Fritinancy

New from me on Medium: All about Oscar

How did that gold-plated statuette get its name? I dive into the theories—is “Oscar” industry jargon for “oscillation”?—and pick a favorite, just in time for the 95th Academy Awards ceremony on March 12.

Read All about Oscar (friend link)

Word of the week: Catch-22

You don’t need me to explain catch-22: It’s been part of our vocabulary for more than 60 years. A catch-22 is “a paradoxical situation from which an individual can’t escape because of contradictory rules or limitations.”

Catch-22 comes from Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel of the same name, published in 1961 and set during World War II; it was made into a 1970 movie (directed by Mike Nichols) and a 2019 miniseries (starring, among others, George Clooney). The novel has never been out of print.

In the novel, Doc Daneeka, an army psychiatrist, explains that “anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy” and therefore can’t plead mental illness as grounds for discharge:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.

Word of the week: Paparazzo

The death, on April 30, of the American photographer Ron Galella brought the fun-to-say Italian borrowing paparazzo back into the news. Galella, who was 91, was a “paparazzo extraordinaire,” the Telegraph and the Guardian headlined. “He personified the paparazzi,” the New York Times obituary reported, using the plural form: “brazen and relentless in chasing the famous, particularly Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.”

Galella himself proudly accepted the title of “paparazzo extraordinaire,” appropriating it for the title of his 2012 memoir.

Advertisement for a 2012 book-signing event for Ron Galella: Paparazzo Extraordinaire via New York Gossip Gal.

What we talk about when we talk about abortion

Because that’s what we’re talking about this week. Don’t worry, though: I’m going to stay in my lane. Mostly.

In case you’ve been tuning out the news, and who could blame you: On Monday, a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito for the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, confirmed what many of us have been gloomily anticipating for years: that the precedents established in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), long considered settled law, are about to be jettisoned. “The immediate impact of the ruling as drafted in February would be to end a half-century guarantee of federal constitutional protection of abortion rights and allow each state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion,” wrote Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward for Politico. 

Here’s what “allowing each state to decide” can mean: Twenty-three states already have laws that could be used to restrict legal access to abortion. Under a state law passed by the Texas legislature in September 2021, abortions are prohibited after six weeks of pregnancy, before many women even know they’re pregnant. “The law empowers private citizens to sue anyone who ‘aids or abets’ a prohibited abortion,” the Texas Tribune reported in March 2022. “Those who sue could be awarded at least $10,000 if they win.”

Snitches get riches, in other words.

I believe abortion is health care. I support abortion access for anyone who needs it. But I’m not a lawyer or a legislator, so I’m using this platform to share some resources about my own specialty: language, messaging, and branding, all of which have played, and continue to play, outsize roles in the ongoing fight for safe and legal abortions.

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Word of the week: Doldrums

No, I’m not feeling particularly blah. On the contrary, I spent a rewarding weekend at the International Ocean Film Festival in San Francisco—my second film festival in three weeks, I’m happy to report. (The other one was Noir City, a film noir festival hosted by TCM’s “czar of noir,” Eddie Muller. In the Before Times, I typically attended at least four film festivals every year.)

The IOFF program included short and feature-length films and West Coast, U.S., and world premieres. One of those feature-length world premieres, Open Ocean, gave me the idea for this week’s word.

Doldrums and other sailing zones, via DifferenceBetween.net. No one is quite sure how “horse latitudes” got its name; theories include “it’s where horses died aboard ships” and “it’s as unruly as a wild mare.”

 

New writing: The International Ocean Film Festival

I’m back at EatDrinkFilms today with a story about the 19th annual International Ocean Film Festival, which opens in San Francisco on April 7.

I was a volunteer for the very first festival, back when it was called the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival. Today it’s the oldest and largest ocean film festival in North America, with year-round educational outreach as well as student-film awards and a traveling program. It was fun to talk with festival founder Krist Jake and film screener Sid Hollister—both of whom are fellow Dolphin Club members—and with Ana Blanco, the festival’s executive director for eleven years.

Read the story and check out the festival—in addition to the live screenings and Q&As there’s now a virtual program that brings great ocean filmmaking to your living room or laptop.

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Read my previous story for EatDrinkFilms, about a very special screening of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights with orchestral accompaniment.

On the Visual Thesaurus: The tales behind the Best Picture titles

For my March column for the Visual Thesaurus I take a look at the titles of this year’s Best Picture nominees, each of which represents a distinct style, from acronym to slogan to Biblical quote.

Full access to the column is paywalled for three months. Here’s an excerpt:

 

The Carpetbagger vs. The Projectionist

The Academy Award nominations were announced this week, which gives me an excuse to finally write about something I’ve been thinking about for a while: the name of the New York Times awards-season column.

The column was launched as a blog in 2005; its original author was David Carr, and its original name was The Carpetbagger. Its purpose was (and remains) “to cover the film world and give viewers a peek into how celebrity news is made, on and off the red carpet,” as a Times press release put it. Carr was replaced in 2009 by Melena Ryzik, in 2014 by Cara Buckley, and in 2018 by Kyle Buchanan, who remains the column’s lead writer. (Carr died in 2015. The column now appears in print as well as online.)

That Carpetbagger title always puzzled and troubled me, because the word has such a fraught history. (More about that in a minute.) So it was a relief to learn, in November 2020, that the column was getting a new name. And it was a surprise to learn, at last, the significance of the original title. (I’d missed the explanation when it was originally published.)

New writing: Chaplin's "City Lights" as you were meant to hear it

I took a break from creating names and writing about names to write about something else I care about: silent film.

Read “CITY LIGHTS: The Little Tramp Meets the Orchestra.” It’s about Charlie Chaplin’s 1931 silent masterpiece and what was involved in bringing it to Oakland’s Art Deco Paramount Theatre for one night only, with live accompaniment by the Oakland Symphony. 

Virginia Cherrill and Charlie Chaplin in City Lights. © Roy Export Company, courtesy of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival

 

The story—which has lots of fun extras, including a clip from City Lights and a reproduction of the original 1931 pressbook—is my first published piece for the delightful EatDrinkFilms, whose publisher, Gary Meyer, is the co-founder of the Landmark movie chain and the founder of the Telluride Film Festival. The man knows his movies, and it was an honor to work with him.

Don't look!

The “disaster comedy” Don’t Look Up opens December 10 in theaters and comes to Netflix on December 24. Directed by Adam McKay (Vice, The Big Short) it features what Variety, in a pan, calls “a galaxy full of stars” and an all-too-plausible premise: “Two low-level astronomers must go on a giant media tour to warn mankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth.”

Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Cate Blanchett, Mark Rylance…

 

Does the title have a familiar ring? It should: Hollywood has been fond of “don’t-look” titles for more than half a century. In chronological order: