebels because she was almost kind of born to rebel. Her parents rebelled, she by product of them had one of the most interesting relationship with the conflict. She's also just a fun character.

Darling the wlw rep we fuckin needed. I'm counting her as a rebel because i think she is? She technically seems inline with her "true" destiny but she acts under the assumption she is going off book and is chill as hell with the other rebels. I'm counting her. Anyways, interesting character, wlw rep, fantastic for the plot whenever she's around. Also feeding my sibling dynamics quota because all fanon with her and her brothers in great (go read Gummy rewrite has some fantastic charming siblings stuff)

🃏 top 3 wonderlandians?

Chase Redford my beloved y'all know this. Does he deserve to be my favourite? probably not but the fixation disagrees lol

hmm everyone else is a bit hard. Lizzie is fuckin great love her to bits, especially love gumjesters interpretation of her in their rewrote (go read it go go go) so I'll let her be the fav #2

3rd place is probably Maddie. I like all the wonderlandians a lot, but ignoring Chase who gets favour hypocrisy, the others i don't really have any much for in canon. Love Alistair, but mostly my own characterization. Kitty is great and i appreciate her arc with her mom, but we get so much screen time with Maddie and she's such a good character you just can't help but love her! Maddie also has a hat-tastic characterization in gumjesters rewrite so yknow <33 doesn't hurt

#long post #fandomsandfears #ask #thanks! very fun for my brain #eah #i havent actually wattched the show in a while so this is digging up some OPINIONS lol #a lot of my canon eah interactions come from gummys rewrite rn so big opinions on that #everyone go read gummy rewrite its so fuckin good #i'm a bit all over the place here since i find merit in most characters and have trouble choosing favourites so yeah idk

1 note · View note

filmnoirfoundation · 1 year

Photo

Dates for NOIR CITY Detroit have been announced!

Sep 22-24 at the Redford Theatre- Detroit, MI.

UPCOMING 2023 NOIR CITY DATES

NOIR CITY: Boston: June 9-11 The Brattle - Cambridge, MA

NOIR CITY: Philadelphia: July 21-23 The Colonial Theatre - Phoenixville, PA

NOIR CITY: Hollywood: Aug 4-13 Aero Theatre - Santa Monica, CA

NOIR CITY: Chicago: Aug 25-31 Music Box Theatre - Chicago, IL

NOIR CITY: Detroit: Sep 22-24 Redford Theatre - Detroit, MI

NOIR CITY: D.C.: Oct 13-26 AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center - Silver Spring, MD

*Other U.S. cities will be added as festival dates are confirmed.

#noir city #noir city film festival #film noir #film noir festival #the brattle #colonial theatre #music box theatre #redford theatre #afi silver #afi silver theatre and cultural center #noir city detroit #noir city boston #noir city philadelphia #noir city hollywood #aero theatre #noir city chicago #noir city dc

7 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 2 years

Text

Jack Welch, the former C.E.O. of General Electric, was “a plainspoken, homespun dynamo—a pugnacious gnome with a large bald head and piercing eyes that made him as instantly recognizable as Elon Musk is today,” Malcolm Gladwell writes, in an entertaining and probing piece in this week’s issue. “He was called the greatest C.E.O. of the modern age,” Gladwell notes, but he was, by modern standards, a difficult leader: one who “seemed to enjoy firing people,” who “was most comfortable reducing anything of value to a transaction,” and who spent years exploiting a loophole in corporate finance to amass riches for the company—only to have his scheme come crashing down during the 2008 financial crisis. How have his words and actions endured as corporate legend? What wisdom—or folly—has he imparted? Consider this: in 1995, at the peak of his career, Welch suffered a devastating heart attack. He would end up living for nearly twenty-five more years, but at the time, death seemed imminent. A priest wanted to give him last rites; his doctor operated a second time. What, then, constituted the dying man’s thoughts? “Damn it, I didn’t spend enough money.”

In late April of 1995, Jack Welch suffered a crippling heart attack. He was then in full stride in his spectacular run as the C.E.O. of General Electric. He had turned the company from a sleepy conglomerate into a lean and disciplined profit machine. Wall Street loved him. The public adored him. He was called the greatest C.E.O. of the modern age. He was a plainspoken, homespun dynamo—a pugnacious gnome with a large bald head and piercing eyes that made him as instantly recognizable as Elon Musk is today.

But, that spring, his fabled energy seemed to flag. He found himself taking naps in his office. He went out to dinner one night with some friends at Spazzi, in Fairfield, Connecticut, for wine and pizza. Then, when he got home and was brushing his teeth, it happened. Boom. His wife rushed him to the hospital at 1 a.m., running a red light along the way. When they arrived, Welch jumped out of his car and onto a gurney, shouting, “I’m dying, I’m dying!” An artery was reopened, but then it closed again. A priest wanted to give him last rites. His doctor operated a second time. “Don’t give up!” Welch shouted. “Keep trying!”

The great C.E.O.s have an instinct for where to turn in a crisis, and Welch knew whom to call. There was Henry Kissinger, who had survived a triple bypass in the nineteen-eighties, and was always willing to lend counsel to the powerful. And, crucially, the head of Disney, Michael Eisner, one of the few C.E.O.s on Welch’s level. Just a year earlier, Eisner had survived an iconic C.E.O. cardiac event: a bout of upper-arm pain and shortness of breath that began at Herb Allen’s business conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, and ended with Eisner staring God in the face from his bed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles. The first chapter of Eisner’s marvellous autobiography, “Work in Progress” (1998), is devoted to the story of his ordeal, complete with references to Clint Eastwood, Michael Ovitz, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, Sid Bass, Barry Diller, John Malone, Michael Jordan, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, David Geffen, “my friend” Dustin Hoffman, Tom Brokaw, Robert Redford, Annie Leibovitz, Steven Spielberg, and at least three prominent cardiologists. In one moment of raw vulnerability, he called his wife over to ask about the doctor who was slated to do his surgery: “Where was this guy trained?” he asked. He explains, “She knew I was hoping to hear Harvard or Yale.” No such luck. “ ‘Tijuana,’ she replied, with a straight face.”

The point is that when a corporate legend has a blocked artery, expectations are high. So after Welch published his own memoirs, the enormous best-seller “Jack: Straight from the Gut” (2001), one of the first questions that interviewers on his book tour wanted to ask was what he had learned from his brush with death.

In an interview Welch gave in 2001 for the PBS show “CEO Exchange,” hosted by Stuart Varney, Varney brought up his quintuple bypass.

Varney: Was that a real change in life for you? A change in perhaps your spiritual approach?

Welch: No.

In the Eisnerian tradition, a heart attack is an opportunity to take stock, to reassess—to perform a kind of psychic stock repurchase. Eisner was certain he’d glimpsed that kind of emotional recalibration when Welch phoned him that day from his sickbed and peppered him with questions about what he was facing. Eisner recalled years later, “As I was talking to him, I was thinking, Oh. This tough man’s human.”

So it’s understandable that Varney tried again, asking him whether he was moved by a sense of his own mortality.

Welch: You know what I thought, Stuart? Larry Bossidy, my friend at AlliedSignal, asked me, he said, “Jack, what were you thinking of just before they cut you?” I said, “Damn it, I didn’t spend enough money.”

Varney: No. Now wait a minute. Wait a minute. Hold on. Hold on.

Welch: I did.

Varney: No, no.

Welch: I did.

Most C.E.O.s, in their public appearances, are circumspect, even guarded. Welch was the opposite, which explains why he has been the subject of so much attention and scholarly interest. There were boxcars full of books written about him during his time at the helm of G.E., still more during his long retirement (some of them written by Welch himself), and even today, in the wake of his death, in 2020, the financial writer William D. Cohan has delivered the absorbing seven-hundred-page opus “Power Failure” (Portfolio), a book so comprehensive it gives the impression that all that can be said about Jack has finally been said.

Then again, maybe not. He was kind of irresistible:

Varney: It never crossed your mind that this is a major event? Your life is threatened.

Welch: It happened so fast that I honestly didn’t think that. We all are products of our background. And I didn’t have two nickels to rub together, so I’m relatively cheap. And I always bought relatively cheap wine. And I always looked at the wine price in the restaurant. And I could never, I swore to God I’d never buy a bottle of wine for less than a hundred dollars. That was absolutely one of the takeaways from that experience.

Varney: After the operation, you would not buy a bottle of wine for under a hundred dollars. And before the operation you wouldn’t be seen dead drinking a bottle of wine over a hundred dollars.

Welch: Right.

Varney: Is that it?

Welch: That’s about it.

By midsummer, Welch was in the office, doing deals. In mid-August—a scant three months after his bypass—he made the finals of a tournament at the illustrious Sankaty Head Golf Club, on Nantucket.

General Electric was formed in 1892, out of the various electricity-related business interests of Thomas Edison, the most storied of all American inventors. J. P. Morgan was the banker who put the deal together; the Vanderbilt family was involved, too. From the beginning, G.E. was resolutely blue-chip. In the course of the twentieth century, it was G.E., more than, say, A.T. & T. or General Motors, that was the preëminent American corporation. It was the stock that grandmothers from Greenwich owned.

During the nineteen-seventies, the company was run by the English-born Reginald Jones, a tall, austere man who was once named the most influential businessman in the country by his peers in corporate America. “Reg Jones, who is decisive, elegant, and dignified, is also described by GE people as sensitive and human; and the affection the GE family has for him is obvious,” Robert L. Shook wrote in his book “The Chief Executive Officers: Men Who Run Big Business in America,” from 1981. “He’s quick to praise and hand out credit,” one executive told Shook. “He’ll always say, ‘I don’t do it all by myself.’ ”

Jones made two hundred thousand dollars a year and lived in a modest Colonial in Greenwich. Jimmy Carter twice tried to get him to join his Cabinet. Several times a year, Jones would travel to Harvard Business School and then to Wharton, at the University of Pennsylvania, to take the pulse of the schools where the next generation of G.E.’s leadership was almost certainly incubating. The bookshelf in his office held volumes devoted to sociology, philosophy, business, and history.

“The General Electric culture is best exemplified by the concern we have for each other,” Jones told Shook. “Let’s say one of our fellows has a problem—perhaps a serious illness or a death in the family. I will usually do what I can for the family. And here we think that is quite natural.”

Within two years of securing the top job, in 1972, Jones was already planning for his succession. And, from the beginning, he could not take his eyes off a young manager at G.E.’s operations in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, who ran the company’s metallurgical and chemical divisions. As Jones confided to a labor historian years later:

I went to the vice president in charge of the executive manpower development and I said give me a list of the contenders for my job! And he gave me a list with 17, 18 people on it. And I looked at the list and I said, well, you don’t have Jack Welch there? Well, he said, well he’s so young. He’s kind of a, you know, not a typical G.E. guy. He’s a bit of a wild man and so on and so forth. I said, put his name on the list.

Why was Jones so drawn to Welch? The conventional criticism of hiring at the upper echelons of corporate America is that like tends to promote like. The Dartmouth grad who summers in Kennebunkport meets the young Williams grad who summers in Bar Harbor and declares, By golly, that young man has the right stuff! But in deciding to turn G.E. over to Welch, Jones was replacing himself with his opposite. Cohan writes:

“He was regal,” explained one former GE executive. “Jones just had an aura about him. I remember being in a room and when he walked in, it was like the king walked in.” Where Jones was reserved, Jack was gregarious. Jones was tall—six foot four—while Jack was short—five foot eight on a good day. . . . Around GE going to see Reg Jones was like going to see the president in the Oval office. Going to see Jack was like going to see a fraternity brother at a tailgate party.

Welch did not view General Electric as one big, warm family. He thought it was bloated and senescent. Jones was known for calling people when they lost a loved one. Welch seemed to enjoy firing people. It is quite possible, in fact, that no single corporate executive in history has fired as many people as Jack Welch did. He laid off more than a hundred thousand workers in the first half of the nineteen-eighties. There are lots of sentences in Cohan’s “Power Failure” like this: “Ten thousand people, or half the people who once worked there, were let go.” Or: “McNerney got the job after a rather infamous annual managers’ meeting in Boca Raton in January 1991, when Jack fired four division C.E.O.s. ‘You could have heard a pin drop,’ McNerney recalled.” Or, of an air-conditioning business in Louisville that Welch did not like, and subsequently sold off:

“This was a flawed business,” he continued. But the people in Louisville who made the air conditioners took pride in them and were shocked when the business was sold to Trane. “It really shook up Louisville,” he said.

He did not feel their pain. Quite the contrary.

Cohan gives us a lot of alpha-male straight talk, like the time Welch cornered Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot, at a party at Larry Bossidy’s house in Florida, not far from Welch’s own place in North Palm Beach.

