When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked at 1935, it gave its Best Picture award to Mutiny on the Bounty. That's an excellent movie, and it's close to the top of my list. But another picture is even better:
1. The Bride of Frankenstein
Directed by James Whale
Written by William Hurlbut and John L. Balderston
A young scientist named Frankenstein feels torn between a conventional marriage and a same-sex liaison with his mentor, an old queen named Pretorius. The latter persuades the protagonist to reproduce with him through unnatural means. Upon succeeding, Pretorius proclaims himself "the bride of Frankenstein." Careless viewers assume he's referring to the couple's creation.
2. Mutiny on the Bounty
Directed by Frank Lloyd
Written by Talbot Jennings, Jules Furthman, and Carey Wilson, from a novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
Revolution on the high seas.
3. Top Hat
Directed by Mark Sandrich
Written by Allan Scott, Dwight Taylor, Ben Holmes, and Ralph Spence
"You mean to sit there and tell me that that girl slapped your face in front of all those people for nothing?" "Well, what would you have done? Sold tickets?"
4. Ruggles of Red Gap
Directed by Leo McCarey
Written by Walter DeLeon, Harlan Thompson, and Humphrey Pearson, from a novel by Harry Leon Wilson
The first great comedy western.
5. The 39 Steps
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by Charles Bennett and Ian Hay, from a novel by John Buchan
Hitchcock wouldn't perfect the lightly comic conspiracy movie til he made The Lady Vanishes, but I think it's fair to say that this is where he mastered it.
6. A Night at the Opera
Directed by Sam Wood
Written by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind
The taming of the Marx Brothers begins here, but in this case the film is so funny that you barely notice. Later, alas, that will change.
7. The Good Fairy
Directed by William Wyler
Written by Preston Sturges
If I just wrote "Frank Morgan delivers Preston Sturges' lines," that would be self-recommending, right?
8. Toni
Directed by Jean Renoir
Written by Renoir and Carl Einstein, from a story by Andre Levert
Neorealism was born in Italy in the 1940s, yet somehow Renoir made a neorealist film in France in the 1930s. Go figure.
9. Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life
Directed by Fred Waller
Written by Milton Hockey and Fred Rath
I know that I just listed Messeurs Waller, Hockey, and Rath, but the real auteur here is Duke Ellington.
10. Scenes of City Life
Written and directed by Yuan Muzhi
The only film on this list to feature a future member of the Gang of Four.
Honorable mentions:
11. Happiness (Aleksandr Medvedkin)
12. La Bandera (Julien Duvivier)
13. Sazen Tange and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo (Sadao Yamanaka)
14. A Colour Box (Len Lye)
15. Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz)
16. The Hyp-Nut-Tist (Dave Fleischer)
17. The Magic Atlas (George Pal)
18. The Devil is a Woman (Josef von Sternberg)
19. Les Berceaux (Dimitri Kirsanoff)
20. The Black Room (Roy William Neill)
Let's give a shoutout as well to Busby Berkeley's Gold Diggers of 1935. If this had consisted of nothing but the "Lullaby of Broadway" sequence, it would have made the top 10. But even with all the filler—a.k.a. "the plot"—it's still good fun. The film is frequently funny, and you have to appreciate a Gold Diggers movie that fully deserves its title: Every character here who isn't already rich is trying to scam their way into riches, with only Dick Powell displaying a scruple or two. And the rich ones aren't always above digging for a little more gold themselves.
Speaking of Dick Powell, let's also give a shoutout to Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle's take on A Midsummer Night's Dream: a picture for people who like high camp in their high art. They say Powell wasn't sure what all his lines in the movie meant—and whether or not that's ideal for appreciating Shakespeare, it certainly makes for a memorable sort of entertainment.
Of the films of 1935 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Eternal Mask.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked at 1945, it gave its Best Picture award to Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend. That is by no means a bad movie, but it manages on the one hand to feel heavy-handed while on the other hand bowdlerizing its source material. I think it's one of Wilder's weaker efforts.
1. I Know Where I'm Going!
Written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
A romantic comedy with something pagan simmering beneath it.
2. Ivan the Terrible, Part One
Written and directed by Sergei Eisenstein
Stalin had an infamously ambivalent attitude toward this film and its sequel: He endorsed the first installment, then suppressed the second when he realized the parallels to his career weren't so flattering after all. Both pictures are deliberately, grandly overstylized, like an opera or a superhero comic.
3. Scarlet Street
Directed by Fritz Lang
Written by Dudley Nichols, from a play by Andre Mouezy-Eon and a novel by Georges De La Fouchardiere
"Who do you think you are? My guardian angel?" "Not me, honey. I lost those wings a long time ago."
4. Open City
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
Written by Sergio Amidei and Federico Fellini
A ground-eye view of the Resistance.
5. Isle of the Dead
Directed by Mark Robson
Written by Josef Mischel and Ardel Wray
As is often the case with Val Lewton's horror pictures, this illustrates the Thomas Theorem: "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."
6. Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
Directed by Robert Bresson
Written by Bresson and Jean Cocteau
Apparently, if you combine Cocteau with Bresson you get a Buñuel melodrama.
7. The Spiral Staircase
Directed by Robert Siodmak
Written by Mel Dinelli, from a novel by Ethel Lina White
Siodmak pumped out a bunch of atmospheric noirs in the ‘40s. An awful lot of them hold up well.
8. The Picture of Dorian Gray
Directed by Albert Lewin
Written by Lewin, from a novel by Oscar Wilde
Wilde inspired so many bad movies—delicate, middlebrow piles of reverence whose creators never forgot they were adapting a canonized Great Author. It's a pleasure when someone actually does justice to one of his works.
9. Children of Paradise
Directed by Marcel Carne
Written by Jacques Prevert
"Novelty is as old as the hills."
10. Detour
Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer
Written by Martin Goldsmith, from his novel
I like the theory that this whole delirious tale is one man's dubious alibi for some crimes he really did commit, and that the film's inconsistencies and glitches are actually just the holes in his story.
Honorable mentions:
11. Fallen Angel (Otto Preminger)
12. The Body Snatcher (Robert Wise)
13. My Name is Julia Ross (Joseph H. Lewis)
14. Draftee Daffy (Bob Clampett)
15. Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz)
16. Le Vampire (Jean Painleve)
17. Swing Shift Cinderella (Tex Avery)
18. Wonder Man (H. Bruce Humberstone)
19. The Screwy Truant (Tex Avery)
20. The Wicked Lady (Leslie Arliss)
Plus a shout-out to the concerto sequence in Hangover Square.
Of the films of 1945 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Bells of St. Mary's.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked at 1955, it gave its Best Picture award to Marty, a film that's pleasant but hardly great. I prefer these:
1. One Froggy Evening
Directed by Chuck Jones
Written by Michael Maltese
This feels like folklore, doesn't it? The legend of the singing frog?
2. The Trouble with Harry
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by John Michael Hayes, from a novel by Jack Trevor Story
The most appealing portrait of rural life that I've ever seen onscreen, which may say more about me than it says about the movie.
3. Smiles of a Summer Night
Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman
The phrase "life-affirming Bergman comedy" may sound about as plausible as “Theo Von's four-hour Shakespearean drama." But that—the Bergman comedy, not the Von epic—is nonetheless what this is.
4. The Night of the Hunter
Directed by Charles Laughton
Written by James Agee, from a novel by Davis Grubb
"Ah, little lad, you're staring at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand?"
5. Kiss Me Deadly
Directed by Robert Aldrich
Written by A.I. Bezzerides, from a novel by Mickey Spillane
Cold War noir.
6. Diabolique
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
Written by Clouzot, Jerome Geronimi, Frederic Grendel, and Rene Masson, from a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac
The Hitchcockian thriller that inspired Columbo and, less happily, a terrible remake with Sharon Stone.
7. East of Eden
Directed by Elia Kazan
Written by Paul Osborn, from a novel by John Steinbeck
"I'm not my brother's keeper."
8. Pather Panchali
Directed by Satyajit Ray
Written by Ray and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, from a novel by Bandyopadhyay
Another portrait of rural life. It doesn't have much in common with The Trouble with Harry.
9. The Man from Laramie
Directed by Anthony Mann
Written by Philip Yordan and Frank Burt, from a story by Thomas T. Flynn
Lear in the old west.
10. Rebel Without a Cause
Directed by Nicholas Ray
Written by Stewart Stern and Irving Shulman, from a story by Ray
Forget all the vague vibes that have gathered around this movie's memory—the James Dean posters, the '50s teen nostalgia—and approach it with fresh eyes. By the time Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo take over that deserted mansion, you should see just how much stranger and more interesting this is than its reputation.
Honorable mentions:
11. Ordet (Carl Dreyer)
12. Rififi (Jules Dassin)
13. Water-Mirror of Granada (José Val del Omar)
14. Mama Don't Allow (Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson)
15. Cellbound (Tex Avery)
16. Hare-Brush (Friz Freleng)
17. The Criminal Life of Archibaldo De La Cruz (Luis Buñuel)
18. Gumbasia (Art Clokey)
19. Killer's Kiss (Stanley Kubrick)
20. The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick)
Best beginning that a film can't live up to: Sure, The Tall Men is good. But it isn't nearly as good as the movie we seem to be watching instead for the first 13 minutes.
Of the films of 1955 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Moonfleet.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1965, it gave its Best Picture award to The Sound of Music. It's easy to denigrate that movie, but I'm willing to defend it. I'm not going to put it on my list, though:
1. Repulsion
Directed by Roman Polanski
Written by Polanski, Gerard Brach, and David Stone
The most claustrophobic and horrific of Polanki's claustrophobic horror movies.
2. The Saragossa Manuscript
Directed by Wojciech Has
Written by Tadeusz Kwiatkowski, from a novel by Jan Potocki
This makes Inception look like Teletubbies.
3. The Loved One
Directed by Tony Richardson
Written by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood, from a novel by Evelyn Waugh
The Duck Soup of pet cemetery movies.
4. King Rat
Directed by Bryan Forbes
Written by Forbes, from a novel by James Clavell
"If you don't want to eat it, you can sit and watch. It's a free prison!"
5. It Happened Here
Written and directed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo
An alternate history in which Britain falls under Nazi rule. A story about life under occupation, and the ease with which people can become collaborators.
6. A Game with Stones
Written and directed by Jan Švankmajer
The stones of the title arrange themselves into simple shapes, into more intricate patterns, and eventually into human beings who swallow each other. If that doesn't sound good enough to belong on one of these lists, well, it isn't easy to describe the plot of a Dalí painting either.
7. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Directed by Martin Ritt
Written by Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper, from a novel by John Le Carré
In Le Carré's bleak tale, the intelligence agencies of the Cold War aren't entirely separate—more like competing forces within one vast corrupting system.
8. Mickey One
Directed by Arthur Penn
Written by Alan Surgal
This prototype for the conspiracy thrillers of the '70s is the most surreal mob movie I've seen.
9. Le Bonheur
Written and directed by Agnès Varda
Somewhere between Éric Rohmer's moral tales and The Stepford Wives, you'll find this horror film disguised as a romance.
10. Time Piece
Written and directed by Jim Henson
You could make a case that this is more Joycean than the film at #20.
Honorable mentions:
11. Simon of the Desert (Luis Buñuel)
12. Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles)
13. The Shop on Main Street (Ján Kadár, Elmar Klos)
14. For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone)
15. Tokyo Olympiad (Kon Ichikawa)
16. Looking for Mushrooms (Bruce Conner)
17. Major Dundee (Sam Peckinpah)
18. The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet)
19. The Return of Ringo (Duccio Tessari)
20. Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (Mary Ellen Bute)
Of the films of 1965 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Red Line 7000.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1975, it gave its Best Picture award to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. That made it only as far as #4 on my list, but there's no shame in that—there's a movie in the honorable mentions this time that would've made the top five in a less stellar year.
1. Nashville
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Joan Tewkesbury
Some of my friends dismiss Nashville as a smug left-coaster giving a raspberry to flyover country. To them I point out that the two of the least sympathetic characters in the whole vast cast are the British reporter and the L.A. rocker. Altman's scorn is nothing if not universal.
2. Seven Beauties
Written and directed by Lina Wertmuller
A pitch-dark comedy about sex, fascism, domination, submission, cruelty, conformity, and machismo.
3. Welfare
Written and directed by Frederic Wiseman
The great epic of American bureaucracy.
4. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Directed by Miloš Forman
Written by Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben, from a novel by Ken Kesey
People call this a countercultural movie, but that could mean more than one thing. The counterculture had its McMurphys, and it turned out to have some budding Nurse Ratcheds too.
5. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones
Written by Gilliam, Jones, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, and Michael Palin
Years of inept quotation by teenage geeks affecting bad English accents can't smother the comic genius of this movie.
6. Love and Death
Written and directed by Woody Allen
"Boris, you're a coward!" "Yes, but I'm a militant coward."
7. Dog Day Afternoon
Directed by Sidney Lumet
Written by Frank Pierson
Best bank-robbery movie ever.
8. Night Moves
Directed by Arthur Penn
Written by Alan Sharp
"Do you ask these questions because you want to know the answer or is it just something you think a detective should do?"
9. Picnic at Hanging Rock
Directed by Peter Weir
Written by Cliff Green, from a novel by Joan Lindsay
Even when nothing seems to be happening, there's a pulsating dread. Like a horror movie where the horror is always just offscreen.
10. Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer
Directed by Thom Andersen
The prehistory of the movies.
Honorable mentions:
11. Jaws (Steven Spielberg)
12. Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
13. Grey Gardens (Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer)
14. Organism (Hilary Harris)
15. The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston)
16. Shivers (David Cronenberg)
17. Posse (Kirk Douglas)
18. Monsieur Pointu (André Leduc, Bernard Longpré)
19. Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack)
20. The Magic Flute (Ingmar Bergman)
How good a year for movies was 1975? That top 10 list features the best Wiseman film I've seen, the best Forman film I've seen, the best Gilliam (as director, at least), the best Allen, the best Lumet, the best Penn, and the best Weir. And down in the honorable mentions, the best Spielberg and Pollack are lurking about.
Of the films of 1975 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Gangsters.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked at 1985, it gave its Best Picture award to Out of Africa, which is basically a coffee-table book masquerading as a story. These are all better:
1. Brazil
Directed by Terry Gilliam
Written by Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown
Monty Python's 1984.
2. Crime Wave
Written and directed by John Paizs
Confusingly, there is another movie called Crimewave that also came out in 1985. That one, unfortunately, is not very good, even though Sam Raimi made it with some help from the Coen brothers. This one is great, though—an absurdist dark comedy whose place on the Weird Canada spectrum falls somewhere between Guy Maddin and The Kids in the Hall. (And indeed, Maddin and Paizs were in the Winnipeg Film Group at the same time, and Paizs went on to direct some Kids in the Hall sketches. It all ties together, man.)
3. Ran
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, and Masato Ide
The story of King Lear predates the Bard, so it shouldn't seem that odd that the best film the play inspired doesn't include a single line of Shakespeare.
4. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Phil Hartman, Paul Reubens, and Michael Varhol
When I watched this in my teens, I thought it was pretty funny. Thirty years later I saw it again, and I realized it was a goddamn masterpiece.
5. Mix Up ou Meli-melo
Directed by Françoise Romand
A gloriously bizarre documentary—bizarre in content, bizarre in form—about what happened when two English families brought the wrong babies home from the hospital.
6. Vagabond
Written and directed by Agnès Varda
Not a simple celebration of a free spirit, and not a disdainful condemnation of a marginal life either.
7. After Hours
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Joseph Minion
Other critics can weigh this picture's place in Scorsese's filmography. I'll just point out that it's the best movie Cheech and Chong were ever involved with.
8. Louie Bluie
Directed by Terry Zwigoff
This is a charming documentary about the bluesman, artist, and porn aficionado Howard Armstrong. It is also utterly fake: The comfortable living room that it seems to have been filmed in is actually a movie set, some of the people reminiscing with Armstrong barely know him, and the director had to persuade his subjects to play the early string-band songs he loved rather than the more complex music they preferred. I go back and forth on whether all that artifice is a flaw or simply another hidden dimension to the story.
9. Static
Directed by Mark Romanek
Written by Romanek and Keith Gordon
Before he was shooting videos for Bowie, Beck, and Johnny Cash, Romanek made this terrific indie flick about a man who believes he's built a machine that lets you peek into heaven.
10. Return to Oz
Directed by Walter Murch
Written by Murch and Gill Dennis
This didn't find an audience at first, probably because most people's expectation when hearing the phrase "sequel to The Wizard of Oz“ is not "freaky, scary movie that strongly implies Dorothy is insane." Fortunately, the picture eventually attracted the underground following it deserves.
Honorable mentions:
11. Mishima (Paul Schrader)
12. Fool for Love (Robert Altman)
13. The Gospel at Colonus (Kirk Browning)
14. Taipei Story (Edward Yang)
15. Come and See (Elem Klimov)
16. Prizzi's Honor (John Huston)
17. Fluke (Emily Breer)
18. Chain Letters (Mark Rappaport)
19. The Epic of Gilgamesh (Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay)
20. Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis)
Of the films of 1985 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Mala Noche.
When the Motion Picture Academy looked at 1995, it gave its Best Picture award to Braveheart, which is not, alas, a sitcom where Mel Gibson opens an inn in Vermont. It does have some good bits, but I think these movies are better:
1. Safe
Written and directed by Todd Haynes
A parable about an egoless person who consumes her life rather than living it, even—or especially—when she turns her back on "consumerism."
2. Smoke
Directed by Wayne Wang
Written by Paul Auster
An ode to connections, coincidence, and place. Probably the best thing Paul Auster ever wrote.
3. Twelve Monkeys
Directed by Terry Gilliam
Written by David and Janet Peoples, from a story by Chris Marker
The shot of the giraffes galloping through the city is one of my favorite moments in any movie.
4. Maborosi
Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
Written by Yoshihisa Ogita, from a novel by Teru Miyamoto
Tricks of the light.
5. Toy Story
Directed by John Lasseter
Written by Joss Whedon, Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen, and Alec Sokolow, from a story by Lasseter, Stanton, Pete Docter, and Joe Ranft
"This isn't flying. This is falling with style."
6. The City of Lost Children
Directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Written by Caro, Jeunet, Gilles Adrien, and Guillaume Laurant
If Twelve Monkeys was 1995's best semi-surrealist science-fiction saga, this is the film for viewers who prefer all that without a "semi" prefixed to it.
7. Shanghai Triad
Directed by Zhang Yimou
Written by Bi Feiyu, from a novel by Li Xiao
A gangster movie in an opium haze.
8. Funny Bones
Directed by Peter Chelsom
Written by Chelsom and Peter Flannery
Jerry Lewis's best performance. And no, I'm not the sort of person who thinks the phrase "Jerry Lewis's best performance" is a punchline.
9. Get Shorty
Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld
Written by Scott Frank, from a novel by Elmore Leonard
It's easy to mock so many of the movies that tried to surf the jetstream of Pulp Fiction. But this one's good.
10. Welcome to the Dollhouse
Written and directed by Todd Solondz
"All of junior high school sucks. High school's better....They'll call you names, but not as much to your face."
Honorable mentions:
11. La Ceremonie (Claude Chabrol)
12. Tierra (Julio Medem)
13. Whisper of the Heart (Yoshifumi Kondō)
14. Electronic Superhighway (Nam June Paik)
15. The Drivetime (Antero Alli)
16. Clueless (Amy Heckerling)
17. A Close Shave (Nick Park)
18. Underground (Emir Kusturica)
19. Casino (Martin Scorsese)
20. The Wife (Tom Noonan)
Full disclosure: I have a bit role in #15. But frankly, speaking as a critic, I think the movie would have been better without me.
A bonus Best Documentary prize goes to Nick Broomfield for Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam. And a bonus Best Mockumentary prize goes to Peter Jackson and Costa Botes for Forgotten Silver.
Of the films of 1995 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Salaam Cinema.
When the Motion Picture Academy looked at 2005, it gave its Best Picture award to Paul Haggis's heavy-handed Crash. The only good thing about that choice is the entertaining possibility that it prompted some people to rent David Cronenberg's Crash by mistake. Here are 20 of the many, many better movies made that year:
1. Caché
Written and directed by Michael Haneke
I'll warn you upfront: This picture doesn't come out and tell you the solution to the mystery that drives its plot. But sharp-eyed viewers ought to be able to piece it together, and in any event the solution isn't really the point.
2. Live and Become
Directed by Radu Mihăileanu
Written by Mihăileanu and Alain-Michel Blanc
This would make an interesting double feature with Europa Europa.
3. Corpse Bride
Directed by Tim Burton and Mike Johnson
Written by John August, Pamela Pettler, and Caroline Thompson
In which a spider sings that life is "just a temporary state/Which is cured very quickly when we meet our fate."
4. The Dying Gaul
Directed by Craig Lucas
Written by Lucas, from his play
"You can do anything you want, as long as you don't call it what it is."
5. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Directed by Nick Park and Steve Box
Written by Park, Box, Bob Baker, and Mark Burton
When this got the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, I got sucked into a weird online debate with someone who didn't like the movie because he was convinced it had a hidden anti-gun subtext. To me that's like claiming an Elmer Fudd cartoon has a hidden anti-gun subtext. At any rate, this is as clever and funny as a good Elmer Fudd cartoon, and that's pretty high praise.
6. Deadwood 2
Written by David Milch, Jody Worth, Elizabeth Sarnoff, Ted Mann, Victoria Morrow, Steve Shill, Regina Corrado, Sara Hess, and Bryan McDonald
Directed by Shill, Ed Bianchi, Alan Taylor, Gregg Fienberg, Michael Almereyda, Ted Van Patten, and Dan Minahan
In a year without The Wire, this became the best thing on HBO.
7. Hustle & Flow
Written and directed by Craig Brewer
I'd like the American conservative movement a lot better if it had embraced this as a loving, textured tribute to a regional culture instead of damning it for being a rapping-pimp movie.
8. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Directed by Tommy Lee Jones
Written by Guillermo Arriaga
Faulkner on la frontera.
9. Noroi: The Curse
Directed by Kôji Shiraishi
Written by Shiraishi and Naoyuki Yokota
Proof that a found-footage horror flick doesn't have to be derivative or dumb.
10. Veronica Mars
Written by Rob Thomas, Jed Seidel, Diane Ruggiero, Dayna Lynne North, Phil Klemmer, Aury Wallington, Russell Smith, John Enbom, and Carolyn Murray
Directed by Mark Piznarski, Harry Winer, Michael Fields, Nick Gomez, Sarah Pia Anderson, Nick Marck, Guy Bee, Marcos Siega, John Kretchmer, David Barrett, and Steve Gomer
Forget High School Musical; I'll take high school noir.
Honorable mentions:
11. Paradise Now (Hany Abu-Assad)
12. Sin City (Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller)
13. Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog)
14. The Thick of It (Armando Iannucci)
15. Nine Lives (Rodrigo García)
16. Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan)
17. Forty Shades of Blue (Ira Sachs)
18. Happy Endings (Don Roos)
19. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu)
20. Rize (David LaChapelle)
Of the films of 2005 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Election. No, not the one with Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick—that one already topped my list for 1999. I mean the Johnnie To movie from Hong Kong.
This viral clip recuts a few dozen classic Hollywood musicals into an unofficial video for "Uptown Funk." It's over in under five minutes and it barely even has a title, but I think I like it even better than That's Entertainment!
Honorable mentions:
11. The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu)
12. Florida Man (Sean Dunne)
13. Better Call Saul (Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould)
14. A Magical Substance Flows Into Me (Jumana Manna)
15. Mr. Robot season_1.0 (Sam Esmail)
16. The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos)
17. Veep 4 (Armando Iannucci)
18. Weather Service (Kris Straub)
19. Thailand Moment (Les Blank)
20. The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson)
Note: Better Call Saul, Mr. Robot, and Veep are all TV shows, so the people in parentheses after those titles are showrunners, not directors. Though each of those folks directed at least one episode too, so I guess they're double auteurs.
Of the films of 2015 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Thoughts That Once We Had.
Horowitz either didn't realize he was going to be debating someone (as opposed to giving a speech) or didn't realize he was going to be debating a libertarian (as opposed to a conventional liberal or leftist), and a few weeks before the event he called me to try to get me to pull out. Debating someone who might be construed as another member of the political right was not on his agenda; he didn't like how that might look in the media. (This point was moot, since as far as I know there was no press coverage.) He proposed instead a "private" debate, to be held before a select audience either after or before his public speech.
