Bryce Zabel's FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH

O.J. Flashback: His Arrest in Los Angeles in 1994

It's been over thirteen years now since that slow-speed chase in the white Bronco where we all held our breaths wondering if O.J. was going to blow his own brains out on live TV.  I remember watching it in the Calabasas Sagebrush Cantina -- the Bronco was on one screen, and the Lakers play-off was on the other.  Nobody could take their eyes off either.

The racial controversy over O.J. Simpson began, of course, with the murder of a white woman and white man by a black suspect, but it was seen visually the minute the issues of Time and Newsweek first came out.  It triggered a pull-back of a cover, an unprecedented action in the publishing history of news magazines.  Here's what their initial June 27, 1994 issues first looked like:

Here's where it got interesting.  Almost immediately after hitting the stands, Time was accused of racism by minority groups for its photographic alteration of the famous O.J. arrest photo.  The editors defended their choice by saying that they had taken that creative license to show the shadow that had descended on his reputation that week.  Illustrator Matt Mahurin was the one to altern the image, saying later that he "wanted to make it more artful, more compelling."  Enough readers, however, said that they saw the white man stacking the deck by "demonizing" the black man, that Time did something it had never done before and has never done since.  They issued a second cover and pulled the first one.  Essentially this meant that only mail subscribers ever saw the first cover.  Here they are side-by-side for your own inspection.

Most of us are very familiar with the story of O.J. Simpson -- the famous athlete a criminal jury said didn't do it only to have a civil jury say he did just over a year later.  Like the Los Angeles riots which preceded the arrest of O.J. by two years, this story said as much about the state of race relations in America as they did about the guilt or innocence of the accused.  Before the racial overtone set in, however, coverage in these initial issues had a lot to do with the actual slow-speed chase.  Here's the way Time started in both versions:

When asked how they could have let one of the most famous double-murder suspects in history slip away under their noses, the angry police commander and the tight-faced lawyer and the whole choir of commentators all said the same thing, without a trace of irony:  "We never thought he would run."

Maybe people condense into their essential selves in crisis, and O.J. was one of the best runners in American football.  Here's how Newsweek began their story:

The end, last week, was off-camera.  After the bloody steps, the heart-rending funerals, the surreal chase through the twilight of Los Angeles, O.J. Simpson surrendered himself into the darkness his life has become.  He was in the back seat of his best friend's Bronco, communing quietly with his cellular phone, his blue steel revolver and a picture of his children.  As the police stood back, the shadows lengthened.

Now, of course, there's a new O.J. criminal saga starting in Las Vegas. If you had any questions about why they denied him bail, this is why. More coverage to come, to be sure...

Lost... and Found

While we were returning from Ireland two days ago (geez, it seems like a month ago and a dream at that), one of my pieces of checked luggage didn't make it from Dublin to Chicago. Then it didn't make it from Chicago to Los Angeles. We filed a lost baggage report.

They told us that they try to get it back in 24 hours and would deliver it to our house. But all day yesterday, the airline kept showing status reports on the internet and over the phone of it continuing to be lost. The video camera you see to the left was in that bag but the good news is that, at the last minute, I stored the two tapes we'd shot in my carry-on and put the camera in the other bag that got checked. "It's only money" I reminded myself; I'd saved what was important, the memories.

I gave up hope of getting the bag back as the clock ran out on the first day. Then I got sad remembering that the luggage had all the t-shirts I'd bought in Ireland, including my two Rolling Stones Slane concert tees. It had some other stuff, too, that had some attachment, plus the bag was new. What really depressed me was the feeling that a robbery victim must have: you've been violated, and there's nothing anybody can do about it.

This morning it looks like they found the bag! Even though I've slept only a couple of hours from this topsy-turvy jet-lag, I'm wide awake and feeling fine. Over a few tee-shirts. Go figure...

Morning Wake-Up Call

Last night, about an hour after I got to sleep, a magnitude 4.5 temblor hit. I know people think we're all matter-of-fact about these things out here in Los Angeles, but I don't think it's true.

This one struck just before 1 a.m. about 4 miles northwest of Chatsworth, which isn't all that far from where I live. It hit with a real jolt and it went on long enough that I was wide-awake and planning where to hide when it subsided.

The thing is that you never know if it's going to be a little shaking or whether it's just the beginning of the "Big One." I was living in this same house back in 1994 for the Northridge quake and it was pretty insane. It literally turned on my stereo (which was turned off) at extremely loud volume for about four seconds. So I woke up then shaking to loud rock-and-roll. We all went outside into the cul-de-sac and worried with the neighbors, got out the flashlights and went looking to make sure everybody was accounted for. It was pretty scary, not something you'll ever take lightly.

Anyway, this recent one went away before it got serious. I checked my son's room and found out he slept through it. My daughter was out, we tried calling but it didn't immediately go through. But she was back home in a few minutes to check on us.

Then we all went back to sleep.

Conspiracy? JFK's Got Nothin' on Jim Morrison

Oliver Stone has made one movie about a conspiracy, "JFK," that probably isn't true at all, and another supposedly true story, "The Doors," which isn't about a conspiracy but should have been because that, in fact, is what really happened.

Ah, the irony...

Regular readers know I'm something of a conspiracy buff. I once called the Warren Commission Report "the greatest work of fiction that American literature has ever produced." Then I proceded to create a TV series, "Dark Skies," that had, as its basis, that President Kennedy was assassinated because he knew the truth about Roswell and was going to come clean with the American people in his second term (and, no, I never actually believed that -- it was a TV series!). We even did an episode of that series, by the way, where Jim Morrison was a character.

Now we have two news stories that are upending what people believe about JFK's assassination and about Jim Morrison's death.

Former LA prosecutor Vincent Buglioisi has a new book out, "Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy."  It's over 16-hundred pages and I'm not done but it make a very persuasive case that Lee Harvey Oswald was, indeed, a lone nut-case who acted alone. Just like the Warren Commission said.

Then there's Time magazine which has a new article, "How Jim Morrison Died" by Vivienne Walt that says the idea he died in his bathtub in Paris is a complete fabrication. The truth, according to Walt, is that Morrison overdosed in a Paris nightclub and that about five or six people participated in taking his body back to his apartment and putting it in that bathtub and that Paris authorities just looked the other way and never did an autopsy.

Imagine how that would have energized the ending of Oliver Stone's movie. Could have happened, too. Sam Bernett who ran the Paris nightclub was described by Time this way.

Bernett says he once met Oliver Stone's mother, and told her: "Tell your son to call me and I'll tell him how his movie should end." Stone never called.

And, yet, just as I'm accepting these new facts, there's something from each story that keeps me guessing.

First, Bugliosi, also writing in an earlier issue of Time about "What We Can Learn From JFK" had this to say about the subject of the vast conspiracy it would have taken to bring down JFK:

"Three people can keep a secret but only if two of them are dead."

Bugliosi has used this line in the famous mock-trial of Oswald he participated in for the BBC, in his book and in most interviews. It's his standard-issue one-liner and it works because, well, it generally is true.

Now let's go to the article about Jim Morrison's death.

"We carried him in a blanket and got him the hell out of there," recalls Chauvel, who was a friend of Morrison. Explaining the cover-up, Chauvel says: "I guess if you have a nightclub and Jim Morrison dies in your toilet, it is not good p.r. The five or six people who knew, who were there that night, agreed to just forget about it."

So, let's see. These six people kept this secret for 36 years now and it only broke because one of them, who's getting on in years, decided to write a book and the others have confirmed it. And they joined the conspiracy because Morrison's drug dealers didn't want their product tied to the rock star in a nightclub. Bad for business.

Maybe Bugliosi's wrong. Maybe even six people can keep a secret, provided nobody thinks there is one in the first place.

Shooting Craps with Joel Siegel

It seems like everybody in America could recognize film critic Joel Siegel. He was the guy with the mustache on the network morning news show who reviewed films and provided comic relief, the guy who wasn't the other guy like that, Gene Shalit.

That's kind of how I thought about Joel Siegel when I first met him in 1984. When my employers at KABC in Los Angeles wanted someone to produce a half-hour with Joel in Las Vegas, they asked me if I'd do it and, of course, I said yes. The program, hazy as it is in my memory now, was an Oscar prequel hype where we would shoot his wrap-around stand-ups at a Las Vegas hotel to demonstrate the horse-race aspect of the whole thing. As it turns out, Joel had a kind of love-hate relationship with Oscar predictions which my friend and Gold Derby analyst Tom O'Neil writes about
today. Here's a tease from Tom's first-person account:

Joel, being a celebrity, could be, well, a bit fickle. Sometimes he'd turn on the whole idea of Oscar punditry — vehemently, like a damning evangelist — and resign from GoldDerby in a huff. When I'd ask him why, he'd get all flustered, give me lots of babbling gibberish about how Oscar punditry cheapens the whole discourse of great films. Then he'd march away from me, cutting off further discussion with an abrupt waving of hands.