“Jack, get off my fucking ass. No business tonight,” Langone said. But Jack wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“I need five minutes,” Jack insisted. They went to Bossidy’s backyard. “The party’s inside,” Langone said. “He puts me against the fucking wall. He said, ‘I want you to go on the GE board.’ I said, ‘What?!?!’ ”

Reginald Jones, one imagines, never backed anyone up against a wall. And he would never have been caught dead in North Palm Beach.

Did he see something in Welch that he could not find in himself? Was he so critical of his own tenure at America’s flagship corporation that he felt a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn was in order? The most charitable explanation is that the transition from Jones to Welch came at the end of one of the more unsettling decades in the history of American capitalism, and Jones may have felt that the sun had set on his brand of corporate paternalism.

After Welch, at age forty-five, was named the new C.E.O. of General Electric, Jones called him into his office to bestow some final words of wisdom. Another recent book about Welch, David Gelles’s “The Man Who Broke Capitalism” (Simon & Schuster), recounts the exchange:

“Jack, I give you the Queen Mary,” Jones said. “This is designed not to sink.”

Jack didn’t miss a beat.

“I don’t want the Queen Mary,” he snapped back. “I plan to blow up the Queen Mary. I want speedboats.”

Then Jones threw his successor a party at the Helmsley Palace Hotel, in midtown Manhattan, where Welch had a few too many cocktails and slurred his way through his remarks to the group. The next morning, Jones stormed into Welch’s office. “I’ve never been so humiliated in my life,” he told Welch. “You embarrassed me and the company.” Welch worried that he would be fired, losing his chance at glory before it had even begun. Cohan writes, “He was despondent for the next four hours.” By lunch, apparently, he had put his existential crisis behind him. That’s our Jack.

Welch believed that the responsibility of a corporation was to deliver predictable and generous returns to its shareholders. In pursuit of this goal, he exploited a loophole in the regulatory architecture of corporate finance. Companies that made things—companies such as G.E.—had long been permitted to lend money to their customers. They could behave like banks, in other words, but they weren’t really banks. Banks were encumbered by all kinds of regulations that had the effect of limiting their profit margins. The markets considered them risky, so they paid dearly to raise capital. But blue-chip G.E. had none of those burdens, which meant that, when it came to making money, Welch’s non-bank bank could put real banks to shame. He then used the proceeds from G.E. Capital to acquire hundreds of companies. In the warm glow of G.E.’s riches, Welch articulated a series of principles that captivated his peers. Fire nonperformers without regret. Shed any business that isn’t first or second in its market category. Your duty is always to enrich your shareholders.

In his interview with Varney, Welch took a question from the audience about how, in enacting these principles, a C.E.O. could tell the difference between leaders who create an “edge” and those who simply create “fear.” Welch explained that there were four types of manager:

One who has the values and makes the numbers: love them, hug them, take them onward and upward.

Second one doesn’t have the values, doesn’t make the numbers, get them out of there. That’s easy, too.

The third one has the values, doesn’t make the numbers, give them a second and third chance.

The fourth one’s the one you’re talking about. The tough one. The horse’s neck that makes the numbers on the backs of people. The go-to person in an organization. And an organization that doesn’t root them out, can’t talk about values, can’t talk about the human equation.

In a perfect world, the interviewer would have asked a follow-up question: What are these “values” that you’re talking about? Surely the desire to meet Wall Street’s quarterly estimates—as much as it felt like a value in Welch’s universe—does not amount to an actual moral belief system. And then perhaps a second follow-up: Doesn’t the fourth category—the “tough” manager who makes the numbers but does not have the values—sound a lot like you, Mr. Welch?

But few ever asked questions like that of Welch. So the man himself remains opaque, and the best we can do is try to piece together the clues scattered throughout “Power Failure.”

One time in Welch’s senior year of high school, his hockey team lost to a crosstown rival, and Jack, who had scored his team’s only two goals, threw his stick in anger. Cohan writes:

Next thing he knew, his mother was in the locker room. She bounded right up to him, oblivious to the fact that the guys around her were in various states of undress. She grabbed him by the jersey in front of everyone. “You punk,” she yelled at him. “If you don’t know how to lose, you’ll never know how to win. If you don’t know this, you don’t belong anywhere.” He paused for a moment, recalling the memory. “She was a powerhouse,” he said. “I loved her beyond comprehension.”

After college, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Illinois. His thesis was on condensation in nuclear power plants. “I thought it was the most important thing in my life,” he tells Cohan. For many people, years of immersion in a complex intellectual endeavor would leave an imprint. Not for Welch. Condensation in nuclear power plants does not come up again.

Golf, by contrast, was “one of the few constants in Jack’s life,” Cohan writes. “One way or another, there was always golf.” But did he like the game for its own sake? Or was it simply, to adapt Clausewitz’s dictum, the continuation of business by other means? After Welch left G.E., the details of his retirement package were made public. It included a pension of $7.4 million a year and a mountain of perks. He got the use of a company Boeing 737, at an estimated cost of $3.5 million a year. He got an apartment in Donald Trump’s 1 Central Park West, plus deals at the restaurant Jean-Georges downstairs, courtside seats at Knicks games, a subsidy for a car and driver, box seats at the Metropolitan Opera, discounts on diamond and jewelry settings, and on and on—all this for someone worth an estimated nine hundred million dollars. And then, finally, G.E. agreed to pay the monthly dues at the four golf clubs where he played. It would be nice to hear from the high-priced attorney who negotiated that last line item. Would it have been a deal breaker? Did Welch believe golf had been so central to his performance as C.E.O. that it made sense for the company’s shareholders to pay those monthly dues?

A few months after he recovered from his bypass surgery, Welch went to see his heart surgeon, Cary Akins. They had become friends. “He was incredibly cordial for somebody who was that powerful,” Akins tells Cohan. Welch had wanted the operation to be done on a Friday, so that he would have three days of recovery under his belt before the news hit the stock market—and Akins obliged. Now Welch wanted to talk.

“You’re doing great,” Akins told him.

“Well, go ahead and ask your question,” Jack said.

“What?” Akins replied.

“Go ahead and ask your question,” he said again.

“What do you mean?” Akins responded, genuinely confused.

“Well, I presume you’re gonna want me to give you some money,” Jack said.

“You didn’t pay your bill?” Akins replied.

“Come on, now,” Jack said. “You must have thought about this. Do you want me to donate something?”

“Jack, it never crossed my mind,” Akins replied.

Akins had performed a feat of skill, born of professional dedication. Welch saw a shakedown in the offing. And maybe that’s the key: Welch was most comfortable reducing anything of value to a transaction. He gave Akins a generous donation—though it came from G.E.’s charitable foundation, not from his own pocket.

It has become fashionable to deride today’s tech C.E.O.s for their grandiose ambitions: colonizing Mars, curing all human disease, digging a world-class tunnel. But shouldn’t we prefer these outsized delusions to the moral impoverishment of Welch’s era?

“In all of our many discussions, the only time he spoke about his children was when he told me that he ‘loved them to pieces’ but that he had made ‘a mistake’ when he gave each of them a bunch of G.E. stock when he first became C.E.O.,” Cohan writes. Because the stock had performed well, they each had something like fifty million dollars in company shares. Although two of his four kids went to Harvard Business School and one went to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, they all quit their jobs, disappointing their father. “They turned out differently than I’d hoped,” Welch tells Cohan. “We’re close. But they got too much money. . . . If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t have given it to them.” A father reflects, after a lifetime, on his troubled relationship with his children, and concludes that he should have adjusted their compensation.

As Welch prepared for retirement from G.E., in 2001, the search for his successor became a public spectacle. He identified three plausible internal candidates. Their faults and their strengths were openly debated. The financial press was riveted. The choice was up in the air until the last minute, when Welch settled on Jeff Immelt, who was then running G.E.’s health-care unit. Welch had had his eye on Immelt for a long time. Years before, Welch had sent him to Louisville, to run G.E.’s sprawling appliance-manufacturing hub there. The job was stressful, and Immelt’s weight hit two hundred and eighty pounds. “You’re never going to be C.E.O. if you don’t lose weight,” Cohan reports Welch telling him. “You’ve got to get your fucking weight down. Can’t have everybody fucking fat.”

When Immelt took over from Welch, he addressed a gathering of top G.E. managers in Boca Raton. “Only time will tell if Jack is the best business leader ever, but I know he is one of the greatest human beings I have ever met,” Immelt said. But by that point the Welch legend was so huge that such blandishments seemed obligatory.