The head of the college libertarian club refused to co-sponsor such an affair and instead proposed a slightly revamped version of the initial idea, in which the debate would be billed as a "discussion" and the topic would be broadened from the Academic Bill of Rights to academic freedom in general. Horowitz agreed and so did I, though it left me a bit uncertain as to just what I was going to be addressing when I spoke.
The next day I privately circulated an account of the evening. After Horowitz passed away, I dug it up to refresh my memory of what had happened. I did not post it here immediately, because it didn't feel like the sort of thing to publish right after a man died. But now more than a week has passed, and so—in the interests of the historical record, and also because it's kind of funny—here it is. I have fixed a few typos but otherwise have not changed a thing:
* * * * *
He very nearly didn't show up. The student who picked him up in DC had his car break down on the way to UMBC. Apparently someone else was following in the car behind him (part of the crack Horowitz security team no doubt), but despite this he was still delayed. At one point we got a call about him from a police station, Lord knows why. But he did finally turn up, half an hour late, and delivered a rambling talk to the forty-odd attendees in which he said (I paraphrase) "I'm going to show you how you're not getting both sides of the story. I'm going to give you some conservative views that I'm sure you're not getting in the classroom." He then gave some garden-variety libertarian-conservative comments about the inner city, DDT and malaria, and one other topic that I've already forgotten. When it was my turn to speak the first thing I did was ask how many people *had* heard these views. As I expected, nearly everyone raised their hands. (I had asked the heads of the campus Republican and libertarian clubs before the talk what the state of intellectual diversity on campus was, and they both said, "Actually, it's pretty good.") If I won the debate, it happened right then.
Or maybe I won it way before the talk began. At the end of the evening, a couple of the College Republicans who organized the thing complained to me about what a prima donna Horowitz had been. They also thanked me for actually sticking to the topic when I spoke.
But it was a civil discussion, and we agreed about a number of things. (It's hard not to when so much of his speech is given over to talking about how inner city schools are mismanaged and how banning DDT hurts people in Africa.) The main difference between us was that he seems to think it's inappropriate for a college professor to ever spend time presenting a political point of view in class. He's also opposed to putting political cartoons on doors. Someone asked him about his, um, polemicist streak, and I took the opportunity to razz him about an article he'd written on an antiwar march that he had headlined "100,000 Communists March On Washington To Give Aid and Comfort to Saddam Hussein." (I also asked him if he still wanted to add political and religious diversity to Title IX, and he said he'd given up on the idea.)
The most bizarre part of the evening was dinner, though. Mostly the conversation was dominated by an elderly Libertarian activist who's a fan of both Horowitz and Reason and who, like most Libertarians, loves to talk. (I didn't mind this, as I wasn't really up to making a lot of conversation with my sparring partner.) But there were other exchanges as well. Horowitz had said during his speech that ordinarily—when his car doesn't break down—he comes to campus early and spends hours interviewing students about the state of affairs on campus. I hope his interview method doesn't ordinarily consist of trying to browbeat students into seeing that they're being discriminated against—why, how much money do you get compared to the campus gay and lesbian group?
"Actually," says the libertarian, "we get more." And he begins to explain how student fees are distributed on campus, and to suggest that the culture of UMBC isn't much like that of UCLA or the University of Wisconsin.
"I'm shocked," says Horowitz. "That's very rare." But then he seems to forget what he's been told, because he goes back to his main theme of the evening: the fact that the one administrator at the university who attended the debate didn't approach him to introduce himself afterwards. This was an insult, he kept saying—not just to him, but to all conservative or libertarian students on campus. "If Angela Davis were here, this room would be packed with deans."
"I don't think it would," says a student. "It's not a very political campus."
"Oh, it would," says Horowitz. "You don't see how you're being insulted. You don't see how all this is connected. I go to campuses all the time, but I'm almost NEVER invited by the administration, and the administrators almost NEVER introduce themselves to me. I could make three times, FOUR times as much as I do now if I were a leftist."
There was also a loud conversation at dinner about just what was good and bad for black people in America. The only black person present was the lady silently collecting our dishes. I abstained from that one.
I'm supposed to speak today on the question, "Does radio have to be lousy?" Before I can answer that question, though, I should probably address another one: "Is radio lousy to begin with?"
The answer to that is going to vary from person to person, since we all listen to the radio for different reasons and since we all like different sorts of programming. Furthermore, it's not enough to say that most radio is lousy, because the important point isn't whether we like everything that comes out over the dial. One consequence of great diversity is that whatever you like will probably seem to be drowning in a sea of trash. What's important is for the stuff you want to be out there and for you to know where and how to find it.
That said, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that, yes, radio really is lousy—or at least a lot lousier than it could be and should be. I wrote a book about this, and the closest I've gotten so far to a negative review came from the conservative magazine Chronicles, which suggested that maybe there's more choices on the radio band than I was willing to admit. I quote:
"A survey of the average metropolitan area will yield broadcasts in Spanish, Korean, and Russian; sports talk shows; Gregorian chants; country and new country; classical music; National Public Radio; soft rock, hard rock, jazz, blues, oldies, classic rock, and Christian rock; fundamentalist preachers railing against all rock music as a tool of the devil; evangelical answer men telling listeners that they can't lose their salvation; Jewish geologists admonishing callers to sober up and take responsibility for their pitiful lives; call-in sex-advice shows; and outraged Republicans and libertarians whipping their listeners into a froth over Democrats, moral outrages, and Big Brother."
Now, that's an extraordinary list, in part because it describes an "average metropolitan area" that doesn't exist. Most cities do not have a Russian-language station or a program devoted to Gregorian chants, and in a lot of places you can't even get jazz or blues—or if you do, it's only for a few hours a week. There is a lot of variety out there: There's around 11,000 stations on the AM and FM dials, with dozens of formats for listeners to choose from; and even if there's no Russian station in your listening area, if you're in a big city there's a good chance that there'll be at least one station that offers non-English, non-Spanish programming. But you'd be shocked at how little variety there is within those stations. I went back to my old high school in North Carolina late last year, to help some students put a station on the air. We toured some of the local broadcasters, and the program director at one of them, an oldies station in Durham, was just beaming when he told us how big his music library was. Most places only have about 400 songs to pick from, he told us, but at this station, there were 1200 songs.
Later on, we dropped by the Duke college station, which is very good—a bunch of kids playing interesting and unusual music and doing a good job of it. I mentioned what the oldies guy had told us, and his jaw just dropped. That station—a tiny little place—had thousands of LPs and CDs crammed into it. The idea of limiting themselves to just 1200 songs was just completely foreign to them. But unfortunately, stations like that are fairly rare. For the most part, what we see out there is diversity without depth: an ether carved into a hundred niches, each of which is only an inch deep.
There's an even bigger problem with the claim that American radio listeners have enough diversity. It's true that in every American city there's a number of formats to choose from. But in every city, there's something else as well: a deafening silent sound of all the things that aren't being broadcast.
I'm going to give you samples of those things.
* * * * * * * * * *
play Wilmouth Houdini: "Uncle Jo' Gimme Mo'!"
We’ll start with something old. This was calypso in the days before Belafonte—the Arhoolie label, which put this out, collects all sorts of amazing folk music of the past and present, along with various ethnic flavors of pop. Most of it won't turn up on the radio.
play Bhundu Boys: "Ring of Fire"
African music. Anyone recognize this song? It's a cover of a Johnny Cash song—from Zimbabwe, where Dolly Parton and Don Williams are very popular. There’s very little African music on American radio, and what there is can't possibly reveal all the variety of music from that continent—a case in point.
play Marius Cultier: "Ouelele"
Where the Bhundu Boys were mixing Zimbabwean music with American country-western, this fellow from French Antilla was mixing the local sounds with American funk and jazz.
By the way, what I'm doing right now is itself something that's increasingly rare on the radio: I'm actually telling you what you're listening to.
play Orishas: "Represent"
Another combination. In this case, it's Cuban hip hop—or Cuban-American, anyway. I actually did hear this on the radio, in fact that's how I found out about the record, but it was a tiny college station in California—much as I love the Buena Vista Social Club CDs and what they've done for Cuban music, the way it's been presented, especially on public radio and public TV, has given the false impression that Cuban music (and traditional music in general) are frozen in time, and that they need to be quote-unquote "preserved." I'm all for preserving the music of past, but vibrant musical traditions evolve, and part of how they evolve is by getting influenced by the other music around them, even if the results don't fit into any obvious radio formats or marketing categories.
play Wally Brill: "A Loop in Time"
This is even more unusual. A DJ took took some ancient 78 rpm records of Jewish cantors, and remixed them. You might hear stuff like this in a progressive dance club, but it's pretty unlikely you'll hear it on the radio. The thinking is that people want to dance to electronic dance music, but not listen to it in the car or anything like that. Of course, there's people who've tried it: I know a fellow, Jerry Szoka, who combined the two, by setting up an unlicensed radio station in a gay dance club he owned and broadcasting the evening's entertainment to his listeners in Ohio—he had a fair number of listeners, but eventually the FCC shut him down. We'll talk more about cases like that later on.
play Jorge Ben: "Ponta de Lança Africano"
If you recognize this song, it's probably not because you heard it on the radio. It's because it was used in an Intel commercial. These days, the people who pick music for TV ads are actually more daring than the people who pick music for radio playlists.
In case you're curious, this is a Brazilian rock song. It came out in 1976, though most Americans didn't get a chance to hear it until David Byrne put it on a collection of Brazialian pop he pulled together in 1989.
play Muslimgauze: "Romania Abuse"
I want to jump back to electronic music for a second. At least the dance stuff gets played in clubs. Music like this, which isn't really very danceable, has a very devoted audience, believe it or not. It's really flourished online, but you're not likely to hear it on the radio. Some of you might think that's a good thing, and while I like this CD, I have to admit that the chief use I've put it to is to blast it when the neighbors are being too loud. But barring this stuff from the airwaves isn't very fair to the people who like it, and more importantly, to the people who might like it if they stumbled on it while scanning through the dial but aren't exactly about to go looking for it, since they don't know it exists.
play 3Tripper: "My Unfinished Novel"
This, by contrast, is really good pop, with clever lyrics by a local band from Hawaii that releases their own music. You can order it from MP3.com. Leave aside the fact that it's not likely to be a hit in general, and consider instead the fact that it's not likely to get much airplay in Hawaii itself. There are exceptions, but the days of the "regional" hit are mostly over, at least as far as radio is concerned, which is a real shame.
play Orson Welles: "Dracula"
Radio drama is pretty much dead as well. Some public radio stations will play old serials or plays like this one, which is also available online by the way, but you can count the number of stations regularly producing new radio dramas on one hand.
play Carl Stalling: "Porky in Wackyland"
I'm just tossing this one in—it's the score to a Porky Pig short called Porky in Wackyland, one of the best short films ever made. Everybody loves this music, but heaven knows you aren't likely to hear it on the radio. In general, film music is rarely heard outside its original context, though occasionally a noncommercial station will devote a program to it. This was composed by Carl Stalling, who's regarded in some circles as one of the most creative forces in twentieth-century music.
play Soggy Bottom Boys: "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow"
This time I'm cheating: You can hear this music on the radio. It's the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou. The amazing thing is, this sold millions of copies without any radio airplay, became the best-selling country music album in the United States, finally got some airplay on TV, and still it's considered daring to play it on commercial country radio. The market is finally responding to it, as you can tell from the success of quasi-bluegrass bands like Nickel Creek, but the fact that radio was so timid, even in the face of such a big hit, tells you a lot.
Don't let public radio get away with claiming that they're the home of bluegrass and old-timey music. WAMU in Washington used to have a bluegrass format, but now it’s all-news except on the weekend, even when that means playing the exaxt same programs you can hear on another public station across town at the same time. Given that, it's possible that on balance, public radio is playing less of this kind of music now than before.
play Merle Haggard: "Bareback"
Meanwhile, bluegrass and old-timey are hardly the only kinds of country music that have had a hard time getting on the air. There's a whole movement of so-called “alternative country” music, some of it ultra-traditional and some of it crossbred with punk rock. This is arguably the most interesting and exciting music coming out today, but it's almost entirely absent from the airwaves. What's worse, onetime commercial gods of country music, like Merle Haggard, have been crammed into this category, now that most commercial country stations either ignore them completely or play only a bare handful of well-remembered hits. Haggard put out this album, If I Could Only Fly, on a small independent punk rock label the year before last. It's the best work he's done in 20 years, but it didn't get much airplay, certainly not on mainstream country radio.
* * * * * * * * * *
There's two more things you usually can't find on the radio, and in some ways they're the most unfortunate gaps. One is a station that wouldn't simply play one of the styles of music I just played for you, but would mix and match all of them in the same show. This is called "freeform," and it used to be fairly common, but now is limited to a certain number of noncommercial stations and less than 10 commercial ones. There are a number of different definitions of freeform radio out there, but they all require the DJ to pick his own records, something that's incredibly rare these days.
The other thing you usually can't find on the radio is a place for you to do what I just did: to stand in front of a microphone and be a DJ. If you want to play CDs on the air, as opposed to through a couple of loudspeakers in a hotel, you'll find that it costs a lot of money to get the government's permission. A radio dial that isn't lousy wouldn't just give us more freedom to choose among different styles of programming. It would allow us the freedom to create programming of our own.
So what do we hear on the radio instead? On some stations, you're not just going to have trouble finding DJs who pick their own records. You're going to have trouble finding DJs at all. Some of you might have seen an article in The Wall Street Journal last month about the biggest commercial radio chain, a behemoth called Clear Channel, and its efforts to propogate a format called KISS-FM. Around the country, 47 different stations with different call letters are all calling themselves KISS-FM and offering pretty much the same programming (though with some variations). On these stations, prerecorded DJs add bits of local color without ever stepping into the town that hosts the station that's broadcasting them. Clear Channel, by the way, has been trying to establish a trademark on the phrase KISS-FM, which sometimes means threatening lawsuits against other stations that call themselves KISS — except for the station that has the actual call letters KISS-FM, which isn't owned by Clear Channel and follows a different format. You'd think that if there were a trademark to be claimed, that's the station that would hold it.
Now, some people would point to KISS-FM and say, "Obviously, listeners are satisfied with this kind of radio. The market has spoken." But the market hasn't spoken, and not every listener is satisfied. For more than a decade, according to the analysts at the industry publication Duncan's American Radio, the percentage of people who listen to the radio has gone steadily down, except for one brief uptick during the talk-radio boom of the early '90s. Meanwhile, radio broadcasting is encumbered with a ton of regulatory barriers which have prevented upstart stations from coming on the air and transmitting something new. Even direct-satellite radio, which promises to tremendously increase the number of listening choices we have, is limited. The National Association of Broadcasters fought hard to prevent it from going on the air at all, and for all the new channels that are now being unveiled for those willing to pay for them, the Federal Communications Commission, under industry pressure, only granted two companies the right to engage in satellite broadcasting.
At any rate, we could have a lot more variety even on the AM and FM bands, without paying for a special satellite receiver, if only the FCC would ease up on its entry barriers. There's a lot of talk about radio deregulation these days, and that can obscure a very important point: We do not have a free market in radio broadcasting. In a free market, you could go out this afternoon, buy some equipment, and start broadcasting whatever you want, and as long as you weren't seriously interfering with someone else's signal, no one would shut you down. The technical cost of starting a low-power FM station is within most Americans' reach: anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand, depending on how elaborate a station you want to put together. The legal cost is much higher. Your startup costs are going to be $100,000 at the very least. If you get a low-power FM license, it may be less, but as I'll explain later, most Americans are in no position to get a low-power FM license.
What sorts of stations are kept off the air by these entry barriers? Would they be interesting and lively, or would they just be more of the same? It's surprisingly easy to answer that question, because for the last decade or so, a lot of people who don't have $100,000 to spare have gone on the air anyway, without the Federal Communications Commission's permission.
Now, as you might expect, some of them did programming that was of no possible interest to anyone but themselves. Here's a sample:
[play excerpt from aircheck]
I actually listened to this entire tape once. I can't imagine that anyone else has, except maybe the guy who made it. Stations like that one tend to drift off the air long before the FCC notices them—in this case, the station shut down because some of its equipment broke. The really good unlicensed stations find a niche for themselves in their communities, and stay on the air until the government asks them to cut it out. Some of them keep broadcasting even then.
Consider Human Rights Radio in Springfield, Illinois. This was started by a blind guy in a housing project, and originally, you couldn't hear it outside the boundaries of the John Hay Homes. Along with playing music and books on tape, Human Rights Radio covered local issues very intensely, especially police brutality. In January 1989, for example, after some Springfield cops beat up a boxing coach and his son, the fellow who started the station, M'banna Kantako, interviewed the victims in their hospital beds and then broadcast the tape.
Later that year, a domestic dispute turned into a hostage crisis and a hundred or so heavily armed cops showed up at the housing project. The standoff lasted for three days, and Kantako covered the whole thing live. It ended when someone started shooting, and three people from the projects were killed. Kantako investigated the standoff and the shootings, and concluded that by overreacting to the initial dispute, the police had paved the way for the deaths. He also probed the question of whether it was police bullets that had killed the three dead. Needless to say, no other local radio station, or any other media outlet, was giving these events this kind of attention.
In the early days, Kantako also trained kids from the John Hay Homes in the basics of radio production, though this project fell off when those same kids started getting harassed by teachers and the police. Eventually, the John Hay Homes were demolished, but the station is still on the air, covering issues of interest to the poor people of Springfield.
Another station: Excellent Radio, run by Charley Goodman in downtown Grover Beach, California. Only two weeks after its debut in 1995, a storm knocked down all the region’s radio towers except for Goodman’s. Charley monitored his scanner closely, passing storm news and emergency announcements along to his listeners. Not long after that, Goodman asked the city council if he could broadcast its meetings live to his listeners. After a few months, he got the go-ahead. The city attorney understood that the station had no license, but that, he felt, was a matter between it and the FCC. California’s open meetings act, on the other hand, guaranteed the station the right to cover the council.
The station's volunteers ranged from skate punks to retirees, from white hippies to Spanish-speaking cumbia DJs. There was an afternoon kids’ show called Treasure Ivan, hosted by the 1960s tunesmith Ivan Ulz, who'd written songs for the Byrds, the Four Freshmen, and several other pop groups. There was a swing show, a ska show, and a weekly helping of “pure pop for now people.” One pair of programmers started interviewing the stars of the World Wrestling Federation. And a retired teacher who'd become an environmental activist had a show called Pollutions—Solutions. Once more, the fact that the station was technically illegal didn't keep local officials from coming on her show—for members of the Planning Department, for example, to talk with their constituents about the contamination of the nearby dunes. Also, unlike Human Rights Radio, Excellent Radio maintained cordial relations with the police, who faxed it the same press releases they sent to all the other local media. The station even had a retired highway patrolman on its staff. He did a jazz show.
Some of you might remember an article Michael Lynch wrote for Reason a couple of years ago about pirate radio in Florida. (Pirate radio is another name for unlicensed radio. Some unlicensed broadcasters regard it as a term of abuse, but others have embraced it.) One of the stations Michael mentioned was Hot 97.7, based in Liberty City, better known as the Miami ghetto. This station was run by a fellow named Brindley Marshall, a.k.a. Bo the Lover. Bo used to be a gangster; back in 1984, he even managed to smuggle a gun into a courtroom. After five years in prison, though, he turned his life around, and became one of the most popular disc jockeys on the Miami club circuit. Hot 97.7 first went on the air in 1996, broadcasting from a warehouse called the Pure Funk Playhouse. At first it was a low-power station, but by the time the FCC shut it down, it was transmitting at 2,000 watts and covering all of Miami and then some.
Now, Liberty City is the poorest, most run-down part of Dade County. Jobs are scarce there, litter covers each corner, drug abuse is rampant, and crime is high. The Pure Funk Playhouse is only a few blocks from the dumpster where a little girl was killed in the crossfire between rival gangs. For a while, the local cops set up a camera in an abandoned bank across the street, to keep an eye on the young blacks who’d hang out in front of the Playhouse all day long. According to Bo the Lover, "They were sure we were fronting for something. They kept sending undercover cops over here, trying to buy crack." But the cops always came away empty-handed. Unlike some of Miami’s pirate stations, Hot 97.7 would never, say, broadcast where to score some coke or where someone had spotted some cops. They always told pushers to stay off their corner, and after that initial period of mistrust, the local police decided that the people in the warehouse weren’t just real DJs, but were real allies in the fight to keep kids away from drug abuse and gangs. Michael and I talked with the beat cop on Bo’s block, Sgt. Frank Dean, and he was full of praise for Bo. Naturally, he wouldn’t condone broadcasting without a license, but he actually had nothing but kind words for the station and its founder.
In a neighborhood where there just isn’t much to do, Hot 97.7 gave people a creative outlet. It also broadcast community announcements, and not just bland stuff like a local events calendar. Once, when a kid ran away from home, the police told his parents that they’d have to wait a day before they started searching. So Mom and Dad went to Bo’s radio station, the call went out over the air, and by the end of the day the runaway had been found. Bo's station also aired some talk shows. Kat, a teen mother turned community activist, hosted a weekly program called Underground Teen Talk, in which service providers and others took teenagers’ calls about pregnancy, HIV, and related issues.
But the most interesting thing about Hot 97.7 might be how popular it was. This wasn’t unusual for pirate stations in the Miami area, though it caught a lot of record companies by surprise. The companies kept wondering why some of their releases were selling well in Miami without getting any local airplay. Then they found out that a lot of stations were playing them—it’s just that those stations weren’t licensed. According to Vibe magazine, Big Pun’s album Capital Punishment topped Miami’s Soundscan charts weeks before any of the legal stations in town were playing it. After that, record companies routinely sent their new releases to the pirates.
Needless to say, Miami's licensed stations wanted the FCC to shut their unlicensed competition down. At the same time, though, some of them started copying their illicit competitors. So in 1996, when a Liberty City pirate called The Bomb started making waves, WEDR—that's a legal station—started a show called The Bomb and hired a former pirate DJ to host it. And in early 1998, when some fully licensed businessmen launched a Tampa station called WILD 98.7 FM, their disc jockeys claimed to be kids broadcasting illegally from a boat in Tampa Bay. Even after the hoax was exposed, some listeners still thought they were real pirates—just unaccountably lame ones.
So that's a small selection of the stations that have gone on the air without the FCC's permission. There's a lot of others, ranging from Panthers to Promise Keepers. There have been left-wing stations, right-wing stations, Hasidic stations, Haitian stations, high school stations, church stations, a station run by migrant farmworkers, a station based in a discount mart, a station based in a retirement home. There have been some really interesting programming experiments: I know of at least two stations, for example, which were basically programmed by their own listeners. The audience sends in music, newscasts, and promos via e-mail, as MP3 files. The station then broadcast them.
When you look at the tremendous variety that's been put on the air in defiance of the law, and then stop to ponder how much more there could be if you weren't weeding out the people who'd rather not break the law, you can't help think of contemporary radio as lousy. We could have all the variety of the Internet on our boomboxes, and we don't.
Speaking of the Internet: I'm not going to get into the field of Internet radio, which is obviously very diverse despite some new costs that have been heaped onto it by the intellectual-property lobby. One thing the Internet has proved, though, is that forms of music that allegedly aren't commercially viable can actually do quite well when they're allowed to find an audience. In 1999, when Arbitron released its first ratings for Web broadcasters, the two stations with the most listeners were a pair of FM outlets—that's licensed outlets, not pirates—with Internet simulcasts: KFAN in Fredericksburg, Texas, and KPIG in Watsonville, California. (We might be able to catch KFAN here in San Antonio—it's at 107.9 FM, if anyone wants to try.) Both of those stations broadcast a lot of alternative-country music mixed with rootsy rock and blues, and both of them have done very well in their local listening areas. But they haven't been imitated much in other markets, where the conventional wisdom is that listeners prefer the polished Nashville brand of country music. Obviously, there's an audience for this kind of stuff after all; and maybe, if the entry barriers to broadcasting weren't so steep, some more stations like these might emerge.
So why do we have all these entry barriers? One of the stated rationales—the main one—is that there simply isn't room for all these new stations. But the fact that so many unlicensed microbroadcasters managed to run stations without causing any serious interference should stand as a response to that argument. It's true that some microbroadcasters have run sloppy operations and stepped on other people's signals, just as some licensed broadcasters have done the same. But most don't.
When you actually talk to broadcasters, you find that the reasons for the entry barriers are a lot more cynical. A lot of them honestly believe that letting more stations on the air will result in a lot more signal interference. But mostly, they just don't want the competition. They're also sitting on some valuable licenses whose prices would sharply drop if more broadcasters were allowed on the air.
Also, some of them will say flat-out that you need to make sure broadcasters made a substantial investment in their stations, even if you need to gin up that investment artificially, because that way they won't waste their frequency on something frivolous. I've actually seen one activist trying to convince broadcasters that low-power FM won't be a threat because there will still be enough restrictions to keep the dabblers out. I'm going to quote him directly:
"How many of the 'nutcases' do you really think will be willing to spend a year trying to get a CP [construction permit], then spend ten grand or more (substantially more for a station with any sort of profit potential) to actually put the station on the air?"
And that's from a supporter of low-power broadcasting. So this is the mentality we're contending with.
OK. So how could we make room in the law for all these different sorts of radio stations? One step would be to allow broadcasters to transmit at lower levels of power. A new high-powered station set between another two high-powered stations might cause a lot of interference; a station with a weaker signal might not. The FCC used to issue so-called "Class D" licenses to schools and community groups to transmit at just 10 watts of power, until the public broadcasting establishment complained that all those little stations were sitting where they might put big NPR outlets instead, leading the government to stop issuing the licenses in 1978. More recently, Clinton's FCC Chairman William Kennard put forward a fairly conservative plan to license 100-watt noncommercial stations on the FM band. The FCC approved the plan, though it met some opposition from the Republicans on the commission. One of them, Michael Powell, is now the head of the FCC and is regarded as a booster for free markets; he often says that the FCC should not be in the business of picking winners and losers. But he dissented in part from the low-power FM plan, specifically citing the possibility that the new stations might erode the economic vitality of existing broadcasters. The other Republican commissioner at the time, Harold Furchgott-Roth, is regarded as a radical free-marketeer, but he voted completely against the plan. To be fair, he raised some significant issues, such as whether the new stations would face the same red-tape requirements endured by other broadcasters. But rather than propose answers to these questions, he used them as an excuse to oppose the plan altogether.
After the plan passed the FCC, the National Association of Broadcasters and National Public Radio started lobbying Congress to kill it, and a sizable number of Democrats, plus every Republican in the House except Ron Paul and Ed Royce, voted against low-power broadcasting. They didn't wipe out Kennard's plan altogether, but they did pile on yet more restrictions, to the point where there's no room, for example, for legal low-power broadcasting in any American cities. Some rural areas will still get new stations, and that's it.
Another step toward better radio would be to allow stations to broadcast closer together. To avoid interference, there must be buffers between broadcasters. That is why there are no stations at, say, 101.2 FM—the FCC won’t risk interfering with the outlets at 101.1 and 101.3. Similarly, and more importantly, if a station is transmitting at 101.3, you have to be a substantial physical distance away before you can be licensed to transmit at 101.1 or 101.5. No one disputes the need for such buffers. But the current rules are based on the technical standards of the 1950s. It’s now possible for far more stations to fit onto the spectrum without stomping on each other's signals.
The FCC is already pragmatic enough to allow stations some leeway in bargaining with each other to set the actual boundaries of their coverage areas. It should let them actually sell interference easements, allowing both established and new broadcasters to set up shop at a closer frequency if they pay for the privilege.
Then there's perhaps the most significant act of deregulation the government could do: It could open up new spectrum to broadcasting. Simply turning over unused UHF spectrum to FM radio would make room for hundreds more channels in every city. Beyond that, if the FCC would open even more of the ether to broadcasting, manufacturers could sell so-called downconverters: small devices that would attach to or sit near a radio and convert signals sent over other sections of the spectrum. This would work a lot like DirecTV, which allows a TV set built to receive UHF and VHF signals pick up broadcasts made in the SHF band. But if you want to bring down the price of the converter, you’ll need a highly integrated device without a high parts cost. And in order for companies to invest in developing such a machine, you’ll need a regulatory regime that will allow the product to be put to the use for which it was devised.
Meanwhile, we need a regulatory regime that will allow radio itself to be put, not just to the use for which it was devised, but to all the new, creative uses that broadcasters can conceive.
If we've got time for questions, I'll take some now.
Ordinarily at this point I would tell you who won the Oscar for Best Picture, sometimes to praise the choice but usually to use it as a foil. But the Oscars didn't exist yet in 1924. The champion at the box office was The Sea Hawk, but that doesn't work well as a substitute, since I haven't seen it. I guess I should just jump into the list:
1. Sherlock Jr.
Directed by Buster Keaton
Written by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, and Joseph A. Mitchell
Here sit the seeds of both The Purple Rose of Cairo and Duck Amuck.
2. L'Inhumaine
Directed by Marcel L'Herbier
Written by L'Herbier, Pierre Mac Orlan, and Georgette Leblanc
A brilliantly demented spectacle that eventually becomes science fiction. Among its many attractions: a vision of television in which the performer views her audience instead of the other way around, changing channels to watch one fan after another.
3. Cartoon Factory
Written and directed by Dave and Max Fleischer
My kinda Clone War.
4. Ballet Mécanique
Directed by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy
Written by Léger
A Cubist ballet.
5. Au Secours!
Directed by Abel Gance
Written by Gance and Max Linder
A haunted-house farce, featuring a flurry of gags, camera tricks, and surrealist insertions.
6. He Who Gets Slapped
Directed by Victor Sjöström
Written by Sjöström and Carey Wilson
The slapping routine just might be the darkest comedy act in Hollywood history.
7. Girl Shy
Directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor
Written by Taylor, Tim Whelan, Ted Wilde, and Thomas J. Gray
In the climactic chase, Harold Lloyd's character commits a series of larcenies and puts dozens of people's lives at risk, all to prevent a wedding that could have been easily annulled after the fact. But it's OK, because it's funny.
8. The Last Laugh
Directed by F.W. Murnau
Written by Carl Mayer
The most silent of silent dramas.
9. The Crazy Ray
Written and directed by René Clair
This list didn't have room for Clair's most celebrated film of the year, the enjoyably loopy experiment Entr'acte. But I couldn't leave out this sci-fi comedy about a machine that freezes a city in time.
10. The Navigator
Directed by Buster Keaton and Donald Crisp
Written by Keaton, Clyde Bruckman, Jean C. Havez, and Joseph A. Mitchell
"He had completed all arrangements—except to notify the girl."
* * *
Of the films of 1924 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Aelita: Queen of Mars.
I have not watched enough good movies from 1914 for a top 10 list, so we'll stop the tour here. For the record, my favorite film of 1914 is Les Vampires (or at least those installments of the serial that came out that year) and my favorite film of 1904 is The Impossible Voyage. And of the handful of motion pictures I've seen from 1894, I guess the best is Autour D'une Cabine. If I've missed a masterpiece from that year, let me know.
When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at 1934, it gave its Best Picture award to the proto-screwball classic It Happened One Night. This is one of those rare years where the prize at least arguably went to the right movie. But on my list, another film edged it out:
1. The Black Cat
Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer
Written by Ulmer and Peter Ruric
This isolationist fable is Ulmer's best feature, the best film to star Karloff and Lugosi together, and perhaps the purest example of a picture that claims to be based on a Poe story while ignoring Poe's plot entirely.
2. It Happened One Night
Directed by Frank Capra
Written by Robert Riskin, from a story by Samuel Hopkins Adams
There's a lot to love in this movie, but it's the "Flying Trapeze" scene that's closest to my heart.
3. L'Atalante
Directed by Jean Vigo
Written by Vigo and Albert Riéra, from a story by Jean Guinée
Romance on a floating Cornell box.
4. The Thin Man
Directed by W.S. Van Dyke
Written by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, from a novel by Dashiell Hammett
"Ever heard of the Sullivan Act?" "Oh, that's all right, we're married."
5. Dames
Directed by Ray Enright with Busby Berkeley
Written by Delmer Daves
This cheerfully amoral musical feels like a product of the pre-Code period, though it appeared about a month too late for that. It spends about an hour mocking the bluenoses, then morphs into a series of psychedelic Busby Berkeley sequences that feel more like 1960s pop art than 1930s pop culture.
6. The Scarlet Empress
Directed by Josef von Sternberg
Written by Eleanor McGeary
A thoroughly ludicrous drama, and I mean that in the most favorable way possible.
7. Granton Trawler
Directed by John Grierson
One decent movie that didn't make it onto this list is Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran. Like Flaherty's film, Grierson's documentary about a Scottish fishing boat is a lyrical look at lives lived close to northern Europe's waters. But while Flaherty's film is a romanticized recreation of the way people may have lived long before the movie was made, this attempts to show us what fishermen were experiencing in 1934.
8. The Mascot
Written and directed by Wladyslaw Starewicz
The Nightmare Before Christmas of the '30s.
9. Lieutenant Kijé
Directed by Aleksandr Faintsimmer
Written by Yury Tynyanov
A brief thaw in Soviet cinema allowed a movie like this to be released: an anti-authoritarian satire where a bureaucratic error creates an imaginary officer and then the SNAFU Principle lets him rise through the ranks. The story had to take place in czarist times, of course—but before long, even that wouldn't work as camouflage.
10. Soldier's Story
Directed by Čeněk Zahradníček and Vladimír Šmejkal
Written by Šmejkal
It's an eight-minute abstraction of every antiwar saga set in World War I, and it's more effective than at least 90% of them.
Honorable mentions:
11. The Merry Widow (Ernst Lubitsch)
12. Ship of the Ether (George Pal)
13. The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock)
14. Crime Without Passion (Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur)
15. We Live in Prague (Otakar Vávra)
16. Ha! Ha! Ha! (Dave Fleischer)
17. The Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright)
18. The Old Fashioned Way (William Beaudine)
19. A Dream Walking (Dave Fleischer, Seymour Kneitel)
20. Babes in Toyland (Gus Meins, Charles Rogers)
Of the films of 1934 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Accordion—the movie that prompted Joseph Stalin to say, "Never make such rubbish as Accordion again." (I said the Soviets saw a thaw. I didn't say they were free.)
When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at 1944, it gave its Best Picture award to Going My Way. That's not a bad movie, but it's a trifle; it feels perverse to hand it the prize in a year that produced as many great films as this one.
1. Double Indemnity
Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, from a novel by James M. Cain
It's a bleak and ugly story about murder and betrayal, and at times it's as funny as any of Wilder's comedies.
2. To Have and Have Not
Directed by Howard Hawks
Written by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, from a novel by Ernest Hemingway
A lot like Casablanca, but better.
3. Laura
Directed by Otto Preminger
Written by Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Betty Reinhardt, from a novel by Vera Caspary
Roger Ebert called this film's allure "a tribute to style over sanity." He didn't mean that as a put-down, and I don't either.
4. The Curse of the Cat People
Directed by Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch
Written by DeWitt Bodeen and Val Lewton
This sweet fantasy film about a lonely child has what just might be the most misleading title in Hollywood history.
5. Hail the Conquering Hero
Written and directed by Preston Sturges
"You don't need reasons. Although they're probably there."
6. The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France
Directed by Laurence Olivier
Written by Olivier, Dallas Bower, and Alan Dent, from a play by William Shakespeare
It's a propaganda picture, but don't get hung up on that. It's also the most visually inventive Shakespeare movie I've seen, a film that feels like an illuminated manuscript come to life.
7. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
Written and directed by Preston Sturges
Between this and Conquering Hero, you'd never dream Sturges' career was about to crash.
8. A Canterbury Tale
Written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
A tale of love, war, and a mysterious figure who assaults women by pouring glue in their hair. And it's actually even stranger than that makes it sound.
9. It Happened Tomorrow
Directed by René Clair
Written by Clair, Dudley Nichols, and Helene Fraenkel, from a story by Hugh Wedlock and Howard Snyder and a play by Lord Dunsany
This one was nearly made by Frank Capra instead, and the story is certainly suited for the Capra treatment. But it works as one of Clair's American fantasies too. Indeed, it comes in a slot ahead of the bona fide Capra movie on this list.
10. Arsenic and Old Lace
Directed by Frank Capra
Written by Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein, from a play by Joseph Kesselring
Surely the finest portrait of Teddy Roosevelt ever to grace the screen.
Honorable mentions:
11. The Old Grey Hare (Bob Clampett)
12. Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk)
13. At Land (Maya Deren)
14. Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock)
15. Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang)
16. The Suspect (Robert Siodmak)
17. Jammin' the Blues (Gjon Mili)
18. Little Red Riding Rabbit (Friz Freleng)
19. The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang)
20. The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks (Edgar Neville)
Plus a nod to the Halloween sequence in Meet Me in St. Louis. The rest of the picture doesn't do much for me (aside from "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"), but if the Halloween segment were a standalone short it might make it into my top 10.
Finally: Having wrapped up my 1954 list with a shoutout to what is probably the only Ingmar Bergman movie to climax with a girlfight in a jazz club, I'll wrap up 1944 with a shoutout to what is probably the closest Bergman ever came to writing a film noir. Torment was his first produced screenplay, he got an assistant director credit too, and it's a pretty solid debut.
Of the films of 1944 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Battle of China.
When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at 1954, it gave its Best Picture award to On the Waterfront. You will find that one below, but not at number one:
1. Rear Window
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by John Michael Hayes, from a story by Cornell Woolrich
The first time I saw this, I thought it was a comedy. The second time, I thought it was a thriller. The third time, I mostly thought the Jimmy Stewart character was kind of creepy. I was right each time.
2. Seven Samurai
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni
"Since it's impossible to kill them all, I usually run away."
3. Johnny Guitar
Directed by Nicholas Ray
Written by Ben Maddow, from a novel by Roy Chanslor
I think the films of the '50s tend to be step down from the films of the '40s, but I do like how the westerns got weirder.
4. Wuthering Heights
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Written by Buñuel, Julio Alejandro, Dino Maiuri, and Pierre Unik, from a novel by Emily Brontë
I would not be unhappy if every adaptation of a highbrow literary classic was made by a surrealist slumming in the Mexican melodrama market.
5. The Age of Swordfish
Directed by Vittorio De Seta
Here is where the boundary between documentary and neorealism breaks down entirely.
6. Sansho the Bailiff
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Written by Fuji Yahiro and Yoshikata Yoda, from a story by Mori Ōgai
"Humans have little sympathy for things that don't directly concern them. They're ruthless."
7. On the Waterfront
Directed by Elia Kazan
Written by Budd Schulberg
My friend Shawn once asked if I'd ever heard "Noam Chomsky's analysis of A Streetcar Named Desire." I did a double take and said, "What? No, I haven't. What does Noam Chomsky have to say about A Streetcar Named Desire?" Shawn then realized that he'd had a brain fart and that he'd meant to say "Noam Chomsky's analysis of On the Waterfront," which further discussion revealed to be exactly what you'd expect Chomsky's take on On the Waterfront to be. But I still sometimes wonder what ol' Noam thinks of A Streetcar Named Desire.
8. Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
Written and directed by Kenneth Anger
Aleister Crowley's home movies.
9. Journey to Italy
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
Written by Rossellini and Vitaliano Brancati, from a novel by Colette
More or less the opposite of a love story.
10. Track of the Cat
Directed by William Wellman
Written by A.I. Bezzerides, from a novel by William Van Tilburg Clark
Beulah Bondi steals every scene she's in.
Honorable mentions:
11. Illusion Travels by Streetcar (Luis Buñuel)
12. Corral (Colin Low)
13. The Far Country (Anthony Mann)
14. Closed Vision (Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin)
15. Islands of Fire (Vittorio De Seta)
16. Late Chrysanthemums (Mikio Naruse)
17. Father Brown (Robert Hamer)
18. Jazz Dance (Roger Tilton)
19. La Strada (Federico Fellini)
20. Senso (Luchino Visconti)
Finally, a shout-out to A Lesson in Love. It may be just a mid-tier movie in the grand scheme of Ingmar Bergman's filmography, but how many of his pictures climax with two girls having a catfight in a seedy jazz club?
Of the films of 1954 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Musashi Miyamoto.
