Oscar Saves The Day For Grown-Up Movies

(By Ann Hornaday, Washington Post, February 24, 2012)

Wanna know a secret? I’ve never cared much about the Oscars.  When I began writing about movies for a living, covering the Academy Awards and its attendant hoopla was always the least interesting part of my job — as I once joked to an editor, I wrote all year for free, but got paid to watch the Oscars. Like so many cine-snooty movie snobs, I dismissed them as celebrations of the hopelessly middlebrow (“Forrest Gump” over “Pulp Fiction”? Really?), a hypocritical exercise in self-congratulation and Hollywood’s longest, slickest advertisement for itself.

Okay, I still think those things are true. And, along with other complainers this year, I agree that the 2012 race is pretty ho-hum. The jaunty silent, black-and-white movie “The Artist” is all but guaranteed to soft-shoe its way to snagging the big awards. Most of its fellow nominees are movies mired in safe, snuggly nostalgia for times gone by, both cinematic and real-world.  But seen through another lens, this year’s race offers a degree of hope, not just for the Academy Awards but for the movie industry in general. And the best of the nominated films exemplify why, in recent years, I’ve come to value the Oscars — not for rewarding artistic merit (they do so only occasionally) or an index of the zeitgeist (“Crash” over “Brokeback Mountain”? Really?), but for their role in preserving a kind of movie that might otherwise cease to exist.

Of all the endangered species in Hollywood, perhaps the most overlooked might be the adult drama — the kind of mid-budget, modestly scaled, smartly written movie that seemed to be so common in the 1970s. Back then, the genre was typified by taut, no-nonsense films like “Chinatown” and “All the President’s Men.” Their present-day analogs are “Michael Clayton” or “The Social Network” — smart, stylish movies geared toward grown-ups that, were it not for the Oscars, would be less likely to find purchase in Hollywood’s current business model.

That model, more than ever, is defined by two kinds of movies. At one end are the “tent-pole movies,” blockbusters geared toward teens that cost a fortune to make and market, but are guaranteed to make their money back because they’re known quantities among the young audiences Hollywood caters to like the world’s most indulgent helicopter parent.  At the other end of the economic matrix live the micro-budgeted guerilla indies, which cost a nickel to make, get scooped up at a festival and go on to make a healthy if not spectacular profit, if only because they cost so little to produce and market.

In the middle of these two extremes are movies that cost much more than a nickel to make, but have no pre-sold niche markets to exploit. What’s more, nowadays they’re increasingly competing for audiences with, of all things, television: Not only does the adult drama’s core audience prefer to wait for the DVD or video-on-demand download, but they have better choices on TV itself. Why put up with parking-garage chicken fights, bad expensive popcorn and texting teenagers at the mall when you can watch your TiVo’ed episode of “The Good Wife” from the quiet safety of your couch?

All of these factors have contributed to making quality, sophisticated grown-up movies a risky proposition in Hollywood, where it can cost almost $100 million these days to create, advertise and promote a piece of product. And this is where the Oscars — with all their hype, sequins and bad production numbers — swoop in to improbably save the day.  “Awards season has become an in­cred­ibly critical, essential element in marketing these films,” Variety Executive Editor Steven Gaydos told me last week, adding that, with films no longer afforded the luxury of staying in theaters for weeks on end to build word-of-mouth, the Oscars have become “the world’s most cost-effective way of marketing drama.”

That strategy begins in the fall, when many studios launch their films at festivals in Telluride, Venice and Toronto. There, critics and bloggers begin the buzz about which directors, actors and films might be awards contenders, with word-of-mouth building once they begin to bestow their own honors and 10-best lists. As the movies begin to appear in theaters, filmmaking guilds begin to hand out their own kudos, lending yet more inevitability to movies deemed Oscar sure-things. Between the Golden Globes and the announcement of Oscar nominees in January, what began as a little-movies-that-could suddenly seem to be everywhere, as people make a mental note to see what all the fuss is about.

Studios pay dearly to help the buzz along, of course, and the escalating arms race of Oscar campaigning has led some industry insiders to call for a freeze. Citing Sony’s Oscar push for “The Social Network” — which cost a reported $7 million to $10 million — former agent and manager Gavin Polone recently complained that “the cost of two Oscar campaigns could comfortably fund the total production budget for a movie like ‘Drive’ or ‘Midnight in Paris.’ ” Magnolia Pictures President Eamonn Bowles agreed, adding that the awards-season strategy is largely based on myth. “There are, of course, instances where winning the Academy Award unlocks a film’s economic potential,” he said. “But the reality is that the vast majority never recoup or come close to recouping the amounts spent on trying to win the award.”  Still, some films have recouped with a vengeance: Last year, “The King’s Speech,” which cost a paltry $15 million to make, went on to earn just south of $400 million at the box office; “Slumdog Millionaire” enjoyed a similar Oscar “bump,” going on to earn more than $300 million worldwide.

With visions of such Oscar-season Cinderellas dancing in their heads, studio executives might be more willing to greenlight projects that otherwise wouldn’t fit neatly into their spreadsheets. And even if they don’t reap the regal financial rewards on a par with “The King’s Speech,” they acquire something more priceless: prestige. When “The Descendants” and its star George Clooney won at the Golden Globes in January, “the first person to shake Clooney’s hand was Rupert Murdoch,” says Hollywood Reporter Oscar columnist Scott Feinberg, referring to the chairman of the media conglomerate that owns the small studio that released the movie.  Awards, Feinberg says, “appeal to the egos of the studio chiefs and the studio executives. . . . In some ways it wipes the stain off what they do the rest of the year.”

No one has proved savvier at husbanding the Oscar’s marketing and reputation-burnishing resources than Harvey Weinstein, who perfected his strategy by steering “Shakespeare in Love” to best picture victory in 1999 (beating out “Saving Private Ryan,” no less.) It was Weinstein who figured out how to make a movie about a stuttering king with no big stars a must-see cultural event, and who cannily picked up “The Artist” at Cannes last year, predicting that a pastiche of Hollywood tropes about an actor feeling pinched between changing technology and a tough economy would be catnip to the academy’s voting members — most of whom are actors feeling pinched between changing technology and a tough economy.