Of course, my brush with Joel was not the long-term relationship that Tom had, but a one-of-a-kind thing. I remember meeting Joel at the airport and sharing a seat next to him on the short hop to Vegas and hearing what he had planned. It was pretty clear that it was his show and I was there to tell the photog where to point the camera, to make sure the accomodations were okay and to run interference, if needed, with the hotel and fans. Not that I expected any more because, to Joel, I was the hired gun for the show.

The shoot went just fine. Joel knew his lines, knew when he liked a take and we all just jammed the work out in short order. Of course, when you're shining bright lights on a guy in a Vegas hotel, people notice. By the time we knocked off, everybody knew that Joel Siegel was there.

What I most remember about the night is that after we finished Joel ended up at a craps table for several hours, surrounded by at least a hundred people who would shout and scream and congratulate with every roll of the dice. Joel took the time to try to explain to me how craps works but, sadly, it seems not to have stuck.

He was a lot of fun that night. He was, like all talent (including myself when I've been in front of the camera), a lot to handle when the pressure of being "on" during a deadline hits, but that's no knock at all, but almost universal. I really liked him. After working with him, naturally, I never ever again thought of him as the "other" guy on the morning shows.

ABC News, of course, has some nice rememberances of him on their web-site today. I really enjoyed this page because it's all first-person information, like what Tom O'Neil did and what I've tried to do. Here's a parting selection from film colleague Roger Ebert.

There were four kinds of e-mails from Joel: (1) Good news; (2) Bad news; (3) Encouragement involving your own problems, and (4) Jokes. Mostly we got jokes. If all else had failed, Joel could have been a stand-up comic; in early days, he was a joke writer for Robert Kennedy. On the other hand, he ran a voter registration program for Martin Luther King, Jr., in Macon, Georgia.'

From the first day I met him, when he was a network star and I was only, well, an out-of-towner, Joel was a friend. We worked the red carpet every year at the Oscars, interviewing each other when things got slow. Chaz and I had dinner with Joel and his wife, the well-known artist Ena Swansea, soon after he got the bad health news, but he wasn't downbeat; he had hope and determination.

I really enjoyed Joel's spirit both on and off camera. And I agreed with his reviews far more often than not. He was opinionated without being mean. I'll miss him. Guess we all will...

• From MOVIE SMACKDOWN! - Two Films, One Review, No Holds Barred
  

Time's New Man-of-the-Year: Still JFK After All These Years

Last month, President John F. Kennedy would have turned 90 years old, had he lived. Even so, JFK is enjoying a banner year of publicity, especially for a dead man.

This week, it's Time magazine joining the fray, giving Kennedy the cover ("What We Can Learn from JFK") and a whopping 18 full pages of print and photo space. He gets a mostly adoring view from the writers who call him "A Warrior for Peace" and an "Icon of American Elegance."

Time joins a veritable publishing bonanza trading on the fascination with JFK-ness. There's Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History which argues the most sensational assassination story you can imagine: namely that Oswald, in fact, acted alone. This book is being made into an HBO mini-series by Tom Hanks & Co. Before Bugliosi, it was Salon's editor David Talbot's Brothers which argued that Bobby Kennedy intended to win the presidency first and then investigate for a conspiracy which he believed in. And, before that, it was E. Howard Hunt who, basically on his death-bed, claimed in American Spy that it was Lyndon Johnson who conspired to see Kennedy shot.

Maybe that's what makes Time so unique with its latest issue. The assassination only gets two pages. One is devoted to Bugliosi's Oswald-acted-alone case and the other to Talbot's Bobby-suspected-conspiracy case. Everything else dissects what made JFK such a great president.

In fact, he was. His speeches were perfect pitch in confronting the Soviet menace and the Cold War, telling the enemy that we would "bear any burden" to oppose tyranny but also extending the olive branch of peace if they wished to be our partners. He was inspirational in other areas from race relations to volunteerism. He literally was of the new generation. He gave Americans hope and he gave people from around the world reason to like Americans.

Amazingly, one of the associated Time articles called "The Swingingest President Ever" is not about the hundreds, if not thousands, of women besides Jackie Kennedy that JFK bedded. It is about his golf game. The closest the writers come to analyzing his personal fall from grace is this single passage from the cover story's introduction:

"In more recent years, he has suffered from a revisionist backlash, portrayed in books and the media as a decadent prince who put the nation at risk with is reckless personal behavior. Journalist Christopher Hitchens has gone so far as to dismiss him as a "vulgar hoodlum." While Kennedy's private life would certainly not pass today's public scrutiny, this pathological interpretation misses the essential story of his presidency."

At the risk of sounding like I'm full of "revisionist backlash," I'm not certain I fully agree.

First, however, as I've said many, many times, I loved JFK and his death made a mark on me like everyone else of my generation. Second, I'm a life-long Democrat.

Still, I'm not inclined to accept Time's analysis that all would have been wonderful if only he'd lived. He lived a life of lies from his medical condition to his now-legendary affairs. He tried to kill foreign leaders. He had friends in the mob who did him favors. And, at the time of his assassination, he was not as universally liked as he was when he became a martyr.

Co-author Harry Turtledove and I have worked through the "if Kennedy lived" scenario and come up with a fairly controversial new conclusion. If JFK survived Dallas, we believe the resulting investigation would have exposed in a very short period of time all the unsavory things that have instead taken over four decades to come out. The backwash would have crippled his presidency and his reputation would be quite different today. It's an alt-history book which we invite you to check out by clicking on the image below.

Lennon and McCartney: Still Competitors

After all these years, Paul McCartney and John Lennon are still rivals. It's odd, but the two most recent CDs I've bought (within a week of each other) have been McCartney's Starbucks fueled "Memory Almost Full" and the Darfur fundraising compilation of Lennon covers "Instant Karma."

"Memory Almost Full" is a lot better than I expected. His last CD, "Chaos and Creation in the Backyard" got all these accolades but it didn't move me like I'd hoped it would. This one seems more like Paul being back to form and, honestly, thinking about being 65 (his birthday was June 18). My favorite cuts so far are "Dance Tonight," "That Was Me," "Gratitude" and "The End of the End." This is not the end of the end for Paul, of course, but it may be the beginning of the end. And, despite the Starbucks inspired commercial overkill involved, it's still well-done.

For a longer post about almost seeing a Beatles re-union at a 1976 McCartney concert, CLICK HERE.

For Time magazine's take on that same tour (which was McCartney's first live show post-Beatles), CLICK HERE.

To read a tribute to Paul McCartney on his 64th birthday, CLICK HERE.

"Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur" is also getting a lot of play on my iPod. It's a wonderful effort musically and for a good cause. Some great acts have given a shot at some Lennon songs that probably a lot of people haven't heard before. U2 does the "Instant Karma" title track, making it come alive again. I'm particularly fond of Dhani Harrison and Jakob Dylan's version of "Gimme Some Truth."  Same with Matisyahu's "Watching the Wheels" and Ben Harper's "Beautiful Boy." The only one that absolutely pales in comparison is "Imagine" which, even if you're Jack Johnson or Avril Lavigne (both do versions), basically just can't compete.

For a longer post about the day John Lennon died and what it meant, CLICK HERE.

For a post about the Beatles coming to America and first playing on the Ed Sullivan Show as reported by Newsweek at the time, CLICK HERE.

For a review of the new Beatle's Las Vegas show "Love," CLICK HERE.

To read about Apple (the computer company) and Apple (the record company) finally coming together, CLICK HERE.

Funny isn't it, 37 years after the Beatles go solo, McCartney is still the "commercial" one and Lennon is still the "political" one. Oh, well...

Duke Out: Would You Watch?

Over the weekend a disciplinary committee disbarred disgraced prosecutor Mike Nifong for his leading role in the disastrous and dishonest prosecution of three Duke University lacrosse players who he falsely accused of rape last year. Even Nifong agreed that his punishment fit his crime.

The only thing left in Nifong's public humiliation will be the books and the movie that may come of all this. I'd love to write the movie of this slow-motion disaster. In fact, I tried as hard as I knew how to do exactly that.

First, the background: the TV movie business isn't what it used to be. The networks, for all intents and purposes aren't interested anymore, leaving the form only to the cable outlets and even that territory isn't taking up the slack.

The Duke non-rape case was a good example. Ten years ago this might have been the perfect "ripped-from-the-headlines" film. It's got it all. He said-she said. Sex (or no sex). Athletics. Class struggle. Strippers. A good villain. Ruined lives.

So, as the story was breaking last year, executive Jonathan Eskenas from the Orly Adelson Company and I said to ourselves, "Damn. There's a movie there."

As a consequence, I wrote this one-page treatment. You can read it for yourself if you want by clicking the link below to download the PDF file.

Duke Out, TV Movie Treatment

We called around. Almost everybody passed in the concept stage. We got one actual pitch, at ABC. The executive we talked to understood the idea, he liked it even, but they passed, too. They just weren't sure...

Too damn bad. I look at the date on that treatment. June 5, 2006. Almost exactly one year ago. That means, being as fast a writer as I am, that I'd have jetted off to Durham for a few weeks, nosed around, read everything, and would have had a first draft by the end of August. We could have been in pre-production in September, shooting in October or November.

If ABC had bought this pitch, they would have had a movie in their hands for this May's ratings sweeps, and they'd be re-airing it this week with the Nifong hearing. Tell me that people wouldn't watch that. We'd have tacked on an ending reflecting the current reality, but it would have been compelling television and I'd be willing to bet that such a movie would have won its time slot.

But the networks are out of the TV movie business. I'm not sure that's wise.  Sounds as clueless as Mike Nifong...

Maybe the feature people will think differently.

Sopranos Interruptus

I didn't like it. Just can't get behind this "do-it-yourself" ending that intentionally had everyone in the room wondering if the TiVO had cut out two minutes too soon. It wasn't cool, it was cruel.

"I can't decide whether to go out with the bang or the whimper."

I know others will be trying to see it as a bold creative choice. For me, it's a cop-out. I have great respect for what David Chase has accomplished, of course, but don't tell me that we can all figure out our own ending. You're the creator. We want to know what you think.

I was particularly disappointed by the A.J. resolution being another inside entertainment joke that, somehow, he was going to end up working in the film biz like Christopher. He's the son of Tony Soprano at a time when the chickens were coming home to roost and this is the way they deal with him?

The no-ending ending did get Jackie and me into a lively discussion with our viewing friends Scott and Andie, mind you, but not the good kind, the frustrating kind.

Maybe it's just a ploy for a big-budget "The Sopranos" movie but, if that's the case, then I feel even more ripped off.

In any case, see ya, Tony, loved you almost to the end...

The "Pandemic" Crystal Ball: Quarantine, Selfishness & TB

Over the weekend, "Pandemic" aired on the Hallmark Channel across the United States, both Saturday and Sunday night. My wife and I wrote the screenplay which tells the story of a passenger who dies on a plane flight from Australia to Los Angeles of a bird-flu type of illness, infecting his fellow passengers, causing a quarantine first of the plane, then the entire city. And, without revealing the ending completely, the ending resolution has something to do with TB.

Today comes word from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about a case involving a U.S. citizen who traveled on two international flights, probably infected his fellow passengers with a rare form of TB (XDR-TB) which was recently defined as a subtype of multiple-drug resistant tuberculosis. It can be fatal. In any case, Here is the story as CNN reports it today.

As with all TB, the disease can be spread through the air. "In this case, the infected patient traveled on two trans-Atlantic air flights and, in doing so, may have exposed passengers and crew to XDR-TB," the agency said.

"A federal quarantine order has been issued and CDC is currently collaborating with U.S., state and local health departments, international ministries of health, the airline industry, and WHO (World Health Organization)."

Sometimes life imitates art and vice-versa. The Fox News article has a couple of other similarities. For starters, the man who carried the disease has been put in respiratory isolation.

"I don't recall us doing this since 1963," said Gerberding. "We want to balance personal liberties with public health and, because this organism is so potentially serious, especially to those who have reduced immunity, our responsibility is to err on the side of caution."

Imagine, by the way, if he wasn't the sole incident but was one of thousands and thousands who needed this level of care or isolation. The other thing is that this particular passenger doesn't appear to have been very concerned about anybody else's exposure.

"The patient felt his personal agenda was highly relevant to him," she said. "The CDC was not aware he was traveling. We were surprised the patient left the country."

This is very consistent with the story we told in "Pandemic." We had a character, Jack Hendler, who felt his work as a Brentwood real estate agent was more important than public safety and broke the quarantine, becoming a "Typhoid Jack" across Los Angeles. All you have to do is to observe people's selfish, immature and dangerous driving habits around here to imagine that someone who is supposed to cool it in a quarantine would decide the rules didn't apply to them.

Should we be afraid? Yeah, probably...