Letters

Does this digital moviemaking thing bother anybody except me? Look at some
of these studio-backed digital pictures like Full Frontal and Tadpole.
What do they cost — $1 million, $2 million each? Well, as long as they are going
to put up $2 million, why can’t they raise an extra few thousand dollars and
buy some fucking film? I don’t want to pay nine bucks to go to a movie theater
and watch something that looks like my uncle’s shaky, grainy home videos of
his fishing trip. Doesn’t anybody else miss the lush look that only properly
projected 35mm film can provide?

My sincere wish is that DV — just like VD before it — will go away before
it gets worse.

—Charles Zigman
Los Angeles

STOP ACHIN’ FOR IT AND DO SOMETHING

Re: Bobbi Murray’s “Canadian
Bacon” [August 9–15]. What if they considered themselves economic actors
first and Americans second? After all, when none of the apparent alternatives
are acceptable, you have to start looking at the assumptions about what is off
the table for a place to find your solution. This idea is actually more common
around the world than we may think. People from every country come to the United
States every day looking for a life, work and a chance for their families. Why
should an American who loses his livelihood not do the same? Is there some inherent
advantage to living in the U.S. that trumps food on the table? We are not talking
about Timbuktu here; it’s Canada for God’s sake. Go there; be Canadian; be employed.

—David Stead
Seattle, Washington

Regarding Bobbi Murray’s article on runaway production remedies
for the U.S. film and television industry, as a crew technician who works on
various films, series and commercials, I’ve experienced the loss of entertainment-industry
jobs in the U.S. as a result of “runaway” productions shooting in
Canada — and, to a lesser degree, in places such as Australia, New Zealand and
Mexico.

The Canadian government has misused a provision of NAFTA regarding
protecting their “culture” in order to justify many of its subsidies.
What kind of Canadian culture is Chicago, Texas Rangers, Pasadena,
American Psycho or Detroit Rock City? (As for Dudley Do-Right
— another one shot in Canada — even though it was made by and starred Americans,
I suppose one might call it an expression of Canadian culture. And since The
Shipping News takes place in Nova Scotia, it gets a pass, too.)

I can think of very few household-name actors (or directors)
who are willing to speak out on this matter. Ironically, many of them are more
than willing to publicly decry the myriad injustices they see and hear in the
largely cruel world in which we all share space, yet virtually none of them
will do something to help the very people who make them look and sound like
the stars they are. If Robin Williams had demanded it, Insomnia might
have been completely shot in the U.S. — not in Canada (except for some aerial
shots in Alaska); if Robert De Niro had demanded it, The Score might
have been shot in the U.S., not in Montreal; if Arnold Schwarzenegger had demanded
it, The Sixth Day might have been shot in the U.S., not in Vancouver.
(This also applies to the upcoming Terminator III — for which Arnie is
getting a record salary, and which was scheduled to shoot partially in Canada.
It is now shooting entirely in the U.S., although this is apparently due to
Arnie’s political aspirations, and to his fear of losing votes in retaliation
for causing his fellow American film workers to lose jobs.)

On the other hand, I know of some actors who said “no”
to Canada. Thanks to them, I got to work on some of their shows in the U.S.
— and they’re not even big names. If they can do it, what excuses do the members
of the multimillionaire club have?

Many of the jobs which do remain here often do so as a result
of wage and benefit concessions, resulting in a lower standard of living for
those of us trying to maintain a moderate lifestyle in the relatively expensive
region in which we live. If you don’t already know it, most of the behind-the-scenes
crew and office personnel working on these productions — and most of the supporting
and bit actors you see and hear onscreen — are far from wealthy. When our income
drops, so does our cash output, thereby negatively impacting the local economy.
On top of that, with fewer productions shooting here, there are fewer permit
and other fees going into the public coffers, along with fewer food, gas, laundry,
hardware, etc., purchases made by said productions, thus further reducing the
revenues circulating in the region.

