Contest: Win the Soundtrack of the Oscar-Winning Green Book
Posted on March 8, 2019 at 8:51 am
Oscars 2019 — No Host, Some Progress, and Gaga/Cooper Sizzle
Posted on February 25, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Raise your hand if you missed having a host at the Oscars. Yeah, me neither. Without a host to mock-mock the stars and studios and be instantly dissected on social media, the Oscar telecast seemed almost — supple and elegant, if still not anywhere close to the authenticity of the Spirit Awards or the grace and aplomb of the Tony Awards. Highlights, lowlights, upsets, and a couple of moments sure to be on Oscar highlight reels for decades to come.
Best idea: Skipping the host. That position, meaning both the assignment and the opening of the show, has become impossible. Starting with a rousing musical number from Queen (though Adam Lambert is no Freddie Mercury, and not even a Rami Malek) was just fine. And the always-brilliant trio of Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Maya Rudolph gave us a light sprinkling of pointed but not mean one-liners to remind us not to take the awards too seriously. Thanks, Academy, for jettisoning almost all of the achingly arch fake banter of the presenters, too.
Worst idea: Trains. Stylists, please remember that the stars may have to do more than swirl on the red carpet. When they have to go up the stairs to claim their Oscars, those trains get in the way. Huge thanks to the gallant Chris Evans for discreetly lending a hand to Regina King.
Best moment: Screens all around the world melted during the sizzling performance of “Shallow” by Lady Gaga and Bradly Cooper. Instead of coming out from the wings, they simply got up from their seats in the audience and sat down on stage as naturally as if it was their own living room. The performance was breathtakingly intimate and touching. When he left his stool to come sit beside her on the piano bench, their deep affection and respect was palpable.
Best speeches: Regina King’s heartfelt tribute to her mother’s support and love, Spike Lee’s jubilance, Olivia Colman’s very un-British dissolve into incoherence.
Best omission: In multiple wins for “Bohemian Rhapsody,” no one mentioned the now-disgraced director.
Best dress: Michell Yeoh in Elie Saab
Runner-up: Billy Porter, designed by my favorite Project Runway winner, Christian Siriano
Porter’s ensemble inspired the evening’s best Twitter comments.
From Broadway star Audra McDonald: Audra McDonald’s time of death: Billy Porter O’ Clock.
From writer/director Ava Duverney: I really just think I’ve seen all I need to see as this outfit is paying all my bills, offering advice, watering my plants and generally giving me life as well as afterlife. I’m going to go somewhere and have a good cry. Amen.
And Porter himself, who noted that the ensemble was a tribute to iconic Hector Xtravaganza of the House of Xtravaganza, who died in December: “My goal is to be a walking piece of political art every time I show up.”
Color theme of the evening’s couture: Pink, worn by many of the most glamorous stars, including Best Picture presenter Julia Roberts, who looked ravishing.
Best surprise: The conventional choices for Best Animated Feature would be whatever movie Disney or Pixar released. I loved “Incredibles 2” and “Ralph Breaks the Internet,” but was thrilled to see the wonderfully inclusive and wildly innovative “Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse” win. My Spidey sense tingled right up my spine with that one.
Best development: Oscars are a little less white this year, not just in the key acting awards, with Regina King and Mahershala Ali winning for supporting roles (Ali is now only the second black performer to win more than one Oscar, after Denzel Washington), but crucially historic wins at the below the line level, with “Black Panther’s” Ruth Carter (costume designer) and Hannah Beachler (production designer, with Jay Hart) becoming the first black women to win in their categories.
“Roma” became the first Mexican film to win Best Foreign Language Picture, and Alfonso Cuaron, its writer/director/cinematographer, who based the story on his own life, won for direction and cinematography as well. This was the fifth time in six years a Mexican director has won Best Director. The other categories had a heartening diversity as well, including Peter Ramsey, the first black director to win an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, and the Chinese-American Domee Shi, who wrote and directed the award-winning animated short “Bao.” Three of the four acting awards went to people of color.
Far to go: But the writing awards sharply highlighted the way that the AMPAS is still grappling with the way American movies tell stories about race and class. The thrill of the adapted screenplay win by Spike Lee for “BlackKklansman.” Lee has been criminally overlooked by the Oscars for decades (except for one honorary award). The joy at his award was instantly eclipsed by the original screenplay award to “Green Book,” which many people consider to be condescending and insensitive. The choice of “Green Book” as Best Picture prompted an explosion of furious Twitter comments. The clueless acceptance speeches of the writer/producers failed to mention either Dr. Don Shirley or the titular travel guide and seemed clueless about the way some audience members responded to it. Their kumbayah-style comments came across as, well, condescending and insensitive.
I gave up on the idea of the Oscars as indicators, much less arbiters, of absolute value, aesthetic or cultural, many, many years ago, which leaves me free to enjoy the show as what it is — the industry saluting and, more important, revealing itself. If you want to know which are the best films of the year, check out the Critics Choice Awards, voted on by people whose profession is to watch all movies, not just those supported by the studios for awards, and to evaluate them. Or check out the Spirit Awards, given the night before the Oscars, which pay tribute to the films made entirely out of passionate commitment to the art of telling stories, not the art of making money. And the awards show has an outsider perspective that ensures no one takes any of it too seriously.
But the Oscars are always un-missable, and this year’s show, frustrating as it was, to me showed great progress and has me already looking forward to next year.
Nat Gertler on the Story Behind the Real Green Book
Posted on November 30, 2018 at 3:34 pm
Nat Gertler’s About Comics is the publisher of the reprinted Green Book, the travel guide that inspired the title of one of the year’s best movies. It listed hotels, restaurants, and other businesses that welcomed Black tourists before the 1964 Civil Rights Act required public accommodations to be open to everyone. In the movie, Black musician Don Shirley was restricted to modest-to-shabby Green Book-listed businesses while his white driver stayed with the other members of the trio at whites-only hotels. In an interview, Gertler explained the history of the Green Book and how the reprint became one of his most popular publications.
How did the Green Book get started and who published it originally?
Victor Hugo Green started the annual series in 1936. He was a mailman, delivering the mail in Hackensack, New Jersey but living in Harlem. The first year’s book just covered the New York area, but the demand for a national book was quickly apparent.
How did people buy it? Bookstores or through the mail?
The Green Book was available through the mail, and some Black organizations made it available to their members. And some of the locations listed in the book got copies to distribute — after all, if you were staying at one hotel that accepted Black customers, odds are you were going to do some traveling and need to stay somewhere else. Some years’ editions had cover versions with places for those hotels to stamp their names and addresses. But perhaps the most interesting source was gas stations — specifically Standard Oil stations (that was Esso then, Exxon now.) Unlike other major gas chains, Standard Oil allowed African Americans to own station franchises. In the 1949 Green Book — that’s one of the eight editions that I’ve reprinted so far — there’s even an article by Standard Oil’s special representative to what was then called the “Negro market.”Who vetted the hotels and restaurants? Were most of them black-owned?
The Guide tries to make clear that the listings aren’t endorsements — a normal listing isn’t mean to guarantee the quality of an establishment, that it just indicates that they were willing to take travelers of color…. although at times they created the implication that businesses that went beyond the simple listing and bought an ad were, of course, particularly good places to stay. Some businesses submitted themselves for listings, some were submitted by customers, but one particularly good source were African American postal workers, just like Green himself. After all, mailmen travel the neighborhood, they know what’s going on.
How does a business with a name like “About Comics” end up publishing something so non-comic as the Green Book?
About Comics is a small company… just one guy, that’s me. If you hear me saying “we,” that’s the corporate “we,” much like the royal “we.” And most of what I’ve published over the years have been comics or at least comics-related, but I’ve got no boss I have to convince when I want to try publishing something else. A lot of what I did is simply driven by my curiosity; when I get to wondering about something, trying to publish it is my way of doing research.
Maybe about three years ago, I read a couple articles about the Negro Motorist Green Book, and it immediately caught my curiosity. It linked to some things that my stepmother had told me. My stepmother, Poco, is half Black, half Cherokee, and when she was in high school she’d be going to one of her athletic competitions, but the bus would leave all of her teammates, all white girls, at one of the hotels in town and then have to drive Poco out to someplace beyond the city limits where she could stay. The sweetest woman you can imagine — I didn’t know her as a teen, of course, for all I know she was a hellion back then, but that’s neither here nor there, that’s not what she was being judged on. Still, to know she was treated like that.
So I was curious about the Green Book, decided to get one for myself so I could experience it… and then found that they were collectors items, museum pieces really. Museums were paying tens of thousands for one. That wasn’t in my budget, at least not just to satisfy my curiosity. But hey, why not see if I could republish it? If there was enough demand for the original editions to send the price that high, maybe I could sell a couple hundred copies of a facsimile edition and make it worth the time I put into reprinting it… and if not, hey, at least I’d have satisfied my own curiosity. And, lucky for me, it turned out that I was not the only one curious about it.
What surprised you about what it included?
I kind of expected it to be a book filled with anger, with screeds against discrimination and with warnings about the horrible things that might happen to you in certain places… but what I found was a very practical document. Just listings of places that were willing to take you as a customer, and maybe some articles, travelogues or other travel advice. And in a way, that was even scarier, even more horrible, because the practicality of it all just lets you know how damnably rote this all was. Green didn’t need to explain to the reader what the problem was, his readers knew what problem was being addressed. And he didn’t need to warn against going certain places, just let you know where you could go… and the sparseness of locations at time told a story. The first volume I reprinted — the 1940 edition, still my best seller — for the entire state of New Mexico, there’s only one entry, just one place to stay. And it’s listed as a “tourist home”, and what that meant was that this wasn’t a hotel, this was just some Black family that was willing to put you up for the night on your trip, kind of the AirBNB of its day. Now, this might not have been the only actual relevant business in New Mexico, the Green Book was still growing and learning about the places that were out there… but if it wasn’t listed in the Green Book, how were you going to find it?
When did you get started in publishing? What have been your most popular titles?
This year is About Comics’ 20th anniversary. At the moment, the 1940 Negro Motorist Green Book actually is our biggest seller — it sells well through Amazon, and we sell a lot of copies to museum gift shops. In terms of comics material, our best sellers have been our books of the stuff that Charles M. Schulz did besides Peanuts, like the book we have out collecting his other newspaper series, It’s Only a Game, which he did for newspapers in the late 1950s. But we’ve also had really strong sales on things we do aimed at aspiring comics creators. Panel One, a collection of comic book scripts by big comic book names like Neil Gaiman and Kurt Busiek, and even filmmaker Kevin Smith, has been perennially strong. and our Blank Comic Book Panelbook series, which is literally just books filled with empty triangles for kids to draw comics in, has done surprisingly well.
What’s coming next?
You know how I said that publishing is often my form of research? Well, about a year ago I discovered the odd world of 1950s Catholic cartoon books. These are books mostly of single panel gag cartoons about nuns, and there were dozens of them, some selling in the hundreds of thousands of copies. It’s this subculture that I haven’t really seen anyone try to cover. Anyway, I launched a line on April Fools Day, trying to get everyone to believe that I was only kidding about suddenly publishing a pile of nun cartoon books, when in reality, I was! By the end of the year, I’ll have published two dozen books of these cartoons. The one I’m laying out now is monk and nun cartoons drawn by an actual monk. If folks are interested, I suggest that they follow @dailynun1 on Instagram or Twitter — they’ll get a different nun cartoon in their feed every day, plus they’ll see announcements when I have new volumes out.
And after that? We’ll see what catches my eye.
Green Book
Posted on November 15, 2018 at 5:50 pm
A-| Lowest Recommended Age: | Middle School |
| MPAA Rating: | Rated PG-13 for thematic content, language including racial epithets, smoking, some violence and suggestive material |
| Profanity: | Strong language including racist epithets |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | Drinking, smoking |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Some peril and violence |
| Diversity Issues: | A theme of the movie |
| Date Released to Theaters: | November 16, 2018 |
| Date Released to DVD: | March 11, 2019 |
Next, the movie is co-written by the real-life son of Tony Lips (real name, Tony Vallelonga), so there was a high risk of a lack of perspective, and probably a lack of experience. And the director, Peter Farrelly, is known for working with his brother, Bobby, on movies known for often-shockingly crude humor like “There’s Something About Mary,” “Dumb and Dumber,” and “Movie 43.”
And yet, they pulled it off. “Green Book” is wonderfully entertaining and guaranteed to warm even the hardest of hearts. The music is sublime, and the performances by Mahershala Ali as Don Shirley and Viggo Mortensen as Tony Lips are superb. Yes, lessons will be learned and racial harmony will be kumbaya-ed, but resistance is futile. This movie will win you over.
Tony needs a job, but not badly enough to accept an offer from some mob-connected friends. When he hears that a doctor needs a driver, he goes to the address for the interview and it is not a home but the legendary Carnegie Hall. It turns out that Don Shirley lives above the performance space, in an apartment filled with antiques and objects d’art. He is (twice) a doctor of music. He appears in a gold and white caftan and conducts the interview from an actual throne. He is sophisticated and a little effete. He is, as is usually the case in road and buddy movies and especially in buddy/road movies, the id to Tony’s unrestrained ego. He immediately knows that Tony is not the right guy and turns him down. But later, he offers him the job, even though when he tells Tony he is going South, Tony thinks he means Atlantic City.
It is 1962. The Civil Rights Act has not yet passed, meaning that the Jim Crow segregation laws are still in effect throughout the South, and there are very few hotels and restaurants that allow black customers. Don will be traveling with two other musicians (the group is called the Don Shirley Trio), and they are white and driving a separate car. The record label guy gives Tony a copy of the Green Book, a travel guide for black Americans who wish to “vacation without aggravation.” And he tells Tony that if Don does not make every single performance on the schedule, he will not get paid.
Tony, in an early scene put a glass in the garbage because a black plumber working in his kitchen drank some water from it, has lived a life as insular as Don’s has been urbane. Tony is expansive and chatty. Don is reserved and cerebral. Tony is devoted to his wife and family. Don is a loner. Tony loves food. Don loves music. Ahead are plenty of conflicts with each other and plenty of conflicts that will put them on the same side against pretty much everyone.
It teeters toward overly cutesy at times, as when Tony teaches Don the joys of fried chicken. But we see Tony’s spirit enlarge as he sees for the first time the beauty and brutality of America outside of New York, as he is touched by the music and Don’s artistry and horrified by the bigotry he faces. And we see Don open up a little to someone outside his world. Watching that opens our hearts a little, too.
Parents should know that this film includes depiction of Civil Rights Era racism with some peril and violence, strong and racist language, drinking, smoking, some sexual references and non-explicit situation.
Family discussion: Why did Don Shirley pick Tony? If you wrote a movie about your parents, what would it be?
If you like this, try: listen to the music of the Don Shirley Trio and watch “In the Heat of the Night”