What Immelt quickly discovered was that Welch had handed him a mess: a company built out of pieces that had no logical connection. Once the global financial crisis arrived, the elaborate game that Welch had been playing with G.E. Capital collapsed. Wall Street woke up to the fact that a non-bank was every bit as risky as a real bank, and the company never quite recovered. Immelt was eventually forced out, in disgrace. Almost two decades after Welch handed the reins to Immelt, Cohan met Welch for lunch at the Nantucket Golf Club. All Welch wanted to talk about was how terrible a job he thought his successor had done. The share price had collapsed, and Welch was disconsolate.

“He’s full of shit,” Jack said. “He’s a bullshitter.”

“But Jack,” I asked, “didn’t you choose Jeff?”

Yes, he conceded, he had. “That’s my burden that I have to live with,” he continued. “But people have been hurt. Employees. People’s pensions. Shareholders. It’s bad.” There were tears in his eyes. “I fucked up,” he said again. “I fucked up.”

As Cohan and Welch ate lunch, the golfer Phil Mickelson and the C.E.O. of Barclays came over to pay homage. Welch may have been long gone from the C-suite, but, in a certain kind of country-club dining room, he remained a rock star. Then Welch offered to drive Cohan back to his house, a few miles away. They got into Welch’s Jeep Cherokee, and Welch refused to put on his seat belt, so the warning bell chimed the whole ride back.

Off he drove. When he got to the left turn out of the Nantucket Golf Club, onto Milestone Road, he did something odd. Instead of keeping to the right side of Milestone Road, as other American drivers do, he decided to drive in the middle of the road, with the Cherokee straddling the yellow line. Needless to say, the drivers coming toward us on Milestone were freaking out. One after another, they all pulled off to the right onto the grassy edge of the street, giving Jack full clearance to continue driving down the middle of the road. He didn’t seem to notice. ♦

3 notes · View notes

themovieblogonline · 3 months

Text

Chicago Rolls Out Red Carpet for Sundance X Chicago 2024

o Logan Center for the Arts on the campus of the University of Chicago co-hosted the first event with Sundance to be held in a city other than Park City, Utah. Sundance X Chicago began with the screening of the Sundance documentary “Luther: Never Too Much” at the Logan Center for the Arts. No less a celebrity than the Mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, was present. Also in attendance was Eugene Hernandez, the Director of the Sundance Film Festival since 2022, and the Director of “Luther: Never Too Much,” Dawn Porter. The City of Chicago, the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), and Choose Chicago, in partnership with the nonprofit Sundance Institute kicked off the highly anticipated Sundance Institute X Chicago 2024 - the first of its kind event in the United States - with a welcome reception with City officials, Sundance creatives, and the greater Chicago film community. SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL The landmark three-day event, June 28 - 30, showcases Midwest premiere screenings of four films drawn from the Sundance Film Festival’s lineup in January, along with a robust series of panel discussions, master classes, and community programming. Sundance, originally the brainchild of Robert Redford, began in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1978. In 1981, the festival moved to Park City, Utah, and changed the dates from September to January. In 2020, the year the pandemic struck, the estimated value of Sundance to Utah was said to be $167 million. Due to the pandemic in 2021, the 44th festival went virtual. The festival returned to in-person showings in 2023. I reviewed 8 films streamed to me from Sundance in 2024. Currently, Sundance is considering moving to another city in 2027. Cities that have expressed interest in hosting Sundance include Boulder, Atlanta, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Chicago, Buffalo, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. "Luther: Never Too Much" Documentary "Luther: Never Too Much" is a documentary that chronicles Luther Vandross's impressive career and life, using clips from his performances and collaborations with greats like David Bowie and Bette Midler to interviews done with Luther, himself, along with those who knew and worked with him. Among those who praise the talent of Luther Vandross in the documentary are Jamie Foxx (an executive producer of the film), Dionne Warwick, Oprah, John Tesh, Roberta Flack, Richard Marx, and Mariah Carey. The treatment resembles the documentaries devoted to Little Richard, Billy Ocean, Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, and others that have recently become available. Read the full article

0 notes

whitepolaris · 4 months

Text

Broadway and Grand

The unluckiest intersection in all of Oklahoma lies in the center of downtown Enid, two hours west of Tulsa. It has nothing to do with faulty traffic lights, traffic congestion, or unsuccessful business venture, mind you, but the fact that, over the span of forty-years, a total of five men, four of them law officers, were killed at this very spot.

The first was in 1895 when Marshal E. C. Williams was shot to death trying to break up a fight. R. W. Patterson, a government official, was scuffling at Broadway and Grand with J. L. Isenberg, publisher of the Enid Daily Wave, over a series of venomous articles that had appeared in the newspaper. Patterson, who was a registrar with the U.S. Land Office, published his legal notices in a competing paper. In retaliation, Isenberg began publishing scurrilous opinions and accusations concerning Patterson. After Isenberg accused him of infidelity, Patterson decided he had enough and punched Isenberg in the face.

About the time Marshal Williams arrived to break up the fight, Patterson pulled out a gun and starting shooting at Isenberg, who quickly ran into a nearby store. Williams pistol-whipped Patterson; Patterson shot the marshal just above his heart. Before the marshal collapsed, however, he took a shot at Patterson, striking him in the temple. Both Williams and Patterson died. Isenberg escaped and later moved to California.

Ten years later, in 1905, another Enid officer was killed at the same intersection. According to a newspaper report at the time, Deputy Sheriff Robert O. Beers received a message one evening alleged to be from the city attorney, which asked for a meeting in the Anheuser-Busch building at the corner of Broadway and Grand. When Beers arrived, he was met instead by two angry men, J. W. Walton and Jacob Erickson. When an argument ensued, Beers pulled his gun but was shot in the head by Erickson before he had a chance to fire. Few details regarding the argument were released, but the confrontation reportedly had something to do with Beers's involvement in an illicit relationship. (Did you get the irony of a man named Beers dying in the Anheuser-Busch building?)

In 1906, less than a year later, yet another lawman was fatally shot in the same building. Marshal Thomas Radford had been in office for only eight months, and just weeks before he had been declared by the chairman of the police committee to be the best marshal Enid ever had. Unfortunately, not everyone agreed, especially John Cannon, who ran a rooming house on East Broadway known for its pleasure of the flash. Redford, determined to close down the rooming house, forced the business's tenants to move, then thwarted Cannon's attempt to set up shop across the street by warning the new building's owner not to rent to Cannon.

Furious, Cannon confronted Redford at the Tony Faust Saloon in the Anheuser-Busch building. Cannon walked up to the marshal, placed his gun to the officer's chest, and fired. As Redford tried to run, Cannon fired back and stuck the lawman a second time, in the torso. Redford continued staggering out the front door, where Cannon shot him again, this time in the head. The marshal fell to the street and died shortly thereafter.

Radford's funeral procession, which consisted of 115 carriages, measured nearly a mile long. John Cannon served twenty-five years in prison.

At the end of a hot July day in 1936, patrons were filling up the German Village Saloon to refresh themselves with a few mugs of beer. Owner Jim O'Neal, however, couldn't relax that evening, as he had been tipped off earlier in the day that someone was going to try to rob him.

O'Neal had been keeping an eye on one particular patron for some time, who seemed oddly familiar. When he realized he may have seen the man in some notorious photographs, he called Enid police officer Cal Palmer to come check the man out. Palmer, along with Officer Ralph Knarr, asked the man to come with them, who replied, "I think I know what you want me for," but kindly asked if he could first finish his beer. The officers agreed.

When the man set down his empty mug, however, he pulled out a revolver and shot Palmer three times. Knarr four times, and another man in the leg once. He then took off out the side door and up an alley, quickly pursued by five other officers. When the killer reached the street, he jumped into the backseat of a car occupied by two men and commanded them to drive.

After the driver hit the gas, he noticed the officers in pursuit, and both he and his passenger jumped out, leaving their hijacker behind. The driver directed the officers to the vehicle, who began firing. The fleeing man jumped out and hid behind the car, but was fatally struck in the head by one of the officers' bullets.

The man was later identified as Lawrence DeVol, a member of the infamous Karpis-Barker gang, which had recently broken up. As for the two officers shot in the saloon, Knarr recovered from his wounds, but Palmer died instantly when one of the bullets struck his heart.

Thankfully, Broadway and Grand, save for a few ghostly encounters reported in the in the surrounding buildings, has been quiet ever since. Probably the worst you'll encounter today is a few red-light runners and the resultant blasts of car horns. But, of course, history is still being written.

#weird oklahoma #type read

0 notes