It looks like Weinstein’s calculation will pay off again this year. But where “The Artist” qualifies as something of a high-end novelty film, at least three other nominees — “The Descendants,” “Moneyball” and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” — exemplify precisely the kind of intelligent, mid-range movies that stand to benefit from Oscar-season awareness. That synergy worked particularly well last year, when “The King’s Speech” was nominated alongside “The Social Network,” “Black Swan,” “The Fighter” and “True Grit.”

All of those movies were made for modest budgets and all were modestly to stunningly profitable, thanks in large part to the added visibility provided by their Oscar campaigns. Surely the movies would have been made even if the Oscars didn’t exist. But they would not have been as successful, making it less likely that studios would greenlight similar projects down the road. “They’re critic-driven and execution-dependent,” Gaydos says of the adult drama niche. “And they’re the most risky films to finance today. Anything that makes them less risky or more viable — such as [an awards season] when they can be celebrated and marketed for a very reasonable amount of money — is good.”  As if to prove that point, Weinstein announced last week that he’s planted yet another seedling: Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts will begin filming “August: Osage County” — an adaptation of Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play — this fall.  Which positions it perfectly for an Oscar run in 2014.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/essay-oscar-saves-the-day-for-grown-up-movies/2012/02/15/gIQAhdjsXR_print.html

Why Every Woman Should Celebrate Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue

I don't dare comment on this article because it would be a no-win situation no matter what I said but I think it is an interesting point of view being made here.

(Keli Goff, Loop21.com, February 21, 2012)

Can swimsuit models actually help girls develop healthier body images?   Each year, shortly after we have made and already begun to break our New Year's resolutions, Americans become captivated by sports' most competitive contest. No I am not referring to the Super Bowl, but the contest for who will grace the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.   Landing the cover is supposed to be the equivalent of winning the Super Bowl of the modeling world (or something like that), credited with launching, or at least elevating, the careers of some of modeling's most famous and enduring names, among them Christie Brinkley and Tyra Banks. While it's arguable that it elicits very different reactions from men and women, with the New York Times describing it as "the dream book of adolescent males and the bane of feminists," I'm one feminist who believes that there's a lot for women to celebrate about the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.

This year's cover girl is Kate Upton, who before receiving the honor was best known for appearing on youtube doing the "Dougie." (If you are scratching your head asking, "What's the Dougie?" click here.) Now she's known as the next big thing. And I do mean big. Upton is not your typical model. Though her official weight is hard to pin down, there have been endless references to her "curves" which, let's face it, usually means cup size when referring to models, actresses and whatever it is that Kim Kardashian allegedly does for a living. But not in Upton's case. As one friend said refreshingly of Upton 'She's not your typical model... She will eat anything." Lengthy profiles in outlets like the Times and the Daily Mail have chronicled her management team's, seemingly uphill battle to establish her and her ample assets, in modeling's incredibly shrinking world, where a size 4 makes you chubby and a size 10 makes you borderline plus size.

Some of the vitriol aimed at Upton -- much of it by women no less -- reinforces the notion that even in the non-high fashion world of swimsuit and lingerie modeling, there is little tolerance for bodies that dare to look -- gasp! -- healthy and not borderline skeletal. Speaking of Upton, who has already drawn comparisons to legendary curvy (all over) beauties like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, Sophia Neophitou, who helps cast the Victoria's Secret runway show said "We would never use" someone like Upton, describing her looks as comparable to those of the half-naked "glamour" models popular in European tabloids.  Underneath photos of Upton at her model heaviest -- which was still thinner than most of us -- anonymous commenters referred to her as a "cow." (No, I'm not joking.) Her own agent at A-list firm IMG has said that colleagues were initially against signing her, owing to her non-traditional look.

Upton's triumph comes at an interesting time in the fashion world. Katie Halchishick, a former plus-size model, recently launched Natural Model Management. The agency specializes in models who are not plus-size or underweight but a healthy 6 to size 10. Halchishick was inspired after her own successful career as a plus-size model came to a screeching halt when she began dating a personal trainer and lost fifty pounds, and subsequently ended up losing most of her clients. Down to a healthy size 6 she found there were virtually zero opportunities for a model who was above a size 2 but below a size 14, a sentiment echoed by one of the few plus-size supermodels Crystal Renn.   Or should I say former plus-size supermodel? Renn, one of the few plus-size models to find mainstream success in high fashion magazines and with top designers, has struggled with the industry's mercurial weight specifications for years. She has openly discussed battling an eating disorder earlier in her career, but recently landed the ultimate validation that at her current weight, which is not stick-thin, but healthy, she looks absolutely fabulous. She appears alongside Kate Upton in the current issue of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. Of the honor, Renn said, "I have been a double-zero to a 16 even, for a bit.... Now to settle at a [size] six or an eight, it's a really interesting place to be because there are very few sixes or eights." Her statement echoes those of one of the most famous supermodels ever. Cindy Crawford has expressed doubts that she, and some of her peers from the heyday of the "supermodel" in the 90's would have made it today, because most of them were a size 6.

And that's why I, speaking as a woman and a feminist, am actually a big fan of Sports Illustrated including its swimsuit issue. While the rest of the modeling world has increasingly celebrated body types that look like a 16-year-old girl's head placed on top of a 13-year-old boy's body, Sports Illustrated has continuously celebrated healthy female bodies. Before the eye-rolling begins, yes, I know that many of those bodies have had a lot more in common with Pamela Anderson than, say, Serena Williams, but Sports Illustrated has also featured a number of beautiful, healthy-looking female athletes in the swimsuit issue, along with a number of male athletes and their beautiful, healthy-looking wives. Some of my favorite photos over the years have featured these women, who don't look like supermodels, but do look beautiful, healthy, happy and like real people. Not some ridiculous, undernourished, overly airbrushed myth of what real people are supposed to look like.  

Based on responses from teen girls regarding questions about their body image, it's arguable the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue could end up having the positive impact on young girls that the Dove real women campaign tried, but some in the industry, believe failed to. The responses illustrate that while teen girls consider most models underweight, they consider themselves overweight. Yet they would still rather look like the images they see in popular culture because while models may be underweight, they also seem glamorous, or at least their lives do. The Dove Real Women campaign exuded a lot of things -- confidence among them -- but glamour it did not.  So maybe, just maybe, seeing real women looking, happy, healthy and glamorous, bikini and all, may send a message to some girls and women that you don't have to be underweight and unhealthy to live a great, or in the words of Sheila E., "Glamorous Life."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keli-goff/kate-upton-sports-illustrated-swimsuit-issue_b_1289959.html    &   http://loop21.com/topic/288

Five Favorite Films with Michael Biehn

I've always thought Michael Biehn was totally kick-ass and I'm disappointed he doesn't get more work.  He would make a great candidate for a Quentin Taratino resurrection or as one of the second tier crew members in a Mission Impossible movie.  His performance in The Abyss was terrific, to say nothing of The Terminator.  Can someone please find him a role worthy of what he can offer?

Five Favorite Films with Michael Biehn

(By Ryan Fujitani, Rotten Tomatoes, January11 2012)

It's one of life's great mysteries why Michael Biehn isn't a household name, considering he starred in some of the most iconic action films of the 1980s. If the picture doesn't trigger any memories for you, perhaps the name Kyle Reese will, as Biehn portrayed the original time traveler who helped to thwart a robot apocalypse in The Terminator. In fact, Biehn was a favorite of James Cameron, who tapped him twice more for the roles of Corporal Dwayne Hicks in Aliens and Lieutenant Coffey in The Abyss. But Biehn's accomplishments don't end there, as the underappreciated actor went on to work with William Friedkin, Michael Bay, and Robert Rodriguez and featured in films like Tombstone, Planet Terror, and The Rock, not to mention his extensive work on television.

This week, Biehn appears in The Divide, a bleak, post-apocalyptic psychological thriller helmed by Xavier Gens (Frontier(s)) and starring Lauren German, Milo Ventimiglia, and Rosanna Arquette. RT was fortunate enough to sit and chat with him, and we were spontaneously joined by his lovely wife, actress Jennifer Blanc-Biehn, who also has a brief cameo in the film. Biehn gave us his Five Favorite Films, then went on to talk about the mounting tensions on set, Xavier Gens's fluid, anything-goes directorial style, and his own first outing in the director's chair (The Victim, which was, in fact, picked up by Anchor Bay on the day of this interview). So, without further ado, here are Michael Biehn's Five Favorite Films!

1) Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976; 98% Tomatometer):  

The first film that really inspired me... When I came out to L.A. to be an actor, I wasn't really taking anything very seriously. I thought, maybe I'll be a model, I could do some modeling, or maybe some commercial acting or whatever, and I thought that would be a career. Then I saw Taxi Driver. Taxi Driver is a movie that changed my life and made me a serious actor. Scorsese and De Niro. I give credit for anything that I've ever done as an actor.

Were you impressed more by Scorsese's direction or De Niro's performance?

I think they go hand in hand. The whole movie, really. Harvey Keitel, even Scorsese in the back of the car. The whole thing is fantastic.

2) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975; 96% Tomatometer)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a movie that I just find flawless. Jack Nicholson... I just saw The Shining again the other day; he's so brilliant. He's such a brilliant actor, just unbelievable.

3) The Godfather/The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972/1974; 100%/98% Tomatometer): 

The Godfather. The Godfather Part II, mostly, but the two Godfathers. There's just something about those movies that I just find I can watch over and over again.

4) The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945; 100% Tomatometer): 

There's a movie called The Lost Weekend, which is about an alcoholic, and that's another favorite movie.

5) Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992; 96% Tomatometer) :  If I had to throw one more into the mix, I mean, there's so many great movies. Unforgiven. There's my last one right there. Unforgiven, I think, is the best Western ever.

Biehn continued on to mention a few other choices he could have gone with:

Michael Biehn: Now, having said that, too, I would also say the greatest horror movie -- we were talking about all these horror movies earlier -- is William Friedkin and The Exorcist. I also think he did the best buddy cop movie ever in The French Connection and, you know, the best car chase, and so on. And I got to work with Billy so that's kind of my group of films that I can watch over and over again. And funny enough, on the lighter side, on the fun side -- I call it the "bubblegum side" -- I like to watch The Buddy Holly Story. I love The Buddy Holly Story because Gary Busey is so brilliant in that movie. You know, he does all his own singing and all his own music and everything, and the rest of the movie is kind of thin, but his performance, I think, is brilliant.

I read somewhere that you were a big fan of Sean Penn...

MB: Sean Penn is, I think, maybe the greatest actor... Jack Lemmon is another great one. It's hard to say who's the best, but yeah, he's right up there in the top five actors of all time in my book. When he goes from playing Milk, and he plays that very thin, kind of light kind of character, you know, Harvey Milk, gay, the whole number, and plays him brilliantly, wins the Academy Award, and then you see him in Fair Game. All of a sudden you see this guy, he's got a f***in' gut, he's got three chins, glasses are down, the hair is out like this, and "Just because you yell louder than me, does that make you right?!" It's f***ing brilliant! Just incredible. I have so much respect for him.

I wanted to mention that because it seems like a lot of your favorite films are very much actor-driven and benefit a lot from really outstanding performances.

MB: Yeah, absolutely.

Well, let's talk about The Divide. Just to start at square one, can you tell us a little about how you came to be a part of this project?

Well, Xavier [Gens] called me up and wanted to know if I'd be interested in it. He sent the script, I read it. The script was okay, the character was okay.

So he called you specifically for the role of Mickey, the landlord.

MB: Yes, for Mickey. I asked him if I could make some changes. He was like, "Well, you can make any changes you want. You can do anything you want with the movie." So I said,"Okay, I'll do it."

So I got involved with the movie, and then I realized once I got up to Canada to shoot the movie that we were, as actors, able to do anything we wanted. Rewrite characters, rewrite scenes. So the Mickey that is in the script that I originally read bears no resemblance to this Mickey that we ended up putting on film. I wrote Mickey with Eron Sheean, and Eron was basically a writer who was on the set to help all the actors rewrite scenes that they weren't happy with or rewrite dialogue that they weren't happy with. I worked with Eron for a week or two; I would send him stuff, he would send it back, I would send it to him again. He finally said, "Michael, you just write it." So I basically created that character and wrote him and created the backstory of 9/11 and all that kind of stuff.

It was a very exhilarating movie shoot because it's like nothing I've ever done before. It was completely like, you can do anything you want, you can improv anything you want, you can write anything you want, you can say anything you want in a scene. And the movie is the only movie I've done... In 35 years as an actor, I've never shot anything consecutively, day one, day two, day three, day four. So the script started out here, but all of a sudden, Michael Eklund's improvising, so now we're over here someplace. Then it went over here, and it just got crazy. Nobody kind of knew where they were headed or where their characters were headed; we were writing them as we went. I mean, Mickey was the antagonist in the script; he was the bad guy, he got it in the end. That was the original script. And Michael Eklund created his character out of nothing. There was no character there; there were four or five lines in the script, and Michael Eklund made that character come alive by improvising things and writing stuff and doing such interesting stuff.

Jennifer Blanc-Biehn: Xavier just couldn't handle it. Xavier was in love with it. He was like, "My God! More, more!" And Milo [Ventimiglia] too.

MB: Milo was so committed, and Rosanna [Arquette] was so committed, and Lauren [German]...

JBB: Lauren, and Ashton [Holmes], and Ivan. Ivan Gonzalez doesn't get mentioned but he's a ridiculously talented actor that lives in France. And Michael said it best when he said it takes a very talented actor to play a weak man.

I want to come back to that collaborative experience in just a bit, because I know you have a history of working with your directors in that way. But it's interesting that you essentially rewrote your character, and that he was originally intended to be the antagonist, because at first, you sort of hate Mickey because he's such a jerk. But as the film continues, you begin to sympathize with this plight; he's providing food and shelter for these ungrateful strangers who have invaded his private space and they're just...

MB: B****ing and moaning, yeah, and not listening to me when I tell them not to leave.

Well, it's interesting because by the end of the film, your character, Mickey, and maybe Lauren German's character to a degree, are the only ones who -- I don't want to say you remain unchanged, but you two are the only ones who don't go completely insane.

Well, I wanted the audience to think that I had changed, you know. The backstory on Mickey, which we created, was that he was a 9/11 survivor. He went into one of those buildings and when it came down on him and his team, and he was the only one left standing. So he ended up with PTSD, you know; his life falls apart and he starts drinking, loses his family, loses his job, gets paranoid, and turns into what he turns into, and that's who he is at the beginning of the movie. But because of what transpires during the movie, he ends up kind of finding his humanity again. So, towards the end of the movie, you know, you see him put that coat on Ivan's character, right, and when he goes out, he goes out kind of like... I tried to play him like he goes out with a kind of smile on his face, like, "This is the way my guys went out, and this is the way I want to go out, looking at the woman that I love." And that character transformed from being a prick, a selfish guy -- understandably so.

And that backstory is revealed pretty economically through just a short series of photos that Mickey keeps around...

JBB: Xavier felt that was enough to soften the character.

MB: Yeah, I mean, we shot the whole scene where it was all explained and everything. I shot a whole scene like that in The Terminator that was cut out, too, that I thought was going to be my big scene. And Sigourney [Weaver] shot a big scene in Aliens, too, that was her backstory with her daughter; that got cut out. That stuff gets cut out, but still there's remnants of that, and that stays with you. You don't need to be told every single detail.

Going back to the collaborative filmmaking process, I have a multi-tiered question for you. I'll start by asking what the filming conditions were like, in terms of the physicality of the set. Were you all really stuffed into a basement?

MB: Yes.

The reason I ask is because some of those scenes felt eerily real, and I have to wonder if the cramped space and the freedom to improvise made for some touchy situations. Was there a lot of tension on the set?

MB: Yes, there was a lot of tension. Yeah, yes, yes. People hated each other so much that the producers had to be called down constantly because actors were fighting because they thought other actors were trying to steal scenes from them. There was a lot of physicality on the scene, and some actors thought there was too much. Yeah, they hated each other. They hated each other.

I've worked with Friedkin, I've worked with Jim Cameron, I've worked with Michael Bay... I've worked with these guys, and there was more tension on this set than any other set that I've ever worked on in my life. And Xavier set it up that way, where he would bring an actor in -- it was going to be their big day -- and all of a sudden, he would start shooting something else, and that would piss off that actor, and he'd be mad at that actress, and this actress would be mad, etc. It was crazy. I thought it was going to get violent at times. It was really close.

That really comes through in the movie, because there are a couple of scenes when, as I was watching them, I pictured what it must have been like to be there as they were being filmed, and I think I would have been frightened. There's that scene when you're being tortured, and you guys are spitting at each other, and I remember thinking, "This anger feels genuine."

JBB: That was a genuine day. [laughs]

MB: [laughs] That was a genuine day. What's not even in there is, the way Michael was holding me, he was holding me like that because originally, he was standing behind me and I was hitting him like this [whips his head back repeatedly]. I hit him a couple times like that. He got a bloody nose, and you know... That was me and Michael. Me, Michael, and Milo would do anything.

You look at that movie, and you watch them try to bring Rosanna Arquette down those stairs. You watch that, and that's her fighting, biting, clawing, doing everything she can, and they shot that three or four times. Those are some committed actors. [laughs]

So what was it like working under that sort of directing style?

MB: Well, that directing style is something that will never happen to us again, because here in America, if you’re doing a TV show or something like that, and you go, "Listen, can I change this 'a' to a 'the?'" And it's, "Oh, we've got to check with the line producer." This was the most amazing, open, fun experience for an actor that I've ever been involved in.

You've worked with some legendary directors like William Friedkin and James Cameron, but you've also worked with newer talent like Robert Rodriguez and, with The Divide, Xavier Gens. Do you sense a noticeable difference between the two generations of filmmakers, between how things are done now and how they were done 30 years ago?

MB: I think every director's different. Every director's got his own style. I mean, when I directed, I basically just screamed for eight hours a day, twelve hours a day. "We gotta f***ing go, we gotta move! We gotta move! Shut the f*** up! We're shooting, we're shooting!" And other people like Ron Howard can just make a brilliant movie and be just as nice as can be. I think everybody's different. You look at Eastwood, you know; supposedly he's just as calm as a cucumber. You look at Cameron, and he's, you know, he's an intense guy, and Friedkin's an intense guy. Everybody's different.

You're actually one step ahead of me, because I was going to ask you about your directorial debut, The Victim, next.

MB: Yeah, I'm like a madman. [laughs] I was described by somebody who was on that set as a cross between a raging lunatic and something else.

Was it Robert Rodriguez who sort of gave you that extra push you needed to go ahead and move into directing?

MB: I guess it was... You know, Jim Cameron has always told me that I should try and be a director, or try directing. And Jim has said to me about Robert Rodriguez, "One of the brilliant things about Robert is that Robert just doesn't realize that he can't do something, and he just does it." He just goes for it, you kow? He doesn't care. He just goes for it; he doesn't care about anything. And when I worked with Robert, I got that from him. He just doesn't care what people think, you know? I do, but he doesn't, and I got that from him. And then, when I was shooting The Divide with Xavier, I saw a guy reading [Robert Rodriguez's book] Rebel Without a Crew, and I said to myself, "You know? F*** it, man, I'm just going to go do this." So that was kind of the genesis of me saying "I'm going to make a movie," and then boom, it was three weeks preproduction and twelve days shooting.

JBB: It was an original story by Reed Lackey; we wrote [the film] in three weeks. Lorna [Paul] and I and Ryan Honey put everybody together and we shot it in twelve days. It was a lot of fun.

What were your takeaways from working with the various directors you've collaborated with over the years?

MB: You know, truth, man. Story. You have to have a good story to tell; that's the most important thing. That's what Cameron always has. That's what Friedkin always has, or usually has. It's having a good story to tell, and telling it honestly, trying to be as honest as you can. That's really the best way I can describe it.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_divide_2012/news/1924298/3/five_favorite_films_with_michael_biehn/

25 Moments That Changed Washington Most Since 1986

         (By Marc Fisher, Washington Post Magazine’s 25th anniversary, December 1, 2011)

Twenty-five years ago, Washington Post Magazine was launched. That doesn’t seem like many years, but life sure has changed  In 1986, terrorism was someone else’s problem, AIDS had only just become a household name, and we’d never seen a serious tech rally, much less a bust. Heck, Whitney Houston even had two hits on Billboard’s year-end singles chart.

To mark the Magazine’s anniversary, we decided to look back at the past 25 years in Washington, a history-making city charged with preserving much of the nation’s history. The question became: What were the 25 moments that changed Washington most since 1986? The answer was more difficult than expected. After going through back issues of the newspaper and other sources, the staff compiled lists, then piled into a room to debate. And debate. And debate. (Regrettably, no one agreed with me that the region’s first legislation to allow red-light cameras belonged — Virginia, 1995.)

Finally we called in Marc Fisher, a longtime Post columnist and reporter who has the sharp intellect to make the choices and the tough hide to withstand the objections. Today we offer you his list. Let us know what you think at wpletters@washpost.com. It’s your turn to debate.

 And thank you for reading WP Magazine. In 1986, dozens of U.S. newspapers had magazines. Today you can almost count them on one hand. Life sure has changed.   — Lynn Medford

1. Overdose Kills Len Bias (1986) Would Washington still be suffering from epidemic cocaine use if Maryland basketball star Len Bias had not collapsed from an overdose in his College Park dorm room and been declared dead two days after the Boston Celtics selected him as the No. 2 pick in the 1986 NBA draft? Bias’s death was both a tragic wallop to fans of the dynamic playmaker from Prince George’s County and a wake-up call to a generation of casual drug users who grew up believing that cocaine was somehow less harmful or more “natural” than other hard drugs. Bias’s death quickly led to the passage of a federal law that attached mandatory minimum sentences to drug offenses — sparking a dramatic 20-fold increase in the nation’s prison population, a sour legacy in the view of many lawyers and law enforcement officials who would rather see government focus on high-level traffickers.

2. Gary Hart Monkeys Around (1987) The story was one of the oddest to have appeared on the front page of The Washington Post: “The Miami Herald reported yesterday that a news team that staked out Democratic presidential front-runner Gary Hart’s Capitol Hill town house determined that a young woman from Miami spent Friday night and Saturday with him while his wife was in Denver.” Reporters from a reputable newspaper staking out a presidential candidate’s house? Hart, then a leading candidate for his party’s nomination, slammed the newsies for “hiding in bushes [and] peeking in windows.” But Hart, faced with earlier questions about womanizing, had invited reporters to “follow me around ... put a tail on me.” Five days after the Herald report, Hart quit the race. The relationship between politicians and the media had been irrevocably altered. The years since have seen not only a cavalcade of candidates brought down by their sexual appetites, but also a redefinition of the relationship between the media and other public figures, including sports stars and Hollywood celebrities, as the salacious became a routine — and highly popular and profitable — piece of the daily news.

3. A Warning On Climate Change (1988) On June 23, a climate scientist from NASA named James Hansen told a congressional hearing that Earth was getting warmer and that the cause was human behavior — namely, the ever-increasing production of greenhouse gases. Hansen painted a grim portrait of a future of ecological turmoil: droughts and fires, floods and ever-more-sweltering heat waves. In the first testimony about global warming, Hansen said there was “only a 1 percent chance of an accidental warming of this magnitude.” From the start, there were skeptics aplenty. Despite a mounting drumbeat of scientific support for the hypothesis, the political divide over global warming only deepened. The skepticism tended to come from the right, as conservatives adopted an attitude eerily reminiscent of one their counterparts on the left embraced in the 1960s: rebellion against the received wisdom of the elites.

4. Corcoran Cancels Mapplethorpe Show (1989) Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art wasn’t looking for a fight. The museum planned to open a show, “The Perfect Moment,” featuring works by American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The exhibition, which had appeared at museums in Chicago and Philadelphia without incident, included portraits of flowers and people, but also a selection of beautifully lighted images of blunt, rough homosexual encounters. Some, depicting sadomasochistic scenes, were to be displayed, as in the other cities, in an X-rated area governed by an age restriction. But shortly before the Corcoran show was to open, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) learned that the National Endowment for the Arts had given the Philadelphia museum $30,000 for its Mapplethorpe show. Appalled, Helms recruited more than 100 congressional colleagues to protest the use of tax dollars to subsidize “morally repugnant materials of a sexual nature.” Federal law prohibited the NEA from interfering with the content of any art its money supported, but the Corcoran’s leaders canceled the show, hoping to save the museum’s federal funding of about $300,000 a year. The decision couldn’t have been more shortsighted. The Corcoran, accused of censorship, was picketed by civil liberties activists, gay leaders and artists, some of whom barred the museum from showing their work. The museum lost a $1.5 million donation. Soon, its director resigned. But the damage was done, and the incident would lead to an effort by Republicans in Congress to dissolve the arts agency. The NEA would survive, but with a far more cautious approach. The battle over what is obscene and who gets to decide rages still.

