Tag: documentaries

Review: ‘Red Penguins,’ starring Steven Warshaw, Valery Gushin, Howard Baldwin, Tom Ruta, Victor Gusev, Alexander Lyubimov and Alexander Von Bush

August 14, 2020

by Carla Hay

Valery Gushin (front row left), Steven Warshaw (front row right) and Victor Gusev (back row left) in the 1990s in “Red Penguins” (Photo courtesy of Red Penguins Doc LLC)

“Red Penguins”

Directed by Gabe Polsky

Some language in Russian with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in Russia and the United States, the documentary “Red Penguins features an all-white group of middle-aged and senior citizen Russian and American men discussing the ill-fated North American partnership with the Russian Penguins hockey team.

Culture Clash: According to the people interviewed in this documentary, the partnership turned into a disaster because of cultural differences, corruption and criminal interference that turned deadly.

Culture Audience: “Red Penguins” will appeal primarily to sports fans and people who like intriguing business stories that take wild and dangerous turns.

Russian Penguins players in the 1990s in “Red Penguins” (Photo courtesy of Red Penguins Doc LLC)

The documentary “Red Penguins” (directed by Gabe Polsky) takes viewers on a rowdy and fascinating ride back to the 1990s, when an unlikely business alliance between the Russian Penguins hockey team and a group of North American investors resulted in outrageous promotional stunts, rampant corruption and the involvement of the Russian mafia. And not everyone made it out alive, as some people associated with the team were mysteriously murdered. Several people are interviewed to get their perspectives, but the story is told in a way that it boils down to the conflicts and clashing cultural styles of the Russians and Americans.

After the fall of Communism in Russia (formerly called the Soviet Union), the nation became a marketplace open to capitalism in the beginning of the 1990s. Boris Yeltsin was elected Russia’s first president in 1991. And many American businesses and investors were ready to jump on opportunities to make money in Russia, even though the country was in chaos, including food shortages, civil unrest and infrastructure in a state of disrepair. Two of these business investors were Howard Baldwin and Tom Ruta, who were owners of the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team at the time.

Baldwin, who also used to be chairman of the Pittsburgh Penguins, was approached with the idea to invest in the Red Army hockey team of Russia. The Red Army team was on the brink of financial disaster. Things were so bad that the team couldn’t afford to buy new uniforms or hockey sticks for the players. And many Russian players were leaving in droves because they were being recruited to play for North American teams in the National Hockey League.

Ruta comments in the documentary about his business relationship with Baldwin when it came to investment ideas: “If I think it’s too crazy, he probably doesn’t do it. If I think it’s a little crazy, we’re probably going to do it.” He adds that aside from making money, one of the reasons they wanted to invest was to help save the legacy of Russian hockey: “We couldn’t believe that one of the greatest hockey teams was on the verge of extinction.”

And so, an unusual alliance was born. The deal was that the Pittsburgh Penguins—along with a group of North American investors that included Canadians such as hockey star Mario Lemieux and actor Michael J. Fox—would invest in the Red Army team (based in Moscow) and split the profits. The Red Army team was then renamed the Russian Penguins. Things were so bare-bones and desperate for the Russian Penguins at the time that the team couldn’t afford to hire a marketing firm to design a new team logo, so Baldwin’s wife ended up designing the logo.

The Pittsburgh Penguins than hired an American eccentric and flamboyant marketing whiz named Steven Warshaw to move to Russia to become the marketing executive vice-president for the Russian Penguins. It was essentially Warshaw’s job to get sponsors for the team and to come up with marketing ideas.

Warshaw reported to his American bosses, but he also had to report to the Russians in charge of the team: manager Valery Gushin and coach Victor Tikhonov. (Tikhonov died in 2014, at the age of 84.) The clash of Russian and American cultures in this business partnership eventually lit a proverbial powder keg that exploded in an environment where anarchy, violence and the mafia ruled in Russia.

Call it the Wild, Wild East. The Americans interviewed for the documentary say they didn’t know at the time what they had signed up for until it was too late. Ruta comments: “In the beginning, we didn’t understand the risks. We didn’t understand the country.”

Warshaw adds: “Russia was an enigma to all of us. What went behind the Iron Curtain, nobody knew. I wanted to know, so I went.” In the documentary, Baldwin is so wary of describing Gushin’s menacing power that Baldwin chooses his words carefully when he says that Gushin was “well-used” in exerting that power.

In the documentary, Warshaw remembers that the Russian Penguins employees in Russia had no concept of putting on a suit to go to an office and have meetings with potential sponsors. He says that the Russians often came to work hung over and in casual clothes that were sometimes dirty.

And where they worked didn’t really look like an office at first; it looked more like a messy warehouse, according to Warshaw. (The documentary includes archival photos and video footage that confirm this desrciption. He also says that he had to send for computer technology to be imported to the offices since the Russian Penguins didn’t have any of this technology installed.

Even without the cultural differences, it’s easy to see that Gushin and Warshaw are complete opposites in the personalities. Warshaw is impulsive and wears his emotions on his sleeve, while Gushin is more calculating and keeps a lot of his emotions in check. And when Gushin laughs or smiles in the documentary, it’s usually in response to a memory of something that happened that made Warshaw uncomfortable when they worked with each other. In other words, their working relationship was a disaster waiting to happen.

It didn’t start out that way. According to the people interviewed in the documentary, Warshaw was initially given free reign to do whatever he wanted to make the money for the Russian Penguins. He describes being completely shocked when he first arrived at the Ice Palace arena, the Russian Penguins’ home venue that was controlled by Gushin and Tikhonov.

The Ice Palace was a “dump,” says Warshaw. “For the most part, it really looked like a bomb had hit the building.” Underneath the arena was a nightclub called the Red Zone, where naked strippers would be lowered in cages. In the documentary, Gushin shrugs off the fact that the arena also housed a strip club, by saying that Ice Palace needed the rent money, and the club was a way to appease the criminal types who were always around.

After the Russian Penguins’ opening game in 1993 turned out to be a poorly attended flop, Warshaw wasted no time in coming up with outlandish ideas to boost attendance, which was necessary to attract sponsors. Strippers from the Red Zone were recruited as cheerleaders to dress in Red Penguins gear and then do strip teases down to their G-strings and pasties during the game.

There was a “free beer nights” promotion, where it was very common to see kids under the age of 18 getting drunk. Remember, this is Russia, where the legal age to drink alcohol (18 years old) isn’t as strictly enforced as it is in other countries. There were other promotions, such as Boris Yelstin look-alike contests and bikini contests.

And probably the most outrageous stunt of all happened when the circus came to Moscow, and many of the circus animals were placed in the underground area of the Ice Palace. Trained bears served beer to people on the hockey rink. The footage of this spectacle will either amuse people or outrage people who believe circus animal acts are a form of animal cruelty.

Warshaw says that people were correct in thinking that he was a “crazy American freak” who came up with these ideas. He says of the Russian Penguins team at the time: “We just did whatever the hell we wanted there. It was a freak show.” Warshaw adds, “We were a petri dish, a science project.” And if the experiment was to see if these publicity stunts would get sponsors, then the experiment worked. The wacky promotions and “anything goes” environment of Russian Penguins games drew huge, sold-out crowds.

Sponsors from numerous international companies began signing up to put their names all over the arena and on Russian Penguins merchandise. Coca-Cola, Gillette, Panasonic, Nike and Delta were some of the corporations that became Russian Penguins sponsors. The medicine company Vick’s had Red Penguins coach Tikhonov star in a Russian TV commercial, since Tikhonov’s first name was Vik, which was used as a catchy homonym in the ad. (Gushin says that Tikhonov was embarrassed by the commercial, which is shown in the documentary.)

Victor Gusev was the Russian Penguins liaison who helped broker many of these deals. He says in the documentary that it was the first time that sponsorship logos were on display at Russian hockey games, because it was unthinkable to make those kinds of deals under Communist rule. Warshaw gives credit to Gusev for also being like an ambassador who “saved my ass” many times when Warshaw could have made some cultural mistakes that might have offended the Russians.

The moneymaking success of the Russian Penguins soon got the attention of the Walt Disney Company, which was headed by chairman/CEO Michael Eisner at the time. Disney’s interest in hockey was at an all-time high in the 1990s, thanks in large part to Disney’s 1992 hit movie “The Mighty Ducks,” which spawned a franchise about a ragtag group of teenage hockey players.

According to several people in the documentary, Eisner took meetings with Baldwin, Warshaw, Gushin and other key members of the Russian Penguins management to discuss the possibility of doing deals with the Russian Penguins for up to $100 million. There was talk of Disney partnering with the Russian Penguins to do a Saturday morning cartoon, world tours and selling Russian Penguins merchandise in Disney stores. Disney Imagineering also offered to design new logos and marketing materials for the team.

But just as these discussions were happening, Russia was undergoing massive civil unrest: the Constitutional Crisis of 1993, when Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet parliament went to war with each other, after he ordered the unconstitutional dissolution of the parliament. There were violent protests and riots in the streets.

In addition to the political chaos, the Russian mafia was exerting a lot of control in everyday life. And the amount of money that the Russian Penguins were making didn’t go unnoticed by the mafia. Meanwhile, inside the Russian Penguins organization, Warshaw says that Gushin and Tikhonov began embezzling money and spending it on things such as a luxury spa inside the Ice Palace.

Gushin doesn’t really deny stealing money, but he says that a lot of the Russian Penguins money he used was for business expenses. Gushin claims that Warshaw was the one who needed to be reigned in with his wild ideas and spending. And he and Warshaw admit that Warshaw was given an unflattering nonsensical nickname Asshole with a Handle.

Warshaw also says that Gushin once drunkenly confessed to him that the Russians would never trust the Americans in the Russian Penguins organization. And according to Warshaw, this mistrust had a lot to do with Gushin and Tikhonov being afraid of losing control of the Russian Penguins.

Warshaw says that the power struggle got so bad that Gushin and Tikhonov tore down displays by Nike (a Russian Penguins sponsor) and replaced them with Adidas displays. Warshaw also claims that Gushin sent someone to spy on Warshaw, which is an accusation that Gushin laughs off in the documentary, but he doesn’t directly deny it.

But these conflicts were nothing compared to the real danger that happened when Russian mobsters began muscling their way into the Red Penguins business. By the mid-1990s, some people associated with the Russian Penguins ended up dead in unsolved murders or suspicious circumstances, including an assistant coach, a photographer and hockey player Alexander Osaochi. Gushin says that Osachi’s death hit him particularly hard and he had a “heart attack” over it.

Some of the other people interviewed in the documentary include Soviet-Russian TV journalist Alexander Lyubimov, who hosted a political talk show at the time) and businessman Alimzhan Tokhlakhunov (who spent time in prison), who says that democracy brought “no stability” to Russia because Russians didn’t know how how to handle their newfound freedom. Also interviewed is former Russian Penguins mascot Alexander Von Bush, former KGB prosecutor Vladmir Golubev and former CSKA Sports Club (Red Army Sports) chief Alexander Baranovsky.

American filmmaker Polsky not only directed the movie but he also conducted the interviews. (His parents are Russian, so he can speak the language.) Under his direction, “Red Penguins” tells an engrossing story that works in large part because all the main players who are still alive are interviewed. It also helps that many of the interviews (especially Warsaw, who gets the most screen time) are colorful characters with distinct personalities. And the movie didn’t have to resort to documentary gimmicks such as animation or actors recreating scenes.

The production values for the movie are at times a little unpolished (for example, the hand-held camera used in a scene can be seen on camera) and some of the scenes look like outtakes. However, that’s part of this documentary’s charm, since a big documentary news crew probably would’ve intimidated some of the interviewees, who might not have been as candid as they are in their interviews.

And despite some of the sordid details revealed in the movie, there are touches of welcomed humor in areas where humor is appropriate. The editing by Christina Stiles and music by Leo Birnberg have a lot to do with bringing some laughs and giving a great sense of the madcap antics described and shown in the documentary. “Red Penguins” is one of the more unique documentaries that people will see about behind-the-scenes machinations for a sports team. People certainly won’t look at Russian hockey in the same way again after seeing this movie.

Universal Pictures Home Entertainment released “Red Penguins” on digital and VOD on August 4, 2020.

Review: ‘Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn,’ starring Diane Hawkins, Amir Hawkins, Freddy Hawkins, Christopher Graham, Al Sharpton, David Dinkins and Joseph Regina

August 14, 2020

by Carla Hay

Yusuf Hawkins in “Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn” (Photo courtesy of Hawkins Family/HBO)

“Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn”

Directed by Muta’Ali

Culture Representation: Taking place in New York City, the documentary “Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn” features a predominantly African American group of people (and some white people) discussing the 1989 racist murder of 16-year-old Yusuf Hawkins and the controversial aftermath of this hate crime.

Culture Clash: Yusuf Hawkins was murdered by a mob of young white men just because Hawkins was an African American, and there were many conflicts over who should be punished and how they should be punished.

Culture Audience: “Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn” will appeal primarily to people interested in true crime stories that include social justice issues.

Yusuf Hawkins, Amir Hawkins and Freddy Hawkins in “Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn” (Photo courtesy of Hawkins Family/HBO)

The insightful documentary “Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn” gives an emotionally painful but necessary examination of the impact of the 1989 murder of Yusuf Hawkins, a 16-year-old African American who was shot to death in New York City’s predominantly white Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst. He was killed simply because of the color of his skin—and it’s a tragedy that has been happening for centuries and keeps happening to many people who are victims of racist hate crimes. This documentary, which is skillfully directed by Muta’Ali, offers a variety of perspectives in piecing together what went wrong and what lessons can be learned to help prevent more of these tragedies from happening.

One of the best aspects of “Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn” is how it has interviews with many of the crucial people who were directly involved in the murder case and the subsequent controversy over how the perpetrators were going to be punished. The people interviewed include members of Yusuf Hawkins’ inner circle, such as Yusuf’s mother, Diane Hawkins; his younger brother Amir and older brother Freddy; Yusif’s cousins Darlene Brown and Felicia Brown; and Yusuf’s friends Christopher Graham and Luther Sylvester, who was with Yusuf during the attack. (Yusuf’s father, Moses Stewart, died in 2003.) They are all from the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York.

The documentary also has the perspectives of some Bensonhurst residents or people who allied themselves with the accused perpetrators. They include Joe Fama, who was convicted of being the shooter; Stephen Murphy, who was the attorney of Keith Mondello, who was accused of being the mob’s ringleader; and Russell Gibbons, an African American who was a friend of many of the white men in the mob of attackers. Gibbons was involved in providing the baseball bats used in the attack, but Gibbons ended up testifying for the prosecution.

And in the aftermath of the murder, several people became involved in the investigation, court cases and public outcry seeking justice for Yusuf. The documentary includes interviews with activists Rev. Al Sharpton, Dr. Lenora Fulani, Rev. Conrad Tillard (formerly known as Conrad Muhammad) and Rev. Herbert Daughtry; Douglas Nadjari, who was New York’s assistant district attorney at the time; former New York City mayor David Dinkins; publicist Ken Sunshine, who was Dinkins’ deputy campaign manager at the time; Joseph Regina, a New York Police Department detective involved in the investigation; and journalist John DeSantis, who covered the Yusuf Hawkins story for United Press International.

There have been many disagreements over who was guilty and who was not guilty over the physical attacks and shooting, but no one disputes these facts: On August 23, 1989, Yusuf and three of his friends—Luther Sylvester, Claude Stanford and Troy Banner (who are all African American)—went to Bensonhurst at night to look at a 1987 Pontiac Firebird that was advertised in the newspaper as being for sale. Banner was the one who was interested in the car.

When they got to Bensonhurst, all four of them were surrounded by a mob of young white men who were in their late teens and early 20s (it’s estimated that 10 to 30 people were in this mob), who attacked them with baseball bats and yelled racial slurs at them. Yusuf was shot to death during this assault. (A handgun was used in the shooting.) The attack was unprovoked, and several people involved in the attack later admitted that it was a hate crime.

Nadjari comments in the documentary: “Yusuf and his friends walked into what I call ‘the perfect storm’ … They [the attackers] didn’t want black guys in the neighborhood.” And even defense attorney Murphy admits: “You’d have to be stupid to not determine that there was a racist element to the whole thing to begin with.”

Furthermore, Yusuf and his friends were not “thugs” with a history of violence. All of the people who knew Yusuf describe him as a thoughtful, caring and good kid. He was the type of person who looked out for his friends to steer them away from trouble. It was consistent with his personality that he would accompany a friend who wanted to look at a car for sale. As journalist DeSantis comments in the documentary about Yusuf: “He was perceived by many to be a martyr.”

It came out during the investigation that a lovers’ quarrel was the spark that ignited the viciousness of the attack. Mondello’s girlfriend at the time was Gina Feliciano. During an argument between Feliciano and Mondello earlier that evening, she said that she was going to have a bunch of black guys come to the neighborhood to beat up Mondello and his friends. Feliciano lied in that threat, but apparently Mondello believed her. According to testimony in the trials, Mondello and the rest of the mob wrongly assumed that Yusuf and his friends were the (fabricated) gang of black thugs that Feliciano had said was coming to assault Mondello.

