Fritz Hollings, the Thinnest Fat Man

You got a problem, buddy?

I met the man who nearly would be President!

In 1983, I worked for CTM, a firm that operated MetroNet and MetroSat, Washington DC's satellite uplink service. The explosion in satellite distributed channels with DC operations made for a good business.  We contracted with the local news bureaus, hauling their signal back to network HQ over "toll" telephone line, microwave, and satellite.

It was that spring that I got my first-ever "Producer" credit.

Hollings: The Citadel, 1943

Fritz Hollings, (D., SC) was to announce his candidacy for the Democratic nomination to challenge Ronald Reagan in the '84 elections.  With no one else around interested to handle it, I was made Associate Producer for the event carried live on C-SPAN and uplinked to all the broadcast news services as well as the cablers - at the time, CNN and Group W's "Satellite News Channels" (SNC I & II).

We used an outdoor setting for the short speech, then hustled into C-SPAN studios on Capitol Hill , where CTM topper Robert Schmidt introduced me to C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb, who interviewed the distinguished senator from South Carolina.

Silver hair and shining teeth, straight from central casting.  And then there was his wife, "Peatsy" - I thought he'd said that her name was "Peaches," and I addressed her as such throughout the event....

I guess he had 'em...

Knew How To Pick 'Em:
After a new Hampshire drubbing, Fritz dropped out of contention for '84, and ultimately endorsed Gary Hart (oy...), he called eventual nominee Walter Mondale a "lapdog," and later endorsed Jesse Jackson in '88.  He had also voted in 1967 against confirming Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, and later for Robert Bork.  Not a winning record at the track. And yes, he's the wag who called Howard Metzenbaum (D., OH) "the Senator from B'Nai B'rith."

Hollings/Porter, '83

Hollings is distinguished for serving 8th longest time in Senate (over 38 years), 36 as the younger in the home-state pair - the junior Senator - w/Strom Thurmond (Strom then then the longest serving Senator, since surpassed by Robert Byrd). Thus - like John Kerry more recently behind "lion" Teddy Kennedy for 26 years - Hollings was known in Senate parlance as the "Senior Junior." Such as when Homeland Security announces that "The Threat Level has been 'lowered to Elevated'."  Or, the Phantom Tollbooth conundrum of the perfectly normal character who represents himself alternately as the shortest tall man, tallest short man, fattest thin man....

I helped to tell the world about this gent's candidacy for President of the United States, and although the world responded with a yawn, for one brief, shining moment in '83 it was all Fritz, Fritz, Fritz !!!

Elizabeth Taylor, R.I.P.

February 27, 1932 - March 23, 2011

Elizabeth Taylor is the only celebrity appearing in Celebrity Romp whom I never actually met (although we did attend movies at the same cinema).

Liz and I, in our prime ...

Here's another great picture from 1970 - "our year."
We shared a birthday.  It is sad that she is gone.

Poolside with Jeff Beck - Guitar God of Few Words

Tune Up The Motor

In 1991 on a business trip to L.A., I had a few hours to kill. Those days I always stayed at the Sunset Marquis, a block off Sunset on Alta Loma near La Cienega.

One day I had slack time between meetings and decided, instead of trucking down the street to Tower Records, to sit by the pool.

Into the next chaise lounge dropped a scruffy guy with a shag haircut and the large J.C. Whitney High Performance Auto Parts catalog in his hands. JEFF BECK !!!

Nobody makes a guitar sound like Jeff Beck can

We soaked up the sun in silence and with furtive glances aplenty I tried to determine the make & model of car he was parts-shopping for.  No luck though, as that catalog is written in 4-point type, like a phone book.

After a while I caught his eye and said "Are y'findin' anything in there?" Jeff's response was a lackadaisical shrug. "Whatcha lookin' for?" I asked.  "Nothin' in particular. Everything."  Brief silence. "Well, good luck!"

