Out of Focus

Studying The Brady Bunch finally pays off

Today Indiewire published a piece I wrote about the portrayal of kids coming-of-age on The Brady Bunch. It's the third in a series of five stories they're running this week to mark tomorrow night's launch of Participant Media's exciting new cable network pivot. As I think about all those afternoons trying to one-up my UCLA Daily Bruin colleagues in Brady trivia 20 years ago, I certainly never realized that one day my encyclopedic knowledge of most-things-Brady would actually come in handy.

I was a typical latch-key kid of the '70s and '80s, so my addiction to television should surprise no one. I had several afterschool television companions. Had you asked me when I was seven or eight to name my favorite show, I likely would have said channel 2's Captain Cosmic. But the show I ultimately absorbed and knew most intimately was absolutely The Brady Bunch, which aired its repeats on rival channel 44.

I'll admit it: I loved the Bradys. My parents divorced when I was four, and neither remarried until I was 13. I had no siblings, and even my two first cousins closest to my age lived out of the country until I was nine. I split time between each of my parents' San Francisco apartments: Mom in the Richmond, Dad bordering Golden Gate Park in the Sunset. The Brady Bunch presented a situation I could recognize and I suppose realistically long for even though it was pretty removed from my own.

I've never been someone who possesses instant recall of movies, television, theater or music. People will quote a song lyric or a line from a film and then be surprised -- or even disappointed -- that I can't identify it. I'm still that way. I tend to remember my feelings and reactions to the overall story more than the intricacies of plot or individual lines themselves.

However, that was never true with The Brady Bunch. By the time I arrived at UCLA in 1988, even though I had stopped regularly watching the Bradys years earlier, I realized that I could identify almost every episode within its first 10-15 seconds. The initial post-credits shot, background music and first few seconds of the first scene often were enough for me to know whether Marcia was about to get hit in the face with a football or Greg was about to "fit the suit" and turn into Johnny Bravo. When I became involved with the Daily Bruin, I met a few other people with Brady obsessions, and thus began the aforementioned trivia battles.

Joseph Losey's "The Servant" expert take on "class warfare"

More violent than any of the tentpole summer blockbusters at the local multiplex, Joseph Losey's 1963 film The Servant examines the diminished and disintegrating British class system of its era. This new restoration for the film's 50th anniversary presents a stunningly claustrophobic and utterly engaging experience for audiences, and if you've never seen it before (as I hadn't), rushing down to Film Forum before it ends its run on Thursday should be a top priority.

The story centers on a young but lazy member of Britain's upper crust named Tony (James Fox) who upon returning to London from time abroad hires Barrett (Dirk Bogarde), a seemingly dutiful and professional live-in butler. The idea of a young bachelor living alone with a manservant was enough of a relic by the early '60s that even Tony's suitably positioned and wealthy girlfriend Susan (Wendy Craig) doesn't understand or like Barrett's presence. As the story unfolds and Barrett reveals his true motivations, the line between master and manservant blurs, and in more than one scene during the absolutely brilliant final third of the film, the two better resemble an old bickering married couple.

With excellent performances all around – including a near-perfect case study in sexy swinging sixties coquettishness from Sarah Miles, introduced to the story as Barrett's sister Vera – the film truly rests on Bogarde's shoulders. He somehow achieves a perfect blend of passive aggressive subservient mischievousness. The subtleties of Bogarde's performance allow Barrett to slowly evolve and transform from soft-spoken and composed to aggressive and dominant.

The first of three collaborations between noted playwright Harold Pinter and Losey, The Servant plays like an Upstairs, Downstairs trip into an alternate reality where everything proper, expected and controlled has been flipped on its head. In fact, the entire film feels like an exploration of flowing duality, a steady and unceasing transference between Yin and Yang. Each character experiences both moments of total control and utter submission; the story itself focuses on the eventual reversal of roles; and even the structure of Losey's storytelling complicates the nature of the protagonist/antagonist relationship.

These multiple realities present themselves in very concrete ways throughout the film. Although set primarily in a large townhouse, Losey shoots most of the action in tight-closeup or showing just a small part of a room with one character dominating the foreground. He repeatedly returns to the narrow foyer and stairwell or shoots through a doorframe from one room to another, further constricting the space and eliciting a tension-raising sense of claustrophobia.

Losey also regularly utilizes mirrors and their reflection (as shown in the film's poster, above), and in one of my favorite sequences, he creates a magnificent separation between Tony's old world represented by Susan and the developing one controlled by Barrett, from which he can't escape. The scene occurs at what seems to be the moment Tony has regained the upper-hand, discovering Barrett's duplicity, but Losey hints that something very different is actually happening. Keeping both images in focus, he divides the frame between a tight shot on the area immediately in front of the mirror and the action within the larger space in its reflection, providing an obvious but no less magnificent through-the-looking-glass moment that further moves Tony from one realm to the other.

In an era when some of a certain political persuasion use "class warfare" an unthinkable derogatory term despite its constant presence in society, The Servant remains ever-relevant and never feels too dated. That's some achievement for a film that couldn't be more rooted and specific to its time and place.

PAUSE FOR PODCASTS: An Introduction, and Goodbye to "It's All Politics"

I once loved to drive. During my eight years living in Los Angeles, I regularly drove myself home to San Francisco to see my family. It didn't take much longer than flying onec I accounted for getting to the airport early, the flight itself, and then the drive to my mom's house in Marin County. I also consider driving way less stressful. In fact, I found it relaxing.

I sometimes enjoyed driving around L.A. too, but I hated having to drive. After spending my first four years carless, once I had the ability, I never considered not I felt driving anywhere more than a few blocks. While I wasn't quite as bad, Steve Martin's half-block journey by car in L.A. Story wasn't too far from my reality, but that was in large part due to the atrocious transportation options available in early 1990s Los Angeles. My one saving grace of being in the car so often was the radio: Howard Stern, Jim Rome, and the early days of Loveline. (Hey, I was in my early 20s!)

After I moved to New York in 1996 and no longer drove with regularity, I rarely listened to the radio other than when I was in the shower or falling asleep. My portable CD player had a radio, which of course was useless in the subway. And so, I found myself listening to much more album-based music and significantly less talk.

Podcasts changed all of that. Suddenly, I could take NPR/PRI with me, and at first, my podcast rotation was limited to shows from those distributors. I wrote about This American Life and Radiolab in 2007, but my obsession with the medium has exploded especially over the last three years as I continued discovering phenomenal shows of all varieties. I have such a backlog of podcasts; I know I will never listen to them all, but when I'm riding the subway, walking around the city, doing dishes or cooking, I'm usually playing one.

I listen to some shows without fail on a weekly basis; others stare back at me from my iPhone and iTunes, wondering when I'll visit, and periodically, I'll have a little binge session. Still others – like the how-had-I-not-discovered-it-before Professor Blastoff -- have become major addictions. I listen to new episodes each week while also working my way through the archives from the beginning so I may belatedly witness the show's development. (To date, I'm up to episode 38.)

As part political-junkie, my weekly must-listens include a few political podcasts, and I was sad to learn that one will end its seven-year run this week. NPR's It's All Politics has been one of the most entertaining and informative political podcasts I've found, but the episode released later tonight - assuming it's on schedule – will be its last.

NPR's decision to cancel the long-running Talk of the Nation, announced a couple months ago, also produced the demise of this weekly conversation between Ron Elving and Ken Rudin as the latter is leaving the network. The show frequently utilized guests hosts when in Elving or Rudin's absence, but it makes sense for them not to continue with a permanent replacement. Although the fill-ins were always engaging and informative, the bad-pun, Borscht Belt-like shtick and chemistry between Elving and Rudin is the primary ingredient that made this podcast such a blast.

Both hosts are seasoned political reporters, and their commentary included a level of thoughtful, usually non-partisan analysis frequently absent from some of the louder shouting matches among the media. Their discussions possessed a wonderful sense of glee allowing even their dumbest jokes – and wow, were some dumb! – to consistently elicit chuckles and even the occasional guffaw.

The most frequently recurring joke involved repeated references to "the listener," as if the podcast's audience totaled one. As the show regularly ranked among the top 30 political podcasts on iTunes - competing with podcast versions 60 Minutes, PBS Newshour and The Rachel Maddow Show among other mainstream TV and radio programs people choose to experience in podcast form during commutes or because they've otherwise cut the cable cord - I'm sure they had a relatively large listening audience, certainly allowing them to add an "s" to "listener." However, if I ever was, in fact, the sole listener to NPR's It's All Politics podcast, I am very grateful to Ron and Ken for doing their show just for me. This listener will miss them and their banter a great deal.

Jumping back into the pool: Writing is hard -- an "Uh-Huh" moment

Several years ago, I started having not-quite-epiphanies: Moments of realization in which something I already knew becomes consciously absorbed. I was not having giant light bulb moments; these weren't sudden ideas that popped into my brain out of nowhere. Rather, I experienced flashes of clarity on subjects not foreign to me. I wasn't exclaiming, "A-Ha! I get it now". Instead, I experienced a huge, "Uh-Huh. Yup. I know, but wow, that makes much more sense now."

I have repeatedly posted about my blogging comebacks, only to feel a sudden need to do so again months or even a year later due to my failure to stick around. I have trouble believing that I began this blog more than nine years ago, but when I travel back in the archives, I find my "Pilot Post" dated Feb. 26, 2004. It was an election year filled with Howard Dean's screams and, eventually, George W. Bush's earning "political capital."

I was in such a different place back then, and the way I treated this blog showed that. For one thing, I not only took this blog's name from my old column at the UCLA Daily Bruin – as described in post two on day two, Feb. 27, 2004 – but I unintentionally maintained my then 13-year-old writing habits. I described looking back at some of my old columns: "WOW, did they ever suck." But what certainly remains in those posts from my most active period of this blog -- its first two years -- is an obvious and blatant carelessness.

I'm not the most patient person. I never have been. Writing takes patience, at least good writing does, and that goes for writing in all of its forms, even the quick-turnaround variety. The emergence of blogging and the immediacy of information sharing online via Twitter et al has certainly not helped those, like me, who prefer adding im- to their patience. It has also led to the emergence of a seemingly endless amount of writing lacking adequate rewriting, proofreading or copyediting. It has created a world in which "Breaking News" is both the rumor of a relatively minor piece of information and than just hours later the "official" word that said rumor was true.

With such tight deadlines and the necessity of being first with everything to ensure that people visit your site rather than a competitor's for every piece of news or even opinion, it's understandable how mistakes make it into the final product. With plenty of professional sites, copyediting in general is an afterthought at best if not actually an even-thought.

I don't say this to critique other writers and publications out there. I'm talking about my own work and habits. Carelessness is prevalent even among many people who care a hell-of-a-lot. I never considered myself such a brilliant writer that in either my opinion pieces or my screenwriting and fiction I never made any mistakes or wrote the perfect final draft with my first draft. I just didn't have the time (I told myself) or didn't care enough (more likely). And suddenly, I do. I've drafted dozens of pieces the last few years that I've simply saved into irrelevancy on my computer but never published in this space and offered to any others. I didn't like the initial results, and I simply procrastinated returning to finish them.

With my original UCLA column, I developed a simple pattern: Have idea, write it, quickly scan for typos (i.e., run my spellcheck and therefore miss all those correctly spelled but wrong words), and submit. If the piece was too long (this was for a physical, print paper, mind you!), I'd cut as rapidly as possible. That's why my old columns "suck," to quote myself.

Sure, I was also 19-20 years old and like most people that age, had a heightened sense of self and my opinions. Plus, I was still learning how to write. But I also took pride in the conversational tone of my writing, which was another way of saying that I didn't really care that my columns were long-winded, possibly dull, and certainly not targeted to an actual "conversation" with a reader.

Don't get me wrong: I find nothing improper about a conversational tone in print, and I believe I still use one. But doing so successfully actually takes a craft; one different than simply recording one's stream-of-consciousness to the page.

When I looked at those early posts from nine years ago, I noticed the same carelessness. I wrote the same way – type, type, type, scan, publish – and I found multiple typos and several minor coding errors, i.e., forgetting a quotation mark at the end of a web link creating a completely incoherent sentence in a published post.

My last temporary comeback occurred at the end of last year. I didn't want to make promises (even to myself) that I wasn't going to keep, so when I found myself seeing a ton of theater while simultaneously searching for a way to satisfy the longing to do something creative, I wrote a few reviews before getting sidetracked again.

More importantly, I had spent the previous year-and-a-half (give-or-take) consumed with a job that kept me from my usual obsessions and joys – namely, film, TV, and theater. I thought my blog made the most sense as a place for me to start shouting back at culture and the world, even if nobody was paying attention. Hell, that was the whole purpose of Out of Focus in 2004, even if I spent those first weeks mentioning and linking and "trackbacking" to other more popular destinations in a frantic attempt to say, "Hey, look at me! I'm here now too."

I parted ways with my most recent job in early April and decided it was time to refocus my attention on those things I've danced around and avoided for most of the past two decades: my own writing and other creative projects. It has been a slow process as I continue to try to develop a routine and not get in my own way. I continuously face the reality that writing is hard. That's no epiphany, of course. That's a continuous "Uh-huh."

But with every new journey, there's always a first step, even if it's the hundredth or thousandth "first" step. So here I go...