[

With the exception of a sparse few truly independent and/or
financially strapped production companies, most of the movies and TV fare we
get is backed by deep-pocketed investors. Incentives or subsidies of any kind
from any source — be they from California, any other state in the U.S., or any
nation on the planet — are simply and unquestionably a reprehensible practice
that lines the pockets of these already rich investors. They are amongst the
last people on this planet worthy of government payoffs and union wage concessions
for granting us the “privilege” of working on their productions, at
the expense of our mostly less-privileged taxpayers.

Yes, I know that businesses work on a model of maximizing profits
and cutting costs in any way they can, and that politicians are frequently willing
to cut taxpayers’ financial throats in order to bribe employers onto their turf.
But when it comes down to the fundamental ethical and moral positions regarding
these issues, I don’t see how anyone can disagree that incentives are wrong.

Ironically, in addition to the creation of jobs in Canada and
elsewhere, the pursuit of short-term cost savings by U.S. productions helps
fund the development of a production infrastructure in these nations that will
ultimately provide foreign producers the resources to compete with U.S. companies
in the creation of movies, TV programs and commercials. Our producers are going
to stab themselves in their backs in the long term. But U.S. companies have
ignored the long term many times in the past, resulting in much financial disaster.

The myriad examples of corporate malfeasance we’ve learned
about recently have opened many eyes to fiscal inequities; the general public
should get a real treat when they learn about Hollywood’s accounting practices,
which make those of Enron look simplistic in comparison. What could lead to
such revelations? A basic investigation of the subsidies, via a 301(a) filing
with the U.S. Trade Representative, which is being pursued by FTAC, a coalition
of affected film/TV industry personnel (and the vendors whose services we use).
This shouldn’t be challenged by anyone who’s honest and open, since no tariffs,
duties or other penalties are involved. However, the studios are dreading such
an investigation, as it would require them to open their financial books to
government officials.

FTAC has evidence to show that the subsidies are a violation
of our trade policies. If they prove to be illegal, the Canadians should withdraw
the subsidies. If they refuse, the matter will be taken up with the WTO. Ultimately,
if the subsidies are still not dropped, a duty could be imposed. This “countervailing
duty” would be tailored to specifically target and equal the amount of
the subsidies offered by the Canadian government entities (both federal and
provincial), thereby nullifying them. This is not the same thing as a
typical tariff, which takes a scattershot approach to trade problems.

A misinformation campaign regarding the potential duties, waged
by Jack Valenti (president of the Motion Picture Association of America), Jack
Shea (president of the Directors Guild of America), Bruce Doering (IATSE Local
600), Scott Roth (IATSE Local 876), Tom Short (president of IATSE, the primary
crew union for both the U.S. and Canada) and their cronies, is inspired by their
relationships with the financial powers behind the MPAA and IATSE’s own territorial
and monetary greed. IATSE organizes inexperienced crews and raids other unions,
taking over their membership, particularly in Canada. I don’t believe, let alone
endorse, anything Short thinks or says about this issue, because he is a labor
tyrant living in an ivory tower. (He’d probably take ivory traders into IATSE
to build his tower if he could get them to pay the initiation fee and dues.)

I support unions, by the way. I’m a member of IATSE, but —
like any old-enough, large-enough organization — the union is subject to corruption.
As for the rank-and-file membership, despite what most of their leaders say,
the members sign on to FTAC’s petition in overwhelming numbers (over 90 percent).

Regarding another union/guild: Even though the Screen Actors
Guild has officially endorsed the countervailing duty petition drive, their
president, Melissa Gilbert, suggested on KPCC 89.3 FM’s Air Talk that
tariffs would instigate a “trade war” with Canada. Excuse me, Ms.
Gilbert, but the subsidies Canada offers were what started this “war”
— a subsidy war. If California offers 15 percent, what’s to stop Florida
from offering 20 percent, and so on? Subsidies like these encourage a downward
spiral of unnecessary corporate welfare. We’re simply trying to negate the subsidies,
making for an even playing field.

[

As for Valenti, he is the studios’ long-standing, highly paid
mouthpiece. That alone says enough about him. I read a comprehensive report
(the Center for Entertainment Industry Data and Research’s in-depth study “The
Migration of Feature Film Production From the U.S. to Canada” at www.ceidr.org).
The supreme zinger here is the boomerang Jack Valenti threw back in 1976, which
is coming back to hit him now: One of the arguments his pro-subsidy brigade
uses against duties is that film/TV production is a “services industry”
— not a “manufacturing industry” — and therefore exempt from said
duties. However, on Page 5 of the report, we learn that Mr. Valenti, along with
Lew Wasserman of MCA, persuaded “the courts, the IRS and Congress . . .
that film should be considered as a tangible property” (not a service).
Gotcha, Jack!

If you don’t want the entertainment industry to go the way
of athletic shoes and other offshore-manufactured products, then you’ll do what
you can to speak out on our behalf and support our progressive efforts — unless
you like the idea of seeing movies made by virtual slave laborers overseas,
which, considering our current trade relations with China, is actually becoming
a possibility. Are you planning on seeing a movie that qualifies as a “runaway
production”? Try this tactic: Buy a ticket for a U.S.-shot film (or a foreign
film) showing at roughly the same time at the same theater, and sneak into the
runaway instead. I feel absolutely no guilt about this tactic. The theater still
gets its ticket money, and a more deserving film gets the credit for my purchase.
This is better than an outright boycott, since you get to have your cake while
the production company “eats it.” (The only cases where this tactic
won’t work are in a single-screen theater, which is a rarity these days, or
for a blockbuster’s opening week, when the ushers actually check your stub.)

And while you’re at it, how about tackling the television version
of runaway production? Start with Showtime, which makes the overwhelming majority
of its original material in Canada. Drop them from your cable or satellite (if
you have either), and/or write or call Showtime to say you won’t use their service
because of this issue. Tell the respective networks carrying the following shows
that you resent Dark Angel, Smallville, Witchblade and
Andromeda being shot in Canada with largely U.S. funds.

THEM IS US

Re: Marc B. Haefele’s “A Platter of Prejudice” [August
2–8]. I read your delightfully cranky piece on immigration. It sounds like Mr.
R attended many American Independent Party meetings pre–Arthur Bremer with Paul
Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb in his hip pocket. I love arguments
that fling statistics back and forth; it never convinces anybody, but it gives
an aroma of truth to both positions. It seems to be true that we use statistics
to argue when we don’t want a problem solved but do want an argument that can
polarize people and energize political bases. Abortion, gun control, welfare
reform and drug enforcement are classic examples of how the ground is plowed
over and over again with the same stale arguments until people demonize their
opponents and reach for their checkbooks to fund whichever party supports their
superstitious, irrelevant and/or un-researched point of view.

From your arrangement of vowels in your name, I take it your
pedigree on our shores is as brief as Ricci, Lopez et al. I don’t mean the assumption
as an insult, but I think it underlines what I believe, that one’s attitude
toward immigration depends on which side of the border one is standing on. The
border in question isn’t a political border but an economic one. A fabulously
well-paid scribe like you probably avails himself of the low-paid skilled labor
by our most recent arrivals doing gardening, or dry-walling, or perhaps minding
the kids. You may be a habitué of the colorful haunts of our Zolaesque
underclass; you may even count advocates for their terrible condition as friends.

