Podcast appearances and mentions of steve rosenbaum

I recently read an editorial piece written by Steve Rosenbaum of The Sustainable Media Center. The title of his piece caught my eye: “Snap, Shame, Repeat: Inside the New Adolescent Reality.” Rosenbaum writes these words: “Social media hasn't just reshaped adolescence – it has reprogrammed it. And we are only now starting to realize how deep the damage goes.” He recounts reading a headline in The Guardian which he says stopped him in his tracks. The headline? “If there's a problem with boys' behavior, it's because of us.” Rosenbaum goes on to say that the “us” are adults, the platforms, the regulators, the educators, the media architects, and the investors. These are the people and institutions which have built social media into the destructive force that it is. But I would add one more group to that list of problem-makers. It's us, the parents. If we fail to see the dangers out there and then take steps to protect our kids, we have not lived up to our God-given parental responsibilities.

In this lively episode of Big Conversations, Little Bar, join hosts Patrick Evans and Randy Florence as they sit down with the dynamic Steve Rosenbaum, Artistic Director of The Bent Theater in Palm Springs. As they share stories of theatrical journeys, friendships, and unexpected life turns, Rosenbaum offers a captivating glimpse into the world of LGBTQ theater, revealing humor, resilience, and passion. Tune in for an engaging discussion that highlights the importance of artistic expression and community building within the Coachella Valley.Takeaways:• Steve Rosenbaum, once on track to become a doctor, changed his career to theater.• Rosenbaum founded The Bent Theater in Palm Springs, focusing on LGBTQ productions.• Steve's journey included unexpected challenges, such as a health battle with cancer.• He met co-founder Terry Ray in unusual circumstances during a unique theater production.• The Bent Theater became a crucial platform for diverse narratives and voices.• Rosenbaum highlights the impact of an inspirational theater show, Nicholas Nickleby.• The importance of community support for the arts is emphasized.• Humor and storytelling serve as powerful tools for both personal and collective growth.#BigConversationsLittleBarPodcast #PatrickEvans #RandyFlorence #MutualBroadcastingSystem #skipslittlebar #McCallumTheatre #Podcast #PalmSprings #Theater #ArtisticDirector #LGBTQ #SteveRosenbaum #CommunityTheater #Performance #ArtisticExpression #Culture #ArtisticInspiration #HealthJourney #TerryRay #Electricity #TheBent #Resilience #PalmSpringsCulturalCenter #Interviews

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with Ari Kahan, who assembled and oversees the most complete compendium of on-line information on Brian DePalma's classic rock music horror classic, Phantom of the Paradise. LINKSA Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/The Swan Archives: https://www.swanarchives.org/Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert's Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastINTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTDo you remember when you first saw it? What were the circumstances? How old are you? What was your reaction? ARI KAHAN: Sure. I first saw it when I was 12. It was double billed with Young Frankenstein. This would have been in early 1975, and my mom took me to see Young Frankenstein, which was okay. It was pretty good, but I was really enamored with the second feature on the bill, which was Phantom. And I've been in love with it ever since.Did you know anything about it before you went in? ARI KAHAN: Nothing. Nothing at all. So, what has been the attraction for you for that film, low those many, many years ago?ARI KAHAN: It may have just hit me at an impressionable time. But I think that, you know, being 12 and being kind of a nerd, I probably identified with Winslow and his fervent belief that if the world could only hear from his heart, and especially if all the girls in school could only hear from his heart, then they would love him and not the jerk that they always went out with.So, there's probably some of that. There was certainly, I do remember very, very clearly that the direction in some respect stood out to me. I had seen a lot of movies when I was 12, and I remember even today, thinking when I was 12, that there was a moment where the Phantom is rising up into the rafters in the foreground as Beef is descending in the background. And I looked at that and I thought, boy, that's complex. Anybody else would have done a shot of the Phantom starting to climb a rope, and then cut away, and then come back to him up in the rafters. This guy is trying to do things that are more interesting than he needs to and I thought that was really fun.After seeing Phantom I went back and saw Sisters.Which was no mean feat back then. ARI KAHAN: Yeah, I know and in fact, I had to see Sisters by buying a 16-millimeter print of it. That was the only way I could. I had fixed up a couple of—this is probably a year or two later—I had fixed up a couple of 16-millimeter projectors that my school was discarding, so I could even do changeovers in my bedroom. And I got a copy of Sisters just so I could see it because it was unseeable otherwise. Well, kudos to you for finding Sisters, because it took me a long time. I imagine it showed up at the Film society at the university or something finally. So getting to see William Findlay in a markedly different role and also seeing, oh, okay, this is a director who likes split screen. Although I probably would have gotten that from Carrie, because I'm sure I saw Carrie first. He's accused of doing stuff like that just for showing off. In fact, I think it's always for a cinematic or emotional reason. And Sisters is the best example of that. The suspense of getting rid of that dead body before they get to the door is enhanced by the fact that you're watching two things happen at the same time. ARI KAHAN: Yeah, I think in Sisters and Phantom both, it works really well. And I think, and I think even DePalma would agree that it didn't work as well in Carrie. Because the split screen calls for intellectualizing on the part of the audience. And it takes you out emotionally and wasn't really working that well. I understand why he did it, because it'd be boring to like, cut to Carrie's face, cut the things happening, cut back to Carrie's face, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I think both he and Paul Hirsch, the editor, feel it would have been better off to do something else.But anyway, after Phantom, you know, every new De Palma film to come out—all the way through Domino—has been a much anticipated event for me, you know, and I'm in the theater on the first day. And there have been a couple of disappointments along the way, but by and large, it's been awesome. Since you've seen Phantom so many times, were there any surprises that popped up over the years as you've watched again and again and things that you hadn't seen or hadn't realized?ARI KAHAN: It took me a really long time to notice that there was a frame or two of Jessica Harper being one of the backup singers on stage when Beef's performing life at last and only because I think it was unavoidable to use those frames. I think somebody figured out in editing that it didn't make any sense for her to be one of those backup singers and then in a white dress. So that took a while. It also was only within the past couple of years that I realized that a lot of the sort of classical, but silent movie sounding music that I had always thought was composed by the guy who did the incidental music was actually Beethoven. Oh, really?ARI KAHAN: Because Beethoven's not credited. So that little like a little violin thing that happens …ARI KAHAN: Or when Swan is going into phoenix's dressing room. When Winslow is escaping from prison. Well, it's Beethoven piano trios for the most part. So, you don't need to get permission from the Beethoven estate on that…ARI KAHAN: Well, I think that they would have had to pay the orchestra involved and I can easily imagine them omitting credit to avoid doing that. Hoping nobody would notice. And nobody did, obviously.Until you've just brought it up. ARI KAHAN: Yeah, sorry. That's okay. It's not, it's not our problem. One of the things that, that I found the Swan Archives to be so helpful on—well, lots of things, uh, when I discovered it years ago and I've returned to it as new things have popped up or I've dug a little deeper—was your explanation of the Swan Song debacle. As a frequent viewer of the movie. I wasn't noticing truncated shots. That I didn't notice until you showed us those shots. But obviously the mattes, particularly at the press conference, are really, really terrible. If I'm noticing them, they're bad. Can you just give us a brief history of why they had to do that? ARI KAHAN: Sure. So, it goes to Beef electrocution. In the early seventies, there was a band called Stone the Crows, whose guitarist was a guy named Les Harvey and Peter Grant, who would later manage Led Zeppelin, managed Stone The Crows. And Les Harvey was—in a freak accident—electrocuted on stage. I think his guitar was badly grounded or something along those lines, in 1971 or 72.And when Peter Grant learned that there was a film coming out in which a rock guitarist is electrocuted on stage, he assumed, that it was making fun of what had happened to his friend, Les Harvey. And by that time he was managing Led Zeppelin. I should say in De Palma's defense that Beef's electrocution shows up in early drafts of the script that were written before Les Harvey suffered his accident. So, this was life imitating art, imitating life, you know, rather than the other way around. De Palma clearly did not take that plot and probably didn't even know about what had happened to Les Harvey. But anyway, by the time Peter Grant got wind of this, Phantom had already been shot, but not yet released. This was in the summer of 1974. And by sheer absolute sheer coincidence, Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin had just gotten a trademark on Swan Song for their record label. And the first record to come out on the Swan Song label was Bad Company's first record, and that was in somewhere around June of 1974. So that's when their trademark was perfected, and Phantom was scheduled to be released a few months later at the end of October.And Peter Grant went to 20th Century Fox, which had just purchased Phantom from Ed Pressman and DePalma. You know, it's important for the story to know that Phantom was independently produced. It wasn't financed by Fox. Pressman and DePalma raised money to make this movie in the hopes that they would then sell it to some distributor for more than they had paid to make it.And it turned out that there was a, quite a bidding war among several studios, which Fox won. And Fox paid more for Phantom than anyone had ever paid for an independent film to that point in history. They had very high expectations for it. So that sale had just closed, but Pressman and De Palma and everyone else hadn't been paid yet by Fox.And of course, they had run out of money and owed everybody money, everyone who had worked on the film. So, they were in kind of a desperate situation. And Peter Grant went to Fox and said, “I'll sue you and prevent release of this film.” And the only thing that Fox could do was to tell Pressman and De Palma, you need to fix this.And the only way they could fix it was by removing all of the references to Swan Song, so that Peter Grant wouldn't have grounds for his claim, because he obviously can't claim you can't have a film with an electrocution of a rock star. Really, all he had was the Swan Song thing. And so that was done very, very hastily. They were still working on it in early October, even though the film was scheduled for release at the end of October. And so, basically, Fox signed a deal with Led Zeppelin saying we won't release the film with any of this Swan Song prominently shown. Which is a very stupid resolution really because Peter Grant in the end did not prevent distribution of a film with an electrocution of a rock star, which was his original concern.All he really managed to do was mangle somebody else's. And so the end result is that the film that we've all been watching for the last 50 years, there's a little bit cut out of it. There's some lovely crane shots that you missed because what the DePalma had done through the film was start on this Swan Song logo or the Swan name and then move away from it to whatever was going on. So that you have the impression that Swan was everywhere. And so that whole thing was lost and, you know, as you and everybody else noticed, some of it's very noticeable, particularly the bird at the airport. Which is too bad.I understand that you have a secret print of the film in which all those logos had been restored. In addition to fixing the crane shots and having shots that no longer have the terrible matte on them, is there anything else in that version that we wouldn't have seen before? ARI KAHAN: It's not a secret print, really. It was just reconstructing the film the way that it was intended to be, using footage that had been assumed to have been destroyed decades ago, but which I eventually found and digitized. And then with the help of a couple of other folks, put the movie back together. The most challenging part: there's a couple of challenging parts to that.You know, it's not just a matter of sticking things in. The footage was without sound. And so, if you're making a scene a few seconds longer, for example, and there's music underlying that scene, what are you going to do? Are you going to start the music a little bit later? Are you going to end it a little bit earlier?Are you going to play it a little bit slower so that it fills up these extra seconds? Are you going to loop it? Are you going to find some other piece of music that was probably intended to go there in the first place? So there's that problem. And then the podium scene, which is the worst offender—at the airport—the original, they actually worked on the negative to put the dead bird on. And so, the original footage for that podium didn't exist. But we knew what the podium was supposed to look like, because there's a photo that was used for the German promotional campaign—created obviously months before the film is released—and that still shows the podium the way that it's supposed to look. So, I got my friend, Steve Rosenbaum, who is a special effects supervisor. He won Oscars for Forrest Gump and Avatar, I think. And he's about to win an Emmy—I will bet you a box of donuts—he's about to win an Emmy for his work on Masters of the Air. I gave him this image and the footage that's shown, you know, in the theater normally, and he reconstructed the podium for me. So that's how we did the podium. But the other thing that was that if you go see the film now in the theater projected from DCP, the DCP master—which is the same master that we've used for the current blu rays—it was done by a company called Reliance Media Works in Burbank. And, I don't know what 17 year olds they had working on it, but they did the coloring and grading the way it's fashionable to do when they did it, you know, 10 years ago, which was a lot of orange, teal and the blacks are crushed so that anything that's really dark gray or dark brown, just black, so that the colors pop more, but you lose a lot of the detail, and to my eye it looks terrible.And so, I used an earlier master of the film that looks more like it looked in the 70s as the base for the reconstruction. And then color matched the replacement footage to that. It sounds beautiful. ARI KAHAN: It's gorgeous. The only other thing that I suppose we could have done, but didn't, is there's originally footage of Winslow's face coming out of the record press looking all mangled. And I have that footage, but I didn't put it back in because that footage that DePalma deemed not appropriate to the tone of the film that he was making. And so, since the object of this game was to restore the film to the way that he would have wanted it, I let that out. I think that was a wise choice. You know, I talked to Pete Gelderblom, who did the Raising Cainreconstruction. And it's a beautiful piece of work that he did. He was more constrained than you, because he was only allowed to use the footage which was there, and he just had to rearrange it. He repeats one shot, but he got it as close to the original shooting script as he could. I don't think Paul Hirsch was particularly thrilled with it, but De Palma was and has referred it as his director's cut. Did De Palma see your version and did he like it? ARI KAHAN: Yeah. I did a cast and crew sort of screening in Los Angeles and Paul Williams came to that and Archie Hahn and so on. Ed Pressman, the producer. And there was tremendous enthusiasm, because none of them had ever seen the film that they made the way that it was supposed to be.And I sent a copy to Paul Hirsch and I'm not sure whether DePalma heard about it from Pressman or from Paul Hirsch, but he asked to see it. And I sent it to him and I got a nice note from him saying, you know, that it was great, good job, la la la, it's great to see the film the way that it was, you know, the original cut.So. Yes, he is. Definitely. He's seen it. He's happy with it. And Ed Pressman, in particular, wanted to have that version released on home video or in some other way. And we went to Fox. This is before Disney. It was still Fox. And Fox said, well, you know, we could consider doing that under two conditions. First, Mr.DePalma approves. Well, yes, check box checked there. He does. And second, we made this deal with Led Zeppelin back in 1974, where we agreed not to do this. And if you can get them to waive their rights under that agreement, then yeah, sure. So, I worked with Ed Pressman and we put together a bunch of testimonials from people that we thought Led Zeppelin might respect, like Brett Easton Ellis and I think Guillermo del Toro and others, and sent a package off to Led Zeppelin through their lawyers. And God bless them, they got back to us in less than a week and said no. At least they didn't leave you hanging. ARI KAHAN: At least they didn't leave us hanging. That's right. So, your archive is amazing and is hour's worth of fun to go through it. ARI KAHAN: It's a rabbit warren. Yeah, I wish it were a little better organized.How did it get started? Well first, when did you start collecting memorabilia and then how did that grow into the archive? ARI KAHAN: I started collecting memorabilia right after I saw the film when I was 12. And that was obviously pre internet and pre-eBay. And it was a lot harder to get stuff. Bt I would frequent science fiction conventions and horror conventions and comic book shops.And there were a whole bunch of people who knew me as that kid who's always looking for Phantomstuff. And I was the kind of nerd who kept a log with the what everybody else was also looking for. And so, if I were at some convention and the guy who was collecting Olivia Newton, John's stuff, if I saw something interesting—not that there is anything interesting about it, but anyway—if I saw something interesting about Olivia Newton, John, I would run to the pay phone and call him and say, Hey, you want this? And I would pick it up for him. And so, there was a lot of returning of favorites where there would be people who were going to cons that I wasn't going to. And if they saw Phantom stuff, they would pick it up for me and that kind of thing. And so, you know, that became the way to get the posters from every country in the world that it was released in and the lobby cards and everything else and it started filling up, taking up more and more space over time and grew into, you know, trailers and magazines and everything else.And then when the site came out in around 2006, I put up the first version of the site. People who either had worked on the film or had something interesting would get in touch with me and say, “You know, I have this. I see you have a good home for it. Do you want it?” And of course, you know, eBay was a way to fill in some gap.Is there, within what your current collection holds, is there a prized possession that, you know, if there was a fire and you only grabbed one of those pieces, what would you take with you? ARI KAHAN: Yeah, absolutely. You know, in every dorm room and every apartment and every house I've ever lived in has hung John Alvin's art from the one sheet, and it's the same art that's on the cover of the soundtrack album. I just thought that was beautiful piece of art. And I think it was his second movie poster he painted. The first one would be for Blazing Saddles. And then he did Young Frankenstein, and if you look at the Young Frankenstein poster and the Phantom poster, you can see that there's a lot of stylistic similarities there.But he went on to do, you know, E. T. and, you know, 130 odd other posters. And at some point, he and I started corresponding and he finally said, “You know, I have something that I think you should have. Give me your mailing address.” And a few days later what showed up was his original painting, the comp painting for that poster, which he had had all this time. And so that would be the prize possession for sure. Well, that qualifies, I think. Is there a Holy Grail out there that you're still looking for? ARI KAHAN: The original art for the Corbin poster. Which is the “he's been maimed and framed, beaten, robbed, and mutilated.” That artwork would be a Holy Grail. As well as, well, the Phantom's original helmet. Now, it turns out there's a couple of them, at least. And one of them Guillermo del Toro now has. He just bought the Phantom's costume after it failed to sell at auction at Bonham's. And the other helmet the Pressmanfamily has, so those would be a grail. There's a lot of things that I'm sure no longer exist that would be the grail, like, you know, the Phantom's contract.Any number of props would be fun, but there's not very many known to still exist. I think Peter Elbling still has—or I think his son has it right now—the microphone that he used with a knife on it. And Garrett Graham still has his guitar strap, Beef's guitar strap. And I think he may still have the plunger.But not the antler belt? ARI KAHAN: No, not as far as I know. That'd be tough to ship. It would be. Yes. Dangerous to keep around the house. You could bump into it. On the site you kindly show all kinds of different memorabilia that you have or that exists around the world. And you also have a section called Inexplicable Crap. Is there one piece in there that just stands out for you as what in the world were they thinking? ARI KAHAN: Maybe the Death Records pillow. Like I can understand why they did. They made prototypes that never went out for sale. Why anybody would want it, you know, a dead bird, probably somebody wants a dead bird pillow, but the market would be limited.When the DVD for Phantom Palooza 2 came out, I bought that and then heard you talking somewhere about getting Jessica Harper to sing Old Souls, which is on the DVD. We just see the very end of her singing it. I'm guessing there were some technical problems or something with that. ARI KAHAN: It wasn't technical problems. It was the Paul Williams rider, which required that the show not be recorded. And I think that midway through Jessica singing, somebody might have said, or actually I think that's an audience--t might be an audience shot thing that we have. There's probably lots and lots of cell phone video out there of the show, but nobody related to who worked on Phantom Palooza—and I was one of the people who worked on Phantom Palooza—is going to be out there distributing anything that we agreed with Paul we would not even shoot. But, but yes, Jessica was absolutely a highlight of the show there. I was surprised that she went full force on the end of that song. ARI KAHAN: Well, there were no plans for her to perform. And the morning of the rehearsal, I said, “Hey, Jessica, you want to go down and watch Paul rehearse?” And I took her over to the auditorium and I was hoping that, you know, seeing that and being a performer at heart, she might be inspired to maybe, you know, participate. And she decided she would do Old Souls with Paul's band. And then she went back to the hotel and practiced the song, I think, all day in her hotel room and then, you know, knocked it out of the park that night. That's how I remember it. And then she came off stage and said, you know, now I know how Mick Jagger feels. It's a pretty stunning debut for her in that movie, to come from essentially nowhere—although she'd done things before that. And then the run that she had in the seventies, pretty unequaled when it comes to being the, um…ARI KAHAN: The queen of cult. Yeah. The queen of cult. And just the range, from Suspiria to My Favorite Year. You don't get a much broader range than that. ARI KAHAN: Pennies From Heaven. Yes, just phenomenal. Even just the wheat speech in Love and Death is worth the price of admission alone. ARI KAHAN: She played, uh, Gary Shandling's wife on The Gary Shandling show in the last season, named Phoebe, of all things. And in, I'm pretty sure it was the last episode of that show, she's held hostage by a phantom who lives under the set, who threatens to sabotage Gary's show, unless she will sing his song. And she ends up singing his song, which turns out to be YMCA. Wearing a dress that is very, very reminiscent of the one she wore to sing Old Souls in. And they even make a Pennies From Heaven joke. So, it's very inside baseball, I should say. Speaking of actors from that, I've always been blown away by William Finley's performance in the movie. I think it was Paul Williams who said something like, you know, he spends three quarters of the movie acting with one eye and metal teeth, and that's all he's got. And it's just flawless and so heartbreaking.And I'm just sorry we didn't get to see him in more movies. He's delightful in The Fury in a very small part. He's all over the early films. And I got the sense since I read somewhere that you did a eulogy for him, that you must have developed a friendship over the years. ARI KAHAN: Yeah. And, before we get to that, you say heartbreaking, right?And I think that that's one of the things about Phantom that was so ballsy. It's obviously a spoof of many things, but while being a spoof, it tries to get you to care about the characters. If, if you were not, you know, devastated at the end when Winslow dies just before Phoenix recognizes that it was him all along, you know, the film has failed.Whereas in other spoofs, you know, Rocky Horror doesn't ask you to care whether Brad and Janet will get back together after their experience or anything like that. Nobody asked you to care about the characters at all. And I think it's a huge risk that DePalma took in making a film like this: while simultaneously being a parody and a satire and a spoof and everything else, he wants you to care about the outcome. As far as Finley, I got to know Bill a little bit towards the end of his life after meeting him at Phantom Palooza. I went to New York and spent a little time with him and now I know his wife Susan pretty well and his son Dash a little bit. And when he died, Susan asked If I would put together some kind of a video montage for the funeral, which wasn't that—it's a celebration of life was what she was calling it. And I did that. And every time I had it finished—and, you know, I had like a day and a half to do this. And then I had to take the red eye to New York from California for this, for this event—every time I had it finished, she would send me a few more pictures and I'd have to, you know, redo it.And then she asked, could you set it to music? Could it be set to Faust? You know, okay. You know, you don't say no to a widow, right? And I was working at the time too. So, when I finally flew to New York, I was completely exhausted. And I got to the chapel I guess a couple of hours before the ceremony was supposed to start, so that we could make sure that this thing would play on their equipment and so on.And I'm taking a nap on one of the pews and Susan showed up with, you know, programs under her arm. And I picked up a program and saw that, right after Garrett Graham and Jessica Harper was supposed to speak, I'm supposed to speak. But I this was the first I was hearing about it. And so, I spent the first, unfortunately, the first part of the ceremony—where I really wanted to be paying full attention—kind of scrambling together what I was going to say.I have no idea what I said at this point. I hope it did Bill justice and didn't offend anybody, but I couldn't tell you now a single word of what I ended up saying there. And it's in front of, you know, various of the icons of my childhood, right, are in that chapel. So it's kind of like all of the nightmares of going to school and realizing that there's a test in the subject that you never took, and that you're not wearing pants, and all your ex-girlfriends are there laughing at you. Because I have my own podcast that has to do with my series of books, and like your site, I want to make it perpetual. But there's really no way to do that unless I set up a fund so that after I die they keep paying the site to keep running it. Because as soon as that site shuts down, the podcast goes away. And the same thing will happen to the archive. Whoever is hosting it, unless they're paid, it's gonna go away. I'm wondering, do you have a plan in place for all that information? ARI KAHAN: When I go, it goes.Oh, I feel like I set you up for that. Okay. Can I propose an alternate ending to that? ARI KAHAN: Sure. You essentially have a book there. You just have it in web form. You should put that together so that when it is done, when you are done, it can just be put into a book because it already reads like a book.ARI KAHAN: People have suggested that, and I've resisted doing a book because every now and then, some new fact comes to light that shows that something I had in there was wrong. And everything in there—virtually everything—is based on conversations that I've had with participants or material that came out at the time. None of it is taken from someone else's book or anything. So it's all fairly firsthand, but people have fallible memory. So, for example, the guy who made the phantom's helmet assured me that he had made only one. And it's crazy, because every production wants to have multiple copies of any key prop, because if something happens to the prop during shooting, shooting would have to, you know, it's an incredibly expensive problem to stop shooting waiting for another one.But as it turns out, he's, he's wrong. He made more than one. There is more than one. And so, every now and then, I have to correct something on the site. And if I put it out in book form, these books would be wrong. Potentially, something could come out in the future that that would make something with my name on it. Wrong. Imagine a book with a mistake. I can't imagine. ARI KAHAN: Exactly. And I can't abide that. So, it exists in electronic form so that I can edit it and improve it. Well, I would argue that you can do the ebooks, but that's, you know, that's your circus. It's not my circus. But you do raise an interesting question about misconceptions. I know that one of the biggest misconceptions is that it ran in Winnipeg forever and it didn't. I can—as someone who lived here in Minneapolis when Harold and Maude ran at the Westgate Theater for two and a half years—I can assure you it ran there for two and a half years, because I was there those two and a half years. So that was real. Is there another misconception out there about the movie that you just can't—like a whack a mole—get rid of? ARI KAHAN: So many. In fact, um, I think on my FAQ page, I list some of them. Is there an egregious one that just gets under your skin? ARI KAHAN: Yeah. The idea that it was only popular in Winnipeg and a couple other places is just completely wrong. It was big in Japan. It eventually became a big in Los Angeles. It never did anything in New York. Where it was actually biggest was not Winnipeg, it was El Salvador, where the songs hit number one on the radio. More than once. And it was brought back and revived many times. I get more mail from El Salvador than from anybody else.As we wrap up here, my favorite scene in the movie is the closing credits. I just love the music. I love what Paul Hirsch did with the assembly of that. And for years, I was living under the mistaken impression that in the credits, when it said Montage by Paul Hirsch, that that's what I was looking at was that montage. That's a montage. Then I was disabused of that in an interview with him—which I clarified with him. It was very nice to get back to me on Facebook when I said, “Am I correct in my understanding that the montage in the middle of the movie, the writing montage, you never saw that until the film was done? You had to put all the timing of that together, the animation of the writing, the placement of Phoenix's face on this part of the screen, and the Phantom and that, all the dissolves, all that timing?” And he said, “Yes it was a one-shot thing.” And I think for that he does deserve a special “Montage by Paul Hirsch,” because even today, with all the stuff we have, that would still be a challenging thing to do. And then not to be able to see the end result.But even with that, I just still love the closing credits. It's a combination of music, it allows me to revisit all my favorite scenes in the movie and a lot of my favorite shots. Do you have a favorite scene? ARI KAHAN: Well, I actually like those closing credits too, because most of the shots in those closing credits aren't actually in the film. Most of them are outtakes. And so, for example, in those closing credits, you have Swan splashing in the tub. There's Archie Han twirling around like this. And most of them, alternate takes. And they're clearly things that Paul Hirsch thought were charming and wanted to include that he couldn't put in the film.I suspect that you've held 35-millimeter film in your hands and cut shot A to shot B. I've only done that in 16mm. To keep a piece of film that short, hanging on a hook somewhere going, “I know I'm going to want to use that later.” Then finding that. I don't think people today understand what skill level was involved in, you know, that sort of thing, or the TIE Fighters in Star Wars that he did, or all that connection of little pieces, and tracking that and knowing that that's going to go there and that's going to go. It's so much easier today. And you had to make firmer decisions then earlier in the process than you do now, right? And fixing things was much more arduous. ARI KAHAN: You know, I think if they had to fix the Swan Song stuff out of Phantom and they were doing it using digital technology today, obviously, it'd be much faster and so on, but, uh, doing it on film. And having to send each change into the processing house, and then getting it back a few days later, and, uh, you know, it's a lot of work. It'd be horrible.But favorite scenes: The Goodbye Eddie number just remains a favorite. Do you know why? It's not fancy DePalma. It's a wide shot, two shot, a single. ARI KAHAN: That's right. It's the most conventionally shot thing in the film, but Archie Han is just so great in it. His delivery boy in My Favorite Year—when he does the punching—he just does the exact right thing at the right time. And I wish there'd been bigger movies with more Archie Han in them than what we got. ARI KAHAN: So does Archie. Okay, last question. If you take Phantom of the Paradise out of the mix, what would you say is your favorite De Palma movie?ARI KAHAN: Well, I'm not sure that Phantom of the Paradise is my favorite De Palma movie. It is a sentimental childhood favorite. But I go back and forth between Carlito's Way, Casualties of War, Femme Fatale, Carrie. And Raising Cain.I think that Femme Fatale is probably the one that came closest to his intention.It's the one that I think of as being, like, the most successfully realized, and I love it for that reason. Carlito's Way is just, by, I think, any objective standard, probably his best work. Then I love Blow Out. I'm not on the Blow Out train as much as everybody else. Maybe because it just, it goes so dark.ARI KAHAN: That's what I love about it is the devastating ending. I really love Peet Gelderboom's version of Raising Cain. Given all that, and given that you're 12 years old in 1974, 75, somewhere in there, and you're you're a movie freak at this point, which is a really good time in film history from that era. Is there a favorite? ARI KAHAN: So, I was really lucky that I was when I was 15 or 16, I was working at a theater called the UC theater in Berkeley, which was a repertory house that showed a different double bill every night. And any night that I wasn't working, I was there seeing movies.So, I saw lots and lots and lots of movies. And despite all that and all the weird stuff I saw, my favorites are probably the same things that every 70s kid's favorites were: Star Wars, Harold and Maude, The Godfather. I loved Harold and Maude so much that I bought an old hearse at one point.Okay, you win. ARI KAHAN: And I didn't keep it for long. It got like, I don't know how many gallons per mile. It was just not economical to have as a car, but it was fun for a while. I was very lucky when they hit the two-year mark here in Minneapolis, and I was a junior in high school, maybe. I happen to know the son of the local movie critic for the paper, and the critic knew that I was a big fan of Harold and Maude. And so he took me along on his press junkets. So, I had dinner with Bud Cort, got to chat with him. I got to hang out with Ruth Gordon for the day. ARI KAHAN: The only one I can propose to top that would be when I was in high school, I was writing for the school paper. Actually, I had stopped going to high school. I was the entertainment editor for the school paper, and I had stopped going to high school. I dropped out, but I kept submitting articles to the paper. And at some point, the newspaper staff changed my title from Entertainment Editor to Foreign Correspondent. And on the strength of that—when Tim Curry's first record, Read My Lips, came out, and he was coming to town to sign autographs at Tower Records—myself and a writer from the Berkeley Bar, which was a newspaper back then, had lunch with him around the corner from Tower Records just before he went off to do his autographing. And I was a huge Tim Curry fan. And I had to try to keep that under wraps and, you know, not ask any Rocky Horror related questions. And that was my claim to fame until all of the Phantom nonsense started.

Send us a Text Message.Dive into the world of customer retention and profitability with sales expert Steve Rosenbaum on Catalytic Leadership! Discover how his journey from a novice salesperson to a seasoned leader can inspire your own path to success. In this episode, Steve shares invaluable insights on leveraging mentorship, quality training, and a heartfelt drive for collective success. Whether you're an agency owner looking to amplify your impact or a business professional seeking growth strategies, Steve's wisdom is tailor-made for you.Join us as we explore the power of the Pareto principle and how perfectionism can hinder progress. Steve's insights shed light on the essential aspects of entrepreneurship that yield disproportionate results when focused on. Learn how embracing imperfection can pave the way for new sales opportunities and personal growth. Tune in to this episode for actionable tips and a deeper understanding of excellence in business!Thank you, Steve and Flawless Followup, for providing our listeners with five easy steps to enhance their follow-up system. Exclusively for Catalytic Leadership podcast listeners, you can access this valuable resource for a limited time at flawlessfollowup.com/catalytic.Support the Show.Join Dr. William Attaway on the Catalytic Leadership podcast as he shares transformative insights to help high-performance entrepreneurs and agency owners achieve Clear-Minded Focus, Calm Control, and Confidence. Free 30-Minute Discovery Call:Ready to elevate your business? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with Dr. William Attaway and start your journey to success. Special Offer:Get your FREE copy of Catalytic Leadership: 12 Keys to Becoming an Intentional Leader Who Makes a Difference. Connect with Dr. William Attaway: Website LinkedIn Facebook Instagram TikTok YouTube

At this week's Round Table Emmanuel, Emily, and Heba dove into a can't-miss conversation with a true pioneer in media transformation: Steve Rosenbaum, the Founder and Director of The Center for Sustainable Media. The mission of Sustainable Media Center is to act as a catalyst to change media for the better, working with young people to give them agency over the media they consume, create, and share. With a rich background as an author, entrepreneur, and filmmaker, Steve has been at the forefront of catalyzing positive change in media.  We delve into an array of critical topics impacting our digital world, from the recent groundbreaking lawsuit against Meta, challenging the way social networks impact child safety, to exploring the roots of social media's perilous landscape. Steve brings insights to the table on a myriad of crucial points: the struggles young people face in this digital age, the generational gap in understanding, and the crucial steps needed to bridge that divide. Together, we grapple with the complexities of social media, dissect the actions being taken by lawmakers, and explore tangible solutions for a safer and more responsible media environment.  Listen in as we unravel the dark path that turned social media into a minefield, uncovering the real struggles of today's youth, and decoding why adults just can't crack the GenZ code. Brace for a showdown as we explore the clash between generations and reveal lawmakers' potential missteps. Oh, and hold tight for the Meta lawsuit bombshell! But fear not—we're not just here to dissect problems; we're crafting solutions for a safer digital world. Thank you for listening! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nextgenpolitics/message

In episode 202 of Beyond The Story, Sebastian Rusk welcomes Steve Rosenbaum, founder of Flawless Follow-Up, who emphasizes the role of technology in selling and how it has advanced over the years. They delve into the topic of customer retention and its impact on profitability and highlight the importance of building relationships and the value of unique experiences.Join Sebastian Rusk and Steve Rosenbaum for valuable insights on maximizing business potential through effective follow-up strategies.TIMESTAMPS[00:05:11] Customer Retention and Profitability.[00:09:43] Discovering Hidden Customer Data.[00:12:27] Flawless Followup.[00:14:13] Customer Retention VS. New Acquisition.In this episode, Sebastian Rusk and Steve Rosenbaum discuss how technology has significantly advanced over the past four decades, greatly benefiting business owners. They highlight their consistent use of technology to increase sales, noting that it has improved the sales process in terms of efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and reliability. Furthermore, Sebastian and Steve highlight the significance of customer retention in comparison to new customer acquisition. While businesses often invest in advertising, lead generation, SEO, and social media to attract new customers, they emphasize that bringing back past customers is easier and faster. Therefore, prioritizing customer retention can yield better, quicker, and more cost-effective results for businesses.QUOTES:"If you got to work, that's the way to work." - Sebastian Rusk“When you follow up with your customers, you have a huge advantage because they already know and trust you. You already have top of mind presence, and so you're going to be at the right place at the right time with the right message, as long as you follow up.” - Steve Rosenbaum“Sales is a process. It's not just about, talking good. It's not about selling ice to the Eskimos. It's a process.” - Steve Rosenbaum“I learned that you could use that technology to make your process better, faster, cheaper, more reliable. And I've always leveraged technology to sell more stuff. And that's what I'm still doing four decades later. Technology just has advanced a whole lot since then.” - Steve Rosenbaum"Past customers that come back to buy again, not only do they buy quicker and faster, but they spend more money with you." - Steve Rosenbaum“When you say win back campaign, that's essentially winning back past customers and people that are on your list in your database.” - Sebastian RuskSOCIAL MEDIA LINKSSebastian RuskInstagram: SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS Sebastian Rusk Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondthestorypodcast/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BeyondTheStoryPodcast/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastianrusk/ Cody Oakes LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cody-oakes-69089bb7/ WEBSITE Beyond The Story Podcast: https://www.beyondthestorypodcast.com/ ========================== Need help launching your podcast? Schedule a Free Podcast Strategy Call TODAY! PodcastLaunchLabNow.com

Today, TikTok is in the cross hairs of the Federal Government, but Taylor Lorenz says, they're missing the target. Then, Teens - increasingly frustrated with social media, go full flip-phone, or worse. And we've got a gift list like no other, because Bob is just in the holiday spirit. I'm Steve Rosenbaum and this is future Forward, along with my podcasting partner in crime Bob Garfield.

TODAY. If your feed is a mess, you're not alone. Content moderation is hard, and getting harder. Then, let's take a look at Roblox, don't know what it is, ask a pre-teen kid. And final. AI explodes in the avatar world, what the hell is Lensa anyway.

Today, there's some crazy nexus of the rising tide of Hunter Biden, the random internal twitter emails, and matt Tibia. Then, as republicans look for reason to cut ties with the former Donald, his dinner with YE seems to be gift wrapped. And then, drones. Because well - drones are great. I'm Steven Rosenbuam and […]

Today. There's a crazy squeeze on to get some legislation passed before the end of the year. And the big buzz is around section 230 and Child Privacy laws. What does that really mean? Then, all these lay offs. Is it a trend, or a safe excuse to cut some headcount? And finally - with the new congress comes a raft of INVESTIGATIONS. What's in store? I'm Steven Rosenbaum, and this is Future Forward, here with my podcasting partner in Crime Bob Garfield.

Today, as we shake off the fiction that was the Red Wave, a look at the youth vote, the state of Mitch McConnel, and Bob Garfield's take on WHAT REALLY HAPPENED. Then, a look at the ongoing disaster that is Elon. Maybe we're not going to Mars after all? And finally the FTX meltdown, and what that means for Crypto.

Today. We've got a barnburner of a pod. Election Tech - a look inside the state of voting in America. Then Crime Stats. Are they bad, or good, or both. And finally - the Curation Team at twitter gets the ax. What is Elon Up to? I'm Steven Rosenbaum and this is Future Forward, here with my podcasting partner in Crime Bob Garfield.

Today: A pod in 3 parts. Part 1, regretfully, we must - must - talk Twitter. Because the various version of social media Armageddon is just too good - red meat - to feed to Bob Garfield. Then, NYC and guns, a solution, or a bad idea? And finally, top tech fails of the past 20 years. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, and this is future forward, here with my podcasting partner in crime, Bob Garfield.

Robots. Are they coming to take your jobs? Today, we have a show that has creatives cowering behind their keyboards. Has AI really arrived, and will it take our jobs? Is Robot Garfield likely to replace Human Garfield - and how soon.

Today. Can tech stem the tide of misinformation as the elections approach? YouTube claims to have a plan. Then: Turkey's Erdogan has a plan for people who publish ‘misinformation' - put them in jail. The only problem is who defines misinformation. And, Biden takes on China. But it's complicated. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, and this is Future Forward. Here with my podcasting partner in crime - Bob Garfield.

Today. Elon Musk unveils a robot, another step toward his IronMan efforts. Yet at the same time, Musks emails reveal a shocking billionaire bro culture. It's kinda gross. Then, out of London, a UK Coroner lists Instagram algorithm as contributing cause of UK teen's death - whose father accuses Instagram of Monetizing Misery. It's hard to disagree. And, is TikTok's charm offensive working in Washington? Maybe yes. That's what's in store for today's Future Forward. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, along with my partner in Podcast Crime Bob Garfield.

We start with the complicated nexus of the slow-moving judicial system, and the ‘flood the zone with crap' former president. Together, we'll declassify some stuff. Then, Google was the darling of the Danish public schools, until it wasn't. And, the German efforts to control hate speech. It's a hard line to draw, and a harder one to cross. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, and this is Future Forward, here with my podcast partner in crime, Bob Garfield. Hey Bob - have you switched to pumpkin spice latte yet?

Today. California passes sweeping child protection legislation aimed a the big tech platforms, but is that really the problem? Then - TikTok goes to congress and gets grilled. So - maybe the clock is Ticking on TikTok. And - two state governors create a made for TV show, and the TV camera's happily obliged. But is shipping asylum seekers to democratic vacation spots even legal? This is Future forward, I'm Steven Rosenbaum, here with my podcast partner in crime Bob Garfield.

A Personal Journey - Untold Until Now.

We've got lots of tech this week, and as you might expect, it overlaps with politics - as it increasingly does. Google and folks are going to protect us from misinformation during the coming midterms. Hour GOP folks - 30 of them are holding Zuckerberg accountable for Hunter Bidden. Ok, sure. And Twitter gets an edit button, if you'r willing to pay 60 dollars.

Niche internet micro-celebrities are taking over the internethttps://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/24/nimcel-influencers-tiktok-youtube/How micro-influencers and mummy bloggers with VERY small followings are earning up to $200,000 a year with sponsored postshttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-11148333/How-micro-influencers-earning-big-bucks.htmlINSIDE THE LUCRATIVE WORLD OF PET INFLUENCERShttps://www.mic.com/life/what-its-like-pet-influencer-moneyMeet the Lobbyist Next Doorhttps://www.wired.com/story/meet-the-lobbyist-next-door/

Today - a pod in two chapters. Chapter 1. CNN is getting out of the media criticism business - after THIRTY years. How does the the termination of both Reliable Sources and Host Brian Stelter portend a less introspective time for media prognostication? Or was it just Brian? We'll dig in. Then Chapter 2 - Adam Neumann's staggering melt down at We Work doesn't seem to have tarnish his brand in Silicon Valley. So, what's the real story about his new startup FLOW. Is is the HBO Drama all you need to know about Nueman, or is there more to the story? I'm Steven Rosenbaum, and his is Future Forward - and Bob Garfield is back to help pilot the Pod. He Bob, Welcome.

Today - A pod in two acts. Act 1, you've heard plenty about Mara Lago, the FBI search, and the unspooling drama about the security issues and nuclear secrets. But friend of the Pod Bob Garfield says there's more to the story. And he sees the unspooling conspiracy theories being tweeted out by democrats as part of a troubling trend. Then, as a growing chorus of voices says that social media is addictive to teens, California was poised to write some ground breaking legislation. Now it's dead, so what happened? Finally, Snap Chat puts in place some parental controls that seem promising. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, and this is Future Forward, let's launch.

Today on Future Forward - Since the horrific murders in Sandy Hook 10 years ago Alex Jones has been trading in misinformation and fictionalized hateful rhetoric. Hiding behind the veil of ‘free speech, he's profited mightily selling snake oil. But now it seems the slow wheels of justice have at a conclusion that's hard to ignore. Jones is a liar, the families were deeply injured, and they were must be paid. What does this mean in particular to the January 6 investigation now that his text messages have been revealed. Media Critic and Author Bob Garfield has been following the Jones case carefully and joins us to talk about case and its outcome. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, welcome Bob to the Pod.

Today, a pod in 3 chapters. Chapter 1: Facebook's on again, off again love affair with News Publishers. Why it's treating Australian publishers so much better than the media makers in the US? Then Chapter 2 - who is Lina Khan? Why does the newly minted FTC chair seems poised to upend decades of anti trust law. Can she pull it off? And finally Chapter 3 - Content discovery. It used to be that you searched, and discovered new things to watch, read, and listen to. But as the volume of choices has grown from a drip to a flood to a tsunami, is human curation destined to be eaten by voracious and profit-driven algorithms? So, that's the menu, and joining us at the feast of content conversations is friend and content curmudgeon Bob Garfield. Brilliant media provocateur, and friend of media makers big and small. Let's the Facebook feast commence!

Today, we unpack the odd, funny, scary, maybe brilliant January six -th PrimeTime spectacular. And who better to do the poking, than political prognosticator Bob Garfield. He says he's not an expert - but he does enjoy a good Josh Hawely joke now and again. Welcome Bob to Future Forward.

Today, the battle over reproductive rights is is now a battle moving online. Then, as the clock ticks - Big Tech Legislation is coming down to the wire. And Apple AI - is it really a game changer, and when will it arrive? I'm with Laura Fitton, and this is Future Forward. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, Let's Launch -

The UK is adjusting its online safety bill so platforms can't pull down content without review. "Democracy depends on people's access to high-quality journalism,” said the British Culture Secretary. Then, it was promoted as a slugfest, but in the end, Tucker Carlson giggled and made wild pronouncements, while Ben Smith was painted into a corner of being reasonable and factual. Maybe that was the way it was supposed to go. And if you've ever wished for crazy low prices, then WISH was your app. Only turns out - it was a scam. Ouch. I'm Laura Fitton and this is Future Forward. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, let's launch!

So let's start with one thing, this is a podcast and we feel no requirement to be objective. Which is why we can say, without equivification that we think the Supreme Court's decision overturning roe vs wade is horrific and indefensible. How did it happen, how does it seem so many people are both overwhelmed by and tuned out of the news? Today a Reuters survey may have some clues. SR: And Facebook effectively pulling out of the newest business may be part of the equation. I'm Laura Fitton and this is future forward. I'm Steven Rosenbaum let's launch.

Doctors and Tech / Future Forward Special Edition. Today, health care has a massive and growing footprint in the digital world. Dr's are being replaced by AI, Famous Doctors are getting into NFT's And medical security and privacy hangs in the balance. Today, a special Future Forward - Health Care's Drive to Digital This is Future Forward, I'm Steve Rosenbaum and I'm Laura Fitton, let's launch!

On Thursday, a piece of media history was made. The January 6th Committee held it's first live, prime team hearing. It was a careful, thoughtful, unfolding of the events of the day. What was done, and what wasn't done. And, much like the opening of a complex trial - it had just one objective. To convict Donald Trump of knowingly urgent mobs to the capital, and then in conjunction with the proud boys and oath keepers -to set them to attack the seat of US government. Today, we'll unpack the first of six hearings, and why Fox News choose not to cover what was clearly a news event. I'm Laura Fitton, and this is Future Forward. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, Let's Launch

Today - Sheryl Sandberg leaves Facebook - What Legacy does she live behind? Then, How Harmful Is Social Media? Open AI and Dall-E, how to manage and limit AI's danger. I'm Laura Fitton, and this is Future Forward. I'm Steven Rosenbaum - Let's Launch How Harmful Is Social Media?https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/we-know-less-about-social-media-than-we-think Sheryl Sandberg's Legacyhttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/technology/sheryl-sandberg-legacy.html How One Billionaire […]

When an AI calls you a cheater, is there any way to fight back? Then the very murky 4chan, who owns it? Data boarderless? big tech takes sides. I'm Laura Fitton, and this is Future Forward. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, let's launch!

Today - Apple has SO MUCH NEWS - and some of it good. Meanwhile, the stock market punishes tech. Is the downward slide over? And glitch sells to fastly. The good guys win. I'm Steven Rosenbaum and this is Future Forward. I'm Laura Fitton, Let's Launch!

Today - we're going to take a look at The Supremes Greatest Hits. And we'd don't mean the R&B Band. We're talking the Supreme Court. Supreme Court to block Texas' controversial social media law. The Court is about to flood New York's Streets with Guns. And of course, Row Vs. Wade. I'm Laura Fitton and this is Future Forward and I'm Steven Rosenbaum. Let's launch

Today, a show that's topical. And disturbing. We're going to look at Trust, Truth, and Change big topics with personal consequence. Today, on Future Forward. I'm Laura Fitton I'm Steven Rosenbaum, Let's Launch.

Today - Air BnB is reacting to the receding COVID threat, but will it work? Then, Netflix had a big wakeup call with subscriber losses, but there may be cultural issues roiling the worlds largest streamer. And finally Snap has a new selfie drone. Is it cool, or is it a digital stalker, or both? I'm Laura Fitton, and this is Future Forward. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, let's Launch!

Today - the Digital Services Act Aims to crack down on misinformation and mandate transparent practices. Sounds good? It is, for Europe. The US, not so fast. Then, DJI is the leading drone company in the world. For a few hundred bucks you can great a flying robot and take to the skies. But DJI is a Chinese company, and now their use in the Ukraine is getting some serious criticism. And Finally - If I give my computer a thumbs up, or wave away a screen - will it work? Now Zoom is saying yes to gesture recognition. Who will be next?I'm Laura Fitton, and this is Future Forward. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, Let's Launch.

Today - Scientists, Billionaires, Futurists, and Philosophers converge on Vancouver, BC - gathering for the first MainStage TED Talks conference in almost 3 years.And - we'll take you insider. We'll share some the talks that galvanized the room, an dig Into Climate Science, Ukraine, and Majestic Robots.I'm Laura Fitton, and this is Future Forward. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, Let's Launch.

Today - rocket ships, self driving cars - and now Twitter. What's Elon up to? And - will he impact the mid terms? We'll investigate. Then - Obama on misinformation. He says he underestimated the threat. I'm Laura Fitton and this is Future Forward I'm Steven Rosenbaum- let's launch

Today, after Staten Island's historic unionization vote, will other Amazon employees follow suite? Then, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is taking on Disney… and he's got Fox News leading the charge. But if Fox is ‘anti Disney- why did they sell for 71 billion dollars in 2019? So, in todays environment, can corporations take political stands on issue? And what if they done? I”m Steven Rosenbaum and this is Future Forward. I'm Laura Fitton, let's launch!

Today - A landmark loss for big Tech in the European Union Given the president setting nature of GDPR, is the US Next? Then, Russian Hacking and Microsoft Bribes…. I'm Laura Fitton, and this is Future Forward I'm Steven Rosenbaum, Let's Launch - Big Tech Legal Battles Brewing  Big Tech attacks tough EU measures aimed […]

Today, we're back from Austin, with lots to share. Then, the info war in Ukraine is now the front page of the internet. And, What big Tech Got Wrong, and how we can reboot it I'm Laura Fitton, and this is Future Forward. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, Let's Launch!

Today - around the world - the connected web is giving new power to individuals who want to support Ukraine in a time of need. Then - a look at Kentucky and why its teacher's retirement system invested in a Russian bank and lost their money. And, finally, we look at SXSW, its upcoming return being in person in Austin and the controversies that swirl around its Texas home. I'm Laura Fitton, and this is Future Forward. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, let's launch!

Today - we'll talk about Ukraine, thought the eyes of Social Media Then - Hackers, on both sides, are fighting a cyber war. And, The Global Political situation, and - how Trump's Support of Putin is leaving him ostracized. I'm Laura Fitton, and this is Future Forward. I'm Steven Rosenbaum, Let's Launch!

Today - Is Ransomware on the Rise? Is sure is! The, the Climate Change story, what the media is getting right, and wrong. And, the rocky relationship between Grub Hub and the Restaurants. I'm Steven Rosenbaum and this is future forward. I'm Alexa Scordato - Let's Launch!

Today - remember Tumbler, well it's back - and hotter than ever. The question is - why? Then, Peter Thiel is shifting his focus - it may be time to be very, VERY afraid. And Lots of companies made big money during COVID, Zillow and Peloton -not so much I'm Steven Rosenbaum, and this is Future Forward, and I'm Alexa Scordato - Let's Launch!

It's been a tough week for people Named Zucker. Or, for that matter Zuckerberg. But are stories about Facebook and CNN really about something else? We'll look into consolidation, and change today on Future Forward, I'm Alexa Scordato And I'm Steven Rosenbaum - Let's Launch!

In this unholy amalgamation of interview and free-form kibbitz between two cranky former employees of WNYC, Bob Garfield and Alec Baldwin discuss life, acting, and the great Stockton Briggle. Plus, find out more about Bob's split with “On the Media.”TRANSCRIPT:TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in. BOB GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt. I'm Bob Garfield with Episode 12: Alec Baldwin Is Everywhere (Including Here, Right Now).ALEC BALDWIN: I'm a game show host. I'm a podcast host. I'm a father of seven children. I'm out of my mind....GARFIELD: ..and see what I mean? That's him, star of stage, screen, Page 6, iHeart Radio, and, in this case, Instagram Live, where he appears once a week for his 2.1 million followers in conversation with actors, musicians, and at least one dashing, elderly podcaster. Why? Because he graciously wanted to call attention to this show. It was something of an interview, something of a promo appearance, and something of a free-form kibbitz between two cranky former employees of WNYC radio in New York City. I warn you, like other friendly conversations you've overheard, it comes with a lot of random digressions.BALDWIN: I'm here with the one and the only Bob Garfield to talk about his new show, Bully Pulpit, to talk about his career in journalism (his long and wonderful career as a journalist), to talk about the fate of journalism. We might talk about that for like 60 seconds, because what's the point? But first of all, Bob, tell me, you left public radio--you were on public radio for quite a while. On the Media, wonderful show. Of course, I'm obviously a fan of yours, a huge fan of yours. But when you left there, talk about the genesis of Bully Pulpit, how did that come together? GARFIELD: Well, first of all, I left there the way an artillery shell leaves a cannon. I was fired. And you know, we can get into that a little bit. The lawyers prevent me from being, you know, too candid. But yeah, we can talk about that. Can we just observe one thing, since this conversation is taking place the day after the Facebook shut down and the Instagram shut down and two days after this blockbuster interview on 60 Minutes with the whistleblower? We are on Instagram, which we now well understand triggers self-loathing in kids, right? Because, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, if we're talking like evil, he makes Vladimir Putin look like Mr. Rogers. So I guess what I'm saying is, kids, please love yourself and we love you too. That's where I want to start. I apologize for talking to you, Alec, on this particular platform because evil. BALDWIN: [coughing] I'm choking. GARFIELD:  I know, it was poignant. I understand.BALDWIN: It's very moving. [coughing]GARFIELD: You know, if that were in a movie (that little episode), in 12 minutes, you would die of consumption.BALDWIN: Well, someone wrote “Trump 2024,” so I immediately started convulsing. GARFIELD: [laughs]BALDWIN: Well, listen, I am someone who Instagram is my primary, if not sole social media source. I have a Twitter account which I keep open just as a placeholder for my name. Facebook--I have a Facebook page for myself, for my foundation. My wife and I have a charitable foundation. We have a Facebook page for that. But Instagram is it for me. And I guess Instagram is owned by Facebook, correct?GARFIELD: It is. And you know, obviously it's a fantastic utility, but it is both utopian and dystopian, and the dystopian side is really dystopian. I mean that because Mark Zuckerberg and company know exactly what the deleterious effects are of the social dynamic on these platforms, and they will not do anything to remediate them because it screws up their business model. So they are constantly apologizing and explaining and being on the defensive, but they never actually fix what's broke. So, nonetheless, like I said, really good utility, and I'm delighted, de-freaking-lighted, to be talking to you on this or anywhere because I'm always delighted talking to you. BALDWIN: Well, thank you. Now a guy who shall remain nameless contacted me quite a while ago, probably last year in the heart of the first waves of the COVID (probably more than a year ago), to talk about a more user friendly platform. Like this with more integrity. Everybody'd have to register. You'd have to give all your real information. You'd have to give a photograph. You'd have to be completely transparent. It's you as you, being you, doing you, posting as you. The question, of course, is how many people really, really want that? Or do most people really kind of like the way it is, where you can hide and you can conceal yourself and say just hateful things?GARFIELD: Well, it's a playground for the id, right? And it, you know, it empowers you to have power, even if it's only the power to intimidate or to terrorize or to bad mouth. And, you know, it taps into something that unfortunately is all too human.BALDWIN: Yeah.GARFIELD: Can I say one other thing, Alec? This is so weird. I'm sitting here looking at your face because Instagram, right? So, last night I was watching the Jerry Lewis documentary, which popped up on Amazon Prime, and there you were. A couple of weeks ago, I was watching the John DeLorean docu-drama--FRAMING JOHN DELOREAN CLIP: I'm gonna try to be DeLorean.GARFIELD: --and there you were, not only as DeLorean, but as yourself commenting on the DeLorean saga. I just watched you in the mini-series, (I think on Peacock), Dr. Death--DR. DEATH CLIP: Duntsch is never going to stop on his own.GARFIELD: --which is a really, really, really perverse story. And I watch you every week on the Match Game.MATCH GAME CLIP: We're looking for….penis. GARFIELD: Well, OK, that's actually not true, I don't watch the Match Game. But Alec, I'm afraid to open the f*****g fridge because I think you're going to be in there like drinking my orange juice from the carton. BALDWIN: There I am on the missing — I'm missing on the carton.GARFIELD: I don't understand. You've got between like 6 and 47 kids. How do you have the time to be everywhere all at once? I don't understand this.BALDWIN: I wish that were true. But Peacock--we started Dr. Death in March of last year. They shut down. They came back and were rebooted and ready to go with all of their protocols by mid-October. We shot from mid-October to the end of like, I think middle or end of February, you know, because we have the holidays. It was like a almost five month shoot to do eight episodes because of all the shutdowns and protocols. But it was a group of people--what you see very often in the business now is how hard people are working to keep everything going. They don't want to be the one that shuts down the production. They don't want to be the one that brings the COVID on the set. They're working really, really hard--like my kids' school. When you go to my kids' school and we drop them off at school, everyone's working really hard, masking, gloves, spraying things down, and distancing. And everybody on the staff is vaccinated. Everybody on the faculty is vaccinated. And I would imagine most of the parents are vaccinated as well, and we're assiduous about all of this because the kids can't be vaccinated yet. So we're always trying to protect unvaccinated children. So the job I did with Peacock (and my part was rather small. I mean, the real star of it was Joshua Jackson--played the eponymous character, if you will.)GARFIELD: Very well. He does a sociopath very, very well, that guy. BALDWIN: Wonderful performance. And so, everybody worked really hard to protect everything COVID-wise. I'm leaving to go to New Mexico in a little while to go shoot a film very quickly, and that's the same thing. Everyone just busting their back to keep everything safe for everybody. GARFIELD: A Western, by the way. BALDWIN: Yes, I'm going to do a Western. GARFIELD: Is this your first Western? BALDWIN: I actually did--the producer was a dear friend of mine. I love this guy. And his name was Stockton Briggle. And we did a--for CBS TV back in the 80s, we did a remake of The Alamo with James Arness and Brian Keith.THE ALAMO: THIRTEEN DAYS TO GLORY CLIP: News is that Santa Anna has crossed the Rio Grand. [crowd noise]What about Fannin and the boys from Goliad? Same with Houston, what about him?Both Fannin and Houston are on the march to come to our aidWhen do they get here, Jim?As of this moment..How about it Jim?As of this moment, we are on a battle alert. BALDWIN: ...and the Alamo Historical Society picketed the sets because they said that the two other men were old enough to play the fathers of their character. They were both long in the tooth for their role. So, I did a Western once. I did The Alamo for CBS, and it was memorable, but not for the right reasons.GARFIELD: I'm sorry. What was the name of the producer?BALDWIN: Stockton Briggle.GARFIELD: Right, of course, the Stockton Briggle. I once did a piece, that involved the director of the McLean Symphony Orchestra, whose name, as you know, is Dingwall Fleary, and that was a career highlight. BALDWIN: Well I'm always looking for names to stay in hotels under. And my favorite, one of my favorites was the great Mozart biographer who wrote the great books on Mozart. His name was Cuthbert Girdlestone.GARFIELD: Yeah, you know what, his name was actually Shecky Cuddlestein. And you know, he changed it at Ellis Island.BALDWIN: Real name was Phil Cohen.GARFIELD: Yeah. [laughs]BALDWIN: But I want to ask you--Bully Pulpit, how did that come about?GARFIELD: Well, it came about because I got fired...BROOKE GLADSTONE: Bob Garfield is out this week, and as many of you know by now, every week. GARFIELD: ...under the allegation that I had violated the WNYC'S anti-bullying policies. Not that I was a bully, per se, not that that nicety ever came through. As far as the world is concerned, I'm a bully, and, you know, to some degree canceled, but I'm certainly fired. And it was catastrophic in many, many ways: financially, reputationally. I am fighting it, and I probably will prevail, although there's no such thing as a slam dunk in this kind of law. But in the meantime, I still want to journalize. So a friend of mine, who was my co-host on a podcast that Slate did called Lexicon Valley...LEXICON VALLEY: From Washington, DC, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Bob Garfield with Mike Vuolo.GARFIELD: It was a wonderful podcast...LEXICON VALLEY: Today, Episode 64, titled “Yada Yada Yada: Europeans Don't Get Seinfeld,” wherein we discuss why the classic American sitcom doesn't translate. Hey, Mikey. Hey, Bobby. How you doing, buddy?Splendid, thank you. And your own self?I am great...GARFIELD: ...which we both--we left. He went and did one thing about Supreme Court decisions. I went to do another thing about MacArthur Genius laureates. And then it was handed over to a Columbia professor, a linguistics professor, named John McWhorter. Anyway, Mike Vuolo his name is, came to me and said, Look, I'm starting this company with my friend, Matt Schwartz, from NPR, and it's called Booksmart Studios, and we would like you to consider doing your thing for us. And I said, Yes! Yes! This is the best part about getting my ass fired and being humiliated and everything else that comes with my fate, now I can do exactly what I want--the same kind of social and political media criticism that I wanted to do, (I don't want to mischaracterize this), but without having to deal with, let's say, the internal politics of an organization, without having any kind of sort of received ideology that has to be at the bottom of it. I'm free to be me, you know, asking the kind of questions and making the kind of observations that I want to make. And that has been very liberating. You know, I wish I hadn't been fired, but I could not be more delighted to be doing this particular show because it's just been a fantastic experience and very well received among the 11 people who listen to it. BALDWIN: I had a show for quite a while. I was several years at NYC.HERE'S THE THING WITH ALEC BALDWIN: My first clip is from an interview with the legendary Barbra Streisand who talks here about how she wanted control of her films in a way that...BALDWIN: When the show ended, when I left NYC to go to iHeart and go from public radio to commercial radio, it was difficult because I was sad to leave behind, figuratively, the public radio audience. I like the public radio audience. And I was always getting--people would tell me how much they liked my podcast in New York more than anything else I was working on. It was kind of funny. But NYC was a place where--I'm a fan of public radio, but not all public radio stations are created equally. And NYC, which has a huge nut, they are, in the COVID era, I would imagine, obsessed with raising money. But NYC, of course, got into the kind of firing jag: Lopate had to go, Jonathan Schwartz had to go, and Hockenberry.I was given a mandatory set of questions that I had to ask Woody Allen. And I said to them, I said, now Woody Allen told me in my conversation with him--we had one conversation, and I said, you know, they're coming after me to ask unanswered questions. And I just find asking those questions--again, not that there's anything wrong with them, but it doesn't mean a good show. He's already been over this a thousand times. And they said, well, if you don't ask these questions, we're not going to air the show. I mean, I found the chuck. This is public radio. They said, if you don't ask the questions--the guy, whatever his name was. What was that guy who was in charge of content there?GARFIELD: I just, I see no need to bandy about names, Alec. Let's just leave them anonymous. BALDWIN: I'd love to put his name right up on the screen, but he was the one that said, yeah, if you don't ask these questions, we're not going to air the show. So in my mind, that was it, I was going to quit. I was out of there. And so, I said to Woody, they're demanding that I ask these questions. I apologize. This isn't at all what I had in mind. He said, listen, he said, don't worry about it. So we do the show. He was great. I mean, he was great, great, great.WOODY ALLEN: I was coming from a position--people were thinking, my god, this older person has seduced this young girl, and he's taking advantage of her. You know, it looked awful. I understood that. I mean, I can understand that. BALDWIN: And then we finished and I called my lawyer and I said, I'm out of here. They didn't care. So I just kind of took a deep breath and I said, you know something, I mean, just about anywhere has got to be better than here. Do I like being on commercial radio? There's benefits to it. Now, you're on commercial radio now as well. GARFIELD: I wish there were more commerce. it's an interesting model. We are on Substack, which is a platform for independent creators of content who are not in the employ of media companies to fend for themselves. You know, put their content out there and be paid by subscriptions by their followers. And Bully Pulpit is, in effect, a Substack talent. And at the moment, we are three shows. There's Bully Pulpit. There is Lexicon Valley, which Mike and I started, and McWhorter now does for us.MCWHORTER: Having a pronoun to mark nonbinary identity could be seen as pretty basic. It could be seen as something that a critical mass of people could agree is a moral advance if you think about history, if you think about what seems to be the case in all cultures.GARFIELD: Then there's Banished by an academic, a professor named Amna Khalid, which looks at what loosely is called “cancel culture” and looks at its implications for the society and so forth.KHALID: To what extent is this just kind of generating frankly b******t work and legislation to make a political point and just to kind of grind down the machinery and keep the conversation going around these issues? And to what extent do they genuinely think that they are going to be able to control the space that is higher education?GARFIELD: She really asks smart questions, and, you know, listens carefully to the answers. And it's something. I mean, when you listen to an episode, when you're done, your jaw aches because of the tension of this moment in our society. And yes, of course, in answer to your question, yes, you can subscribe to all of them for free at Booksmart Studios. BooksmartStudios.org. And if you ask me later, I'll also plug the shows.BALDWIN: [laughs] What are the benefits of the show you're doing now as compared to where you were before? GARFIELD: Well, I get to be me. I don't have to worry about other people's ideology, about their their red zones, you know, I don't have to worry about their aesthetic. I mean, collaboration is great, and I worked with extremely, extremely, extremely talented producers. But they weren't me, and there were times when I was stymied in my wishes for a particular piece of subject matter (often subject matter) or an approach, a line on a piece or something like that. And now I am free to either soar or f**k up all by myself. I'm free to be me, if you call that freedom.BALDWIN: Now, you had on one of the episodes your friend who you've known for many years, who did the 911 Museum documentary. Correct?GARFIELD: Yeah. Steve Rosenbaum.BALDWIN: Rosenbaum--the director or the producer or both?GARFIELD: Both. BALDWIN: And Michael Shulman, I remember that clearly he was the kind of protagonist of the piece.ROSENBAUM: I mean, he's quite brilliant in the way that lots of thoughtful New Yorkers are about images and sound and picture. He's just not a museum person in that he doesn't play by the rules...BALDWIN: I liked the film a lot and I just couldn't get enough of Shulman. I wanted to see more of Shulman.GARFIELD: Shulan. Shulan. BALDWIN: Oh, Shulan? Yeah, Michael Shulan. Sorry. So, you know Rosenbaum from where?GARFIELD: I've known him for, you know, six or seven hundred years. I was a--believe it or not, this is going to sound ridiculous, but before I got into the media criticism racket, I was an advertising critic. I was a, believe it or not, world famous advertising critic because I worked for Advertising Age, which was the global publication for media and marketing industry. And I passed judgment on new commercials and campaigns and print ads and so forth. And as such was--[laughs] it's crazy. “BOB GARFIELD: EXCELLENT RADIO MAN”: Good, old Bob Garfield is the best man in the whole wide world. Good, old Bob Garfield is very intelligent. Good, old Bob Garfield is the nicest man who ever lived. GARFIELD: You know, you know what it's like to walk down the street in Cannes during the movie festival in May and people turning their heads and going, [whispering]. Well, that's what would happen to me when I walked down the Croisette in Cannes in June for the advertising festival.BALDWIN: I thought you were going to say that that was what it was like when you walked down Madison Avenue in the 70s and 80s. That was your Croisette.GARFIELD: As you well know, Alec, as a native New Yorker, nobody makes eye contact with you on Madison, so.CHARLI XCX: Why you looking at me? Why you looking at me? All these  b*****s looking at me.GARFIELD: You know, it's easy to be anonymous walking down at North to South Street. Anyway, so he called me once to book me for a speaking gig, and we became friends. BALDWIN: You were a person who was immersed in the world of advertising. I used to do voiceovers in the early days with the Young & Rubicam and of course, my favorite piece of  Madison Avenue trivia, my favorite anecdote, was when someone said that BBDO (Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn) was the sound made by what? What was the joke?GARFIELD: A trunk falling down the stairs. And it was Fred Allen, said it on his radio show back in 1644.BALDWIN: Batten, Barton...GARFIELD: Durstine and Osborn, yeah. [laughs]BALDWIN: What's your media diet? I mean, I talked to a couple of people, all of them say the same thing, and I don't fault them for that. Their go to in the morning is The New York Times online. They're all reading The Times first and foremost. What's your media diet every day? What are you committed to listening to, reading every day? GARFIELD: Well, as we've discussed, the major thing that I consume it turns out, is Alec Baldwin movies, which is is getting to be a problem.GLENGARRY GLENN ROSS SPEECH: You see this watch? You see this watch?Yeah.That watch costs more than your car. I made $970,000 last year. How much you make? You see pal, that's who I am, and you're nothing. GARFIELD: You know, I read The New York Times. That's my first go. And then, because I'm always looking for story ideas, the other thing I read is everything. Now, one of the things I really miss, one of the things I really miss about On the Media is the producers in the aggregate had far more scope in their media diets than I did, and they would bring stuff that I otherwise would not have found. And, you know, sometimes it was from Atlantic or The New Republic or The Nation or some even less brand name publications, but far greater than I personally consumed. And now, because I have constantly to be on the lookout for ideas, for pieces and commentaries and essays, I just obsessively scroll everything. So the answer to your question changes hour by hour, but I'm just going to go with everything.BALDWIN: So again, the podcast is called Bully Pulpit. It can be found at Booksmart Studios? GARFIELD: BooksmartStudios.org. You can subscribe for free. You can pay $7 a month and get bonus content from Amna and John and from me. I write a weekly text column, which might be even funner for me than the audio pieces. You know, in my life, I've written 3 or 4,000 columns. That's really how I got started in this business. What we do, or at least what I do, is observe. I observe my ass off, try to look at what is happening in our society, and ask questions that for whatever reasons some are uncomfortable about asking. And I may sometimes seem polemical. But the key is I make an argument. I don't just say things as if they were received truth. I make an argument and the arguments are pretty strong and it's often kind of funny. Have you heard any of the pieces?BALDWIN: Yes. I listened to the one about the tortillas. I listened to one about the documentary. Yeah.GARFIELD: So, I mean, in two words and one of them being “transcendent,” how would you characterize Bully Pulpit from BooksmartStudios.org.BALDWIN: Almost transcendent. GARFIELD: [laughs]   BALDWIN: To get back to your media diet, no TV for you? You're not watching any TV news at all. That's hopeless to you. GARFIELD: Well, cable news is not news. It's just highly conflicted people arguing about the news, right? Fox News obviously is not news because it's just political propaganda and opposition research. And it's, you know, it's a cancer on the society. And the local news is, you know, people standing in front of police tape talking live from something that happened yesterday. So that's utterly useless. And unfortunately, local news reporting, it's all but disappeared. We are awash in national political reporting. But the collapse of the media industry has devastated, decimated, the journalism business everywhere in this country. In some places, there are vast deserts where there is no local news available. And you know who's behind that too? You know who is at the heart of that collapse? Well, the digital revolution in the first instance, because it bollixed up the advertising model and it created an endless glut of content and not enough advertising to support it. But then Facebook and Google snapped up everything. They own the advertising economy, and everybody else has to fight for scraps. So, on top of all of the other evils of Mark Zuckerberg that we began with, they have, more than any other institution including the Trump administration, eviscerated the news business here and around the world, and from this, I believe we shall never recover.BALDWIN:  You don't see any hope?GARFIELD: No, I mean, I'm in the despair industry, but there's not a lot I see. Let's just say the planet does not burn into a cinder, about which I'm also increasingly skeptical. I don't see the problems, the intractable problems, in the news business doing anything but getting worse and worse and worse. BALDWIN: The show is called Bully Pulpit. The site is BooksmartStudios.org. I'm especially interested in both the other podcasts--Banished, and what's the other one, Lexicon Valley?GARFIELD: Lexicon Valley. They both are transcendent. And also Alec, I should say I'll be at the Valley Forge Music Fair June 7th, 8th and 9th, and I'll be doing some summer stock in Meridian, Mississippi. I'm doing Music Man. It's long been a dream of mine. I will be playing the Shirley Jones character. BALDWIN: I'm so sorry to miss that. Let's record that. Anyway, my very best to you. I look forward to Bully Pulpit, Lexicon Valley, and Banished on BooksmartStudios.org.GARFIELD: Thanks, man. It's always a pleasure. BALDWIN: My pleasure. We'll talk to you down the road.GARFIELD: All right, we're done here. You now know what my conversations with Alec Baldwin tend to sound like and you also know more about the origins of this show. In due course, you will learn more about my WNYC ordeal. It is as frustrating, I promise you, to be muzzled as it was to be smeared in the first place, but I promise you in time the truth will emerge.Meantime, we encourage you to become a paid subscriber to Booksmart Studios, so you can get extra content from Bully Pulpit, Lexicon Valley and Banished. The big Bully Pulpit bonus is my weekly text column, which some have described as “like Bully Pulpit but you don't need earbuds.”Also, I can't emphasize this enough, if you like what you hear from our shows, please share with your peeps and go to iTunes to rate us. Those ratings to date are phenomenal across the board but scale matters a lot. So, please please weigh in. And I, of course, thank you very much.Bully Pulpit is produced by Mike Vuolo and Matthew Schwartz. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

Bob speaks with “The Outsider” co-director Steve Rosenbaum about his film documenting the fraught creation of the National September 11 Memorial & MuseumTEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in. GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield. Episode 8: The Outsider.It has been twenty years since the bloody horrors of September 11th, 2001 scarred lower Manhattan and the American psyche. Within three years of the terror acts that claimed nearly 3,000 innocent lives, plans were underway to commemorate the fateful day and its events for posterity. The National 9/11 Memorial & Museum would be constructed on the hallowed footprint of the atrocity. A decade later, the half-billion dollar project would be opened to the public. Here was President Barack Obama at the dedication ceremony:OBAMA: A nation that stands tall and united and unafraid -- because no act of terror can match the strength or the character of our country. Like the great wall and bedrock that embrace us today, nothing can ever break us; nothing can change who we are as Americans.GARFIELD: That was perhaps a fitting tribute to a new national shrine, the memorial part of the project that must necessarily dwell in the grief, the sacrifice, the heroism that so dominate the 9/11 narrative. But what Obama left out was the museum part and its role of exploration, illumination and inquiry, such as where do those acts of terror and their bloody toll fit into the broader sweep of history, into America's story, into our understanding of human events before and since? If the dedication ceremony was appropriately a moment for communion and remembrance and resolve, surely the ongoing work of the museum would go beyond the heroism and sacrifice to the complex history and geopolitics that led to 9/11 evil.SHULAN: One of the key meta narratives of this exhibition, one of the most important things about this exhibition, is to say to people, “Use your eyes, look around you, look at the world and understand what you're seeing.” And if we don't do that with the material that we're presenting to people, then how can we give them that message? How will that message ever get through?GARFIELD: A new documentary by husband and wife filmmakers Pam Yoder and Steve Rosenbaum offers an inside view of the creation of the 9/11 Museum. It tells the story of the storytellers as they labor for a decade, collecting artifacts, designing exhibits, and editing the narratives flowing from that fateful day. And its protagonist was a relatively minor character who was propelled by internal conflict among the museum's planners into a central role in this story. The film is called “The Outsider,” available on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Vudu, Facebook and other platforms. Steve Rosenbaum joins me now. Steve, welcome to Bully Pulpit.ROSENBAUM: I am so glad to be here, because I've always wanted to be on a bully pulpit.GARFIELD: Uh huh. Well, congratulations. You have achieved your dream, perhaps your destiny. OK, first, a whole lot of disclosure. You and I have been friends for most of our adult lives, so about 100 years, and I've been following your progress in getting this movie made for a long time. And furthermore, at more or less the last minute this summer, I stepped in to help write the narration and ended up voicing it in your movie. So I'm not exactly bringing critical distance into this conversation, but I still have a lot of questions. You ready?ROSENBAUM: I am ready indeed.GARFIELD: OK, so not only have you made a feature length movie about a process, it is a feature length movie about the process of museum curation with most of the action taking place around conference tables. So what I'm saying is Fast and Furious, it isn't.ROSENBAUM: You know, the Blue Room, which is the conference room you're referring to, was both the magical place where the magic happened and also a bit of our albatross because it is, in fact, a conference.GARFIELD: So in the end, though, you do manage to capture quite a bit of drama, quite a bit of drama, but there is no way you could have anticipated, when you got started, what would emerge over these years and -- how many hours of film?ROSENBAUM: 670. GARFIELD: Over how long a period of time?ROSENBAUM: Six and a half years.GARFIELD: How did you come to be a fly on the wall for six and a half years as they undertook this project?ROSENBAUM: So we negotiated with a then non-existent museum to trade them a very precious, valuable archive that my wife and I had lovingly gathered over many years in exchange for access to the construction, design, and development of the museum. And I think at the beginning, everyone thought it was fairly harmless. Like, what could go wrong? I mean, the museum will be fantastic and they'll record all of its fantasticalness, and that will be a film.GARFIELD: When you went in there for those six and a half years, it was purely as a matter of documentation, right? You didn't walk in with a premise or a hypothesis or a scenario or an angle, much less an agenda. But there must have been some sort of core interest, some focus when you undertook this project.ROSENBAUM: You have to remember that in the weeks after 9/11, particularly in New York, there was this extraordinary feeling of camaraderie and connectedness, both among New Yorkers and also around the world. And the sense that maybe what would come of this terrible day is some real goodness, that people would understand each other, that we'd be part of a global community. And so, we brought that, what now seems like naive optimism, to the museum. And they, at least in the early days, fueled that. I mean, they said to us, “We're going to build a different kind of museum. It's going to be open and participatory. It's going to be democratic.” And, you know, that worked for us as filmmakers. We thought a different kind of museum in a country that's gone through a terrible day and hopefully will come out of it stronger and wiser and, you know, more introspection--GARFIELD: But as of at least a year ago, you really didn't know what your film was going to be about. You didn't really have a movie scenario.ROSENBAUM: Well, you have to start with the problem that we had as a filmmaker, as filmmakers, which was a) No one gives a s**t about museums and how they're made. There's zero public interest in that. And then secondly, as it turned out, no one really gave a s**t about the museum. Nobody went to it other than tourists. Thoughtful people, historians, scholars, New Yorkers, media people didn't go there in droves. So, we're like, “How do we make a movie about a museum nobody cares about?” And in fact, the museum opened in 2014 and we spent three or four years fumfering around trying to get our arms around a movie we could make and pretty much gave up. And then Pam, my filmmaking partner and life partner and smarter person than I am, came to me one day and she said, “You know, I think there's a scene that might help.” And she came out with this little -- in her hand, this little Hi 8 tape, she handed it to me, said, “Put it in the deck.”And it was this exhibit in Soho. It was a photo exhibit, which I actually remember going to and some of your listeners may remember as well. It was called “Here is New York,” and it was literally the first crowdsourced photo exhibit in history. All of these people with little mini cameras made pictures of 9/11. And this character, a guy named Michael Shulan, who is a kind of a failed author, owned a little storefront gallery that had been essentially empty, put a picture on the window. And what exploded there was this spectacular collection of real person pictures. And so, the scene that Pam found was of this guy, who we had at that point never met -- one of our camera people had recorded him -- telling the story of why they gathered these pictures.SHULAN: We've asked basically that anyone bring us their pictures and we will display them. And to date we've probably had sixty or seventy people who've brought in pictures in the past two days.GARFIELD: So two things. One, this clip Pam found was from video you guys had shot twenty years ago for a previous movie about 9/11's aftermath called “Seven Days in September.” And you watch it and you're like, “Holy hell, that's Michael.” He is one of the guys who wound up on the museum planning staff, and you have been filming for six and a half years.ROSENBAUM: You know, we have 500 hours of the day of 9/11 and 670 hours shot at the museum construction. It is the definition, the filmmaking definition, of a needle in a haystack. We literally didn't know we had the Shulan scene until Pam magically pulled it out of -- the rabbit out of the hat. And Shulan was one of the five people we had chosen to follow for all six and a half years. And so, the combination of that -- and “Here is New York” is a wonderful kind of mile marker for where the film began because Michael talks about democracy and openness and sharing and letting people kind of find their own story in the photos. And that's exactly what the museum began as.GARFIELD: You say it was a needle in a haystack, finding this film of one of your characters surface. It was also very serendipitous because Shulan, who had the title of museum creative director and who is the “outsider” of the title -- of your title -- is not a professional museum executive or even a professional curator. He had this storefront where he crowdsourced this enormous collection of, you know, amateur images of the day and its aftermath.SHULAN: I live in this little building on Prince Street in Soho, which was inside of the World Trade Center. On the storefront of the empty shop, someone had taped up a copy of the 9/11 morning's newspaper and people were touching this thing and seeming to take some solace in this. And I suddenly remembered I had an old picture of the World Trade Center. So I ran upstairs and I got this picture and I taped it up. And as the day wore on, I noticed that people now came by and were starting to take pictures of the picture. And that was how the whole thing started.GARFIELD: And he was kind of thrust by events into the spotlight, which is how he got hired by the museum to begin with, right?ROSENBAUM: That's exactly correct. But I don't want to, you know, sell him short. I mean, he's quite brilliant in the way that lots of thoughtful New Yorkers are about images and sound and picture. He's just not a museum person in that he doesn't play by the rules. And I think it's important to foreshadow that because, you know, nobody who hired him could have had any confusion about what his behavior was going to be. I mean, he wore his heart on his sleeve.SHULAN: 9/11 was about seeing. 9/11 was about understanding that the world was a different place than you thought it was. It didn't start on the morning of 9/11. It started twenty or thirty or forty or fifty years before that, and we didn't see it.GARFIELD: You know, I've seen this movie now a number of times. He is clearly, as you say, a smart and interesting guy. He is a very thoughtful guy. He is a man of principle. What he isn't exactly, is a charmer.SPEAKER: Robert--SHULAN: Do you understand what I'm saying? Do you care what this project looks like?SPEAKER: Michael, I care very much what this project looks like, but we are in a process that makes decisions and moves forward.SHULAN: But the process makes the decision. You made a check, but is it the right decision?ROSENBAUM: No, he's abrasive. But, you know, I'm personally very fond of him, both as a character and as a human being, because I don't think 9/11 needs lots of people patting it on the head and telling it how heroic that day is. I think we need more of him, not less of him.GARFIELD: And this will ultimately coalesce into the thematic basis of the film, because Shulan was not only abrasive, but he's a man with a point of view. And his point of view was very specific. He believed that a museum documenting 9/11 should not be pedantic and definitive, it should be open ended and inquiring -- well, I'll let him say it:SHULAN: One of the conditions I laid down both explicitly to Alice and to myself when I took the job was that if we were going to make this museum, that we had to tell the history of what actually happened.GARFIELD: Which is not categorically a bad way of approaching museum curation, is it?ROSENBAUM: No. In fact, if you think about your journeys to museums and the ones that you remember, if you've ever gone to one -- I mean, you know, if you go to the Met or to MoMA or the Whitney, there'll be some art in those museums that you like very much and there'll be some other art that you'll look at and go, “Why in God's name did anybody put this thing in this building?” And museum curators don't do that accidentally. They want to challenge your comfort zone. They want to show you things you may not like, and then they want you to think about why you don't like them. So, I don't think museums succeed by being simplistic or pedantic.GARFIELD: Well, as we shall see, there were those who wished not to have this sacred space marred by uncomfortable questions. So you got this guy as your protagonist, a not particularly warm and fuzzy one. And from a dramatic perspective, I guess, the story requires a villain or at least a foil, someone whose philosophy of museuming is very different from Shulan's, providing you the conflict you need as a storyteller, right? And that role fell to the museum's big boss, the CEO, Alice Greenwald.GREENWALD: The politics are the terrain we're in. And it's the, you know -- the World Trade Center has always been a complicated site. You know, it's a bi-state agency that operates, you know, an entity that, an authority that deals with transportation, but it's also building commercial buildings and, you know, a transportation center. It's going to be complicated. It's just going to be complicated.ROSENBAUM: So, Alice is charming. She's warm. She's approachable. She answers questions. She doesn't get caught up in her knitting. And from the day that we met, you know, I remember this conversation like it was yesterday. I said to her, “You're going to be the magnetic north of this story. All people on the planet that want to come and explore it are going to come here.” And she said, “We understand that. We understand that's our responsibility.”GARFIELD: And yet, she is also clearly not as keen as Shulan is in exploring, let's just say, the geopolitical nuance of 9/11. And this has something to do with curatorial philosophy, but it also has to do with this museum being both a memorial and a museum and there being a lot of stakeholders, including the families of the 2,900 plus victims of the attacks. She was politically in an awkward position because there was no way that whatever decision she made, that everybody was going to be delighted.ROSENBAUM: Well, let's go back just half a step. She came from the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. So that was the bulk of her career and that was her experience. And so, you know, she's used to demanding stakeholders and people who want the story told a certain way. But the Holocaust Museum is also quite open, and in fact, allows lots of different points of views, some of which they find abhorrent. And so, I don't think she -- I don't think she brought to the museum any sense of shutting down debate or dialogue. I think that happened in an evolutionary process over time.GARFIELD: But as we see the design and construction and planning and curatorial decisions play out, there did seem to be -- you know, I hesitate to use the word whitewash, but it was there seemed to be no great effort to do what Shulan wanted, which is to ask difficult questions, even if you could not come up with a definitive answer. When did it become clear to you as a filmmaker looking at the footage that you had found the conflict that I previously described?ROSENBAUM: So, you said it exactly right. I mean, you know, people say to me, “Well, you know, did you know when you were at the museum, there was a change? Did you feel like it was shift--?” The answer is no, we didn't. And it wasn't until Pam handed me that first tape and we then took the 14 hours of Michael Shulan and laid it out end to end and watched it, that you could feel the tone changing and his kind of quizzical nature become more frustrated and then more angry by about year three. And one of the things I think that's important to remember here is there were some things that Alice was facing that are now lost in history a little bit. So, you know, they began construction in 2005, 2006. By 2008, Wall Street had collapsed. And all these people that had committed donations to build this thing took their money back. And the mayor of the city of New York, who is also the museum's chairman at that point, was Michael Bloomberg. And, you know, Michael's got no shortage of cash, but I don't think there was ever an intention that this museum was going to be a perennial money suck for him or other donors. And so, part of the drumbeat that you start to feel is, “How do we make this private museum” -- not a public museum -- “without government funding, something that people will come and buy a ticket for?” And that's, I think, where some of the rub was.GARFIELD: A twenty three dollar ticket, if I recall correctly.ROSENBAUM: They raised the price. It's now twenty six.GARFIELD: So at that point, you know, apart from any political or philosophical considerations, there becomes the problem of needing, in order to meet expenses, to have not just a shrine and not just a museum, but an attraction which changes the calculus altogether. And what you were able to do when you were combing through your footage was find some pretty upsetting scenes of museum staff trying to figure out what would make the customers react.ROSENBAUM: Yes, there was definitely a series of debates about what would be impactful. And they were always careful to never say immersive. But there definitely became a bit of a schism on the team between people that wanted the museum to be welcoming and complicated and people who wanted the museum to be intense and dramatic. And there are some good examples of that, in particular, some particular scenes that I think the museum wasn't happy to see recorded. But, you know, we had them on tape.SPEAKER 1: Do you have any interest in developing ties? You can do whatever you want on it.SPEAKER 2: I think a tie is a really — you know what's nice to give away is a tie and a scarf.NEWS REPORTER: Just days away from the public opening of the 9/11 Memorial Museum, there's growing criticism of high admission fees. Twenty four dollars to get in and the sale of souvenirs at the gift shop. SPEAKER 3: I think it's a revenue generating tourist attraction. NEWS REPORTER: Jim Riches shares the same sentiment shown in this New York Post headline titled “Little Shop of Horror.” ROSENBAUM: But I also think it's important for your audience to understand people don't want to re-experience 9/11. Certainly New Yorkers don't, and probably Americans as a class.GARFIELD: There was the question, and this was a word you ended up not using in your film, of whether you going through that footage were witnessing the “Disneyfication” of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, yet you ended up pulling that punch up. Why? ROSENBAUM: It made people so staggeringly angry that -- I mean, I don't think it was inaccurate or untrue. It was just we were picking our battles a little bit at that point with the museum and like, they -- because we didn't have any of our characters raising the word “Disneyfication,” although we'd heard it, we decided it was harder to defend than some other challenges that we made that were on tape.GARFIELD: You got a lot of good press for this film, but you also ran into a couple of buzzsaws, notably The New York Times Review, which was pretty scathing. And, although the critic was kind enough to single out my performance as a narrator -- what word did he use?ROSENBAUM: I believe the word was “amateurish.”GARFIELD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that was unfortunately true because I did it for nothing. But his central complaint is why you and Pam, as filmmakers, would privilege the creative vision of this novice outsider, Shulan, over the consensus of the team and the museum that they together crafted. Why did you, in the end, apart for reasons of just dramatic conflict, focus on Shulan?ROSENBAUM: Well, let me answer that question. So a couple of things: in the review, his criticism is that we're somehow promoting Shulan's career as a museum curator. And, you know, I watched the film not objectively, but I don't think anyone's going to be hiring Michael as a result of this. I also don't think that that was his intention or ours. I think, you know, what we liked was that Michael said, “Let's make a museum that's open and democratic.” And that that was the same thing Alice told us on day one. And then, as we slipped away from that, we slipped to an institution that felt to us heavy-handed and pedantic. And so, you know, Michael certainly represents a point of view that the filmmakers share about the museum. But I also think that, you know, the questions he raised about the museum, he's not alone. I mean, Tom Hennes, who's the head of Exhibits, feels very much the same way. And, you know, Philip Kennicott from The Washington Post feels very much the same way. And the head architecture critic from The New York Times, oddly, feels very much the same way. But it wasn't meant to put Shulan on any kind of a pedestal. It was simply that he was a really good lens through which to focus the question.GARFIELD: Speaking of Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic at The Times, you have some tape of him commenting on a sign that is erected, you know, in the plaza area of the museum, the above ground portion of the museum. Most of the exhibit space is below ground, which was jaw dropping for him and for, I think, any viewer of the film.KIMMELMAN: The list of don'ts on the site is astonishing. You can't sing, much less stage a protest or a demonstration. And I think that does raise some very profound questions. You know, I have to keep coming back to say, I think the ability of New York, and by extension, America, to return again to life and return this place to life would have been a very remarkable and powerful statement.GARFIELD: If one bookmark of the movie was Michael Shulan, at his open source photo exhibit in Soho, this was the other bookend: the opposite of open source democratic anything, this closing down of protest or comment or debate on this site. I mean, it's not to be believed.ROSENBAUM: You have to think about where it sits in the arc of the last twenty years in American history. I mean, you know, you got the Patriot Act, you got renditions, you've got drone strikes, you've got police being heavily armored and turning into military units. The museum's fear of terrorism was the reason why they controlled the site so closely, but it also was part of this larger shift over the last twenty years toward a nationalistic heavy-handed kind of militaristic control. And I don't think that they were out on their own when they were limiting the fact that you couldn't sing or, you know, bring a guitar or read a piece of poetry on the site. I also think, by the way, it's worth remembering that the site is private property. So there's really nowhere else in New York -- I mean, if I want to go to Central Park and read a poem, no one, no cop is going to come up and say, “I'm sorry, sir, no poetry reading here.” The only place where that's going to happen is at the September 11th Museum.GARFIELD: Now, let me ask you this final thing. You have documented what I think could be characterized as the denaturing of the 9/11 Museum, the slowly evolving whitewashing of what we described in the very beginning of this thing, which was the search for meaning in the events of that day twenty years ago. As a museum goer, will I come away with the sense that something is being withheld, or does what they have come up with provide the raw material I need as a member of the society and a citizen to ask these questions myself?ROSENBAUM: You know, I've come to be able to answer that question after a couple of months of talking to other people. I think the best answer is, you know, that they're in a really tough box at this point because the thing about, you know, Afghanistan is it's not going to go away and it will be the bookend on this twenty years that will raise questions about, “Wait a minute, is the museum not going to talk about Afghanistan and the war, the twenty year failed -- our failed war in Afghanistan?” Well, of course they have to. And then the question is, what about the twenty years between the “never forget moment” that they hit like a drum beat and now? Because lots of things happened. And theoretically, at some point, the material about Saudi Arabia that has been hidden by the government will make its way into the light and then that will raise questions about, “Oh wait, who did 9/11?” So, when you really look at what the museum has chosen to put on a pedestal, it's essentially those two towers and they're falling down and all of the horrible human pain and suffering that comes from that. But I'm not sure that counts as the appropriate historic take on that day.GARFIELD: Steve, I want to thank you very much for doing this. I'm sorry Pam couldn't join us, but thank her for me as well. And I wish you all best of luck with the film.ROSENBAUM: We love people to watch it and send us, you know, notes, criticism, feedback. We think it's the beginning of a conversation, not the end.GARFIELD: Just as Michael Shulan would have preferred. Steve, thank you. ROSENBAUM: Thanks. GARFIELD: Steve Rosenbaum with his wife, Pam Yoder, directed the new documentary “The Outsider,” available now on Apple TV, Prime Video, Vudu, Xbox, Facebook, and other digital platforms. All right, we're done here. We encourage you to become a paid subscriber to Booksmart Studios so you can get extra content, including my weekly text column from Bully Pulpit, Lexicon Valley and Banished. Meantime, do please review Bully Pulpit on iTunes. Amid a cacophonous glut of podcasts, we depend on you to bring news of us to the world. We are trying to bring unapologetic scrutiny to the world of ideas and we cannot do that without you. Thanks in advance. Bully Pulpit is produced by Mike Vuolo and Matthew Schwartz. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe