February 2023

When I was 11, on vacation in Miami Beach with my parents and brother John, we went to the movies to see Around the World in 80 Days.  It wasn’t just “the movies.”  It was a spectacular event. Everyone in the world HAD to go.

That became the definition of a blockbuster movie: big, expensive, beautiful, funny, a fantasy with scenes from all over the world, dozens of movie star cameos and an adventure that carried on all the way to the end.

Based on the Jules Verne classic written in 1872, the movie was the culmination of the career of showman/producer/hustler/ bigger-than-life Mike Todd.  It broke all box-office records at the time and won the Oscar for best picture (among others.)

Everything about Todd (born 1909 as Avrom Goldbogen) was huge.  He made and lost fortunes;  produced 16 Broadway shows (many with minimal costumes;)  married Hollywood’s biggest star, Elizabeth Taylor (her third of seven husbands, and the only one she didn’t divorce.)  They were married only two years… he died in a crash of his plane, The Liz, in 1958 at 49.

A few months earlier, Todd staged an invitation-only cocktail party for 18,000 celebrating the success of Around the World at Madison Square Garden.  He hustled CBS to broadcast it live.  Walter Cronkite was the “anchor” for the bread and circus event that evolved into a food fight.  Cronkite later expressed regret for ever getting involved in the “self-serving event”.  

A remarkable personal biography, The Nine Lives of Michael Todd, by his confidante Art Cohn (author of The Joker is Wild) came out shortly after he Todd’s death.  

Cohn crashed on the plane with Todd, just two chapters short of finishing the definitive book about “the gaudiest, brashest, most controversial showman of our time.”   Cohn’s wife finished the book.  I have thought for decades that the book could be a wonderful movie with clips from Todd’s productions.  I doubt that anyone under 50 knows anything about him other than “Wasn’t he the guy who was married to Elizabeth Taylor?” 

Todd’s story is so much bigger than that and his life is mostly an unknown story:

• clawed his way up from the slums
• built a two-million-dollar construction business when he was 19.
• went broke in the Depression, was a millionaire again, then, broke again.  Money was just a means to his ends.
• married movie star sex symbol Joan Blondell, later Hollywood’s reigning beauty, Elizabeth Taylor.
• produced the most successful movie ever at the time.
• revolutionized how movies were shown with Cinerama then Todd-AO.
• crowded into one lifetime more action-packed drama than would have been believable in one of his own lavish productions. 

Why’s it matter to me?  It was the start of a thread in my life that attracted me to the power of the shapers of public perceptions, like Todd, Howard Hughes, Bill Veeck, Fred Friendly…all of them larger than life, fascinated with action and innovation.  Ego was part of it. Money was what they used to keep it going, but it wasn’t the primary motivator.  They were unique characters who needed to make things happen, to entertain and influence as many people as possible.  Fun was always in the recipe. They were all self-confessed promoters, but with underlying personal integrity.  Most attractive to me is that they were characters, individuals who didn’t care about conforming.  They weren’t afraid to be spontaneous and try new things.  In fact, they thrived on it. 

It wasn’t show business or aviation or baseball or TV news that attracted me…it was the personality that pushed the limits of what was possible.

I can also see now that Around the World in 80 Days influenced me to spend a couple years inventing the board game, Global Village, about 15 years later, in 1972.  It was “The Whole Earth Strategy Game,” played on a map of the world.  Players traveled virtually to discover stories and earn points in the process. My fascination was in learning about and writing the cards (like a script) for each of the dozens of locations.  I made it a viable competitive game with the underlying goal of providing a way to have fun learning geography.  It reflected the way I perceived (or wished) the world worked:  (No wars, no nationalism, systems based on information, not money.)

Global Village was my around the world in about 80 minutes.

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And Now a Word from Our Sponsor

I worked in and around television for some 50 years.  I’ve watched it for 75 years.  

Technology and digital capabilities have relegated TV into almost exclusively a mass sales medium.   You could argue that it always was only that. 

It might have been different.   People were excited in 1961 when Newton Minow spoke to broadcasters when he was first appointed as the New Frontier chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. 

Minow is still alive (97) and as an attorney, has represented commercial broadcasters for 50 years.  He was also a force for the expansion of public broadcasting.

His “Vast Wasteland” speech to broadcasters was idealistic at the time.  Here’s an excerpt:

I admire your courage — but that doesn’t mean that I would make life any easier for you. Your license lets you use the public’s airwaves as trustees for 180 million Americans. The public is your beneficiary. If you want to stay on as trustees, you must deliver a decent return to the public — not only to your stockholders. 

[TV is] the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years, this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make our people aware of their world.

But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe there is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons

Ours has been called the jet age, the atomic age, the space age. It is also, I submit, the television age. And just as history will decide whether the leaders of today’s world employed the atom to destroy the world or rebuild it for mankind’s benefit, so will history decide whether today’s broadcasters employed their powerful voice to enrich the people or to debase them.

There is your challenge to leadership. You must reexamine some fundamentals of your industry. You must open your minds and open your hearts to the limitless horizons of tomorrow. I can suggest some words that should serve to guide you:

Television and all who participate in it are jointly accountable to the American public for respect for the special needs of children, for community responsibility, for the advancement of education and culture, for the acceptability of the program materials chosen, for decency and decorum in production, and for propriety in advertising. This responsibility cannot be discharged by any given group of programs, but can be discharged only through the highest standards of respect for the American home, applied to every moment of every program presented by television.

Program materials should enlarge the horizons of the viewer, provide him with wholesome entertainment, afford helpful stimulation, and remind him of the responsibilities which the citizen has towards his society.