If my comic version of you is correct, you are entrepreneurial,
intelligentsia and capitalistic by inclination — bourgeoisie despite your pay
rate. I doubt if you have any friends in the construction trades who have to
compete with the exploited underclass and see their property taxes going to
provide a health-and-safety net (such as it is) for unwelcome, uninvited visitors.
They are proletarians and rely on others’ capital to provide their crust; their
only asset is their time, which they spend working. The immigrant makes them
spend more time for less pay; meanwhile, he’s a victim of immigration.
Poverty and powerlessness breed crime, which is endemic to the immigrant class,
and your victim of immigration sees his personal safety eroded by, again, unwelcome
guests. Think not? Rackets were originally extortion vehicles for Irish hoods
of the Five Points. The word then described the organized Jewish and Italian
mobs of the first decades of this century; now it applies to the Cosa Nostra
or anywhere else the RICO statute is applied. New and exotic crime has always
been the special purview of the immigrant; Mexicans, Russians and Jamaicans
all have their Mafiosi. Whatever their names, the victim sees a class of people
that threatens him, and he gets angry. There is truth on both sides of the line,
although I doubt we are hearing it from the L.A. Times.

[

The U.S. has an ancient tradition of despising immigrants,
with good reason. Immigrants stress the existing system, which eventually crumbles
and is replaced by something newer; whether it’s better is something you have
to decide yourself. The Indians — excuse me, Native Americans — still despise
the whites for upsetting their apple cart. The Irish were virtual slaves until
the Civil War ,employed to dig the Erie Canal because New York didn’t allow
slavery, and Irish Catholicism was viewed with suspicion for years afterward.
One of the reasons Mexico exists is because, although the South coveted the
rest of the frontier for division into slave states, they didn’t want an influx
of that many Catholics, so the American Army withdrew to the Rio Grande and
we left Mexico to the Mexicans.

The Germans of the same era were considered thickheaded dunces
and freethinkers who undermined Americanism; the Know Nothing Party was founded
in reaction to their arrival. By the way, the Germans of 1849 were despised
specifically because they were German and not poor and congenitally lazy; many
were well-to-do and educated but fleeing vengeful aristocrats after the failure
of the 1849 revolts. They were also thought to be bad soldiers, incapable of
following the simplest commands and lambasted by that fine humanist General
Oliver Howard, late commander of the 11th Corps at Chancellorville and Gettysburg,
first administrator of the Freedman’s Bureau during Reconstruction and eponymous
founder of Howard University.

One of the funniest examples of the virulent hatred Americans
have for the recently arrived dates to the Johnstown flood. A writer for a Chicago
paper reported on how the dirty Poles were looting the dead bodies. His story
came back; the paper didn’t want to offend the Poles in Chicago. He filed again,
calling the perps Serbs. Same reaction. He tried Hungarians; the same. He finally
filed it claiming it was the dirty Bulgarians doing all the evil. The Bulgarians
lacked the requisite clout, so the story ran.

The Emma Lazarus melting-pot version of immigrant history was
dreamed up by socialist utopians of the 19th century who were fortunately rounded
up and deported by Attorney General Palmer under that hero of liberalism, Woodrow
Wilson. In reality, the country invented things like the Pledge of Allegiance
and flag worship to let all the dagos, kikes and Polacks know what real Americans
were all about. The country got back to normalcy and could again thrash Catholics,
Negroes and immigrants through the Black Legion and the KKK. Until the Depression,
FDR and World War II intervened. It was expedient then to invent a tolerant
America, so the utopian malarkey was trotted out as fact. (The beloved and sainted
FDR ran for vice president in 1920 on a Democratic ticket headed by an avowed
white supremacist.)

We try to present this as a race issue, but it isn’t; it’s
about economics. It’s about how much you are willing to pay for food, to have
dry-walling done, to do gardening, to do the menial labor Americans don’t want
to do. You either pay more or you import new Americans to clean out your toilets.
I think it’s important to remember that we probably wouldn’t like our ancestors,
or they us, if we met them on the street at the same relative social status.

PEEVED PETS

Reading Mira Tweti’s “A
Pet Peeve” [August 9–15], I am reminded of why it is that I do not shop
at pet stores that sell live animals. I encourage everyone not to extend their
business to the stores referred to that sell creatures that have been subjected
to an environment that causes them great stress, and to the inexpert individuals
“responsible” for their daily nutritional needs. Bottom line: If we don’t buy
these animals from these stores, then they will eventually stop selling them.
I encourage everyone, instead, to look for a rescue organization that specializes
in whatever animal you are looking for. And there is a rescue for everything!
Not only will these animals from rescue be healthier, but you will be happier
in the pocketbook (and in your heart) too.

[

Also: Thanks for Nikke Finke’s Deadline Hollywood item in the same issue.
I have never watched Fear Factor, and after reading your story, I think
I will now eliminate NBC from my TV remote altogether.

—Cheryl Frick
El Segundo

FIRST PRINCIPLES

Re: Johnny Angel’s “Butterfly
Meets Bazooka” [August 9–15]. I say to Brian Robin: Surely you can’t be
that stupid! Freedom of speech is irrelevant in a private message. If you had
the bad judgment to phrase a public letter the way you phrased that message
to Congressman Thomas, then you could have invoked the First Amendment.

What did you hope to achieve by sending such a message privately, anyway?
I see your action as the same as those idiotic TV ä reporters who stick a microphone
in the face of an accused murderer and ask them to incriminate themselves by
admitting to the crime. (“Mr. X, did you kill your wife?”) You should have known,
and by now you definitely know, that what you did was nothing less than shooting
yourself in the foot.

—Mac Hayes
Rosamond

CHOOSE THE MUSE

Recently, I read Gabrielle Idlet’s condemnation
of the misdeeds of her late father, the poet John Thomas [“Hitting
the Beats,” July 19–25]. It would be a true blessing if the L.A. Weekly
would emulate its sister publication the O.C. Weekly by providing
readers with weekly coverage of the poets and poetry in Southern California.
This would be so much better than your current policy based, it would seem,
on the assumption that your readers aren’t interested in poetry-related subjects
unless they are tinged with sensationalism.

—Terry McCarty
Granada Hills

SEEMS LIKE NEW TIMES?

Re: Joseph Treviño’s “Sinner
Behind the Saint” [August 2–8]. Why don’t reporters stick to facts? The
article seemed to be merely a chance to bash the Catholic Church. Mr. Treviño
presented what he wants us to believe Bishop Onésima Cepeda is like. Why not
print an actual interview with the bishop, and let us judge for ourselves?

—Jeff Gatlin
Los Angeles

A FINE DAY FOR A LYNCHING

In her very good and accurate brief of William
Wyler’s The Letter, Hazel-Dawn Dumpert is wrong on one point, when she
calls the film “a thrillingly nasty item that begins and ends with hot-blooded
murder.” Bette Davis was indeed guilty of murder in the beginning, but she was,
in the end, executed by the Asiatic girlfriend of her lover. Justice
does not require a judge in robes or a state-authorized executioner. Justice
required that Bette Davis die for what she did. Wyler knew it, and so does his
audience.

—Don Jordan
Los Angeles

EVERYBODY’S A CRITIC

I have a pet peeve regarding your “Where
To Eat Now” section. For a long time it inexplicably lumped Highland Park
in with downtown L.A., yet didn’t bother to actually include any Highland Park
places. I am glad to see the addition in your paper of H.P. newbie the
Gutter. It is a fine place to get food, even if you have no interest in what
else is going on at Mr. T’s that night. But for god’s sake, please review some
of the other kick-ass H.P. food establishments. My short list includes La Estrella
(6103 N. Figueroa St.) for awesome fish tacos, La Fuente Restaurant (5530 Monte
Vista St.) for out-of-this-world fajitas, Folliero’s Pizza & Italian Food
(5566 N. Figueroa St.) for pizza that puts Casa Bianca to shame, Penny’s Burgers
(6300 N. Figueroa St.) — they do it right.

—Scott Kelley
Highland Park

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