Four years later I had a pair of tickets to see Beck/Santana outdoors on a perfect summer night at Wolf Trap Farms in Virginia, and work interfered. Instead, I gave those tickets to Michael, a young friend and colleague who brought an exquisitely beautiful date for what he described as a splendid, enchanted evening.

I wished I'd been the one to use that ticket - but the following spring, when my friend died of leukemia, I was glad he'd had his own magical night in the company of this guitar god.

The Sunset Marquis: Where Rock Stars and Nobodies Alike May Mingle

...After all, Jeff and I'd already become fast friends!  

A Short Swim with Tark the Shark

From 1989 to 1995 I paddled in the sharkpool that is the annual VSDA convention, un-spooling every summer in stiflingly hot Las Vegas.  It's the trade show where all the big home video releases are promoted before the fall/pre-holiday buying cycle.

Tark SharkBite

Christopher Lloyd signs autographs

The LV Hilton exhibit hall would be packed:  Up front: Hollywood Studios with big booths and wild promotions (Warner Bros: "Get your picture taken in front of the car from Lethal Weapon and next to a cardboard standee of Mel Gibson!"; Paramount: "George 'Sulu' Takei signing autographs, 3-4pm today!").

Middle of the pack: independent video publishers, from desperate chop shops like United Video with Go-Go-Gophers, to one-hit golden geese (Lyons Group with the Barney franchise, Andrew Solt selling the Ed Sullivan archive), to high-end special interest catalogs (Kultur, Pacific Arts).

Walking the floor in Vegas...

In the back of the hall, behind a curtain: the motor that drove the video store business - porn.  But that's another story or two....

So it's 1994 and we're set up in our little Discovery Channel booth in the "Special Interest" section, showing off Nature, Science, History (a.k.a. Military), People & Places, and Human Adventure titles.  Coming up the aisle? A glowering, lumbering hulk with a low-brow look, surrounded by an entourage of husky peackeepers and a school of beanpole remoras (remorae?).  It's him!  The Towel Chewer - Jerry Tarkanian!

Tark coached the UNLV "Runnin' Rebels" hoop team, and had been notorious for over 20 years for his winning ways, NCAA-infuriating violations of recruiting and other policies, and "questionable associations" with Las Vegas sports, gambling and other nefarious denizens.  The hoop arena was close by, nearly around the corner on the short drive between the strip and McCarran airport.  He must have just popped over to review the fun at the rear of the hall.

I had all of three seconds in the paint, to think fast, pick, roll, and reach for the spinner rack.  With Discovery's annual "Shark Week" stunt coming shortly and already getting heavy on-air promotion, we'd featured a series of Shark titles in the booth.  "Hey Tark!  Sign my Shark box!" He ambled over, took the magic marker from me and scribbled "Tark the Shark" across its face, and kept moving.

I later gave the box to a wide eyed intern as a prize for some sort of sales support contest.

Don't Miss: "Jerry Tarkanian and other Runnin' Rebels" premiering tonight and playing all this month during March madness, on HBO!

Panning and Zooming: The Ken Burns Effect

I'm proud to support a great local arts organization that operates two of the finest independent cinemas in the northeast US, the Amherst Cinema and the Pleasant Street Theater.  Like similar non-profit arts organizations, we must fund-raise through membership and other means in order to present the fantastic program that movie-goers have come to expect and love.  A high point: the yearly Gala - third annual to take place this Saturday evening.

Hampshire College - 1977

During last year's event while guests were seated for dinner, I visited the Men's Room in the Crown Center gymnasium at Hampshire College and, on exiting, began to study a large framed b/w photograph of the Hampshire College community of 1977 all gathered on the grass at the main quad. [For reasons of necessity, HC grads do not identify themselves, I learned from Bert and Liz, by their class (graduation) year, but rather by their entry year: "Entered 1971"].

"There's my [first] wife Amy!" came an excited voice from over my shoulder - and it was the Gala guest of honor, documentary filmmaker (and HC grad '75) Ken Burns.

In The Beginning...

I heartily shook his hand, introduced myself, and ticked off our connections: while at National Geographic TV in mid-'80s my friend and colleague Eileen Opatut had smartly picked up cable rights to a first-ever off-PBS run of Ken's first film, "Brooklyn Bridge;" later my boss at Discovery Channel had traveled to Vermont to attempt - without success - to woo Ken away from PBS and his sweetheart, "long-form" sponsorship deal with GM; and finally that Ken's mentor Jerome Liebling - who built the Hampshire visual arts program and whom Ken has publicly acknowledged many times for instilling the love of storytelling through photography and film - had been living in my home during part of Ken's time at HC (as my dad had a teaching exchange that year in the UK).

Filmmaker Ken Burns

Ken is uncommonly dynamic, bright and intense: highly animated and engaged, really willing to share all manner of insights.  We chatted and hooted together about the difference between making documentary films for TV and for the theater, and about the difference between true documentaries and more "polemic" exercises of late in political film-making.

As we stood before the "Class picture," I couldn't help watching to track Ken's eyes as they scanned and panned, focused and zoomed, while he picked out one old friend after another, and some favorite faculty as well.  There it was: the "Ken Burns Effect!"

Jerry Liebling was in attendance at the event and his photograph of the fence and walk at the Emily Dickinson Homestead in Amherst fetched the highest bid of the evening at the benefit auction.

Dickinson Fence  - Amherst, MA (1980)  Jerome Liebling

 Before he and I parted ways to re-enter the dinner, I also thanked Ken Burns for his "effect," now bundled with Apple iMovie, and its impact at thousands of events - but especially at my parents' 50th Anniversary party.

Later, Ken captivated the dinner crowd in his talk, underlining his passion for the ever-changing American society (Civil War, Jazz, Baseball, Jefferson, Twain, etc.), and describing how Hampshire College had nurtured a life-long drive for creativity and expression.

Burns brought tears to many pairs of eyes when he described, with great magic and rhapsody, a particular transcendental, Emersonian "transparent eyeball" moment* during his time as an undergrad in this, the USA's #1 college town.  Ken had taken the bus uptown to the old/original Amherst Cinema, watched a film - he couldn't recall which one! - and exited the theater... (I paraphrase):

"...now knowing exactly what my purpose would be in life, knowing for the first time who I was becoming! Knowing exactly what I would do, which was to tell stories, to use this beautiful medium to communicate, to feel, and to reach to the heart of things!  It was late at night, and it was snowing softly, and there was no traffic in the center of town, and I ran down the middle of Main Street hollering at the top of my lungs, with my arms outstretched over my head! Hallelujah!"

 * Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball - I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me - I am part or particle of God.... I am a lover of un-contained and immortal beauty.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

>>
Coming in episode II:
My two dates with Kathleen Turner, and a thirty-years-late "Thank You"...

Rangel Redux: A Jive Turkey Gets Trussed

I'm afraid that my friend Charley Rangel is again popping up in the news as a shameless opportunist and sanctimonious, scenery-chewing blowhard, one who should be censured in Congress, found in contempt in a court of law, disbarred in NY, and jailed.

The current contemptible behavior is described here, and my acquaintance with Charley here.

Sadder is the fact that the student mentioned in today's news - who departed boarding school last spring and clearly has been on a rapid, downward spiral - is someone I've met and for whose future I despair.  She and my daughter were classmates and teammates on a girls' basketball team, and it is always a tragedy when one so young has her life wrecked; in this case (it appears) by her own choices.

Afrika, Charley Rangel will NOT be your salvation but rather the vulture who picks at your flesh for his own sustenance.

My Impertinent Connection with James Burke

A great IDEA, like a great song, has persistence and will come back around, will live, and evolve in new applications and accoutrements.

Such is the "Human Business" of Innovation...

After Discovery Channel acquired TLC and began to invest in first-run programming, we knew that Connections, with James Burke was a knockout concept, had been a winner in the PBS system in the late 70's, and still had a core of devoted fans.  We resurrected it, made a hit of it on cable and in home video.  Then we set out to do it justice as a Discovery Multimedia interactive "real world game."

JB: The Encyclopaedia Wore a Leisure Suit

The CD-ROM game would follow the promise of the series: James would dive in and hop-scotch through time across scientific-historical steppingstones from one madcap innovation to another, weaving a verbal string of ingeniously-related anecdotes based on relations - some solid, others coincidental, a priori, or downright tenuous.  One or two of the most entertaining examples were quite rococo, yet so glib and charming was James that he could pull it off.

I recall thinking, of some examples, that perhaps it was all a bit of a parlo(u)r trick, and I said as much in our very first meeting. Mistake - the audacity!  He could - and should - have cut me to the quick, but...

All that was missing was the yad

Instead, high-brow James unfurled a huge scroll of parchment - 15 feet long by 30 inches wide - across the 20-foot executive conference room table.  On it were hundreds of constellations, each with 5 or 6 to 20+ pencil-written "nodes," each node a pivotal event that capitalized on applied learning to introduce a solution that not only solved a problem but also led to successive innovation.

The ersatz map of the night sky depicted what Burke called the "web of knowledge," and even included extra leaves that he would fold under to link across levels and conjoin multiple constellations with one or more shared nodes.  James had painstakingly hand-made this work of cartography, and he'd clutched and carried it like a precious Torah scroll during the pitch meetings at the network. Its existence was legendary; to have him unfurl it for our team was a huge honor.

Understand that we were seeing this in 1993 and early 1994, only months before getting a first peek at Hypertext Markup Language and the eventual/true wwweb.  Lo and behold, that Burkeian "web of knowledge" now has new life as an interactive application for personal exploration, creativity and corporate development from the James Burke Institute.

See knowledge web 'Mystery Tour' examples such as "King Frederick to the Bottle Cap (via Voltaire)," or "Cornflakes to Communism."


James was game for making Connections interactive, and very involved in the concept and development.  He joined the team for several planning meetings, and we reviewed the software shoulder to shoulder as the project came together (we commissioned SF-based developer Luminaria who'd produced the most excellent mythology title Wrath of the Gods).

At our direction, Luminaria shamelessly patterned Connections on Myst, which my QA team were playing when they weren't playing networked DOOM.  James was genuinely pleased with the way that Connections came out, and promoted it with vigor.  The title became Discovery's first seven-figure seller.

Without modesty I'll assert that our little "It's A Mind Game" effort, in more ways than one, was a CD-ROM approximation - a tiny bi-sect - of what would emerge shortly as the consumer-oriented and media-rich Internet.  It used the medium to go well beyond what had been possible in the linear television format.

Rob Bole: "The show was smart, interesting and really underscored how all ideas and objects are built upon the accretion of human knowledge, insight and innovation.

"You fool, you!"

When I first understood what a URL was - meaning when I first experienced linking I immediately thought that promise of James Burke's Connections was finally at my fingertips. Through the magic of linking I could wander off through the vast store of human knowledge; sometimes following determined paths, but others through luck or fancy that would lead to new insights and appreciation for our world.

Amazing! The World Wide Web was going to be my encyclopedia, teacher and exploration portal all in one. While I did not appreciate or understand it then this was the potential to index the knowledge of the world through a commonly-understood metadata; the accretion of thousands of individual decisions about context that would help build a vast human store of experience.

However, the web has never really lived up to this promise." (read more at PublicPurposeMedia)

We Drank Deeply, & with Satisfaction

James really took care as we built the title together, and afterward.  An old hand at the book tour game, and a veteran huckster from his days as on-air talent for BBC covering the Apollo lunar excursions and other science topics, he gamely went on the road with us and nailed the endless interviews, demonstrations, and promotions with style, wit and class.

In this mad rush, to share a pint with Sir James on La Croisette in Cannes, captivated by his knowledge and drawn in warmly by his passionate love for people and their ideas, was my unique and lasting joy.

Thankfully, but not surprisingly, he was way too well-bred to be-head me over the parlo(u)r-trick jibe....