47 All dead

Los Gatos High School

 

 Of course they are all dead now, the teachers I had crushes on in high school.

After writing yesterday's post I searched for my old Latin prof and found that he had accepted cancer's final invitation in 2012 at the age of 81.  The two other teachers I loved with my crazed high school passion, Mr. Ridgely and Mr. Glasner, are also gone.

Mr. Ridgely was an English teacher of no great good looks.  About fifty, balding and pot bellied, he was fierce, funny and demanding.  In a senior year English class he had us read and think about Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus.  One of our paper writing options was to compare it to the "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech from Macbeth.  I think about that now.  Why invite students into existentialist angst when they are seniors in high school?  Or did he think we were there already and that he was simply giving us tools for expressing our languors with greater creativity?  My crush on him developed in part because one day after class he showed me some of his own poetry.  I felt like he was interested in me personally.

I feel mildly embarrassed even now at how transparently needy I was then.  Perhaps that's why I've not been able to have close relationships with students.  It always seems so fraught.

That neediness also drove my crush on Mr. Glasner.  He directed the senior play and oversaw the drama department at Los Gatos High.  He was also well known as an actor in local theatrical circles.  I took an acting class from him and under his direction played Helena in the senior play, Midsummer Night's Dream.  He had a flamboyant personality at a time when such a vibrancy made what we now call "affectional preference" questionable.  He was married, of course, but with those he trusted his conversation carried hints to sparkle a Bay Area kid's suburban gaydar.  Heck, our senior year variety show contained numbers from Cabaret and Gypsy (including "You Gotta Get a Gimmick!")  And I certainly owe him for introducing me to grand opera.  One day as some of us theater kids were hanging out in the auditorium at lunch time, he played the drinking song and "Sempra Libera" from La Traviata.  I have loved opera ever since.

I met with all three men occasionally in the years after high school.  While I was happy to be gone from my parent's house, I missed my town and teachers for a long time after I left.  But I have seen none of them for over 30 years.  Mr. Ridgely died in 2011.  His obituary is still up at the Mercury News obit site.  As for Mr. Glasner -- I found only a "death record" for a Joseph Glasner in Sunnyvale in 2005 that was roughly the correct age.  But I was also told of rumors of his death back in 2011 at our 40th Reunion.

While googling these men, I made the sort of startling discovery once reserved for folks mucking about in library stacks.  I found out that I actually saw Mr. Glasner for the first time in 1963 when I was in fifth grade.  My folks took me to a performance of Comedy of Errors at the Lifeboat Theatre in Santa Clara.  A quick search for Joseph Glasner in Newspapers.com showed me story from the Santa Cruz Sentinel noting that he was the Antipholous in that production!  So I first saw him when I saw my first full Shakespeare play!

And it was Mr. Glasner who cursed me with the words, spoken one day outside of our auditorium, "I promise you, you were born to be a teacher!"

And now he is gone, and Ridgely is gone, and most lately Mr. Barrans is gone.  All, all are gone, these men who were so important to my younger self. 

Professor Google allowed me to find a copy of one of the saddest short films ever made which suits my mood just fine.  This is  "Valse Triste" from Allegro Non Troppo.

LY #123 Death and the Movies

Maybe you missed the pop-up Sunday night, the one that appeared right after Bette Midler sang "Wind Beneath My Wings" and right before a commercial.  This announcement of the death of Sarah Jones was added in this afterthought to the In Memoriam sequence of Oscar's broadcast.

Why add the name of a minor player, a mere second camera assistant, lowest of the low, to this august list the recently dead?

Maybe it has something to do with the massive online campaign by others in the industry, especially other p.a.s, to get her name added.  A social media movement called Slates for Sarah pushed for Sara Jones to be remembered publicly.

And maybe it has something to do with the long film-making tradition of considering the injuries and deaths of crew folk and actors just collateral damage in service to the "vision" of directors and producers.

For those who haven't heard yet, Sarah Jones was killed on February 20 when a train struck her while she was setting up a shot on a trestle in Georgia.  It sounds as though the director and producer did not have the proper permissions nor had they established proper safety precautions for the crew but that issue will, of course, be settled by investigation and in a court of law.  Bloggers in the industry have responded with horror and warnings.  The Anonymous Production Assistant tells all people working on a movie set to "just say no" if they think the conditions are unsafe, all the while admitting that this is a very difficult thing for young people in the business to say.  Scout, producer and photographer Jamie Vesay considers anyone putting others in harms way unprofessional.  Writing "An Open Letter to Young Filmmakers," Vesay calls on producers, directors and photographers to "Stop putting people in harms way" and noting that

"My plea is not exclusively to moviemakers. I have seen many photographers shooting local fashion or the next music video – draping their models on train tracks or having them swim in a polluted, high current river. Graduation and engagement pictures are being taken on rickety fire escapes or in abandoned private properties that have weak floors, broken glass, and numerous environmental hazards."

It's that vision thing, I think, the idea that what's cool is what's right, no matter the risk.  And there's also the concern among some that it's time consuming, difficult, and occasionally expensive to get permissions and take safety precautions.  So lives are put at risk these days in the name of "guerrilla filmmaking," independent work done on shoestring budgets.  But lives have also been put at risk time and time again on big budget works as well, ever since the beginnings of the trade.

A brief glance at the history of the film industry shows that budgetary need and creative vision have often trumped safety.  A quick google brought up a few lists of accidents, including a well researched Wikipedia article going back to the 1920s and a recent Australian News list of "horrific accidents" that happened to important stars.  Anthony Slide's book Hollywood Unknowns

A History of Extras, Bit Players, and Stand-Ins, reveals the hard lives and unsafe working conditions experienced by those who were necessary but expendable in Old Hollywood.  

One of the most famous "visionaries" who put his workers at risk on a regular basis was Cecil B. DeMille.  A 2014 article by Anton Karl Kozlovic in the European Journal of American Studies makes a very interesting point about one of the planets most famous producer/directors.  In "DeMille and Danger: Seven Heuristic Taxonomic Categories of His Hollywood (Mis)Adventure," Kozlovic found that DeMille expected his workers to embrace personal discomfort as danger and risk-taking became "normalized" aspects of his film sets.  He writes that DeMille

"was professionally enamoured with the pursuit of sensationalism, authenticity and realism for his crowd-pleasing productions. Whilst pursuing this filmic quest, many of his crew were subjected to real danger, distress and injury, sometimes mortally."

But DeMille was also cheap.  Like contemporary guerrilla filmmakers.  And he also encouraged long hours and pushed people past their limits, like many producers in today's film industry, both independent and studio.

The problem of film people doing more work than they should and not getting enough sleep is the focus of Haskell Wexler's 2006 documentary, Who Needs Sleep.  Wexler talks about his own near-death experience, wrecking his car after working 14 hours, as well as the deaths of others caught on the high demand treadmill.  Sometimes the people who work too hard are their own masters.  At other times they are subject to the people in charge.  Who often just don't care.

The issue for those of us who consume the products of the entertainment industry is, do we care?  Should we care?  And how can we show our caring?

As for Sarah Jones, I'm happy to hear that her death is being treated by the Wayne County, Georgia, Sheriff's Office as a homicide. 

Last Year #1: Retirony

Today is auspicious.  It marks the first day of my last contracted teaching "year."  Not that I've signed my last contract yet.  I called H.R. on Friday and found out that contracts won't be ready until tomorrow.  So, I have no contract though I'm back on contract.

I have a bit of paranoia about this final year as I count down the days till July 1, 2014.  I am a life long movie and television watcher with a strong attachment to detective plots and police procedurals.  There is a tradition in these genres that subsidiary characters who are looking forward to leaving their difficult jobs will face death shortly before they get their reward.  Richard Roeper's written review of "After Earth" mentions this plot device:  "It's the last mission before the general retires to a desk life.  Cop movies, heist films, and futuristic sci-fi thrillers all have that in common:  You say you're going to retire after one last job, and that job is going to go BOOM."

This is a  media "trope" called "retirony."  According to the occasionally excellent and occasionally awful but always interesting website, TVTRopes,  Retirony  "is a way to make the audience feel sorry for a character's death without having to actually give him more than ten minutes of screen time. Anybody in a dangerous job who's only a few days away from retirement . . . is absolutely doomed to death by Retirony."   I first became conscious of this plot device as a "trope" when I saw the movie Last Action Hero.  I've captured a scene from it that you can view here:  http://www.screencast.com/t/RuyTvOvm.

Of course, a community college professor imagining that her life is as exciting as that of a screen cop is redonkulous.   Nevertheless, it's true that "no one knows the day or the hour" of her own death.  (Yes, I know that quote is originally about an event not quite so personal, but I figure that one's own death is the end of some world, if not the world.)  It might be an interesting experiment to live this year as though it's my last.