Author: Craig Fehrman

Craig Fehrman is the author of Author in Chief (February 11, 2020). Find out more at his website http://craigfehrman.com.

Speaking in Dialects

by Craig Fehrman, posted in TV and Movies

[x-posted at The Rumpus]

Tim Monich has five times as many IMDB credits as Jason Schwartzman, but we know for whom Brooklyn tolls. This week’s New Yorker profile of Monich won’t change that, of course, but it does offer a riveting look at the world of Hollywood dialect coaches.

Movie accents are one of those things we don’t notice until they go bad, but, as Alec Wilkinson reports, Monich has worked with tons of stars, including Hilary Swank in Amelia and Matt Damon in Invictus. Whatever the role, Monich can rely on his incredible archive of sound recordings—more than six thousand of them, all filed in boxes bearing names like “USA A-H” (American dialects, Alabama to Hawaii).

The world of elite dialect coaching, as you might guess, is a small one; Monich received his start from a student-of-a-student-of-a-student of the man who provided the inspiration for Henry Higgins. (The New Yorker identifies Higgins as the Pygmalion character, but here, at The Rumpus, we’re on fine terms with My Fair Lady.) Thankfully, Wilkinson walks us through the entire process, showing how, under Monich’s aegis, Brad Pitt perfected the speeches memorialized this summer in the Inglourious Basterds trailer. Sooooun gud?

It’s all accessible––Wilkinson spares us any IPA or epiglottal consonants––and it’s all fascinating. Where else will you hear Gerard Butler compare Speak with Distinction to Ulysses? In fact, the whole thing recalls Rebecca Mead’s great 2003 profile of Jaime Pressly, “The Almost-It Girl.” (Like the Monich piece, it sits behind a subscription wall; what’s with The New Yorker burying its best Hollywood-from-the-margins stories?)

But there’s one key difference between Wilkinson’s profile and just about any other piece of Hollywood journalism, and I think it imbues the profile with much of its oomph. In no other story quoting so many celebrities—and Pitt/Damon/Swank are only the start—do they all talk about one relatively average guy. It becomes a weird, inverted world where Leo and Liam rub elbows with Monich and the regular folks he interviewed while building his archive. For a moment, or maybe just for an unruly vowel, the actor-viewer relationship reverses.

In Which I Accidentally Answer My Own Question

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books

Last Friday, in a short essay for The Millions, I tried to call attention to an egregiously overlooked essay by Lewis Hyde on copyright and the Founding Fathers. I spent most of the time summarizing and quoting from Hyde, but did try to end on an original point:

Since December 13, 2005, when Hyde published it on the Social Science Research Network under a Creative Commons license, “Frames from the Framers” has been downloaded only 746 times. . . . [W]hile the Founders’ ideas still hold relevance, they do so in a much different media landscape, and these differences should play a part in any discussion. “Frames from the Framers” is part of Hyde’s book-in-progress, so its ideas will get their due soon enough. Still, it says some timely things in richly historical ways. Hyde’s essay deserves attention now—not least because its own reception offers one more thing to consider in our ongoing debate about individuals, intellectual property, and the circulation of ideas.

Well, Hyde’s is now the second-most popular essay at the SSRN. This is thanks in large part to the Internet taste-makers at Boing Boing; it also shows one way our “media landscape” now circulates ideas.

I’m going to stop before I give myself a meta-headache.

Lewis Hyde Practices What He Preaches

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Academia, Books, Dissertation ephemera

[The Millions]

Over at The Millions, I’ve got a post on Lewis Hyde and his absurdly overlooked “Frames from the Framers: How America’s Revolutionaries Imagined Intellectual Property.” It’s a great essay with real-world relevance—both to downloading music, which Hyde examines in the essay itself, and to the Google Books settlement, which he takes up (with some of the same quotes and ideas) in this recent NYTBR essay.

I’m actually working on a longer story on Google Books (more specifically, on its covert scanning operations in . . . Indiana!), and I’m starting to think that Hyde’s idealism might hamstring him there in the same way it does in his “Frames from the Framers.” But we need more idealists, not fewer.

You can download Hyde’s entire essay here.

Aggregators and the Media: Sportscenter Edition

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Sports, The Media

[Slate’s The Big Money]

One of the things I don’t understand about the Huffington Post—and there are many—is its lack of a sports page. I mean, they have one, technically, but it doesn’t make the home page’s navigation bar and seems kind of pro forma, even forgotten. If you’re willing to use sleaze to drum up page views, why not sports?

Well, here’s another way the Huffington Post might benefit from sports: over at Slate’s The Big Money, I’ve got a new piece that explores how and why, in the sports media, the relationship between aggregators and news outlets has remained sympathetic and even symbiotic.

And if you’re in the mood for more sports journalism, why not check out my Deadspin follow-up on Jericho Scott, the nine-year-old baseball player who got banned for being “too good”? It was a big story last year—big enough, even, for the Huffington Post.

John Cusack and DFW

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, TV and Movies

[x-posted at The Rumpus]

On Friday night, and in preparation for Where the Wild Things Are, I rewatched Spike Jonze’s first feature, Being John Malkovich. What struck me was not the film’s final childlike shots or how its puppet shows anticipate both Christopher Walken and those expensive, “absurdly heavy” monster suits, but something else—namely how goddamn much John Cusack looked like David Foster Wallace.

In the film, Cusack plays a character named Craig Schwartz, and, to me, at least, he bears an uncanny resemblance to DFW circa Charlie Rose. I can’t find a good image of Cusack-as-Schwartz online, but you’ll have to trust me. Both men sport the same long, thick, unmanaged hair; the same weak, stubbly jaw; the same tight white shirt and skinny red tie; the same unhip round glasses; and even some of the same facial tics (especially once Cusack discovers “the portal”).

Wallace recently got his own film treatment—for the titular sections of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, adapted and directed by Office-ite John Krasinski—and, thanks to it, we can connect these dots. Krasinski to Dave Eggers (Away We Go), Eggers to Jonze (Where the Wild Things Are), Jonze to Cusack—no Kevin Bacon needed![1] But I’m starting to sound far more glib than I felt after finishing Being John Malkovich. In fact, for me, the Wallace/Cusack effect quickly went from oddly creepy to kind of sad. But then I decided to rewatch that Rose interview, where guest and host meander through A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Strangely, the real dead person cheered me up where the silly doppelganger got me down. And I think that’s because the lo-fi Wallace interview stands as a better piece of visual entertainment than Being John Malkovich or Where the Wild Things Are or just about anything else—and that’s because of what Wallace says.

Watch that interview. Read the collection’s essay on television and contemporary fiction. Cipher on the ghostly parallel to Cusack (the trailer’s here). Just remember that DFW’s body of work lives on, and that it’s a little less bitter on each return.

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[1] Being John Malkovich‘s original script did call for Bacon to play one of Malkovich’s friends.