5. Barry’s Drug Bust (1990) Technically, Marion Barry was not quite accurate when he reacted to his arrest after taking two long drags on a crack pipe in Room 727 of the Vista Hotel on M Street NW. “Bitch set me up” was an understandable expression of pique and shock, but Barry’s girlfriend Rasheeda Moore was only a tool in the operation, a joint sting set up by the FBI and Barry’s own D.C. police department. The grainy videotape of the mayor of the capital of the free world sucking up a cocaine high became the city’s shame, a cruel comedy mainstay and a crystallization of the District’s abiding racial divide. Although Barry was convicted of drug possession and served six months in prison — after a trial at which prosecutors claimed that he had used drugs hundreds of times over his three terms as mayor — he was back on the D.C. Council within months, and reelected mayor two years later. But although Barry never went away — as Ward 8 council member, he was a constant burr in the side of then-Mayor Adrian Fenty — his drug travails and the failures of his final term as mayor led to the elections of Anthony Williams and Fenty, who spurned the populism of the Barry era and emphasized a quieter, duller politics in which the city was no longer the employer of last resort, but a more professional operation aimed at lending confidence to private investors. Still, even in the sunset of his remarkable career, Barry retains the power to inject racial resentments into city affairs. Mayors ignore him at their peril.

6. Anita Hill Testifies (1991) In another landmark stop on the path to polarization, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma came to Capitol Hill to comment on Judge Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. This is what Anita Hill told the senators: When she worked for Thomas at two federal agencies, he would frequently call her into his office and talk about sex. “He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals. ...” she said. “He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involving various sex acts. On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess.” Four days after Hill’s testimony, the Senate voted 52 to 48 to put Thomas on the Supreme Court. But the reverberations from Hill’s allegations continue even 20 years later. As they’d learned to do since the Gary Hart scandal, politicians, the media and members of the burgeoning industry of spinmeisters turned a Washington process that had formerly been the purview of law professors and bar associations into a partisan battlefield. As a result, Americans chose to believe Hill or Thomas mainly according to their preferred ideology or party. The nation was splitting into two camps, each not only with its own belief system, but even with its own set of facts.

7. Redskins Win SuperBowl XXVI (1992) In January, after a 14-2 season, the Washington Redskins defeated the Buffalo Bills, 37-24, the last time a D.C. team in any of the big four sports leagues has won a championship. Since then, the Redskins have appeared in the playoffs only four times. The Wizards have never made it to the NBA Finals; earlier, as the Bullets, they won the big prize in 1978. The Capitals and Nationals have never won a championship. Hope arrives regularly for all of these teams, usually in the form of a savior: a new owner (Daniel Snyder, Ted Leonsis, the Lerners), a superstar player (Michael Jordan, Kwame Brown, Gilbert Arenas, Alex Ovechkin, Donovan McNabb, Stephen Strasburg), even a new building (MCI Center, Jack Kent Cooke Stadium, Nationals Park). But the result is always the same: Washington is the home of the Senators, the Generals (the Harlem Globetrotters’ perennial victims) and Tony Kornheiser’s vaunted Curse O’ Les Boulez. They even made a musical and movie out of our sentence to sports hell: “Damn Yankees,” in which we finally make a deal with the devil to win the pennant — but the show ends before we get a shot at the World Series. But that’s fiction. In real life, the Redskins won in ’92 by taking their first 11 games, riding what Kornheiser famously dubbed the Bandwagon, a vehicle expansive and powerful enough to carry the whole D.C. area along.

8. Holocaust Museum Opens (1993) The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum opened to huge popular and critical success, a victory for curators who worked to tell the complex story of how extremist ideology took hold of an advanced society and how the German people came to murder millions of Jews, including hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens. But as successful as the museum was in combining serious history with an emotionally devastating presentation, the Holocaust Museum opened the door to a trend that would dramatically alter the face of the Mall and the way in which Americans tell the story of our past. After the founders of the Holocaust Museum were given federal land and the right to tell their story as they saw fit, demands from other groups multiplied. The result is a balkanized Mall: separate museums for American Indians, blacks and perhaps Latinos as well. The Smithsonian’s American history museum is left with the difficult task of finding what still unites us on a Mall full of separate visions of history — an approach that culminated in the National Museum of the American Indian, which gave control of its content to individual tribes, who were free to present their history in the best light, without independent curators filling out more challenging parts of the story.

9. GOP Takes Control Of Congress (1994) Republicans won control of the House, giving the party the upper hand in both chambers of Congress for the first time in 40 years. In the Senate, Democratic stalwarts such as George Mitchell, Howard Metzenbaum and Dennis DeConcini gave way to a new generation of Republicans including Jon Kyl, Rick Santorum, Bill Frist and Fred Thompson. But it was in the House that the Republican Revolution would find its voice, as Speaker Newt Gingrich led conservatives such as Lindsey Graham, Tom Coburn, Sam Brownback and Bob Barr to sell the “Contract With America.” The campaign plank that promised to change the rules by which Congress ran and to introduce bills to balance the budget, cut taxes, reform Social Security and welfare, and impose term limits — a program primarily drawn from Ronald Reagan’s 1985 State of the Union address. Although most of the program did not become law, the Contract played a major role in nationalizing House races that had previously focused on local concerns and solidified a conservative agenda that would dominate the debate no matter which party controlled the White House or Congress.

10. Capital Girds Against Terror (1995) One month after the truck bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people, President Bill Clinton ordered Pennsylvania Avenue NW in front of the White House closed to vehicles, the first major step in a hardening of the city against terrorist attacks. Although the al-Qaeda attacks of 2001 led to a more thorough reshaping of the city’s landscape, it was the Oklahoma City blast that ended the capital’s life as an open city. Suddenly, driving into a garage involved guards wielding mirrors to inspect car bottoms. Jersey barriers undid the designs of landscapers and architects. An architecture of fear came into vogue, and as critic Witold Rybczynski put it, a city of “graceful Georgetown mansions, neoclassical federal buildings” and iconic monuments was tucked behind a new vocabulary of “screening facilities, hardened gatehouses, Delta barriers, perimeter fences, and seemingly endless rows of bollards.” The result of this explosion of security measures was a visible, palpable sense of insecurity, a fortress of fear, and a new form of Washington one-upmanship in which an agency was only as important as the extent of its security perimeter. Defenders of the American tradition of openness cried out against the capital as bunker, but their arguments were usually trumped by the security officers’ simple retort: “Are you ready to risk lives?”

11. Woodies Shuts Down (1995) In November, Woodward & Lothrop closed, leaving Washington with only one department store it could call its own. (Hecht’s would die soon enough, in 2006.) Garfinckel’s, Raleigh’s and Lansburgh’s had already called it quits. In the next few years, Giant Food and Riggs Bank would be bought by bigger companies from out of town (the Netherlands and Pittsburgh, respectively). The local families that ran the stores Washingtonians knew as their own sold out to the big boys, usually because they were losing out to national chains that moved in with lower prices. Peoples Drug fell to CVS; Hechinger hardware bowed to Home Depot. The newcomers set up shop first in big boxes in the suburbs. Years after the homegrown stores had left the city as a retail desert surrounded by suburban malls, Target and now Wal-Mart ventured into the District as well. But the damage done by the loss of the area’s major locally based retailers is felt to this day, in the reduced commitment to local charities, the demise of careers that started and stayed in one community, and the diminution of a sense of place.

12. Fox News Alters Media Landscape (1996) Since its founding in 1980 as the Cable News Network, CNN had opened bureaus throughout the world, offering a breadth of news coverage never before seen on television. But in the 1990s, despite CNN’s success in attracting huge audiences for major events, the cost of gathering news rose far faster than ad revenue. In 1996, Rupert Murdoch, who had made a raft of newspapers around the English-speaking world editorially conservative and quite profitable, launched Fox News Channel, which offered hard-news headlines midday and strong, almost entirely conservative pundits in prime time. Fox News changed the tone and content of cable news, raising argument and punditry over neutral reportage. For Republican politicians, the new channel was a godsend, a national platform for their talking points and a launching pad for their personalities. Fox’s ratings success — before its second decade, Fox News had surpassed CNN in audience — led competitors to copy its approach, if not its political leaning. CNN put a greater emphasis on punditry and personalities, and Fox’s liberal counterweight, MSNBC, made an even more dramatic shift from traditional news reporting. Before long, much of the content and style of national politics was being shaped on cable news, despite its relatively tiny audience. On any given weeknight, about 3 million Americans watch one of the cable news channels. On any given autumn Sunday, about 105 million Americans watch football.

13. Charter Schools Become Public (1996) After a surprisingly easy path through the District’s political thicket, charter schools became a free and popular alternative to the city’s troubled regular public schools. Although the charter movement began as a conservative challenge to public schools that right-wing politicians believe are sentenced to poor quality by rigid and selfish teachers unions, D.C. leaders avidly grabbed on to the idea as a way to keep and lure back a black middle class that had been leaving the city for better public schools in the suburbs. Although the charters vary enormously in quality and as a whole perform only slightly better than regular public schools, they offer smaller classes and a safer environment — in good part because every family in a charter is there by choice. Today, almost half the city’s schoolchildren are enrolled in about 60 charters, which the teachers unions have long since embraced. Some of the schools have been criminally lousy, and some are recognized as among the nation’s best charters, but overall, they have established themselves as the schools of choice for D.C. parents who are actively involved in their children’s education.

14. Arena Blesses Neighborhood (1997) Abe Pollin just wanted to build an arena for his basketball and hockey teams that would be modern and convenient. Downtown Washington made sense to him, in part because a Seventh Street NW site was right on top of a Metro station, but also because the city’s center was, well, central — unlike his failing Capital Centre in Prince George’s County. The D.C. government was in no position to pay for a sports facility, so Pollin, in a move that likely gave other sports moguls palpitations, paid for the building himself — to the tune of $200 million. When MCI Center opened (in the annoying manner of sports facilities these days, it changes names, though by any reasonable measure, it should be called the Pollin Center), banks and developers, seeing masses of people pouring into the then-dormant area, loosened their purse strings. The result was a new entertainment and dining quarter, with boutique hotels, new theaters, apartment buildings and, most important, plenty of foot traffic. Maybe the whole neighborhood should be named for Pollin.

15. The Tech Boom (1999) The Dulles corridor sprouts office towers and morphs into Silicon Valley East! Tech zillionaires party on Seventh Street NW and at the Tower Club in Tysons Corner! Ordinary houses in choice Zip codes in Arlington, Bethesda and the District bust through the $1 million mark! Valet parking, celebrity chefs and outdoor heaters remake Washington’s night life! The explosion of new technologies created a bubble that seemed as if it might never burst. After hitting a modern low of 519,000, the District’s population started to rise again. The District’s streets became a minefield of construction ruts, but who could complain? Crews were laying fiber-optic cable that would make Washington one of the world’s most connected cities, and connection brought the magical riches of the Internet. It seemed as if everything was changing: money (online trading and banking), housing (sell and search from your desk), work (résumés and job listings), love (online match services), sex (free porn), school (would teachers and buildings even be necessary?) and on and on. “Bricks and mortar” became shorthand for old-fashioned and obsolete — but buildings kept rising. Silver Spring would finally get its new downtown, the National Harbor development on the Potomac in Prince George’s County got the green light, and Whole Foods would put its largest store in the region on P Street NW, unleashing a wave of gentrification along the 14th Street corridor, which had sat forlorn for more than three decades after the 1968 riots.

16. Bush Is Named Election Winner (2000) In the ultimate partisan face-off in Washington history, the contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore came down not to who should win the presidency, but who did, bringing postmodernist deconstructionist battles from academia’s ivory tower into the homes of American voters. Whose facts would count? In the closest presidential election in a century, the power to decide devolved first from the nation’s voters to a few hundred semi-confused elderly voters in Florida and then to the nine justices of the Supreme Court.After the court’s 5-to-4 vote to select Bush and, later, the birthers’ false claim that Barack Obama was not a natural-born U.S. citizen, neither of the last two presidents has been considered fully legitimate across the nation’s political divide.

17. September 11 Changed Everything (2001) Everyone walked through his or her own Ground Zero. We flew flags over highway overpasses. We learned alternative routes out of town. We made escape plans with those we loved. We woke in the small of the night to the vague howl of fighter jets that patrolled the skies over our homes. We joked about duct tape, then bought some more. We sent our armed forces overseas to gain revenge, then, when we looked up a decade later, they were still there and we were still here, wondering why we have to take off our belts and shoes before boarding an airplane. Every day since, in office lobbies, we have signed log books no one will ever look at. Every day since, we have shown ID cards to guards who don’t read them. Every day since, we wait for the next one and wonder who has won.

18. Snipers Attack And Kill At Random (2002) What sense of security the 9/11 terrorists didn’t steal from us, the snipers did. Whereas the jihadist attacks succeeded in creating a terror that first united and later divided us, the personal vulnerability many Washingtonians felt in the days after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center was eventually displaced by debates over foreign policy and two wars. But the two snipers who shot at random people from the trunk of a 1990 Chevy Caprice aimed directly at us, targets chosen solely because we lived here. They killed 10 people. Their 23-day reign of terror focused on our most ordinary activities: pumping gas, going to school, getting a bite to eat. There was no white box truck, but suddenly white box trucks were everywhere, each of them a threat. A decade later, those who were children during those days remember it as the time they learned that their parents could be more afraid than they were.

19. WWII Memorial Opens (2004) The design and completion of the National World War II Memorial on the Mall was done in a hurry, a laudable effort to honor — while some of them were still alive — the 16 million Americans who served in the military during the most ambitious undertaking in the nation’s history. The memorial to a war that cost 400,000 U.S. lives, built in a classical style reminiscent of many European war memorials of an earlier age, was roundly dismissed by critics. The New York Times called it “a shrine to the idea of not knowing or, more precisely, of forgetting. It erases the historical relationship of World War II to ourselves. It puts sentiment in the place where knowledge ought to be.” Other critics compared it to the Soviet Union’s war memorials or even to the fascist style beloved by Hitler and Mussolini. Future generations will decide if the memorial has the lasting power of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Wall, I.M. Pei’s East Wing of the National Gallery of Art or James Freed’s Holocaust Museum, designs that communicate an enduring belief that Americans will always strive for a more perfect union. For the moment, the World War II Memorial is a gathering place for those who already know. The surviving World War II veterans mostly love the place. Tears roll down their cheeks as they walk their younger relatives through the memorial, proudly set at the center of the Mall, in the core of our collective memory.

20. Baseball Fever Returns To DC (2005) After a 33-year absence so devastating that some Washingtonians lost their sense of place and aligned themselves with a team in Baltimore, baseball overcame its twice-burned bias against the nation’s capital and gave Washington a third chance. The area’s economic boom and persistent position atop any list of the nation’s most affluent metropolises — along with the fact that the Montreal Expos were a flop and baseball had nowhere else to turn — finally led Commissioner Bud Selig and his fellow owners to spurn the fulminations and threats of Orioles owner Peter Angelos and move a franchise to the District. The city’s cause was helped considerably by the D.C. government’s willingness to front the money to build a new stadium — a decision that divided District voters and helped deliver the mayoralty to one of the deal’s leading opponents, then-D.C. Council member Adrian Fenty. Soon, bang-zoom went the fireworks, and curly W’s appeared on red caps from Manassas to Mitchellville.

21. Crackdown On Illegal Immigrants (2007) Egged on by residents who clamored for action after a doubling of Prince William County’s Hispanic population between 2000 and 2005, the county passed the toughest anti-illegal-immigrant law in the nation. Police were authorized to check the immigration status of anyone they stopped on suspicion of committing an infraction. The crackdown led to huge protests by Latinos, about 8,000 of whom later left the county, perhaps because of the new law but in many cases because of the precipitous decline in construction jobs following the economic crash of 2008. The crowds of young men hanging out on street corners seeking the work of day laborers largely dissipated, but the crime rate did not change much. Most residents pronounced themselves pleased with the law’s impact, and studies concluded that Prince William had effectively pushed some Latinos to neighboring jurisdictions.

22. Rhee Storms DC School System (2007) Everyone wanted D.C. public schools to get better. But which schools and better for whom? Adrian Fenty won the mayoralty by promising he’d improve schools throughout the city, but while his dynamo of a schools chief, Michelle Rhee, blazed a trail of firings, hirings and renovations through every ward, she did so with a brazen disregard for local politics and the sensitivities of race and class. The result was dozens of shuttered schools, stunning new facilities at many D.C. schools, a new generation of teachers, a one-term mayor (whose replacement immediately showed Rhee the door) and a resurgence of black frustration over the city’s changing racial and economic demographics.

23. Region Enters Economic Free-fall (2008) The near-collapse of the world’s economy emptied out suburban developments that had been home to working people who had surprised even themselves by their ability to get mortgages their incomes didn’t remotely support. In Prince William and Prince George’s counties, foreclosure signs seemed to dot every block. In the District, the baseball stadium-sparked construction boom froze. In the Dulles corridor, tech companies dissolved, leaving office buildings hungry for tenants. Unemployment throughout the region spiked, and the fact that the rate here was well lower than almost everywhere else in the nation was little solace for those who painfully discovered just what it is to try to survive without means in one of the country’s most expensive markets. The economic free-fall slammed every income level. Fortunes shrank, some dramatically, especially after investment whiz Bernard Madoff turned out to have been a world-class thief. The resulting surge of schadenfreude over the suffering of wealthy individuals and institutions didn’t last long, as local charities suffered from the loss of donations from some of their most stalwart supporters.

24. Barack Obama Makes History (2009) After a spontaneous explosion of people onto Washington’s streets on election night, the city played host to the most remarkable inauguration party since John Kennedy’s nearly half a century earlier. Young and old, black and white, Democrats and independents and even some Republicans flooded the Mall and much of the District’s center to celebrate America’s first black president, a cool, young, inexperienced senator whose promise of change spoke deeply to an electorate frustrated by both parties’ failure to engage with the fact that the country had gone seriously off the rails. Would Barack Obama live up to the hype or even to his own soaring rhetoric? Would he challenge the system in real and penetrating ways? Those questions would bedevil the president in the years to come, but for the moment, he was a singular avatar of change, a vessel overflowing with voters’ hunger to believe in the enduring power and promise of the American dream.

25. The Democratic Ideal (2011) Two years after more than a million people massed on the Mall to place their trust in a new leader, Washington had morphed into a target of frustration and wrath from all sides. The tea party on the right, the Occupy Wall Street movement on the left and a besieged middle class in the center were united in the greatest expression of economic anxiety and political distress the nation had seen since the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s. The right blamed big corporations and big government. The left blamed big corporations and big military. The little guy wondered what had happened to the great American promise of class mobility, the idea that if you worked hard, you’d get far. The government teetered on the verge of shutdown, its leaders unable to agree on much of anything. Yet even in this time of sky-high unemployment that now seemed baked into the system, Americans took to the streets and social media in impressive numbers, refusing to let go of the ideals of a country founded in revolt against the elites. “We are the 99 percent,” they said, convinced that it was the people, not the banks or corporations, that were truly too big to fail.

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