The documentary points out that even though New York City has an image of being “liberal” and “cosmopolitan,” the city is not immune from racism and racial segregation. East New York and Bensonhurst are just 13 miles apart, but these two very different Brooklyn neighborhoods might as well have been on other planet, because the people in these neighborhoods rarely mixed with each other. East New York has a predominantly working-class black population, while Bensonhurt’s population consists mainly of middle-class white people, many who are Italian American.

According to Amir Hawkins, who was 14 at the time his brother Yusuf was murdered, even though he lived in Brooklyn for years, all Amir knew about Bensonhurst was from “The Honeymooners,” one of his favorite sitcoms. He says of Bensonhurst: “Nobody told us, ‘Hey, that’s off-limits You can’t go there.'”

Amir also gives a chilling description of how his grandmother Rosalie seemed to have some kind of premonition that something would go horribly wrong when Yusuf was in Bensonhurst. According to Amir, when his grandmother found out that Yusuf had gone to Bensonhurst, Amir says he never saw his grandmother more upset in his life. Sadly, her apparent premonition turned out to come true, when the family got the devastating news about Yusuf’s murder later that night.

As an African American and longtime Bensonhurst resident, Gibbons admits in the documentary that he has experienced a profound racial identity crisis and still has deep-seated inner conflicts about race. He says that even though he was bullied by white racists in Bensonhurst, he also wanted to be friends with them. Gibbons was the only “black friend” of the mob accused of attacking Yusuf and his friends.

In the documentary, Gibbons downplays his role in providing the baseball bats used in the attack. Just as he said in trial testimony, Gibbons claims that all he heard on the night of the incident was that some black and Latino men were coming to Bensonhurst to attack some of his friends and he wanted to assist his friends in defending themselves. He says in the documentary, “I wasn’t thinking about race. I was just there because my friends were there.”

As for Fama, he says nothing new in the documentary that he hasn’t already claimed during his trial in 1990. Although he didn’t testify during his trial, Fama admits that he was part of the mob of attackers, but he claims that he’s not guilty of shooting Yusuf. Fama went into hiding after the murder, but he eventually turned himself in to police a little more than a week after the murder. During the documentary interview, Fama is shifty-eyed when discussing the case and seems more concerned about trying to appear innocent than expressing remorse about the circumstances that led to Yusuf’s murder.

Yusuf’s father (Moses Stewart) had been mostly an absentee father who left the family when Yusuf was about 17 months old. Walter Brown, a friend of Stewart’s, says in the documentary, says that Stewart was “stupid” for being a deadbeat dad, but Stewart wanted a chance to redeem himself. In January 1989, Stewart and Yusuf’s mother Diane reconciled, and so he was back in the family’s life. Seven months later, Yusuf was murdered.

After the murder, Stewart reached out to Sharpton who, along with other activists, spearheaded the protests and rallies demanding justice for Yusuf. Yusuf’s mother, father, brothers and other family members participated in many of these protests and rallies, but it’s mentioned in the documentary that Yusuf’s father was more comfortable than Yusuf’s mother with being in the media and public spotlight. There’s archival footage showing that Yusuf’s mother was often very reluctant to make a statement when there was a crowd of media gathered around asking her to say something.

In the documentary, Yusuf’s mother gives heartbreaking descriptions of her nightmarish grief. Its sounds like she had post-traumatic stress disorder, because she experienced panic attacks and became paranoid of going outside at night and was afraid of doing simple things such as taking the subway. She and other family members and friends confirm that losing Yusuf is a trauma that they will never get over.

Yusuf’s murder happened to occur in an election year for New York City’s mayor. The incumbent mayor Ed Koch was widely perceived by his critics as too sympathetic to the accused attackers. (Koch died in 2013.) Dinkins, who defeated Koch in the primary election and would go on to become New York City’s first black mayor, openly supported the Hawkins family before, during and after the trials took place. Dinkins comments in the documentary about how Yusuf’s murder affected the mayoral race that year: “I knew that Yusuf Hawkins would be a factor in my contest, but I’d like to believe that we treated it as we would have had I not been seeking public office.”

The protests also came at a time when filmmaker Spike Lee’s 1989 classic “Do the Right Thing” had entered the public consciousness as the first movie to make a bold statement about how racial tensions in contemporary New York City can boil over into racist violence against black people. It’s not a new problem or a problem that’s unique to any one city, but in the context of what happened to Yusuf Hawkins, “Do the Right Thing” held up a mirror to how these tragedies can occur. The documentary mentions that Lee and some other celebrities became outspoken supporters of the Hawkins family.

The documentary also offers contrasting viewpoints on the protests, which included protestors going into Bensonhurst on many occasions, sometimes to protest at other events happening in the neighborhood. There’s a lot of archival footage of the protestors (mostly black people) and angry Bensonhurst residents (mostly white men) clashing with each other, with many of the Bensonhurst residents and counterprotestors hurling racially charged and racist insults at the protestors.

While Sharpton and other activists involved with the protests felt that the protestors were peaceful and law-abiding, critics of the protests thought that the protestors were rude and disruptive. It’s part of a larger issue of how people react to racial injustice. Some people want to stay silent, while others want to speak out and do something about it.

In fact, it’s mentioned in the documentary that Yusuf’s family was initially told by police to not speak out about the murder because the police were afraid that news of the murder would cause civil unrest. But after the media reported that Yusuf’s murder was a racist hate crime, the crime couldn’t be kept under the radar. According to several people in the documentary, the media helped and hurt the case.

The documentary mentions that although the media played a major role in public awareness of this hate crime, the media (especially the tabloids) got some of the facts wrong, which distorted public opinion. One of the falsehoods spread by the media was that Yusuf or one of his friends in the attack was interested in dating white girls they knew in Bensonhurst, and that was one of the reasons for the attack. In fact, Yusuf and the three friends who were with him didn’t know anyone in Bensonhurst and were really there just to look at a car for sale.

And even though Dinkins publicly gave his support to the Hawkins family, the documentary reveals that there was tension behind the scenes between Dinkins and Sharpton. Dinkins wasn’t a fan of the protests because he felt that they were too disruptive, while Sharpton and many of his supporters thought that Dinkins and other local politicians weren’t doing enough to help with the protestors’ cause. The documentary shows that although Dinkins and Sharpton were at odds with one another over the Yusuf Hawkins protests, many people in positions of power (including Dinkins and Sharpton) used the murder case to further their careers.

Sharpton was also controversial because of his involvement in the Tawana Brawley fiasco. In 1987, Sharpton publicly supported Brawley (a teenager from Wappinger Falls, New York), who claimed that four white men had raped her and covered her in feces. But her story turned out to be a lie, and the hoax damaged Sharpton’s credibility, even though he claimed he had nothing to do with the hoax. Many of Sharpton’s critics pointed to the Brawley hoax as a reason why Sharpton couldn’t be trusted.

In the documentary, Fulani makes it clear that she thinks that it’s enabling racism when people are told to keep silent about it: “I think the problem is that the people who aren’t involved in being racist pigs couldn’t get it together enough to make a different kind of statement.” The documentary shows that a huge part of the controversy in cases such as this is that a lot people can’t really agree on what kind of statement or response should be made.

Gibbons, the African American who was a friend to the Bensonhurst mob of attackers, has this criticism of Sharpton and his protests: “Men like that, they do more damage, and maybe they think they’re doing good.” NYPD detective Regina adds, “Yusuf Hawkins did lose his life because the color of his skin, but not because Bensonhurst is a racist, vigilante neighborhood trying to keep colored people out … There was justice. And after that justice, there should have been peace.”

But considering the outcome of the trials, it’s highly debatable if justice was really served. And is there really peace when people are still getting murdered for the same reason why Yusuf Hawkins was murdered? As long as people have sharply divided opinions on how these matters should be handled by the public and by the criminal justice system, there will continue to be controversy and civil unrest.

“Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn” could have been a very one-sided documentary, but it took the responsible approach of including diverse viewpoints. “Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn” is the well-deserved first winning project of the inaugural Feature Documentary Initiative created by the American Black Film Festival and production company Lightbox, as part of their partnership to foster African American filmmakers and diversity in feature documentaries. And the poignant ending of this documentary makes it clear that Yusuf will be remembered for more than his senseless murder. The positive impact he made in his young life goes beyond what can be put in a news report or documentary.

HBO premiered “Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn” on August 12, 2020.

Review: ‘The Go-Go’s,’ starring Belinda Carlisle, Jane Wiedlin, Charlotte Caffey, Gina Schock and Kathy Valentine

August 1, 2020

by Carla Hay

The Go-Go’s in 1981 in “The Go-Go’s.” Pictured from left to right:  Kathy Valentine, Jane Wiedlin, Gina Schock, Charlotte Caffey and Belinda Carlisle. (Photo by Paul Natkin/Showtime)

“The Go-Go’s” 

Directed by Alison Ellwood

Culture Representation: This documentary about the Los Angeles-based rock band The Go-Go’s features interviews with an almost all-white group of people (and one black person) discussing the band, including former and current band members; former business colleagues of the band; and other people in the entertainment industry.

Culture Clash:  The Go-Go’s (an all-female band) battled against sexism, as well as internal band conflicts fueled by drugs and egos.

Culture Audience: Aside from the obvious target audience of Go-Go’s fans, this documentary will primarily appeal to people who like hearing first-hand stories about self-destructive rock stars, although the movie retreads most of the same territory as the Go-Go’s “Behind the Music” episode.

Jane Wiedlin and Belinda Carlisle in “The Go-Go’s” (Photo by Melanie Nissen/Showtime)

“The Go-Go’s” documentary film (directed by Alison Ellwood) recycles a lot of what the Go-Go’s revealed when they did an episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music” docuseries, and updates the band’s story to make what is essentially a campaign video to induct the Go-Go’s into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That doesn’t mean that the documentary isn’t good and that it isn’t enjoyable to watch. It just means that there’s almost nothing significant in the film that wasn’t already covered in the Go-Go’s 2001 “Behind the Music” episode and their updated 2012 “Behind the Music Remastered” episode. In fact, “The Go-Go’s” documentary film, which is about one hour longer than a “Behind the Music” episode, actually has a lot less information than the “Behind the Music Remastered” episode on the Go-Go’s.

What sets “The Go-Go’s” documentary apart from “Behind the Music” is that the documentary places more emphasis on the band’s punk roots, and there’s no bleeping out of curse words. The documentary, which is told in chronological order, spends so much time on the Go-Go’s history before the band got signed to a record deal, that it isn’t until about halfway through the film that it finally gets to the Go-Go’s getting signed and recording their first album.

Formed in 1978 in Los Angeles, the Go-Go’s have an origin story that’s very common with people who start punk bands: They started a band without knowing how to play instruments or write songs. The real attractions to punk music for bands and their fans were rule-breaking attitudes and forming their own communities of misfits and antisocial people. Being a true punk artist meant shunning corporate deals and mainstream acceptance, which is why many bands like the Go-Go’s that started out as punk could no longer claim to be truly punk once they started making pop music and having big hits.

As an all-female rock band, the Go-Go’s stood out from most of their peers in the punk scene. Lead singer Belinda Carlisle and rhythm guitarist Jane Wiedlin (who both grew up in the Los Angeles area) were two of the co-founding members who were part of the lineup that recorded the Go-Go’s groundbreaking 1981 hit album “Beauty and the Beat.”

Carlisle was a former high-school cheerleader who, even though she identified as a punk, still had “a prom queen” aura about her as lead singer of the Go-Go’s. Wiedlin’s pixie-ish voice and appearance might have made her seem innocent, but she says in the documentary (as she’s said in many other interviews) that she’s a self-described weirdo with “a lifelong history of depression,” including attempting suicide when she was 15. It was this dichotomy—squeaky-clean on the outside, rebellious/troubled on the inside—which defined who the Go-Go’s were to the public and who they really were in private.

In the documentary, Carlisle says that being an unpolished, sloppy musician who couldn’t play very well was almost like a badge of honor in the punk scene: “If you were terrible, you were cooler.” Wiedlin comments on what the Los Angeles punk scene was like at the time: “We hated our parents and society but supported each other.”

Margot Olavarria, who was the Go-Go’s original tough-talking bassist, adds: “It was a great sense of belonging.” Elissa Bello, who was the Go-Go’s original drummer, comments: “It was about feeling emotion and rage and you got to express it. And the rawer, the better.” (Olavarria was in the Go-Go’s “Behind the Music” episode, but Bello, who appears briefly in the documentary, was not.)

Lead guitarist/keyboardist Charlotte Caffey was also in the band’s original lineup before the Go-Go’s got signed to a record deal. Caffey (a classically trained pianist who learned to play guitar for the Go-Go’s) and Wiedlin (a self-taught musician) would turn out to be the chief songwriters of the band. The higher earnings that Caffey and Wiedlin received because of songwriting royalties caused huge rifts in the band later on, which resulted in the Go-Go’s breaking up and reuniting several times over the years. Caffey, who came from a privileged background in the entertainment business (her father was a TV director), describes herself as an introverted music nerd who was thrilled to join the Go-Go’s, since she was eager to be a part of the L.A. punk scene.

Overseeing the Go-Go’s early career was manager Ginger Canzoneri, a friend of the band who made up for her lack of experience in band management with a lot of enthusiasm and personal sacrifices for the band. She says in the documentary that she sold almost everything she had to finance the Go-Go’s first tour of the United Kingdom in 1980. Canzoneri is often described as “the sixth Go-Go,” albeit someone who wasn’t a performer or a songwriter but who worked behind the scenes on the day-to-day business, at a time when female managers of rock bands were very rare.

Canzoneri says in the documentary why she became the Go-Go’s manager: “I wanted to support that cause and be a part of it. I love communities of women. This band caught my interest for that reason.”

Bello had a day job, which she chose over being in the Go-Go’s. So, in 1979, Bello was replaced by Gina Schock, a fast-talking, ambitious drummer from Baltimore who says she knew from an early age that she wanted to be famous. Schock states in the documentary that before she moved to Los Angeles, she told people in her hometown that the next time she would be in the area, she would be a rock star. And she says of the Los Angeles punk scene at the time: “Being in that setting made me feel safe.”

The Go-Go’s weren’t an overnight sensation. But once they hit it big with their first album, they had a steady string of hits with their second and third albums, until everything came to a crashing halt when they broke up for the first time in 1985. By then, by their own admission, their drug use was out of control, and there were many emotional casualties along the way.

“The Go-Go’s” documentary goes more in depth than “Behind the Music” in describing what happened behind the scenes on the Go-Go’s first U.K. tour in 1980, when they were the opening act for British ska bands Madness and the Specials. It’s already well-documented that on that tour, the Go-Go’s played for mostly male audiences (many of them were racist and sexist skinheads), who hurled a lot of abuse at the band on stage and off stage, including spitting, throwing objects, instigating fights and making threats and insults.

However, the documentary talks a little bit more about how some of the members of the Go-Go’s ended up having “tour romances” with some of the members of Madness and the Specials. Madness multi-instrumentalist Lee Thompson and the Specials co-lead singer/guitarist Lynval Golding are among the people interviewed in the documentary. Golding said that he and Schock had a love affair back then, and he wishes that he asked her to marry him.

Wiedlin began a torturous long-distance romance with the Specials co-lead singer Terry Hall, who was engaged to another woman at the time. One of the love letters he wrote to Wiedlin at the time had some lines that Wiedlin would later put in a song that became the Go-Go’s hit “Our Lips Are Sealed.” (It’s why Hall has co-writing credit on the song.)

And speaking of band members dating band members, Schock says in the documentary that when she first joined the Go-Go’s, she and Wiedlin had their own short-lived fling. Although this hookup wasn’t mentioned in “Behind the Music,” Schock and Wiedlin came out as “sexually fluid” years ago, so it’s not much of surprise that they had a sexual relationship with each other at some point, given the tight-knit nature of the band in its early years.

In the documentary, Wiedlin doesn’t comment on her past sexual relationship with Schock, but Schock says with a laugh that Wieldin broke up with her, although no one’s heart got broken over it. Schock comments, “Do you think something like that is going to fuck with the band? No way!”

Just as they did in “Behind the Music,” the band members credit Schock with being the driving force to get the Go-Go’s to start taking their music careers more seriously. She was the one who pushed for them to go from rehearsing a few times a month to rehearsing every day. “I was determined to whip them into shape,” Schock says in the documentary.

While the Go-Go’s spent much of 1980 touring in England (and came back to Los Angeles pretending that the tour wasn’t a disaster for them), they scored a one-off deal with independent British label Stiff Records, which released “We Got the Beat,” a song written by Caffey. The demo version of the song was released in the U.K., where it was a minor hit. Stiff Records co-founder Dave Robinson says in the documentary that he tried to buy the Go-Go’s song publishing rights. Canzoneri says she advised the Go-Go’s not to sell their song publishing, the band agreed with her, and it ended up being one of the best and most important decisions they ever made.

Despite getting some buzz in the U.K., the Go-Go’s couldn’t get a record deal in their home country of the United States. All the major record companies rejected them, with many of the companies outrightly saying that an all-female rock band wouldn’t be a hit. The Go-Go’s had a large following in the Los Angeles area (they performed regularly at the nightclubs the Masque and the Whisky a Go Go), but they were also untested as a band that could headline a U.S. tour.

The Runaways (also from Los Angeles) were a pioneering all-female rock band from the mid-to-late 1970s, but they never hit it big in the United States (they were more popular in Japan), and are best known for being the band that launched the solo careers of Joan Jett and Lita Ford. Unlike the Go-Go’s, who formed the band organically as adults and had a female manager, the Runaways were a teenage band manufactured with a Lolita/jailbait image by their male manager Kim Fowley. The Runaways recorded songs from a lot of outside songwriters, while the Go-Go’s were a self-contained unit that, with few exceptions, wrote their own songs that they recorded.

Olavarria was pushed off of the Go-Go’s ride to commercial success before the Go-Go’s got a record deal, because her punk ideals and attitude clashed with the rest of the Go-Go’s desire to become a more mainstream pop group. In December 1980, Olavarria got sick with hepatitis A and couldn’t perform in a series of already-booked Go-Go’s concerts.

And so, guitarist Kathy Valentine was recruited as a substitute—she says in the documentary that she learned to play bass and all of the Go-Go’s songs during a cocaine-fueled binge—and the rest of the band liked her so much that they decided to keep Valentine as a permanent member. Canzoneri, just as she described in “Behind the Music,” talks about how she was forced to do the unpleasant task of telling Olavarria that she was fired from the Go-Go’s, because the other band members were too afraid to tell Olavarria themselves.

Olavarria says she was so hurt by the experience that she moved to New York City so she wouldn’t have to see the Go-Go’s and their inner circle in Los Angeles. Ironically, a few years later, Canzoneri would also be on the outs with the Go-Go’s, and she reacted in a similar way. Canzoneri says that she was so angry about the way she was treated that she moved to New York City to get away from the Go-Go’s.

The documentary is a rehash of “Behind the Music” when covering the Go-Go’s rise in the music business. Miles Copeland III, who used to manage the mega-successful rock band the Police (whose drummer, Stewart Copeland, is one Miles’ younger brothers), co-founded the independent I.R.S. Records in 1979. I.R.S. Records had many major-label distributors over the years, but A&M Records was the distributor from 1979 to 1985, during the years that the Go-Go’s were signed to I.R.S. Records. Miles and Stewart Copeland are both interviewed in “The Go-Gos” documentary, and they both have nothing but praise for the Go-Go’s.

I.R.S. Records signed the Go-Go’s in May 1981. By July 1981, the Go-Go’s debut album “Beauty and the Beat” was released. In the documentary, Canzoneri repeats the same story that she told in “Behind the Music” about how the luxurious towels used in the album’s “beauty spa-themed” photo shoot were returned to Macy’s because they couldn’t afford to keep the towels.

At the time of the album’s release, the first wave of influential punk bands had faded or had broken up, and the Go-Go’s were considered part of the New Wave of punk-influenced rock bands that unapologetically recorded radio-friendly pop songs. Miles Copeland comments on why he signed the Go-Go’s to I.R.S. Records: “The establishment record business dismissed them. I saw them as a generational change.”

The “Beauty and the Beat” album’s first single was “Our Lips Are Sealed” (which was a Top 20 hit in some countries, including the U.S.), but it was the album’s new version of “We Got the Beat” that catapulted the Go-Go’s to the major leagues. Released in 1982, this new version of “We Got the Beat” was a No. 2 hit in the U.S., while the “Beauty and the Beat” album eventually hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.

The chart-topping achievement of “Beauty and the Beat” made the Go-Go’s the only all-female band to write all the songs and play all the instruments on a No. 1 album in the United States. No other all-female rock band has had the same accomplishment. (The Bangles, who signed to I.R.S. Records after the Go-Go’s did, had their biggest hit songs written by or with outside songwriters.)

The documentary points to two major factors that helped the Go-Go’s become a huge success after their first album was released: MTV (which launched in 1981 and gave the Go-Go’s a lot of airtime) and the Go-Go’s being the opening act for the Police’s 1981 arena tour. Stewart Copeland gushes in the documentary about the Go-Go’s: “They were the best opening act ever!” A year after opening for the Police, the Go-Go’s were headlining arenas.

Other people interviewed in the documentary about the rise of the Go-Go’s include Martha Quinn, one of MTV’s original VJs; journalist Chris Connelly, who worked for Rolling Stone magazine at the time; writer Pleasant Gehman, a longtime friend of the band; Richard Gottherer, one of the producers of “Beauty and the Beat”; and Bikini Kill lead singer Kathleen Hanna, who says she was heavily influenced by the Go-Go’s when she was a teenager.

Many entertainers who become major successes with their first project often feel that they’ve outgrown their original manager and want to move on to management that they think can take them to the next level. That’s what happened with the Go-Go’s and Canzoneri, who says she saw the writing on the wall when other managers started to court the Go-Go’s, and the band became dazzled by these more-established managers who were making big promises.

In “Behind the Music,” Canzoneri’s split from the Go-Go’s is described as her voluntarily “disappearing.” But in “The Go-Go’s” documentary, Canzoneri makes it clear that her split from the Go-Go’s was something that she didn’t want, but the band wanted, and it hurt her deeply. Just as they did in “Behind the Music,” the Go-Go’s admit in retrospect that parting ways with Canzoneri was a mistake.

“When she left, it wasn’t fun anymore,” Carlisle says in “The Go-Go’s” documentary. “We should’ve stuck with Ginger,” Wiedlin comments, while bitterly stating that the management hired to replace Canzoneri ended up being horrible for the band. Although no one names this replacement management in the documentary, it was Irving Azoff’s Front Line Management, which is best known for representing the Eagles.

“Behind the Music” already chronicled the downfall of the Go-Go’s: problems with drugs and egos, only made worse by money and fame. Therefore, nothing new is revealed in “The Go-Go’s” documentary about why the band went on a downward spiral. All of the band members were living a “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll” lifestyle while having a relatively “clean” public image. The hits kept coming with second album “Vacation” (released in 1982) and third album “Talk Show” (released in 1984), but the Go-Go’s sales were decreasing, and they never again achieved the heights of their first album “Beauty and the Beat.”

Caffey’s heroin addiction is detailed again, and so is Schock’s health scare in 1984, when she had surgery for a congenital hole in her heart. The documentary includes the Go-Go’s talking about how even though there were growing tensions in the band, they rallied together for Schock and took a band trip to Palm Springs to do some drug-fueled partying before Schock was scheduled to have surgery. (Because of her heart condition, the band members say that they didn’t allow Schock to indulge in any illegal stimulants, such as cocaine.) The documentary includes some candid photos of that trip, but these photos are very tame and don’t show any debauchery happening.

By the time the Go-Go’s recorded the “Talk Show” album, Wiedlin was feeling increasingly alienated from the band. She talks about telling the other band members that she wanted to sing lead vocals on “Forget That Day,” an “intensely personal” song that she wrote for the album. But she was outvoted because the other band members felt that Carlisle had to sing lead vocals on all Go-Go’s songs. In the documentary, Schock implies that she never fully agreed to that decision, but she went along with it, perhaps out of peer pressure.

Also repeated is the story of why Wiedlin quit the Go-Go’s in 1984: Even though she wrote or co-wrote the majority of the songs on “Talk Show,” the rest of the band wanted to split the album’s songwriting royalties equally amongst all the band members, which greatly upset Wiedlin. She privately told the band she was quitting before the Go-Go’s 1984 tour began, but she agreed to do the tour and to publicly announce the split after the tour ended.

The documentary spends more time on the band’s conflicts over songwriting royalties rather than giving new insight into the Go-Go’s songwriting process. There’s nothing new in the often-repeated stories about how “We Got the Beat” and “Our Lips Are Sealed” were written. And don’t expect to hear songwriting descriptions for a lot of lesser-known Go-Go’s hits.

There were also ego issues over Carlisle getting the majority of the public’s attention (a common issue with bands and their lead singers), and chief songwriters Caffey and Wiedlin were making a lot more money than their bandmates because of the songwriting royalties. After the Go-Go’s broke up for the first time, Schock and Valentine went on to separately write hit songs for other artists, but it’s clear that Valentine and Schock felt like they were treated as the “inferior” members of the Go-Go’s.

After Wiedlin quit, the Go-Go’s had to go through another lineup change: Valentine switched to rhythm guitar, and Paula Jean Brown joined as the band’s new bassist. Brown, who is interviewed in the documentary (she wasn’t in “Behind the Music”), remembers she was very excited at first to join the Go-Go’s, before she knew how bad things were in the band. Their next big show was at the first Rock in Rio Festival in 1985, but by then the band was really starting to fall apart. Schock says that Caffey was so out of control with her drug use that notorious drug addict Ozzy Osbourne threw Caffey out of his dressing room.

Brown says that she was the one who urged Caffey to check into rehab. Caffey agrees that’s what happened, and she says she’s “forever grateful” to Brown for helping save her life. Caffey reiterates that if she had continued to be in the Go-Go’s, it would have put her newly sober life in jeopardy: “I made the decision to choose myself over the band.” Carlisle’s own rehab stint for cocaine addiction around the same time (and her admitted relapses over the years) are not mentioned in “The Go-Go’s” documentary, but they’re mentioned in “Behind the Music Remastered.”

The documentary repeats the well-known description of how Schock and Valentine were furious over Caffey and Carlisle deciding to disband the group in 1985. Schock and Valentine describe being treated like disposable backup musicians, since they were told that because Caffey was a songwriter and Carlisle was the lead singer, the Go-Go’s couldn’t exist without Caffey and Carlisle.

What exactly is new in “The Go-Go’s” documentary? In addition to having interviews with some people who weren’t in the Go-Go’s “Behind the Music” episode, the movie has some never-before-seen photos, such as Polaroids of the Go-Go’s dressed as a fictional Clown Family, where each of the band members took joke-intentioned solo photos with the same theme. For example, if the theme was snorting cocaine or giving birth, each band member would be posed in the same place acting out that theme. (For whatever reason, Wiedlin was the “baby” in the childbirth Clown Family photos.)

These photos in the documentary, just like the photos of the Palm Beach trip, are deliberately goofy, as if to downplay the group’s raunchy exploits that were recorded or photographed. The Go-Go’s have a widely circulated, explicit bootleg video from the early ‘80s, showing Carlisle and Valentine with male groupies and roadies and a sex toy. “Behind the Music” mentioned the video and showed a quick clip from the non-sexual part of the video, but the video is not mentioned at all in “The Go-Go’s” documentary. The band members’ marriages and children are also left out of the documentary.

Solo projects are barely mentioned, except mainly to note that Carlisle was the only Go-Go’s member to have hit albums and major tours as a solo artist. The documentary breezes right through a brief mention of the “Head Over Heels” Broadway musical (which used the Go-Go’s songs but it wasn’t a musical about the Go-Go’s) that debuted in July 2018. The documentary leaves out the fact that “Head Over Heels” was a money-loser that closed after just six months on Broadway.

And the documentary erases a lot of the Go-Go’s history, including the numerous reunions and “farewell” shows; Valentine’s 1997 lawsuit against the Go-Go’s that was settled out of court two years later; and the band’s fourth studio album, 2001’s “God Bless the Go-Go’s,” which was a big flop. The Go-Go’s “Behind the Music” episode was done mainly to promote that album.

Not coincidentally, this “Go-Go’s” documentary premiered on the same day (July 31, 2020) that the Go-Go’s released “Club Zero,” the band’s first new single since 2001. There’s footage of the Go-Go’s rehearsing the song in a studio, as well as a mention that the band continues to do live performances. (The Go-Go’s 2020 tour was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.)

The documentary seems overly calculated to not include anything that’s too raunchy or anything that would remind people of the acrimony and flops in the band after the Go-Go’s broke up the first time in 1985. And these omissions are disappointing, considering that a documentary feature film with the freedom to have uncensored curse words (unlike “Behind the Music”) should have used that freedom to have content that’s more revealing than what can go in a “Behind the Music” episode.

The documentary’s over-emphasis on the Go-Go’s origins as a punk band (even though the Go-Go’s were never famous for writing any punk music) seems like pandering to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame music snobs or anyone else who thinks that the Go-Go’s don’t deserve to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In the documentary, Carlisle implies that Rock and Roll Hall of Fame co-founder Jann Wenner (who co-founded Rolling Stone magazine) might hold a grudge against the Go-Go’s.

Why? The band members (through Canzoneri) complained to Wenner about the Go-Go’s first Rolling Stone magazine cover (in 1982), which had them posed in their underwear with the sexually degrading headline “Go-Go’s Put Out.” It was the headline, which the Go-Go’s had no control over, that seemed to irk the band the most.

Canzoneri remembers when she called Wenner to tell him that some of the Go-Go’s were unhappy with the magazine cover, Wenner said that he thought she was calling him to thank him for the cover, and he hung up on her. “Maybe that’s why we’re not in the Rock Hall of Fame,” Carlisle speculates, because she says that certain Rock and Roll Hall of Fame board members probably think of the Go-Go’s as “those ungrateful wenches.”

The movie ends with journalist Connelly saying about the Go-Go’s: “I don’t know what more they have to do to get in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Come on!” And then, Bikini Kill’s Hanna chimes in to say, “They’re in my Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.” Ending the movie this way is basically a direct plea for the Go-Go’s to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It comes across as a little too cloying and desperate.

When “The Go-Go’s” documentary had its world premiere 2020 Sundance Film Festival, the movie didn’t get any documentary awards buzz, and here’s why: When you consider that the Go-Go’s already revealed a lot about themselves in “Behind the Music,” and Carlisle and Valentine have each done a memoir, the documentary doesn’t deliver a lot of new and noteworthy information about the band. Even though the Go-Go’s story has been told before (and some would say better) on “Behind the Music,” this documentary is interesting enough, but not essential, for people who want an overall history of the band.

Showtime premiered “The Go-Go’s” on July 31, 2020. Mercury Studios/Eagle Rock Entertainment will release “The Go-Go’s” on digital and VOD on February 5, 2021. Polygram/Universal Music Enterprises will release the movie on Blu-ray and DVD on February 5, 2021.

UPDATE: In May 2021, it was announced that the Go-Go’s would be among the inductees in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with the induction ceremony taking place in October 2021.

Review: ‘Creem: America’s Only Rock’n’Roll Magazine,’ starring Dave Marsh, Connie Kramer, Jaan Uhelszki, Alice Cooper, Chad Smith, Kirk Hammett and Cameron Crowe

August 8, 2020

by Carla Hay

Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer) in “Creem: America’s Only Rock’n’Roll Magazine” (Photo courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment)

“Creem: America’s Only Rock’n’Roll Magazine”

Directed by Scott Crawford

Culture Representation: The documentary “Creem: America’s Only Rock’n’Roll Magazine” features an almost entirely white group of entertainers and journalists (with one Asian and one African American) discussing the history of Creem, a Michigan-based rock magazine that was published monthly in print format from 1969 to 1989.

Culture Clash:  Creem, which was considered the “edgier” alternative to Rolling Stone magazine, prided itself on being disrespectful of many artists; there were serious internal conflicts among Creem staffers; and Creem often had a lot of content that would be considered politically incorrect today.

Culture Audience: “Creem: America’s Only Rock’n’Roll Magazine” will appeal mostly to people who are interested in rock music or the magazine industry from the 1970s and 1980s.

Barry Kramer, Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs in “Creem: America’s Only Rock’n’Roll Magazine” (Photo courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment)

The documentary “Creem: America’s Only Rock’n’Roll Magazine” gets its subtitle from the slogan of Creem magazine, which had a raucous ride in monthly print circulation from 1969 to 1989. The movie includes interviews with numerous people who either worked for the magazine and/or considered themselves to be regular readers of Creem. It’s a nostalgic look at a bygone era when print magazines had more clout than they do now, when it comes to influencing music artist’s careers and shaping pop culture.

The documentary (originally titled “Boy Howdy! The Story of Creem Magazine”) doesn’t gloss over the dark side of Creem’s history, but the overall tone of the movie is one that’s similar to how someone would look back on their rebellious youth. Almost everyone interviewed in the documentary was born before 1970.

One of the main reasons why the “Creem” documentary (directed by Scott Crawford) has an overall fondness for the magazine is because some of Creem’s former staffers were involved in making the movie and are interviewed in the documentary. Jaan Uhelszki, a former Creem senior editor, is one of the documentary’s producers, and she co-wrote the movie with Crawford. Connie Kramer, who used to be Creem’s associate publisher and was married to Creem co-founder Barry Kramer, is one of the documentary’s executive producers.

Another producer of the documentary is JJ Kramer, Barry and Connie Kramer’s son who inherited partial ownership of the magazine after Barry passed away in 1981. (Barry Kramer was not related to MC5 co-founder Wayne Kramer, who wrote this documentary’s original music score.) Susan Whitall, who was a Creem editor from 1978 to 1983, is an associate producer of the documentary.

It’s pretty obvious that the documentary was filmed over several years, because some of the artists look different now, compared to how they look in the documentary. However, their commentaries are insightful and offer the additional perspectives of people who were not only in the magazine but who also were fans of Creem. (Only a few of the artists interviewed in the documentary became famous after Creem’s publication ended in 1989.)

There’s an overabundance of people interviewed in the documentary, but the film editing is good enough where the soundbites aren’t too repetitive and each has something unique to say. The types of people interviewed for the documentary essentially fall into two categories: entertainers (usually music artists) and former Creem employees/other journalists.

The music artists interviewed include Alice Cooper, Ted Nugent, Kiss singer/bassist Gene Simmons, Kiss singer/guitarist Paul Stanley, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett, former R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe, Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament, the Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney, music producer Don Was, Suzi Quatro, Destroy All Monsters singer Niagra Detroit, former J. Geils Band singer Peter Wolf, Lenny Kaye, Mitch Ryder, Lamar Sorrento, Johnny “Bee” Bandanjek, Patti Quatro Ericson, Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore, Blondie guitarist Chris Stein, Joan Jett, Michael Des Barres, Scott Richardson, Keith Morris (founding member of the bands Black Flag and the Circle Jerks), and Redd Kross co-founding brothers Jeff and Steve McDonald.

In addition to Uhelszki, Connie Kramer and Whitall, the former Creem staffers interviewed in the documentary include Dave Marsh, who was Creem’s editor-in-chief from 1969 to 1973; Dave DiMartino, who was an editor from 1978 to 1986; Wayne Robins and Robert Duncan, who were editor-in-chief and managing editor, respectively, from 1975 to 1976; Ed Ward, who was West Coast editor from 1971 to 1977; Bill Holdship, who was a senior editor from 1980 to 1986; and Billy Altman, a reviews editor who worked for Creem from 1975 to 1985.

Creem alumni who were also interviewed include former staff writer Roberta “Robbie” Cruger, former editorial assistant Resa Jarrett, former staff photographer Michael N. Marks, former circulation manager Jack Kronk, former contributing writer Craig Karpel, former assistant to the publisher Sandra Stretke and former manager Toby Mamis. Other assorted journalists offering their comments in the documentary are Ann Powers, Legs McNeil, Scott Sterling, Ben Fong-Torres, Greil Marcus, John Holstrom, Josh Bassett, radio personality Dan Carlisle (who worked for Detroit’s WABX-FM during Creem’s early years) and photographers Bob Gruen and Neal Preston.

And there are some people from the worlds of art, movies or fashion who are included in the documentary, including artist Shepard Fairey, actor Jeff Daniels, former model Bebe Buell, fashion mogul John Varvatos and filmmaker Cameron Crowe, who started his writing career as a teenage music journalist in the 1970s for magazines such as Creem and Rolling Stone. Crowe’s real-life experiences as a beginner teenage journalist in the early 1970s became the inspiration for his Oscar-winning 2000 comedy/drama movie “Almost Famous,” which includes Philip Seymour Hoffman portraying Lester Bangs, Creem’s most influential writer.

Creem’s roots began in Detroit in 1969, when Barry Kramer (who owned shops in the area that sold music and drug paraphernalia) joined forces with a Brit named Tony Reay to co-found Creem magazine, with Kramer as publisher and Reay as editor. Rolling Stone magazine, which launched in 1967, was named after the Rolling Stones, the favorite band of Rolling Stone magazine co-founder Jann Wenner. In a cheeky nod to that idea, Creem was named after Reay’s favorite band Cream, the British blues-rock trio led by Eric Clapton.

Robert Crumb, also known as underground cartoonist R. Crumb, was recruited to come up with Creem’s original artwork, which included the magazine’s famous Boy Howdy mascot resembling a bottle of milk cream. It’s mentioned in the documentary that Creem offered to pay Crumb’s medical bills in exchange for his art services. Crumb’s illustrations and Creem’s irreverent humor often resulted in people describing Creem as the Mad magazine of rock’n’roll.

Reay’s stint as Creem’s founding editor didn’t last long, because he and Barry Kramer didn’t see eye-to-eye in the direction of the magazine. According to former staffers interviewed in the documentary, Reay wanted Creem to be a niche publication for blues-rock enthusiasts, while Barry Kramer wanted Creem to be a slick magazine that reached a wider rock audience. Reay parted ways with Creem, which hired Marsh as the next editor-in-chief in 1969, when Marsh was just 19 years old and had no previous experience editing a magazine. Marsh certainly didn’t take the job for the money, since he says that his Creem salary at the time was only $5 a week.

Marsh comments in the documentary “I had a vision for what the magazine could do for kids who were out there being ridiculed and beat up … The idea I had about Creem was that even in rock’n’roll, it had come to pass that there were stuffy ways of dealing with people. And I thought part of your job as a human being was to oppose that.”

Several artists interviewed about Creem in the documentary make comments essentially saying that Creem’s primary appeal was that it was a magazine made by and for rebels and misfits. Creem and Rolling Stone both considered themselves to be counterculture magazines when they first launched. However, Rolling Stone (which was originally based in San Francisco before moving its headquarters New York City in 1977) had aspirations that were more highbrow and more glamorous than Creem had.

It’s noted in the documentary that Rolling Stone co-founder Wenner (the magazine’s longtime editor-in-chief/publisher) loved hanging out with rock stars and other celebrities, which had an effect on the type of coverage that Rolling Stone gave to certain artists who were considered Wenner’s friends. Creem was the type of magazine that identified more with the fans who paid for albums and concert tickets. Bangs famously advised other music journalists to never make friends with rock stars in order to keep journalistic integrity, but it’s mentioned in the documentary that Bangs sometimes broke that rule himself.

Bangs, who was a freelancer for most of his career as a music writer/editor, is described by many in the documentary as a brilliant but fickle writer who was addicted to meth. Marcus says that when Bangs started writing for Creem in 1970, Bangs “turned [Creem] into a playground [with] … a wonderful sense of mocking everything.”

Crowe comments on the frequent conflicts between Bangs and Marsh: “Lester Bangs and Dave Marsh were like the two people that, within their collaboration, what they got to argue about is why and how to love the thing they loved. And what came out of that was desperate, reckless, raw, unforgettable coverage of this thing they were both in love with.”

Several people in the documentary comment that Creem’s “outsider” attitude had a lot to do with the fact that the magazine was based in the Midwest state of Michigan for most of its existence, instead of a big city on the East Coast or West Coast. The documentary gives a great overview of the Detroit music scene in the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s, to provide necessary context of why Creem’s Detroit origins were crucial to the magazine’s original tone and outlook. Creem embraced subgenres of rock that Rolling Stone tended to dislike in the 1970s, such as punk and heavy metal.

Although Creem was known for championing a lot of artists who were ignored or bashed by other rock magazines, Creem was notorious for its vicious insults directed at artists and other celebrities. Sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and body-shaming comments were not unusual in Creem. And the magazine probably would’ve had a lot of racist comments too if not for the fact that white artists got almost all of the coverage in this rock-oriented magazine. Creem was also known for having female artists and models pose in sexually provocative pinup photos, while nude (but not pornographic) photos of women and men were not unusual in Creem.

Uhelszki admits that much of Creem’s content would be considered problematic or offensive enough that people could get fired it for today. “Everybody was politically incorrect,” she says of Creem’s staff at the time. Uhelszki remembers that back in Creem’s 1970s heyday, the inflammatory comments in the magazine were all part of Creem’s rebellious image.

Uhelszki also says that it wasn’t just the men on the male-dominated staff who wrote the misogynistic comments, because she wrote a lot of sexist content for the magazine too. “It was a boys’ magazine. It was meant for teenage boys,” Uhelszki comments in the documentary. “Did girls read it? Sure, they did. It was only sexually provocative when it was funny.”

While Creem was stirring up enough controversy where it was considered an inappropriate magazine for very young children, several former Creem staffers say in the documentary that there was chaos behind the scenes too, as Creem employees partied like the rock stars they gave coverage to in the magazine. In other words, drug-fueled behavior was part of the craziness. Creem’s original headquarters on Cass Avenue in Detroit was also in a run-down building in a crime-infested area, where it was not unusual for the female employees to be sexually groped on the streets on the way to and from the office.

People would also use the office as a “crash pad” to sleep and bring their personal lives to work with them, since the office would often be a battleground for arguments between employees and their significant others who didn’t work for Creem. And several of the employees mention that the staff had a love-hate relationship with Barry Kramer. Whitall comments, “Barry was an explosive editor … but he also had a sense of fun.”

The increasingly unsafe urban environment of Detroit became too much for the head honchos at Creem, so they decided to move to a completely different work environment. Creem’s headquarters relocated to a rural farm commune in Walled Lake, Michigan, where the magazine was based from 1971 to 1973. Creem’s crucial staff members lived and worked on the commune.

At the commune, the lines between personal and professional lives continued to blur for some staffers. In addition to Dave and Connie Kramer being a couple, some of the staffers were inevitably involved in co-worker romances. Marsh and Cruger were a couple, while Uhelszki was dating Charlie Auringer, who was Creem’s art director at the time.

Connie Kramer says in the documentary: “The women in the house … were much more monogamous than any of the men.” Uhelszki says of Creem’s Walled Lake headquarters, “It was a horrible place to be. And we were there for two years.”

Creem then relocated again in 1973. This time, it was to the Michigan suburban city of Birmingham, where the magazine experienced what many people consider to be the peak years of Creem. Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Smith, who grew up in the nearby city of Bloomfield Hills, remembers that when he was a kid, he was so excited to find out that Creem’s head office was close to where he lived, that he rode his bike to the office, and one of the first people he saw come out of the building was Alice Cooper. Smith says he was naturally star-struck.

The documentary includes some archival 1970s film footage of Creem staffers at headquarters, as well as many great photos from past issues of Creem. There’s a short segment on Uhelszki’s article “I Dreamed I Was Onstage With Kiss in My Maidenform Bra,” from Creem’s August 1975 issue. The article documented Uhelszki’s experience of getting to put on stage makeup with Kiss and joining the band on stage for a concert. It’s the type of article Rolling Stone magazine would never do, since Rolling Stone despised Kiss at the time. Kiss members Simmons and Stanley remember how the band argued about which member of Kiss would be the one Uhelszki would portray when she got her stage makeup done for the article.

The Boy Howdy mascot was such a part of Creem’s identity that the magazine got rock stars and other celebrities to pose for photos with fictional Boy Howdy beer cans. (A Boy Howdy sticker would be placed over real beer cans to make it look like Boy Howdy beer was real.) Not everyone was a fan of these promotional stunt photos. Longtime rock photographer Preston comments on the Boy Howdy beer cans: “The whole Boy Howdy thing was completely cheeseball, and I was mortified anytime I had to ask anybody to shoot with them.”

Another popular Creem photo feature was Star Cars, with each issue having a different celebrity posed with one of the celebrity’s vehicles. In 1977, Aerosmith lead guitarist Joe Perry notoriously posed for Creem with his mangled 1967 blue Corvette that he crashed in a car accident. Also included is a documentary segment on Creem’s Profiles, a one-page feature inspired by Dewar’s Profiles. Creem’s Profiles weren’t full-length interviews but were lists of artists’ likes, dislikes and other thoughts on various subjects.

The documentary also includes a segment about Creem’s famous section for reader mail, in which reader comments would be published next to sarcastic responses from Creem editors. Uhelszki says that the most famous reader letter they got was from Jett, the co-founder of the Runaways, who reacted to Creem’s extremely misogynistic review of the Runaways’ 1976 self-titled first album. In the review, Creem writer Rick Johnson said of the all-female Runaways: “These bitches suck … Girls are just sissies after all.”

In the documentary, Jett remembers her reaction to the review: “I was infuriated.” She says she was so angry that she showed up at Creem headquarters looking for Johnson, but he wasn’t there. “I bet he ran out the back door,” Jett quips in the documentary, which includes her voiceover reading of her letter that was published in Creem. The letter, which is directed at critic Johnson, says in part: “Since you seem to know that girls are sissies, come and see us sometime, and we’ll kick your fucking ass in.”

Just like what happens to a turbulent but successful rock band, the more popular Creem became, the more there was turmoil behind the scenes. The documentary details the main feuds that would eventually tear apart Creem’s original “dream team” senior-level staff. There was Barry Kramer vs. Marsh, who disagreed over editorial coverage and had fist fights over it. There was Marsh vs. Bangs, who also had physical altercations with each other and clashed over the direction in which the magazine should go. And there was Barry Kramer vs. Connie Kramer, who says that their marriage was ruined by cocaine addiction.

According to Uhelszki, Bangs wanted Creem to have more of a satirical edge, while Marsh wanted Creem to have more serious political content. Both Marsh and Bangs would eventually leave Creem: Marsh in 1973, and Bangs in 1976. Marsh went on to write for Newsday, Rolling Stone and other publications, while Bangs continued his freelance career and died of a Darvon overdose in 1982, at the age of 33. Even though Bangs was a known hardcore drug addict, several people in the documentary remember how shocked they were to hear about his death, because he had recently completely a stint in rehab.

Connie went to rehab and left Barry, because she says that he did not want to stop doing cocaine. They divorced in 1980. Barry tragically committed suicide by nitrous oxide suffocation in 1981, at the age of 37. Connie still seems to be experiencing denial and shame over his death because she says in the documentary that Barry “didn’t commit suicide” but “he wanted to end his life.”

Connie Kramer eventually sold Creem to Arnold Levitt in 1986. The magazine relocated to Los Angeles in 1987 and then ceased its monthly publication in 1989. Because this documentary is meant to showcase Creem before it was sold to Levitt, there’s hardly anything in the movie about the last few years of Creem. The magazine, licensed to a group of investors, was revived as a New York City-based bimonthly publication from 1990 to 1993, but that revival ultimately failed. The movie doesn’t include the legal disputes during the 2000s and 2010s over the Creem name and archives.

“Creem: America’s Only Rock’n’Roll Magazine” gives the impression that its candid look at the good, bad and ugly aspects of this magazine’s history is precisely because the magazine is no longer in business and former employees can speak more freely about people who are no longer their co-workers. It’s a much grittier and more honest portrayal of the wild and wooly days of 20th century rock journalism than, for example, HBO’s “Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge,” a glossy 2017 documentary celebrating Rolling Stone’s 50th anniversary. Although the artists in the “Creem” documentary have important perspectives, the magazine’s former staffers are the ones whose behind-the-scenes stories resonate the most.

Greenwich Entertainment released “Creem: America’s Only Rock’n’Roll Magazine” in select U.S. cinemas on August 7, 2020.

Review: ‘On the Trail: Inside the 2020 Primaries,’ starring Dana Bash, Kyung Lah, Jasmine Wright, Daniella Diaz, Kaitlan Collins, Annie Grayer and MJ Lee

August 6, 2020

by Carla Hay

Daniella Diaz in “On the Trail: Inside the 2020 Primaries” (Photo courtesy of CNN/HBO Max)

“On the Trail: Inside the 2020 Primaries” 

Culture Representation: Taking place in various cities across the United States, the documentary film “On the Trail: Inside the 2020 Primaries” features a racially diverse (white, African American, Asian and Latino) group of female CNN reporters as they cover the primaries in the 2020 U.S. presidential race.

Culture Clash:  Several of the reporters talk about how their line of work conflicts with having a “normal” lifestyle; the intense competition between the political candidates; public animosity toward CNN and other media outlets that get criticism for being “fake news”; and issues such as racism, sexism and the massive divide between Democratic and Republican politics.

Culture Audience: “On the Trail: Inside the 2020 Primaries” will appeal primarily to people interested in how CNN reporters work behind the scenes, because there’s very little in the documentary that includes exclusive access to the political candidates.

Kyung Lah and Jasmine Wright in “On the Trail: Inside the 2020 Primaries” (Photo courtesy of CNN/HBO Max)

HBO Max’s “On the Trail: Inside the 2020 Primaries,” produced by CNN Films, is part behind-the-scenes documentary, part promotional vehicle for CNN on how the network covered the U.S presidential primary campaigns of 2020. (HBO Max and CNN share the same parent company: AT&T’s WarnerMedia.) Because this documentary was intended to make CNN look good, people who hate CNN probably won’t be interested in watching, unless CNN haters (who love to call CNN “fake news”) are curious to see how critics of CNN are depicted in this film.

For everyone else—people who like CNN or people who are neutral about CNN—the movie gives some insight into not just the political campaigns but also about the employee politics of working for CNN. The documentary definitely puts CNN in a positive light. But there are some cracks that show how CNN, which has an image of being “left-leaning” and “liberal,” has some work to do in practicing the progressive ideals preached by CNN’s opinionated anchors and hosts, who are the collective voice of the network. (There’s no director credited for the entire documentary, which has the executive producers listed as Amy Entelis, Katie Hinman, Toby Oppenheimer and Courtney Sexton.)

Perhaps to try to deflect criticism of CNN being a male-dominated company (just like many news/journalism companies tend to be male-dominated), “On the Trail: Inside the 2020 Primaries” only focuses on the female CNN journalists who were assigned coverage of various U.S. presidential candidates. There were many more Democratic candidates than Republican candidates (with Donald Trump as the presumptive Republican nominee, since he had no real competition in the Republican Party), so most of the documentary is about coverage of the Democratic candidates.

The documentary gives a brief explanation of the hierarchy of campaign assignments at CNN and other major TV news companies like CNN, by describing the difference between a correspondent and an embed. A correspondent is assigned to cover a particular candidate’s campaign and make their reports on camera, while an embed is the lower-level person assigned to cover a particular candidate’s campaign by doing all the traveling to follow the candidate.

Embeds do a lot of the behind-the-scenes grunt work, while correspondents (who typically have more job experience) have more flexible hours and get the glory of being on TV. A correspondent usually has at least one embed counterpart who can do the correspondent’s work if the correspondent isn’t available. That doesn’t mean that correspondents don’t have to do a lot of traveling. It just means that correspondents get to travel less than the embeds.

Therefore, the embeds tend to be younger employees, who usually don’t have children. It’s mentioned many times in the documentary how this type of journalism is very hard on raising children and maintaining committed relationships. It’s also implied, but not said outright, that women are judged more harshly than men for having these jobs that take time away from their loved ones.

The CNN employees featured in the documentary are:

  • Dana Bash, chief political correspondent
  • Kaitlan Collins, White House correspondent, assigned to cover Republican candidate Donald Trump
  • Jessica Dean, correspondent, assigned to cover Democratic candidate Joe Biden
  • Daniella Diaz, embed, assigned to cover Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren
  • Annie Grayer, embed, assigned to cover Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders
  • Kyung Lah, senior national correspondent, assigned to cover Democratic candidate Amy Klobuchar
  • MJ Lee, political correspondent, assigned to cover Democratic candidates Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg
  • Abby Phillip, correspondent, assigned to cover Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg
  • Arlette Saenz, correspondent, assigned to cover Democratic candidate Joe Biden
  • Jasmine Wright, embed, assigned to cover Democratic candidate Amy Klobuchar

Throughout the documentary, it’s clear that for all the money that CNN spent to put these journalists on the campaign trail, the political candidates featured in this documentary didn’t really single out CNN as the “go to” outlet to do in-depth, one-on-one interviews with any of the journalists featured in the documentary. The only one-on-one interview time that’s shown in the documentary is a quick interview (lasting maybe a few minutes) that CNN’s Phillip did with Buttigieg after a campaign speech. The majority of the time, the CNN journalists are lumped in with the rest of the press corps, who end up getting the same candidate soundbites at a speech or rally, whether the cameras are stationed on a platform or are following a candidate like a pack of vultures.

There is no footage of the journalists on the candidates’ buses or traveling with the presidential candidates by plane. (By contrast, Showtime’s political news docuseries “The Circus” has this type of footage.) There’s no footage of a candidate in a personal or informal setting. Instead, there’s a lot of footage of the CNN journalists in their homes or hotel rooms, packing suitcases or getting ready for their next trip. As Diaz says in the documentary, “I stalk presidential candidates for a living.”

By the time this documentary premiered on HBO Max, it was already known which Democrat in the race was the last one standing (Joe Biden). And that’s why there’s no real suspense in seeing the ups and downs of certain candidates’ campaigns. Therefore, the documentary spends a lot of time giving background stories on several of the CNN journalists who are featured.

Out of all the journalists in the documentary, Bash has been with CNN the longest. She joined CNN in 1993, not long after graduating from George Washington University. She admits that she’s been “lucky” to have been given the opportunities that she’s had. (Most on-air journalists at CNN usually have to spend years paying their dues working at local news stations before getting a job at a national network such as CNN.)

And she says of her political coverage of this election cycle: “I get to have a front-row seat to history.” It’s an apt description, since she spends more time seated in front of a camera than traveling on the campaign trail with the candidates, compared to her CNN colleagues who are featured in the documentary. Out of all the CNN journalists featured in this documentary, Bash has the highest position in the employee hierarchy. And with that ranking comes the privilege of not having to travel so much, but she still has to work under a 24-hour news cycle where anything can happen.

Bash says in the documentary, “I’m so lucky that I get to work with so many young women. I know what it was like for me when I was younger, to have somebody help me keep perspective, and so I really try to do that with them.” However, the documentary doesn’t actually show Bash do any mentoring, other than a few sentences of encouragement that Bash gives to Diaz during some free time in a hotel’s event area after a candidate’s appearance. If Bash does in fact devote significant time mentoring her younger colleagues, it’s not in the documentary.

Bash, who has a son named Jonah (born in 2011) with her second ex-husband John King (who’s also a CNN correspondent), is shown talking about the difficulties of balancing raising a child with a busy career that doesn’t have regular 9 to 5 hours. While in the CNN studios, Bash and King are seen doing a video conference chat with Jonah. There’s no mention of who’s at home watching their son while they’re at work, but Bash and King make the type of CNN salaries where they can easily afford a nanny. A lot of people watching this documentary know that being able to afford great child care isn’t a problem for a CNN star like it is for a lot of average working folks. Therefore, Bash won’t get much sympathy from viewers, especially since a lot of people already think that CNN stars are “out of touch” with their “privilege.”

Whatever salary Lah is making at CNN, it’s obviously not nearly as much as Bash’s salary, because Lah doesn’t have outside help in raising her children. Lah’s husband stays home and watches their two kids while Lah is at work. Lah (who worked in Japan as a TV journalist before joining CNN) says that her husband, who used to work at ABC News, had to make sacrifices in his career in order to have the time to take care of their children: “He’s definitely taking the professional hit, in order for me to do what I’m doing.”

Lah adds, “If you were to ask my kids, they’d tell you that they don’t like my job at all.” However, Lah says she loves doing this kind of journalism and wouldn’t trade it for any other career. “In order to tell the story, you have to go to the story,” she comments on all the travel required for her job. Lah is a straight-talking, often foul-mouthed, sometimes abrasive journalist who comes across as more “real” than some of her CNN colleagues in the documentary who seem afraid of admitting to having any flaws or painful experiences in their past.

Lah opens up about how being a Korean immigrant and coming from a working-class background are indelible to who she is and how she approaches reporting, since she can relate to the people whose struggles are often ignored by politicians. Lah says that her parents had master’s degrees when they immigrated to America, but because of language barriers, they couldn’t get jobs in their desired fields. Instead, her parents owned and operated a store, which eventually went bankrupt. Lah breaks down and cries when she says that she spent so much time working in the store, she remembers what the inside of the store looked like more than she remembers what her childhood home looked like.

According to Lah, her immigrant background made her strive hard to achieve the American Dream that her parents didn’t quite have. A few moments of comic relief are in the documentary when Lah’s mother calls her, almost like a mother in a sitcom, to nag Lah about her job and not being at home with her kids. Lah says that her mother sometimes drives her crazy with these calls, to the point where she no longer tells her mother where she is going when she has to travel for her job. Even though Lah acts annoyed by her mother at times, it’s obvious that they have a lot of deep love for each other.

Bash and Lah are the only female CNN journalists in the documentary who were in these two categories when this documentary was being filmed: (1) mothers and (2) over the age of 40. Whereas Bash doesn’t really express concerns about her job security (in an industry where getting older can be more harmful to a woman’s career than a man’s career), Lah says that complacency is not an option for herself. Lah is also candid in saying that, as a woman color, part of her drive to work extra hard comes from knowing that racists will see her as “less than,” just because she isn’t white, and she wants to prove the naysayers wrong.

Wright also has a similar outlook on life, so that’s probably why the documentary shows that she and Lah have a special bond, which they both talk about in the film. It’s a mentor/protégée type of relationship where it’s obvious that they really enjoy working together and respect each other. It’s a great example of the type of female empowerment in the workplace where women can help each other, and it’s not about bashing or badmouthing men.

A proud native of Chicago, Wright seems to have been born to work in politics in some way, since her parents took her to political rallies and events, ever since she was a child. She also comes from a well-educated family. Her mother was a surgeon, and her father was a lawyer who was an aide to former Chicago mayor Harold Washington. Wright’s father also did presidential campaign work for Bill Clinton. She says of her politically active upbringing: “It really shaped my view of the impact that I wanted to have on the world.”

Out of all of the CNN journalists in the documentary, Wright is the most outspoken about how being a woman of color affects her job at CNN. Wright says in the documentary that she told CNN bosses early on that CNN needed to cover Klobuchar’s record of siding with police officers accused of unlawful killings of black men, when Klobuchar was a county attorney in Minnesota, before Klobuchar became a Minnesota U.S. Senator. Wright says that her CNN bosses told her that it wouldn’t be a good time to cover it because the New Hampshire primaries were coming up.

“There’s always [supposed to be] a time for this story!” Wright says in exasperation, as she mentions that she could’ve reported this story first if she hadn’t been stonewalled by her CNN bosses, whom she does not name on camera. Later, when Klobuchar’s county prosecutor record was fully exposed and covered by the media, Klobuchar awkwardly defended herself in interviews when she was asked if her county prosecution record made her look too sympathetic to police accused of racist brutality. Her fading presidential campaign took a big hit and never recovered.

During the final days of the Klobuchar 2020 campaign, Wright comments that it’s ironic that she is the only African American embed at CNN, and it’s for the remaining Democratic candidate who has the least amount of support from black voters. It’s a pointed comment to let people watching the documentary know that even though CNN has an image of promoting “liberal” politics, it still has problems with racial diversity when it comes to the journalists they hire and promote. As of this writing, CNN has no women of color anchoring any of the weekday newscasts, which have higher ratings and more prestige than the weekend newscasts.

Just like Lah, Diaz also comes from a working-class immigrant background (her parents are from Mexico) and is very close to her mother. Diaz wears her mother’s wedding ring and engagement ring as unusual good-luck gifts that her mother gives her—an indication of how highly Diaz’s family must think of her to entrust her with wearing that jewelry in a job where Diaz has to frequently travel and be in large crowds.

Diaz says she grew up poor in McCallen, Texas. Her parents came to the United States to give their family a better life and to pursue the American Dream. Diaz says that although she is very proud of her ethnicity, she constantly has to fight some people’s misperception that her ethnicity is a detriment to her qualifications as a news journalist. Diaz comments that it really irritates her when she’s told that “being white is objective, and being Latina is biased.”

Diaz, Lah and Wright all say that because America is continuing to be more racially diverse, being a woman of color in U.S. journalism matters for an accurate representation of what the U.S. population looks like. And it’s pointed out in the documentary that although Republican presidential candidates generally don’t need a lot of people of color to vote for them to win, the opposite is true of Democratic presidential candidates. Biden’s major comeback in winning the 2020 South Carolina caucus is shown as proof (he went from the middle of the pack in the Democratic candidate polls to first place), since his victory was significantly boosted by black voters.

Collins, the only CNN journalist in the documentary whose job is to cover a Republican presidential candidate, talks about coming from a family and community in Alabama which are mostly Republican and very pro-Donald Trump. Since Trump’s hatred of CNN is well-documented, Collins obviously doesn’t get to interview him. Instead, the documentary shows Trump and his supporters at some of his rallies. When Trump brings up “fake news” and the media, the crowds boo, and Collins looks both embarrassed and defensive.

Collins doesn’t reveal what her political views are, but she does comment in the documentary: “I don’t think that people think about what they’re saying when they say, ‘Fake news.’” She adds that people’s general perception of the media is that “We all think alike and act alike.”

It’s a very myopic and untrue statement, because there are plenty of media outlets to serve all kinds of people, whether their politics are conservative, liberal or somewhere in between. In fact, conservative-leaning Fox News gets higher ratings than liberal-leaning CNN and MNSBC. Clearly, there are millions of people who don’t believe everyone in the media thinks alike, by virtue of the fact that numerous media outlets exist for diverse groups of people. Collins seems like a nice person, but she’s not the smartest of this bunch of CNN employees in the documentary.

The documentary shows a little bit of socializing between the younger CNN employees, to give viewers an idea of what their camaraderie is like. Diaz, Grayer and Saenz are seen eating breakfast together at a diner and talking about how their work is affecting their love lives. (Not surprisingly, they all say that it’s hard to maintain a relationship because of all the traveling they have to do.) Diaz, Wright and Grayer are seen in a hotel room together, watching the Democratic candidate debate in Las Vegas on February 19, 2020, and reacting to Warren’s tear-down of Bloomberg during the debate.

Diaz says that she’s not surprised that Warren was capable of that type of attack. Multiple times in the documentary, these CNN journalists say that they’ve become experts on the candidates they’re supposed to cover, but they don’t share any interesting anecdotes about things they learned about their candidates while following them on their campaigns. And the only time that the documentary shows something that’s close to these journalists getting a “scoop” is when Wright got a tip (that she passed on to Lah) that Klobuchar was going to end her campaign. The information turned out to be correct, so Lah was able to be one of the first TV journalists to report it.

The movie ends with the COVID-19 pandemic beginning to hit the United States, leading to campaign events being cancelled, and journalists having to social distance and doing their reporting from home. Lah ended up getting sick and had to quarantine herself, while the CNN journalists who covered presidential campaigns that ended had to stay at home and wait for their next assignments.

“On the Trail: Inside the 2020 Primaries” doesn’t have any surprising revelations about how the featured presidential candidates operated in their campaigns, and there are no interesting interviews with any of the candidates. Instead, the movie is more of a showcase of female journalists covering politics for CNN.

If CNN Films is making a documentary about CNN employees, there’s going to be an inherent bias. It’s impossible for most viewers to know how many negative things behind the scenes could have been edited out of the documentary. However, if people want to see a documentary about female colleagues in TV news where their work relationships are about camaraderie instead of catfights, then this movie serves that purpose.

HBO Max premiered “On the Trail: Inside the 2020 Primaries” on August 6, 2020.

Review: ‘Instaband,’ starring Sam Tinnesz, Paul McDonald, Phangs, Charlotte Sands, Ray Wimley, Farrah Boulé and Amber Stoneman

August 6, 2020

by Carla Hay

Sam Tinnesz in “Instaband” (Photo courtesy of Gravitas Ventures)

“Instaband” 

Directed by Bob Rose

Culture Representation: The documentary “Instaband” interviews a predominantly white group of people (with some African Americans and Latinos) in the music industry about how independent and unsigned artists are making money in the era of digital technology.

Culture Clash:  The pros and cons of signing to a major label are discussed in the film, as well as artists’ ongoing battle to get paid more money for their work.

Culture Audience: “Instaband” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in what relatively unknown independent and unsigned artists have to go through to get money and recognition; therefore, people looking for celebrity gossip will not find it in this documentary.

The Ries Brothers in “Instaband” (Photo courtesy of Gravitas Ventures)

The documentary “Instaband” (directed by Bob Rose) gives a practical and informative look at what it takes for unsigned and independent artists to make money in an industry where album sales aren’t what they used to be, but opportunities to release homemade music have grown exponentially, thanks to technology and the Internet. The good news is that it’s a lot easier and less expensive to record and release music than it ever has been before. The bad news is that this increased accessibility has resulted in a more crowded marketplace for consumer choices, making it harder for new and emerging artists to stand out and rise to the top.

All the artists interviewed in the documentary are unsigned or independent American artists. There’s some footage of artists performing live or in the studio, but the majority of screen time for this documentary is for interviews with artists sharing their experiences of working in the music business in an era where digital technology rules. Even though the title of the documentary is “Instaband,” Instagram marketing is not the focus of this documentary.

Watching “Instaband” can be a little irritating at first because most of these artists have very little or no name recognition to the average music listener. Therefore, people watching this movie might wonder why these artists are worth listening to for advice, when most of them admit in the documentary that they still have day jobs. In other words, most of these artists don’t earn enough money doing music to be able to do it as full-time professionals, which is the reality for most people who are music artists.

The artists interviewed in the documentary are Sam Tinnesz, Paul McDonald, the Ries Brothers, Ray Wimley, True Villains, Future Thieves, the Aquaducks, Kid Politics, Jeremy Claudio (Tiger Drive, Sensor the Artist), Charlotte Sands, Svrcina, Nappy Roots, Adara, Stealing Oceans, Ray Wimley, A.J., Phangs, Infamous Her, Farrah Boulé, Forest Fire Gospel Choir, Mahlleh, Salt Salt and Rellraw. The documentary even interviews the Naked Cowboy, who’s famous for singing and playing guitar in his underwear in New York City’s Times Square, because he sells his own music and merchandise.

Other people from the music industry who are interviewed in the movie are Wendy Duffy, president of Resin8 Music; former MTV personality La La Anthony; and Amber Stoneman, who is CEO of music media/promotion company Nashville Unsigned. The independent retailers featured in the documentary include Bananas Music owner John Allen, Bananas Music employee Jennifer Trunbull and Ernest Tubbs Record Shop’s David McCormick.

Most music artists make the majority of their money through performing live, merchandise, sponsorship deals, product endorsement and/or licensing their songs. Even top superstar artists can’t really get rich anymore from selling new recorded music (albums and singles), because a lot of people expect to get recorded music for free and because the percentages that the artists gets for recorded music are very low, after record companies and distributors take their large cuts of the revenue.

However, having recorded music available is still essential for music artists who want to be taken seriously. People can record music on their computers or phones with sound quality that’s almost as good as an expensive recording studio. And there are numerous options for artists to make their music available for sale or for streaming online, other than their own websites. Spotify is currently the top site for independent artists to sell and stream their music. Apple Music, SoundCloud, YouTube Music and Amazon Music are also popular choices for independent artists.

Artists also have to decide which formats they want for their recorded music. Many artists (such as indie pop singer Phangs) say that they only want to release music digitally because their fans only ask for digital music. Phangs comments, “I’ve never had physical music. What’s wild is that no one asks for it … because it doesn’t matter anymore, unfortunately.”

However, the retailers interviewed in this documentary say that vinyl is making a big comeback and should be considered a viable option for artists who have the type of fans who are inclined to buy vinyl. The biggest drawback to vinyl releases is that a lot of music consumers don’t have and don’t want turntables. As for cassettes and CDs, demands for those formats have been decreasing for years, but CDs are still fairly popular with people who want artwork packaging but don’t want the size of a vinyl album.

Songwriting publishing is a type of revenue that’s separate and different from money made through record sales. A record company handles the money made through sales of the music. A music publishing company handles the money made through licensing songs—for example, if a song is recorded by another artist or is used in visual media. And a performing rights society (ASCAP, BMI and SESAC are the three biggest ones in the U.S.) handles the money made through songs being played on the radio, in nightclubs or wherever recorded music is played. “Instaband” makes the assumption that the artists watching this documentary already know this information.

While some unsigned artists want a major record label to sign them, the vast majority of the artists in this documentary say that major labels (and the major labels’ “indentured servant” type of contracts) only benefit the artists who are on the superstar level, because those artists can afford to pay back the debts that the major label collects as part of the contract. A lot of artists know this already (but many artists still don’t know) that major labels and large independent labels have a contract system where the record company acts as a loan institution to artists.

Whatever money the record company spends to promote an artist is really a “recoupable cost” (or loan) that the artist has to pay back. Furthermore, most contracts for major labels and large independent labels require that the artists sign over the rights to the master recordings of any songs that the artists record under the contract. The record company then has the right to decide when, if or how the recordings will be released.

Considering all the control that artists give up when they sign to a record company, “Instaband” asks the question: Is it worth it? The answer is “It depends.” The general consensus is that artists who want complete control over their music and higher percentages of payments from their music sales generally shouldn’t sign to a major label. The down side is that independent or unsigned artists have to find a way to pay for everything, since they won’t have a major record company to finance tours and do marketing and promotion.

Now that it’s become easier for artists to record their own music (instead of having a record company pay for a recording studio), signing to a record company isn’t the coveted prize that it used to be. It’s why more artists are choosing to bypass record companies and release their music themselves, so that they not only have control over how and when to release music but they also have the rights to own the music. Record companies still have most of the power in getting radio airplay for artists, but a lot of artists don’t need radio airplay to promote themselves and make a living from their music.

In the documentary, Infamous Her (lead singer of the country rock band Her & Kings County) shares her experience of when she and her band were signed to Warner Music Nashville in 2010. She says that the record company demanded that the band spend $250,000 to record an album, even though the band wanted to record the album for a small fraction of that price. Warner Music Nashville threatened not to release the album unless it was done the record label’s way, according to Infamous Her.

Warner Music Nashville released Her & Kings County’s self-titled album in 2011, but the band ended up parting ways with the record company. Looking back on the experience, Infamous Her says that she probably won’t sign with a major label again because she’s learned firsthand how much control an artist gives up to the label for a long-shot hope of making it big.

Tinnesz, who works as a solo artist and as a member of the pop band Wave & Rome, has also gone through the experience of being signed to a major label. He was signed to Curb Records early in his career. According to Tinnesz, being an independent artist is financially harder in the short-term, but the financial rewards can benefit the artist in the long-term. He comments on his experience of being an artist signed to a major label: “The more we learned about the music business, the more we realized that we were never going to recoup. The system was made to keep us in this financial slavery thing.”

In the documentary, Tinnesz says that he makes most of his money as a musician by licensing his songs to visual media. His songs have appeared in a Samsung commercial and on TV shows such as NBC’s “American Ninja Warrior,” ABC’s “The Rookie” and “The CW’s “Riverdale,” “Batwoman” and “Charmed.”

Tinnesz states, “When I started owning my own master [recordings], it changed the game. I can put out music whenever I want, wherever I want.” He comments on the type of royalty payments he receives as an independent artist, compared to being an artist on a major label: “Maybe it’s less, but it’s all mine, and that’s better.”

Claudio mentions that writing songs for other visual-media projects has its own set of challenges: “I think the hard part of this is that you can easily get stuck in writing music that doesn’t mean anything. You can get stuck in writing music about whatever the pitch is or whatever the movie is about. I think where you have to find a happy medium [is] always be yourself and [by] refusing to write music that is not you.”

The Music Modernization Act, signed in 2018, aims to update copyright issues by taking into account digital/streaming music, and giving artists better payment for their music. And although music streaming services such as Spotify have a lot of clout in the music industry, they still can’t completely replace the financial support that artists can get through a record deal.

“A [record] label is a bank,” comments Nashville Unsigned’s Stoneman. “Is Spotify a bank yet? No. But do they help dictate if an artist is successful in streaming? Absolutely.”

Some people in the documentary say that the Music Modernization Act is a step in the right direction for artists getting paid more for their digital music. However, almost everyone in the documentary says that there’s still a long way to go before music artists get the same level of fair-paying labor contracts that other artists (such as actors) get in the entertainment industry. Stealing Oceans comments: “Music is so powerful, but it’s so undervalued … I don’t think songwriters, creators, artists are getting paid what you deserve.”

Many people interviewed in the documentary mention social media as a perfect example of how technology has given artists more control over how they are marketed. Some artists (such as Phangs and rock duo the Riess Brothers) are heavily involved in social media, to the point where fans know the artists’ daily activities off-stage. Other artists, such as pop/ rock singer Paul McDonald (who was a Top 10 “American Idol” finalist in 2011) say that they’re comfortable using social media to only promote their music, not as a way to show a lot of what’s going on their personal lives.

And there are some artists who end up having a viral video that leads to opportunities that most artists don’t get. That’s what happened to rapper Ray Wimley, who makes money as a street busker in New Orleans. When famous rapper/actor Common happened to join in with Wimley for an impromptu, freestyle street performance in July 2019, the video went viral with millions of views on YouTube. A month after the video was filmed, Wimley and Common appeared as guests together on NBC’s “The Tonight Show.” It remains to be seen if Wimley will become a well-known hit artist or if that viral video was just his 15 minutes of fame.

While some artists (like Tinnesz) make most of their money through licensing songs, and others (such as Phangs) say that they make most of their money through selling their own branded merchandise, the vast majority of music artists still make most of their money through live performances. (This documentary was filmed before the coronavirus pandemic.) For independent artists, that usually means bars and nightclubs, while those who develop a large-enough fan base can be booked at larger venues and at major festivals.

And for some independent artists, corporate gigs are the way to go. Boulé, who is a New Age R&B artist, says that performing at company events has been a “lucrative” way that she makes money. She comments that it’s allowed her to find “people who are aligned with me,” because she says it’s important to her to only book gigs with companies that are in line with her spiritual values. Boulé also notes that it’s easier to network with important contacts at a corporate event than it is at a regular nightclub show. “It’s all about aligning and being true to yourself,” she says of corporate gigging.

Although making money in the music industry can be more difficult in an oversaturated marketplace, Stealing Oceans has this optimistic view: “It just blows my mind when people choose to complain where we’re at today. Because really, we are so lucky, and there’s so much at our disposal.”

“Instaband” doesn’t really reveal anything new for people who are very familiar with the music industry. But it’s a fairly good introduction for independent music artists who might be looking for ideas to take their careers to the next level. The documentary assumes that people should know that having good representation and getting good legal advice are essential before signing any contracts, because lawyers, managers and agents basically aren’t mentioned at all in the film.

“Instaband” leans heavily toward artists based in Southern states (there are many people from the Nashville music scene in this documentary), so “Instaband” could have used more variety in interviewing people from other parts of the United States. Because technology and the music industry keep changing, “Instaband” will probably be outdated in about five years, but the documentary has some valuable lessons that can stand the test of time.

Gravitas Ventures released “Instaband” on digital and VOD on July 28, 2020.

Review: ‘Rebuilding Paradise,’ starring Michelle John, Steve ‘Woody’ Culleton, Carly Ingersoll and Matt Gates

August 1, 2020

by Carla Hay

A scene from “Rebuilding Paradise” (Photo by Noah Berger)

“Rebuilding Paradise”  

Directed by Ron Howard

Culture Representation: Taking place in California, the documentary “Rebuilding Paradise” features a predominantly white group of people (with a few African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans) representing the middle-class.

Culture Clash: A devastating wildfire nearly destroys the California city of Paradise, and the people affected have to fight to rebuild their lives while dealing with bureaucracy from the government and from the energy company Pacific, Gas & Electric, which was largely blamed for causing the fire.

Culture Audience: “Rebuilding Paradise” will appeal primarily to viewers who are interested in stories about how people recover from disasters.

Mauny Roethler in “Rebuilding Paradise” (Photo by Pete Muller/National Geographic)

What do you do when most of your city has burned down in a devastating fire? The documentary “Rebuilding Paradise” shows how people of the city of Paradise, California, had to cope with this trauma, after Paradise was nearly destroyed by wildfire that began on November 8, 2018. The wildfire (called the Camp Fire) killed 85 people, displaced 50,000 residents in Paradise and surrounding cities, and destroyed 95% of local structures—making it the worst fire disaster in California history.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Ron Howard directed “Rebuilding Paradise” to show what happened in Paradise in the year after the disaster occurred. The documentary is filmed in a very conventional cinéma vérité style that fortunately is not cluttered with commentaries from people outside of the Paradise community. Howard respectfully lets the survivors express their feelings and open up about what they are going through, without trying to exploit them or manipulate any outcomes.

The movie begins with raw video footage taken of people trying to escape the fires, which literally surrounded several areas of Paradise. It’s harrowing to watch people’s fear and anxiety and to see the blazing infernos that they had to get through in order to survive. Phone services (land lines and mobile phones) weren’t working. And it was dangerous to breath the noxious, smoke-filled air.

Some people who took videos while they were in their cars didn’t know if they would make it out alive. Many people just barely made it out with just the clothes on their backs, while others who weren’t so lucky were trapped and lost their lives. “Rebuilding Paradise” doesn’t have any gruesome footage of people getting physically hurt or dying, but it gives viewers some idea of how terrifying the ordeal was for the people who experienced it.

What caused this disaster? Faulty and outdated equipment (specifically, an electric transmission line) from Pacific, Gas & Electric (PG&E), the main energy company in California, has been named as the main culprit. The Paradise area had also experienced a five-year drought. And on the day of the fires, winds reached about 40 miles per hour. And climate change/global warming made the area’s environment extremely vulnerable to wildfires.

“It really was the perfect storm,” says the Paradise Police Department’s John Singler in the documentary. Paradise Police Department’s Sean Norman adds, “It didn’t matter if we had a thousand fire engines on the ridge that day, this [disaster] was going to happen.”

“Firefighters are living climate change. It’s staring them at them in the face every day,” comments Singler. And because of climate change, these kinds of major fire disasters will become more prevalent, according to former Paradise Fire Department chief Ken Pimlott, who says in the documentary that there’s a rising trend of fires “lasting longer and becoming more extreme.”

At the time that the fire disaster happened in November 2018, the city of Paradise had a population of 26,800, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In December 2018, residents were allowed back into the city, after it was deemed safe enough. However, most people who lived in Paradise at the time the disaster happened didn’t want to go back and rebuild their homes. By April 2019, the city’s population had dropped more than 92%, to a little more than 2,000 residents, according to data released by the office of California Governor Gavin Newsom.

The mass exodus had a domino effect on the amount of money and resources that the city of Paradise could expect to get from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other government agencies. And it caused a vicious cycle: With a much smaller population, the city would get a lot less money and resources, which would make it more difficult and take longer to significantly recover from the disaster. And without a significant recovery, the city wouldn’t be attractive enough for people to want to live there.

For example, there was a real health danger to living in Paradise after the disaster. Even after the cleanup, the documentary notes that toxic chemicals (especially benzene) from the wildfires still permeated the city’s water supply. People were warned not to drink the city’s tap water. And not even taking showers or baths was considered safe, since many of the chemicals in the tap water have been known to cause cancer.

Carly Ingersoll, a Paradise school psychologist who says she nearly died during the fires, comments in the documentary about how her determination to stay in Paradise has come with a big personal cost: She had been planning to start a family, but was told by her doctor that she shouldn’t have a child as long as she is doing things such as taking showers and baths with Paradise’s tap water.

Ingersoll gets emotional when she also says that she thought that going back to Paradise after the fires would get easier over time, but it’s gotten harder. And because her job is to counsel students who also survived the wildfire disaster, “It’s kind of hard not to get triggered,” she says of reliving the trauma.

Another big problem was Paradise’s devastated school system. The wildfires destroyed eight of the nine schools in Paradise, so the Paradise school district had to scramble to find temporary places to have classes, including shopping malls in nearby cities and donated spaces. It’s an uncomfortable and disruptive way of learning that most parents understandably did not want their children to experience, if these parents were lucky enough to have options.

Teenage students’ perspectives in the documentary are primarily shown through schoolmates Brandon Burke and Zach Boston, who were seniors in high school at the time of the disaster. They are shown going back to the burned-down areas where their houses used to be and expressing wistfulness that Paradise might never be the same again. And on a more immediate level, they also worry that they wont be able to have their graduation ceremony at Paradise High School’s Om Wraith Field, due to government concerns that the field might have dangerous levels of post-wildfire toxins.

Michelle John, who was Paradise’s school superintendent at the time, had the monumental task of leading a team that needed to get Paradise’s education system back on track. The documentary includes a lot of footage of the frustrating bureaucracy, complications and stresses she had to deal with rebuild Paradise’s school system. It’s clear from the footage included in the movie that she has a true passion for education, and is an empathetic leader who can gets results through teamwork

She also has a very even temper, considering all the difficulties she encountered not just on the job but also in her personal life as a disaster survivor. The emotional support that she gets is primarily from her devoted husband Phil, a retired military veteran who says that the fire disaster gave him another type of PTSD. At one point, Phil reminds a stressed-out Michelle that she needs to eat and that whatever problems they have to deal with, their health should come first.

Like most of Paradise’s residents, Michelle and Phil lost their home, so the documentary shows them temporarily staying with Michelle’s cousin Roni Masuda and Roni’s husband. The two cousins had been somewhat estranged until the fire disaster brought them back together again. Michelle also leans on her family when she experiences another tragedy.

The documentary also prominently features Paradise Police Department officer Matt Gates, as he patrols the area and helps residents try to get their lives back on track. One month after the disaster, Gates is shown as one of the chief organizers for a much-needed community event for the December holidays. Matt and his wife Tenille, with their movie-star looks and their two adorable young sons, look like they have an ideal family.

However, Tenille says that Matt working very long hours after this disaster (working about 14 hours a day) has put a major strain on their marriage. She says she wishes he could be present for his own family as much has he is for other people. The documentary shows whether or not their marriage survived.

Steve “Woody” Culleton, who was 74 when the fires struck Paradise, is the most colorful character in the documentary. He says when he first moved to Paradise since 1981, he had a very band drinking problem. But he sobered up in 1984, and years later, he became the mayor of Paradise. “I went from being the town drunk to the town mayor,” he quips.

His love of Paradise is so strong that he was determined to rebuild his home and continue to live there, no matter what. A feisty raconteur, Culleton, says that at this point in his life, he doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him for wanting to rebuild in a city that could be in danger of another fire disaster. He likens it to people who still want to live on the beach Miami, even though it’s a direct target for hurricanes.

Culleton’s experience and wisdom as a former mayor of Paradise is also shown as being helpful when he attends city council meetings and town halls and gives advice to obviously less experienced and less knowledgeable city officials. Jody Jones, who was Paradise’s mayor when this documentary was filmed, is briefly shown in one of these meetings, but she’s not interviewed for the documentary.

Other city officials shown in the documentary include the town council’s Mike Zuccolillo and Melissa Schuster. Also shown briefly in the documentary are California state assemblyman John Gallagher, who represents the city of Paradise; Butte Country district attorney Mike Ramsey; Butte County sheriff Kory Honea; Calli-Jane DeAnda, executive director of Butte County Fire Safe Council.

The documentary also shows how two young couples and their children were living after the wildfires destroyed their homes and they had no where else to stay. Marcus Nelson and Krystle Young escaped the fires with their three young daughters, with only a few clothes as their possessions. They ended up at a Red Cross shelter in the nearby city of Chico, and the family eventually moved into a FEMA trailer. Kayla Cox and Justin Cox (who have three daughters) also lost their home and ended up renting a small trailer that Justin (who works as a school custodian) said cost more than it cost to rent the house they used to have.

Nelson says what some of the survivors also express in the documentary: No one really knows what it’s like to experience this type of devastation unless they’ve been through it themselves. Nelson comments, “Is was so sad and hurt for the people of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina [in 2005], but it doesn’t really hit you until it affects and hits you in your own backyard.” (Later in the documentary, some Paradise students are shown raising money for victims of the Alabama tornados in 2019.)

Both couples say that wildfire disaster has caused a lot of stress in their marriages. Kayla Cox was born and raised in Paradise, and almost all of her relatives live there, so she says that there is no way she is moving out of Paradise. Meanwhile, her husband Justin says he’s “done with California,” although later it’s shown that he and and Kayla are still together when they move into their new home in Paradise. Young says that she and Nelson broke up “many times” since the wildfire disaster, but they decided to get back together for the sake of their kids. Time will tell if these couples’ relationships will last.

The documentary also includes coverage of PG&E’s legal responsibility and being held accountable for the wildfires that devastated Paradise. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich and attorney Joe Earley are shown leading a town hall meeting with residents to advise them on how to fight for their rights in dealing with PG&E. And the documentary includes a tension-filled town hall where PG&E representative Aaron Johnson faces an angry crowd with canned apologies. (The outcome of Paradise residents’ class-action lawsuit has been widely reported, but won’t be mentioned in this review in case it’s spoiler information for some viewers.)

A scientific point of view about fire prevention is offered by pyrogeographer Zeke Lunder, who says that fires are inevitable, but “we cant vegetation-manage our way out of the problem.” Lunder and fire and fuels field technician  Danny Davis are shown in the documentary setting little fires to a wooded area in Paradise to demonstrate potential weak spots and strong spots in the area, based on the post-disaster terrain.

The word “resilience” is a word that comes up quite a bit in the documentary when survivors talk about what it takes to get through the disaster that they experienced. However, “Rebuilding Paradise” also serves as a warning that what happened to this city in California would not have been as devastating if it had not been for corporate negligence and denial over how the world’s climate is changing. (In the documentary’s end credits, it’s mentioned that “emissions resulting from making this movie were balanced by investments in projects that benefit wildlife, air quality, water and local economies.”)

At the end of the documentary, there’s a connection made between the Paradise wildfires and other devastating environmental disasters that happened during the year that the documentary was made. It’s up to viewers to decide how much these disasters could have been different if people had treated the environment better and what all of that means for any future environmental catastrophes.

National Geographic Documentary Films released “Rebuilding Paradise” in select U.S. virtual cinemas on July 31, 2020. The movie’s digital/VOD release date is September 22, 2020. National Geographic will premiere the movie on November 8, 2020.

Review: ‘The Fight’ (2020), starring Lee Gelernt, Dale Ho, Brigitte Amiri, Josh Block and Chase Strangio

July 31, 2020

by Carla Hay

Brigitte Amiri and Dale Ho in “The Fight” (Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

“The Fight” (2020) 

Directed by Elyse Steinberg, Joshua Kriegman and Eli Despres 

Culture Representation: This documentary about the New York City-based American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) features a predominantly white group of people (with some Asians, Latinos and black people), as the movie follows five ACLU attorneys in their battles for civil rights.

Culture Clash:  The movie (which began filming shortly after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States in 2017) focuses on four main issues that ACLU is fighting against with the Trump administration: immigrants’ rights, reproductive rights, voting rights and LGBTQ rights.

Culture Audience: “The Fight” will appeal primarily to people who have liberal political views and/or support what the ACLU is doing.

Lee Gelernt in “The Fight” (Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

The documentary “The Fight” takes a behind-the scenes look at some of the legal battles waged by the New York City-based American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) shortly after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States in January 2017. Although the legal issues aren’t new, the documentary shows that Trump’s attempts as president to make sweeping changes to civil-rights laws brought increased urgency for the ACLU to fight back against those attempts.

“The Fight” co-directors Elyse Steinberg, Joshua Kriegman and Eli Despres had unprecedented access to ACLU headquarters as well as high-ranking members of the ACLU team. The movie focuses on five attorneys with four different specialties: Lee Gelernt (immigrants’ rights); Brigitte Amiri (reproductive rights); Dale Ho (voting rights); and Josh Block and Chase Strangio (LGBTQ rights).

Each of these four issues is given a spotlight, as the featured ACLU attorneys prepare legal cases that represent these causes. Cameras are not allowed in the courtrooms for these cases, but what happens on the inside of these courtrooms is depicted in the film through audio recordings, illustrations and animation.

Gelernt is involved in battling Trump’s order to banning immigrants from several Muslim-majority countries, as well as the controversy over immigrants seeking refugee status in the U.S. and being locked up and separated from their children. He is he deputy director of the ACLU’s national Immigrants’ Rights Project and director of the project’s Access to the Court’s Program. In the documentary (where almost all of the clients’ full names are not disclosed, for privacy reasons), Gelernt is shown helping an African immigrant woman identified only as “Mrs. L” in her case against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) because she was separated from her 7-year-old daughter, who was sent to live in Chicago without Mrs. L’s permission.

ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project deputy director Amiri fights back in cases involving abortion restrictions that the ACLU believes are unconstitutional policies against the U.S. Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal in all U.S. states in 1973. Amiri, with the help of ACLU reproductive rights attorney Meagan Burrows, is shown helping a 17-year-old Spanish-speaking pregnant immigrant in the case Garza v. Hargan.

The immigrant, who is identified only as “Jane Doe” in the documentary, says that her pregnancy was due to rape, and she wants an abortion, but is being prevented from getting an abortion by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which she says is treating her like a prisoner. In an interview with Spanish, she says that ORR officials won’t let her outside, they follow her into the bathroom, and they won’t let her visit a doctor. The outcome of her case is a race against time, because in the U.S. state where she lives, abortion is illegal when a pregnancy reaches at least 20 weeks, and Jane Doe’s interview in the documentary was when she was 15 weeks pregnant.

ORR director Scott Lloyd, an admitted right-wing conservative, is the ACLU’s chief nemesis in this case, since he’s the official who signed off on Jane Doe not being able to have an abortion. Lloyd is seen squirming and being evasive in a videotaped deposition when asked what his views are on abortion. But later in the documentary there is TV footage of him appearing on a conservative talk show openly discussing that he is a conservative Christian who thinks abortion should not be legal.

ACLU Voting Rights Project director Ho does a lot of work against voter suppression. But the main battle that he has in the documentary is the case Department of Commerce v. New York, which is the ACLU’s fight to prevent any questions from being added to the 2020 U.S. Census that asks if anyone in a U.S. household is a U.S. citizen. The ACLU and other civil-rights groups have a legal argument that this question about U.S. citizenship is unconstitutional for a U.S. census, because the question is designed to deter people from filling out a census form if they are not U.S. citizens or have people in their households who aren’t U.S. citizens, thereby making them underrepresented in the census.

Block (an openly gay cisgender male) and Strangio (an openly transgender male) work as a team. Block is a senior staff attorney with the National ACLU’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender & HIV Projects. Strangio (who is a parent to a daughter, who’s shown in the documentary) is deputy director for Transgender Justice with the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project. Block and Strangio are seen working on the case Stone v. Trump, in reaction to Trump wanting to ban transgender people from the U.S. military. In this case, the ACLU is representing transgender male plaintiff Brock Stone, a U.S. Navy petty officer first class who has been in the Navy since 2006.

The directing style of the documentary is cinéma vérité, with each of the narrative jumping back and forth between each case. There is ample use of a split-screen format (with three or four screens at once) to show what might be happening on multiple cases. However, all of this doesn’t get confusing because the cases and the lawyers are very distinct from each other, and everything is smoothly edited to together in a cohesive storytelling style.

And fortunately, the documentary isn’t cluttered with a lot of interviews with people who aren’t involved in the cases, because those outside people would be a distraction and could possibly compromise some of the confidentiality of any pending cases at the time. Other ACLU employees who are briefly featured in the documentary include ACLU executive director Anthony Romero and ACLU deputy director of communications Stacy Sullivan.

On the flip side, the documentary doesn’t shut out opposing views of the ACLU. There is some archival footage of ACLU opponents getting into debates with ACLU attorneys on TV talk shows (usually on cable news channels), as well as news footage of Trump and his supporters at Trump rallies and speeches. And the documentary briefly includes other examples of the ACLU representing people or groups that promote hate speech and other controversial issues that the ACLU says that people have a right to express under freedom of speech.

There’s also a segment in “The Fight” where all of the featured attorneys read aloud or show many of the hate messages that they get (on social media, by mail or by phone), because of the work that they do for the ACLU. Many of the haters identify themselves as Trump supporters, and the ACLU lawyers who aren’t straight white men are often called racist, sexist or homophobic slurs.

Gelernt says of the hateful criticism that often includes death threats or other threats to his safety: “If you don’t look at the negative stuff, you’re sort of in your own bubble.” Ho comments on being the target of ACLU haters: “I don’t want to run from this,” as he says as he takes a hate-filled postcard that he got in the mail and tacks the postcard on his office wall.

The documentary also includes an unflinching look at how there can be conflicts within the ACLU. The ACLU won a lawsuit for a Unite the Right protest (consisting of white supremacists) to be held on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11 and August 12, 2017. That rally led to tragedy, when a Unite the Right supporter plowed his car through counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old counterprotester Heather Heyer.

Although some people blamed the ACLU for this tragedy, others did not. And the documentary shows that people in the ACLU also had different opinions on how the ACLU’s legal defense for the Unite the Right protest to take place ended up playing a role in this tragedy. The documentary does not show anyone at the ACLU getting into heated debates about this protest, but the film does offer two different points of view from high-ranking ACLU officials.

ACLU director David Cole (a white man) stands firm in his belief that the ACLU did the right thing in helping make the Unite the Right protest happen: “We defend civil liberties for all,” he says in the documentary. Meanwhile, ACLU deputy legal director Jeffrey Robinson (an African American man) says that privately, he had a problem with the ACLU being involved in making the Unite to Right rally happen, and he did not support ACLU’s decision to represent the Unite the Right people in their legal case to make the protest happen. Robinson comments in what was obviously a prepared statement: “The ACLU was not responsible for Heather Heyer’s death, but we were not a random organization just watching what happened.”

The documentary does a good job of making the featured attorneys look very human. The attorneys are all shown with family members (Gelernt, Amiri and Ho are married with children) and with getting emotional during the many ups and downs in their cases. They all show empathy for their clients. And they all talk about the toll that their stressful work takes on their personal lives and emotional health. However, none of them wants to quit because they say that the work is too important to them.

They attorneys aren’t afraid to show their insecurities: Block wants Strangio to take the lead on the Stone v. Trump case, because Strangio is transgender, but Strangio declines to do so because he says that he’s still not comfortable standing up in court and making arguments. Ho is the lawyer who tends get gets tongue-tied and flustered the most. Gelernt talks about feeling that if he loses a case, he will let down not just his client but also American society. (All ACLU attorneys probably feel this way too.)

But not everything is dead-serious in the film. There are touches of humor, such Gelernt (the oldest lawyer in the documentary’s featured five) getting flustered when he doesn’t know how to plug a phone charger into a computer. Each of the attorneys give a tour of the ACLU offices in their own unique style, and during his tour Gelernt admits that he doesn’t even know how to use the copy machine.

Meanwhile, Block is shown going from pleased to frustrated when he uses a dictation program on his computer. Things starts out fine but then the computer program’s translation abilities quickly goes awry, in one of the funnier scenes in the film. Ho is shown in multiple scenes practicing his courtroom arguments in front of a mirror, sometimes with amusing results.

Of the legal cases featured in “The Fight,” most of the outcomes are already known. However, just because there have been rulings on these cases (some of which were appealed), that doesn’t dilute a lot of gripping suspense and emotionally stirring moments in the documentary, since it shows for the first time many of the behind-the-scenes, real-time reactions that the ACLU people had to major steps in the cases.

The ACLU is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2020, so “The Fight” is a fitting tribute to the legacy and longevity of the ACLU. But as Ho says in the documentary, the ACLU should not be counted on as the only way to defend liberties for everyone, when there are forces trying to take away or restrict those freedoms. “It’s not going to be lawyers in courts,” he comments on who will be making the most progress. “It’s going to be people [in the general public] turning the ship around.”

“The Fight” probably won’t change a lot of people’s political opinions. Trump’s views on issues such as immigration and abortion were made very clear during his presidential campaign, so people who voted for him in 2016 expected him to act on those views. However, for anyone interested in what politically liberal attorneys at the ACLU are doing behind the scenes to push back against many of the changes that Trump and politically conservative lawmakers want for the United States, “The Fight” offers an insightful peek into this process.

Magnolia Pictures and Topic Studios released “The Fight” in select U.S. virtual cinemas, on digital and on VOD on July 31, 2020.

Review: ‘Pornstar Pandemic: The Guys,’ starring DeAngelo Jackson, Dante Colle, Pierce Paris, Elijah Wilde, Jack Loft, Alter Sin and Alex Lecomte

July 30, 2020

by Carla Hay

DeAngelo Jackson in “Pornstar Pandemic: The Guys” (Photo courtesy of Breaking Glass Pictures)

“Pornstar Pandemic: The Guys” 

Directed by Edward James “EJ”

Culture Representation: Taking place in the Los Angeles area, Atlanta, New York City, Brazil and Spain, the documentary “Pornstar Pandemic: The Guys” features a predominantly white group of men (with one African American and one Latino) who work in adult entertainment, doing non-sexual videoconference interviews about how their lives have changed since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Culture Clash: Most of the men talk about how they deal with online haters, crazy fans and misperceptions about men who do gay porn for a living.

Culture Audience: Fans of these adult entertainers are obviously the target audience of “Pornstar Pandemic: The Guys,” but the documentary might also appeal to people who are curious about how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting people who work in porn. 

Dante Colle in “Pornstar Pandemic: The Guys” (Photo courtesy of Breaking Glass Pictures)

The first thing that people need to know about the documentary “Pornstar Pandemic: The Guys” is that it has absolutely no sexual activity and no frontal nudity. “Pornstar Pandemic,” although it has a very catchy title, is basically a very tame interview documentary where male adult-film performers (some more famous than others) are shown in friendly videoconference calls talking about how they’re handling the coronavirus pandemic since the pandemic shut down filming of anything where social distancing is not possible. The interviewees, who do mostly gay porn, also give tours of their homes and show some of their socially distant outdoor activities. The only nudity in the film is when one of the porn stars (Dante Colle) is seen taking a shower and his backside is briefly shown.

If that’s not sexually interesting enough for viewers, there are plenty of places online to see these performers doing sexual activities on camera. But if you’re curious to see what their personalities and lives are like when they’re in semi-quarantine, then “Pornstar Pandemic” might be worth checking out if you know that this movie about porn stars doesn’t have any porn in it.

However, the running time for the movie is a little too long (132 minutes), and boredom might set in quickly for people who are expecting a lot of raunchy talk. There’s hardly anything in the documentary that would be considered sexuality explicit dialogue. It’s a very mainstream, non-pornographic film, but that doesn’t mean the movie is appropriate for everyone.

Longtime adult-film director/producer Edward James “EJ” directed “Pornstar Pandemic: The Guys” as his first mainstream documentary feature. Most of the job is in the editing, because the movie is really just a series of videoconference segments, mostly moderated by adult-film performers Alter Sin (who’s from Spain), Alex Lecomte (from Brazil) and Jack Loft (from the United States).

The movie begins with Sin and Lecomte interviewing Loft at the partially furnished home that Loft shares in Atlanta with his manager, who is not interviewed or seen in the movie. Loft, Sin and Lecomte together then do individual interviews with Colle, Pierce Paris, Elijah Wilde and DeAngelo Jackson. And then, at the end, EJ (who is not seen on camera) interviews Loft, Colle, Paris, Wilde and Jackson. All of them say that their families and friends know that they do porn for a living. They also say that cyberbullying and criticism are unavoidable on social media, and it’s best not to fall into the trap of believing all the harsh things that people say.

In this documentary, Loft is one of the newcomers to porn. He talks about how the coronavirus pandemic shutdown happened soon after he filmed just one porn scene, after moving to Atlanta from a small town in Iowa. Loft (who looks like he’s in his early 20s, and whose physical appearance would put him in the “twink” category) says of his choice to do porn for a living: “I’ve never been the type of person who thinks sex work or pornography was something to be ashamed of.” He adds that “every gay guy” he knows is on Only Fans and/or watches porn.

Loft also says that his family and friends know about his decision to do porn, and they’re okay with it. He believes that for people in his generation (Generation Z), taking naked selfie photos and making consensual sex videos are less taboo than it is for previous generations. He also believes that in the future, there won’t be as big of a stigma for this type of activity as there is now. “Ten years from now, there’s less of a chance of someone trying to use my adult films and my adult pictures against me. In 10 years, I hope it won’t be a big deal.”

This is where Loft shows a major blind spot when it comes to gender, because he doesn’t really seem to understand that when it comes to posing for pornographic photos or doing sex videos, men get a lot less negative reactions and society shaming for it than women do. Loft is also openly gay, so any videos of him having sex with a man wouldn’t be as shocking as it would be if he were a man who presented himself as straight in his personal life.

There are many variables in how porn stars’ sex work will affect their futures, but women who’ve done porn in the past definitely have a harder time overcoming the stigma that comes with it. For example, “Million Dollar Listing New York” reality star Fredrik Eklund, a real-estate agent who is openly gay, has freely admitted to making gay porn videos in his past. Would a woman in the same circumstances be given the opportunity to star in an internationally televised American reality show? At this time, realistically? No. The double standard is real, and it’s not going away anytime soon.

Loft also says that he’s noticed that since the pandemic, people are spending more time online but also being more authentic with their feelings when they’re online. If he’s able to become a more well-known porn actor, he says his two biggest fears are that we won’t look good-enough on camera and that he’ll be misunderstood as disrespectful or inauthentic.

Just like the other performers interviewed in the documentary, Loft says he’s been focusing more on his online activities as a way to make money. And working and staying in shape is obviously a huge priority for all of the actors who are interviewed. It goes without saying that the pandemic doesn’t stop these performers from doing “solo” videos.

Colle (who lives in a small trailer in Malibu, California) says the pandemic has given him more time to work on content for his videos that people can access by subscription or pay-per-view. Colle, who says he doesn’t want to label his sexuality, comments that he’s lucky that his parents have been completely accepting of him doing porn. He also talks about the misconceptions that people have about men who enjoy having sex with men and women. Colle mentions that gay people can be just as prejudiced as straight people who think that sexuality means that you have to choose one gender to be attracted to sexually.

He also shares some stories about what some crazy fans will do to get him to notice them. He says that he uses his parents’ address as his mailing address, so they sometimes get some very kinky mail. Colle also mentions that because he learned from his parents to be smart about saving his money (maybe that’s why he lives frugally in a tiny trailer instead of a house or apartment), he says that he’s not financially panicking during the pandemic, unlike many people he knows who lost their incomes and are running out of money because of the pandemic.

Colle shows some of his workout routine. He also admits that since the pandemic, he doesn’t shower every day, and sometimes he’ll go up to three days without showering. And in case anyone cares, Colle has two very adorable French bulldogs, who make an appearance in his individual interview segment.

Speaking of cute pets, Paris (who lives in Los Angeles) shows two kittens that he’s fostering and plans to adopt. Paris says his hometown is Bozemon, Montana, where he used to be a farm worker. He opens up a little about his high-school days, by saying that he was sort of a “class clown” who got along with various cliques in his school.

And he says that the he’s had a “fetish” for anal sex ever since he first heard a gym teacher mention it in a high-school sex education class. Just like Colle, Paris says he’s open to having sex with men and women in his personal and professional lives, but on camera, Paris is mostly known for having sex with men.

Paris also says that he got inspired to do porn by a TV show (which he does not name) that had crazy sports stunts. He admits that his income has dropped because of the pandemic, but he’s doing more solo videos and his fans like to see his “naked workouts.” He adds, “That’s what’s keeping me busy and making me money.”

When asked how he prepares for doing a porn scene, Paris says that he’s found that he has to spend at least 45 minutes before doing a scene to get mentally and physically ready. He mentions that if he just nonchalantly shows up on the set without that preparation, it has a negative effect on his performance.

Wilde is fairly new to porn, compared to most of the others in this documentary. Currently living in New York City, he says in the documentary that he was born in Montreal but grew up in New York. He used to by a gym trainer as a day job, but due to the pandemic, he lost his gym job. Wilde also says that, as a former go-go dancer, he especially misses going to nightclubs, dancing, and being able to hug his friends.

DeAngelo Jackson, who identifies as gay and lives in Atlanta, is one of the veterans in this documentary’s group of performers. He’s been doing porn since 2008. He says that he lost his virginity in a porn scene, and he describes that experience as “traumatizing.” Unlike the other people interviewed in this documentary, Jackson says his strict and religious family has difficulty accepting that he does porn for a living.

His father was in the military, so Jackson says that he grew up as an “Army brat” in various countries and learned to appreciate different cultures. He also says that when he’s not performing, he’s an “introvert.” There’s a scene in the documentary of Jackson playing a video game wearing very skimpy brief underwear that leaves nothing to the imagination.

At the 2020 GayVN Awards (the Oscars of gay porn), Jackson became the first person of color to win the Best Actor award. He says he’s humbled by the prize, but he also understands that winning the award is something bigger than him, because it’s symbolic of breaking a racial barrier in the porn industry.

He also hopes the prize means that more people will look at black men in porn as not just a “fetish” but award-worthy actors. Wilde, who is also a person of color, mentions toward the end of the documentary that he hopes to follow in Jackson’s footsteps, but Wilde says that would just be happy to be nominated for any award.

When asked for his advice on what he would tell men who are new to porn, Jackson replies: “Know who you are,” because he’s seen too many young men in their late teens and early 20s get “lost” and overwhelmed in adult entertainment because they don’t have a strong sense of identity. Jackson also echoes what some of the other performers say in the documentary: Be professional and treat it like a regular job.

Except it’s not like a regular job. Some of the men interviewed in the film say that their parents and other family members express concerns that they will get HIV or AIDS in their line of work. This is an issue that seems to make porn actors very defensive, because porn actors say that the people they work with in porn are regularly tested for HIV and other STDs, and that it’s actually “safer” to do porn than to have sex with random people who aren’t tested.

One thing that all of these men have in common is that at the time of this filming this documentary, they didn’t talk about being in any committed relationships, past or present, although Colle says dating someone who also does porn is sometimes easier than dating someone who doesn’t do porn. And none of them admitted to having sex during the pandemic, although it’s kind of hard to believe that they’re all celibate during the pandemic. But based on what’s implied in the documentary, even without the pandemic, what they do for a living makes it challenging to have a long-term, committed relationship with a love partner.

Ultimately, “Pornstar Pandemic: The Guys” is a very simply made documentary that can serve as a time capsule of how some male porn stars were living during the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic. (This movie was obviously filmed before June 2020, because director JR says in the documentary that movie production should return to normal by June 2020, but that ended up not happening.) People who are expecting sexually explicit content in the documentary will have to look elsewhere. This movie is really a series of interesting, but not particularly fascinating, conversations to show a more human side to some current and aspiring male porn stars.

Breaking Glass Pictures released “Pornstar Pandemic: The Guys” on DVD and digital on July 28, 2020.

Review: ‘Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind,’ starring Gordon Lightfoot

July 30, 2020

by Carla Hay

Gordon Lightfoot in “Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could read My Mind” (Photo courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment)

“Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind” 

Directed by Joan Tosoni and Martha Kehoe

Culture Representation: The documentary “Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind” features an all-white group of people discussing the life and career of Canadian folk-pop singer/songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, including Lightfoot, other entertainers and some people who work behind the scenes in the music business.

Culture Clash:  Lightfoot admits that he had a lot of problems with alcohol and women during his up-and-down career.

Culture Audience: “Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind” will primarily appeal to people who like documentaries about singer/songwriters or folk-pop music from the 1970s, since that is the decade where Lightfoot had his biggest hits.

The documentary “Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind” takes a candid yet conventional look at the Canadian folk-pop singer/songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, who presents himself as nostalgic about his accomplishments and remorseful of past mistakes, particularly in his mistreatment of women. Directed by Joan Tosoni and Martha Kehoe, the movie isn’t particularly groundbreaking, but it should please Lightfoot’s die-hard fans and give insight to him as an artist to people who are less familiar with his music.

The movie starts out on a humbling note, as Lightfoot is seen in his living room, uncomfortably listening to “(That’s What You Get) For Loving Me,” one of his early hits from 1965 that he originally recorded, but the song was made famous with cover versions by several other singers, including Waylon Jennings, Peter, Paul & Mary; Johnny Cash; and Elvis Presley. The lyrics of the songs are told from the point of view of an unapologetic philanderer who brags about having many sexual conquests.

Lightfoot comments with a grimace: “I’ll never write another song like that as long as I live. That song was really offensive to write for a guy who was married with a couple of kids … I didn’t know what chauvinism was.” He then adds, “There’s a great deal of regret there. I guess I don’t like who I am.”

His wife Kim Lightfoot, who is seated near him, protests: “We do, though. You were just a little boy from Orillia [in Ontario, Canada]. These people sang your songs.” However, Lightfoot eventually can’t take listening to the tune anymore and he says, “Okay, I hate this fucking song, so let’s move on.”

Born in 1938, Lightfoot was a self-taught musician as a child and knew from an early age that he wanted to be a singer/songwriter. He studied music at Westlake College in California before returning to Toronto at the age of 20. Lightfoot was working in a bank when he quit to become join a square-dancing group, which set him on a path to a career in showbiz.

Lightfoot then made his mark in the Toronto music scene in the early 1960s. He joined the music group the Singin’ Swingin’ Eight, recorded some music as a solo artist, and later teamed up with singer Terry Whelan in a duo called the Two-Tones.

However, Lightfoot says that he decided once and for all that he would be a solo artist when he walked away from Whelan’s demands to have a 50/50 partnership, even though Lightfoot was writing the duo’s songs. In the documentary, Lightfoot said it took him about a year to recover from the Two-Tones breakup and get his music career back on track: “It damn near killed me,” he says of the bitter split.

Lightfoot’s talent eventually got him noticed by Albert Grossman, who was Bob Dylan’s manager at the time, who signed Lightfoot in 1965. By then, the Beatles and Bob Dylan had taken the world by storm. Although Lightfoot wasn’t on that level of success, he saw these artists as his competition.

He admits that at the time, he was very envious of the amount of records that the Beatles were selling, which motivated him to be a better songwriter. It’s an envy that Lightfoot says is common for a lot of artists, but they don’t want to publicly admit it: “You just sit down and write another album. You just try to do better.” In the documentary, Lightfoot comments that the Beatles’ 1966 “Revolver” album made him appreciate the band for the first time as true artists.

Lightfoot’s peak of commercial success didn’t happen until the 1970s, when he had hits such as “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Sundown,” “Carefree Highway” and his six-minute epic “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” inspired by the tragic sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald that killed 29 people in 1975.

Along the way, Lightfoot became an alcoholic (he claims to be clean and sober now, but the documentary shows that he’s still a heavy smoker); fathered six children with four different women (two of the women were his ex-wives, and the other two he never married); and at the 1996 Juno Awards, he got inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame by Dylan, his hero and friendly rival.

One of the best parts of the documentary is the vivid descriptions of Lightfoot in his early years in the folk scene of Toronto’s Yorkville district, where he developed a fan following by performing at places like the Riverboat Coffee House. In the documentary, Lightfoot goes back his former stomping grounds in Yorkville to reminisce about his humble beginnings in the mid-1960s Toronto music scene, which included Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.

Lightfoot says that “Early Morning Rain” was “one of my important tunes” that he wrote during this period. Sylvia Tyson of the folk duo Sylvia and Ian adds, “One of the things that was so special about folk music was that it was so accessible … Those songs said something and had a point of view … that were missing in pop music at that time.”

“The vibe was the best,” remembers True North Records founder Bernie Finkelstein. “Toronto loved him, kind of like the way Toronto loves Drake right now.” Speaking of Toronto-born rapper Drake, while Lightfoot is shown driving his car through Toronto, he sees a giant billboard of Drake, and says he’s a fan because Drake’s music is “well-orchestrated” and “professional.”

The documentary is also chock-full of great archival footage and photos. One of the more interesting things in the film is an audio recording of Lightfoot as a choir boy, when he did his first public performance as a solo singer at St. Paul’s United Church. Even with his pre-pubescent voice, it’s obvious that he had a great sense of melody and pitch.

Lightfoot says in the beginning of the documentary that he doesn’t like himself, but the movie has plenty of people who express their admiration of Lightfoot. They include entertainers such as Sarah McLachlan; Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson of Rush; Anne Murray; Ian Tyson of the duo Sylvia and Ian; Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings (of the bands Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive); Ronnie Hawkins; Steve Earle; Greg Gaffin of Bad Religion; the Good Brothers; Alec Baldwin; Murray McLauchlan; and Tom Cochrane.

Also interviewed are former Riverboat Coffee House owner Bernie Fiedler; former Warner Bros Records executive Lenny Waronker; and “Lightfoot” author Nicholas Jennings. And weighing in with their comments are Lightfoot band members Rick Haynes (bass), Barry Keane (drums) and Carter Lancaster (guitarist), who describe Lightfoot as brilliant perfectionist, but you wouldn’t want to get on his bad side, especially in the days when he was a heavy drinker.

McLauchlan describes Lightfoot as “meticulous” with his songwriting. “He’s one of the few people I know who writes his lead sheets. He’s a craftsman.” Grammy-winning songstress McLachlan says that Lightfoot’s “Song for a Winter’s Night” is a tune that “conjures up images of the quintessential Canadian winter,” even though Lightfoot says in the documentary that the song was actually written in a hotel room in Cleveland. Murray says it’s her favorite Lightfoot song.

Other fellow Canadians gush about him. Bachman comments, “He did ballads like nobody else did them.” Cummings remembers the first time that he saw Lightfoot perform: “He changed our lives forever. We came away that night immediately wanting to be songwriters.”

Cochrane has perhaps the most over-the-top comment about Lightfoot: “He defined who we were as Canadians. It wasn’t just about pop music. It was deeper than that. If there was a Mount Rushmore in Canada, he would be on it.”

Fans of Lightfoot love his songs for their storytelling qualities. And although some of his songs are about specific things or people, he has this to say about his overall songwriting: “Almost everything I’ve done is a figment of my imagination. You just have to make sure it rhymes.”

One thing that wasn’t fictional is Lightfoot’s reputation for being a ladies’ man in his younger years. Hawkins says with a laugh about his memories of Lightfoot in the Toronto folk scene: “I had all the girls until he got big. Then he got them all.”

Lightfoot’s most notorious love affair was with backup singer Cathy Smith in the early 1970s. He left his first wife, Brita, to live with Smith for about three years, but it was a volatile relationship. Lightfoot revealed in interviews years ago that Smith was the inspiration for his 1974 hit “Sundown,” a song about suspicion of infidelity from the perspective of someone in a romance with a seductive woman. His 1970 hit single “If You Could Read My Mind” was about his deteriorating marriage to Brita.

Years later after Lightfoot and Smith’s relationship ended, Smith became infamous as the drug dealer who injected the dose of heroin and cocaine that killed comedian/actor John Belushi in Los Angeles in 1982. In 1986, after giving up her fight to be extradited from Canada, Smith turned herself in to authorities and spent 15 months in a California prison for manslaughter.

In the documentary, Lightfoot says about Smith: “I really loved her,” but he also says that he didn’t want to marry her. “It was one of those relationships where you get a feeling of danger,” he comments.

Lightfoot and a few other people in the documentary mention his days of heavy partying. And although Lightfoot hints that he indulged in taking plenty of drugs, he only specifically mentions alcohol as his main vice. Lightfoot also acknowledges that his alcoholism ruined many of his relationships, and he gives a lot of credit to his sister for helping him get sober in 1982. His passion for canoeing became part of his sobriety therapy, he says.

And in the documentary, Lightfoot makes a heartfelt public apology to anyone he’s hurt, especially the women who were damaged by the “emotional trauma” he says that he caused. He’s been married to his current and third wife Kim since 2014. And she’s shown in the documentary as his constant and loving companion.

“Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind” gets the job done well in telling Lightfoot’s story while putting into context how he was one of the pioneering Canadian solo artists who was able to make it big as a pop star in the United States. Lightfoot comes across as someone who survived a lot of ups and downs, and he evolved into trying to be a better person. He is keenly aware that his legacy as a human being is more important than what people will remember of his career.

Greenwich Entertainment released “Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind” in digital and VOD on July 29, 2020. The movie was released in Canada in 2019.

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