That was May 9, 1961, almost 62 years ago.  He was right.  But, the economic and political power of the industry and corporate ambition were far too much to take on.

They won.  TV moved from being a commercial entertainment form into an unabashed 24/7 media bordello with no regulation at all regarding the public interest or limitations on commerciality.  Despite Minow’s threat, TV licenses have been held in perpetuity. The FCC has never taken one away from corporate owners who have been able to buy and sell them for hundreds of millions of dollars.

In a way, the commercializing of television established the precedent for the Internet and streaming.  Now, the Internet is so laden with advertising that you can’t watch anything without being sold something, even when you pay for it.  The wasteland endures.

If you dropped in from Kryptonite and saw that the average American (and people worldwide) are exposed to about 10,000 commercial images every day, you probably wouldn’t believe it.  But that is the system, like the slogan that made a New Jersey store a national success: “Money talks, nobody walks.”  Our media, our eyeballs and brains, our politics (who gets elected and their policy on guns, the climate, personal rights and various freedoms)…are all up for sale. This isn’t entirely new, but it has gone to unprecedented extremes.  I can’t believe it’s good for humans or other animals, now, or for the future.  However, as sportswriter Jimmy Cannon wrote almost daily, “Nobody Asked Me, But…”

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Way Back When

Sometimes when I’m trying to get some historical perspective on what’s going on today, I go back to the bound volumes of the Weinberg House Organ (1952-1967) to see if my dad wrote something relevant to my topic.  Turns out that in 1957, Lou Weinberg quoted a friend who wrote occasional letters from his country town in Georgia:

Dear Trade:

In the event that some of you have been worried, concerned or upset because the Russians were the first to put a satellite in the sky before we did, please be assured and reassured that everything is going to be all right in the long run.  Sidney [his brother] and me are positive that the time will not be too distant before us Americans are going to have a moon in the skies, not only bigger and better than Spudnick [sic] but also bigger and better than the moon that has been shining up there for all these years where the man in the moon is.

…there are men in governmental circles who know that the moon is made of green cheese and that there’d be no useful purpose putting another one up there.  They also believe that the world is flat (not only broke, but also in shape) so it would be foolish to expect any satellites to go around it.  But they realize that there is nowhere on earth to build as many golf courses as on the moon.

So, we will have our own satellite.  It will not be broadcasting “beep-beep” like the sorry old Spudnick named after the Russian national flower, potatoes.  Ours will be called Sudsnick (or perhaps Tidenick) named after America’s national flower, Soap.  It will be broadcasting opera and commercials, every hour, every minute, everywhere.”     

It reads like the Onion or Borowitz Report from 66 years ago, showing that some truths written as satire can be more profound than sophisticated columnists or the editorial pages.  

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Jobs, Jobs, and Jobs

Every day, it gets a little more confusing about inflation, recession, layoffs, jobs, etc.

I did some digging about where jobs are at the moment. 

Maybe you’ll get a few surprises as I did.  Here are some baseline numbers:

The biggest employers in the world in millions

1. Indian Ministry of Defence: 2.92
2. US Department of Defense: 2.91
3. People’s Liberation Army China: 2.55 
4. Walmart: 2.30 
5. Amazon: 1.61 
6. China National Petroleum (CNPCC): 1.45
7. National Health Service (GB): 1.38
8. Foxconn: 1.29

Companies with Most employees (in 000’s)

1. Walmart: 2.300 (USA)
2. Amazon: 1.610 (USA)
3. Foxconn:  1.290 (Taiwan)
4. Accenture: 738 (Ireland)
5.  Volkswagen: 642 (Germany)
6. Tata Consultancy: 616 (China)
7. Deutsche Post (DHL): 583 (Germany)
8. UPS: 529 (USA)
9. Home Depot: 490 (USA)
10. Kroger USA: 465 (USA)
11. Gazprom: 468 (Russia)
12. Agriculture Bank: 455 (China)
13. Target: 450 (USA)
14. China Mobile: 450 (China)
15. Industrial Bank (ICBC): 425 (China)

Lots of attention is being paid to tech companies and layoffs.  If my research is right,

Amazon has more payroll employees, 1,610,000 than the next ten American tech companies COMBINED.  (in order: IBM, Microsoft, Alphabet/Google, Apple, Oracle, Tesla, Facebook/Meta, Cisco, and Salesforce)

“Employees” keeps having less importance in understanding work and the economy.  Contract and gig workers now outnumber employees.  Lyft and Uber alone have more than two million drivers, more than any US company has on its payroll. 

I don’t begin to pretend to know what all this means.  I do know for sure that it’s a completely different economy than it was, even in 2000.  I also believe that politicians and governments haven’t begun to develop policies that take the new worker and workplace realities into account.  That might just be contributing to the frustration that so many people feel about their lives and work.

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“COTTAGING”

I have to admit I’d never heard of it until I randomly came across it as I was flitting online looking to track down old stories about a British actor.  Public lavatories, like this one in Pond Square, London, is the origin of the term cottaging.

Cottaging is a gay slang term, originating from the United Kingdom, referring to anonymous sex between men in a public lavatory (a “cottage” or “tea-room”), cruising for sexual partners with the intention of having sex elsewhere. The term has its roots in self-contained English toilet blocks resembling small cottages.  

^{Now that I think about it, I’ve seen something similar around here, in Forest Preserve parking lots, but never put 2-and-2 together…or even one and one.}

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As usual, it’s the grandkids who steal the show…

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The end of January has been just plain cold around here.  We’re getting out of frozen Dodge for warmer climes for ten days or so…back to the little beach bungalow off the coast of Nicaragua which I haven’t seen in four years, since before COVID. I’ll report back to you on March 1.

Stay well,