While I’ve always been a big fan of action and sci-fi flicks, the movie I’ve been most excited about seeing this summer has been Lin-Manuel Miranda’s (Hamilton) and Jon Chu’s (Crazy Rich Asians) musical extravaganza In The Heights.
In the Heights is based on Miranda’s first hit Broadway musical that was a love letter to the Latinx Washington Heights neighborhood near where he grew up in New York City.
The musical is pretty light on plot, serving primarily as a character study of a neighborhood full of immigrants from countries like the Dominican Republic and Cuba, and people who have moved to the mainland from Puerto Rico. The focus is on a group of friends and potential lovers and circles around immigrant bodega owner Usnavi and an aging Cuban abuela. There’s more to the story, but that’s all you really need to know. (And it doesn’t hurt if you know a bit of Spanish.) The movie has received mostly positive reviews, highlighting the vibrant music and dancing.
Heights is from Warner Brothers, which means it debuted simultaneously in the theaters and on HBO Max. (As an experiment this year, WB gave all of their major releases a month on HBO Max at the same time the movies opened in theaters. The studio is not planning to continue doing this in 2022.0
As excited as I was to see it in the theater, I first watched it at hone on HBO with the subtitles on. As any Hamilton fan knows, Miranda’s lyrics stream out at a firehouse pace and with my aging hearing, I really liked having the words on the screen to help me appreciate the depth of his writing. The next evening I went with my Dear Wife and some friends to see it on the big screen, which is where you really want to see it with the spectacular Busby Berkeley style dance number at the swimming pool and the percussive Latin music surrounding you.
One thing it is not is star studded, unless you are a Broadway fan. Bodega owner and narrator Usnavi is played by Anthony Ramos, who debuted the dual roles of John Laurens and Phillip Hamilton in Hamilton; and “Abuela” Claudia is portrayed by Olga Merediz, who played the role of the neighborhood matriarch for the show’s entire Broadway run. Jimmy Smits is the only well-known actor in the cast. (Miranda, who debuted Usnavi on Broadway, has a small part of the piragua guy I.e., the guy selling sno cones.)
Disappointingly, In The Heights has not been particularly commercially successful so far. Among the possible explanations are that it has no stars, it doesn’t have a strong narrative, people don’t know the Broadway show it’s based on, it’s the story of a city block rather than a person, and it’s a story about Latinx culture.
The movie has also faced charges of “colorism,” that is, featuring primarily light-skinned actors in the lead rolls of a story about a Black Latinx community that has people in it of a wide range of skin tones. Aja Romano has written a good explainer on this topic for Vox, looking at how light-skinned Black actors have long been more common in media productions than actors with dark skin. In my skimming of reviews at Rotten Tomatoes, I saw very little mention of this. Notably the one review I saw that did discuss this issue was by a Latinx writer.
The discussion about this went far enough that composer Lin-Manuel Miranda felt compelled to respond to it on Twitter:
For the record, I absolutely loved the movie both times I’ve seen it. If our local community movie theater is able to bring it in next month, I would love to see it again in the theater. I understand and respect the criticisms of it, but I still really loved this movie and hope I someday get to see the stage version of it.
For the last six or seven years, every summer I do a national-scale motorcycle scavenger hunt run by a motorcycle club out of Minnesota known as Team Strange. Each year it has a theme. One of my favorites was “On The Trail of the Whispering Giants.” Whispering Giants are 10-20-foot tall sculptures of Native American figures carved out of tree trunks by artist Peter Wolf Toth. I tracked down about a dozen of them back in 2015 ranging from Lincoln, Nebraska, to North Bay, Ontario.
Last year’s tour had a “Riding to Hounds” theme that called for equestrian statues as well as statues of dogs and foxes. Had great fun picking up a fairly limited number of images during the pandemic, most notably one of “Bass Reeves, Black Lawman” who was the very real first Black U.S. Marshall who was featured in the HBO Watchman series.
This year’s Grand Tour is made up of bonus locations that were intended to be a part of last year’s Butt Lite X motorcycle scavenger hunt rally. (See, it’s a shorter version of the 11-day, 11,000-mile Iron Butt Rally, so it’s Butt Lite…) And just to make it more fun, all of the bonus locations for Butt Lite IX are included as well.
So far I’ve only had one chance to get out and collect grand tour bonus sites, but I hope to be picking up the pace in the weeks to come. Here are my first two:
“In 1964, Dwight D. Eisenhower called Andrew Jackson Higgins “the man who won the war for us”. Higgins was born in Columbus, NE in 1886, and without his landing crafts the Allied strategy in World War II would have been different and winning the war more difficult.” This photo is from the Higgins memorial in Columbus, NE. (74 Columbus, NE HIG)
“George A. Wyman was the first person to cross America on a motorized vehicle. Wyman started in San Francisco, California on May 16 and arrived in New York City 50 days later on July 6, 1903. On June 14, 1903, Wyman stopped in Ogden, Iowa for repairs to his motorcycle.” (38 Ogden, IA WYM)
And finally… on my way home from this trip (which was to visit my 93-year-old father in Iowa), I stopped at Butch’s Deli and Ice Cream in Blair, NE on a cool, drizzly afternoon for a much needed Italian sub and cup of chicken noodle soup.
Huge transitions and consolidations are happening in the media business right now as the COVID pandemic winds down. We’re going to take a look at a number of these changes over the next week or so.
Today we start with Amazon buying out legacy movie studio MGM – home of the James Bond franchise.
eCommerce giant and streaming provider Amazon agreed to buy the MGM legacy movie studio for $8.45 billion. The studio has been around for nearly 100 years and is known for movies such as the Rocky/Creed franchise, Ridley Scott’s feminist road movie Thelma and Louise, but most of all for the more than 40 James Bond movies.
(What about classics such as The Wizard of Oz, Signin’ in the Rain, and Gone with the Wind? Those still belong to WarnerMedia as part of a previous round of consolidation decades ago. What? you don’t remember when Ted Turner was the head of Turner Broadcasting and bought up MGM for their film library, and then was forced to sell off the studio to keep his rapidly growing company out of bankruptcy, right before he was forced to sell out to Time Warner? But don’t worry – MGM as acquired by Amazon still has a library of more than 4,000 movies.)
The purchase is the second largest in Amazon’s history, second only to their $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods grocery stores in 2017.
Tech giants Amazon and Apple have both been seen as likely buyers of legacy media companies that are perceived as being too small to compete in the new streaming-centric media world.
Amazon has the runway to be patient and just scoop up legacy companies (and their libraries) for pennies on the dollar. MGM is just the beginning.
Pure content companies are at a huge disadvantage right now compared to companies that have servers full of user data.
The purchase of MGM will give Amazon Prime video a deep library of content for its streaming service as well as a well-regarded production studio. Amazon has traditionally primarily focused on producing movies and TV shows exclusively for streaming. It will be interesting to see whether they will continue to place MGM movies into theaters.
Amazon’s offer of $8.45 billion was approximately 40 precent more than other possible buyers thought the studio was worth. Amazon does, of course, have the money, with more than $71 billion in cash on hand and a market capitalization value of $1.64 trillion.
Twitterati are making a big deal out of the fact that the first big movie to come out of MGM under the Bezos era will be the long-delayed new Bond movie, No Time To Die. “They” have also been pointing out that Bezos looks like a Bond villain and might even talk like one:
That last one is an actual, unretouched Bond Villain line, but sounds like it could be from Bezos or another billionaire's self-congratulatory memoirs. pic.twitter.com/AkTsozKHAA
I would close by noting that my favorite Bond movie villain is Jonathan Pryce’s Rupert Murdoch clone Elliot Carver from Tomorrow Never Dies who seeks to start a war so he has a great story to cover in his media empire.
For the last few months I’ve been down to posting about once a month with everything going on. Now that the semester is over it’s time to get back to thinking about where our media have wandered off over the last year. So a bit of fun today, and then off to the races this week!
Weird Al’s Hamilton Polka now with 90% more real Hamiton
Weird Al Yankovic did a Hamilton Polka parody song a couple of years ago, and now he’s taken footage from the Hamilton movie on Disney+ and turned it into a truly awesome video!
Baby Yoda, aka Grogu, is a real performer and cuts up on the set of The Mandalorian.
Why hard drive storage is cheaper than dirt:
Trying to understand what large-scale computer storage means? This brief thread gets at the meaning of terabyte in terms of how incredibly cheap hard drive storage is now when bought in bulk. (This is at the core of the meaning of the long tail.)
And Finally … DA drops felony charges against Oklahoma woman who failed to return a rented VHS tape of Sabrina The Teen-Aged Witch 20 years ago. (This is not from a parody site!)
She's been a wanted felon since 2000 for not returning a copy of "Sabrina the Teenage Witch."
Editor’s Note: Thanks to my friend Dr. Michael Socolow, University of Maine, for letting me reprint his article from The Conversation. Near v. Minnesota is such an important media law case that highlights the importance of defending unpopular speech. When I saw Michael’s article pop up on my Twitter feed showing how it applied to the George Floyd case, I was absolutely fascinated.
Darnella Frazier is third from right, recording the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020. Minneapolis Police Department via AP
When 17-year-old Darnella Frazier started recording video of Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd, she initiated a series of historic events that led to Chauvin’s conviction.
The constitutional protections enjoyed by U.S. citizens empower and encourage everyday Americans to discover, record, expose and distribute evidence of governmental malfeasance. This freedom to publicize crimes committed by state actors creates the possibility of improving policing and making the administration of justice more sensitive, effective and responsive.
To understand how the United States developed this unconstrained news culture, you need to return to Minneapolis, to a moment one century ago, when a newspaper exposed police corruption and provided a key turning point in protecting the American public’s right to expose governmental crimes.
Darnella Frazier’s video of George Floyd’s murder was crucial evidence in the case against Chauvin, prosecuted by Steve Schleicher, front right, accompanied by prosecutor Jerry Blackwell, front left. Court TV via AP, Pool
Press abuse vs. press limits
Jay Near always knew there were bad cops in Minnesota.
Today, Near is remembered – if at all – for his legendary Supreme Court victory in the 1931 U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Near v. Minnesota.
In 1927, Near and his business partner were prevented from publishing because The Saturday Press was deemed in violation of Minnesota’s “Public Nuisance Law.” That law outlawed publishing or circulating “obscene, lewd, and lascivious” or “malicious, scandalous and defamatory” materials.
Near sued to lift the prohibition, and his case made it to the Supreme Court, where his publication rights were ultimately vindicated. Near v. Minnesota opened up the modern version of press freedom we recognize today. Calling the Minnesota Public Nuisance Law “the essence of censorship,” a five-justice majority struck it down.
Essentially, the high court ruled that the U.S. Constitution allowed the abuse of press freedom in order to protect the most vibrant and robust public discussion possible. The Court had no illusions – the judges were well aware The Saturday Press published inflammatory misinformation. But in assessing the costs of censorship versus the benefits of liberty, the majority sided with the racist crank against the state of Minnesota.
Making the connection
The expansive media freedoms originating in the First Amendment, and later enshrined in Supreme Court decisions like Near v. Minnesota, would continue into the internet age with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That’s the law that allows people to post freely on internet sites while protecting the internet companies from legal jeopardy caused by those materials.
For better or worse, Section 230 establishes media freedom across the internet in the U.S. And it is this law, built on the traditions of media freedom, that allowed Darnella Frazier – and all citizens who follow in her footsteps – to stand up to the government in ways previously unimaginable.
A portion of the front page of The Saturday Press, Oct. 15, 1927, published by Jay Near that figures prominently in U.S. press freedom law. Minnesota Historical Society
But some stand ready to abandon these long-established legal and cultural protections.
Had Minnesota’s Public Nuisance Law survived Near’s challenge, it very well might have prevented publication of Frazier’s video. Those images could easily have been deemed “obscene,” or a “malicious” or “scandalous” incitement to violence.
But U.S. states can’t outlaw media organizations as “public nuisances.” Yet tensions over media freedom now exist that have the potential to lead to limits on the public’s ability to record and distribute police crimes.
Critics who want to get rid of Section 230 regularly blame it for the plethora of “fake news,” misinformation, and hate speech that infects our web and social media. Because Twitter, Facebook, Tik Tok and others can’t be held liable for users’ content, the companies have felt little pressure, until recently, to moderate the blizzard of material they publish every second.
But media freedom is always a double-edged sword. Without Section 230 protection, social media companies would likely behave cautiously to minimize even the hint of legal jeopardy. Frazier’s video, in such a world, might be deemed too risky to distribute.
The immunity provided by Section 230 encourages YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and others, to stimulate users to post pretty much any news, information or video their users deem newsworthy or interesting.
The repeal of Section 230 could result in a system in which inflammatory or provocative news or images that might outrage or incite people could be deemed too socially destructive or disturbing of the peace by internet companies. And this could include images and video such as the murder of George Floyd.
The idea that U.S. citizens can report, publish, print and disseminate information that might be terribly damaging to authority is a radical one. Even within the United States, this freedom is often considered too expansive. In Oklahoma, for example, a new bill criminalizing the filming of police officers recently passed both houses of the state legislature, and elsewhere the rights of citizens and journaliststo record police behavior occurring in public are regularly violated.
The direct line from Minneapolis in the 1920s to Minneapolis in the 2020s is the notion that protecting people’s rights promises to foster an active, aware and engaged citizenry – and that violating those rights by repressing or censoring information is deeply anti-American.
Last evening I was reading reading CNN’s Brian Stelter’s nightly media news newsletter that had just shown up in my mailbox. The lead story was about how television habits have changed during the pandemic.
Megan Thee Stallion & Cardi B at the 2021 Grammy Awards (Please note, they will be performing an edited version of WAP. If you don’t know what that means, you might want to skip viewing this video.)
The article goes way beyond the reasons that the Grammy’s show might have tanked (No common pop culture; show featured artists that appeal to young people on a medium primarily consume by older people). Stelter quotes Brian Lowry:
The fallout from Covid-19 –- and the impact on these live events -– has hastened a host of problems. One obvious issue across the industry is fragmentation. Without the red carpet fashion and the unpredictability of live acceptance speeches in front of big audiences, why not just wait and watch the clips of anything interesting that happens after the fact?
“Even the Super Bowl wasn’t entirely immune to these forces, which leaves me wondering: To what extent is this huge dropoff not a one-time blip, but the new normal? If the latter, license fees for award shows are dramatically out of whack, and that will have a ripple effect on the organizations behind them, which rely on that TV revenue.”
It’s fascinating how people have reacted to this story on social media (I know, I know, “Never read the comments”).
Does the 58% drop in Grammy’s audience signal the end of broadcast TV as a broad-based mass medium? @brianstelter’s Reliable Sources newsletter examines the question. https://t.co/GNRaqxBLtG
— RalphIsNow@rhanson40@threads.net (@ralphehanson) March 16, 2021
After Stelter shared my Tweet, I got a fair amount of readership and response, including this rather thoughtful one from Joe Flint at the Wall Street Journal who accurately points out that Oprah got a huge audience a week ago with her interview with the disaffected Royals. Though I might point out that putting a top interviewer with guests who have enormous appeal to older viewers is bound to get an audience.
Yes, if we have the greatest TV interviewer of her generation bring in guests with global appeal, broadcast TV can still bring in an audience. But that's a pretty high bar to clear. https://t.co/NeRsYzQXnQ
— RalphIsNow@rhanson40@threads.net (@ralphehanson) March 16, 2021
And this is exactly the kind of debate that one would hope for on Twitter. (But that you so rarely get.) Here’s another reasonable response:
But there were also a number of responses that reminded me of how negative Twitter can be.
The fact that broadcast television is declining is inarguable. But someone tell Big Media they are dying. They are going through a period of transition, moving from legacy media like television to new modes such as streaming. But Disney, ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia are hardly dying. And don’t forget the new Big Media like Google and Apple.
Finally, there is the evergreeen “music sucks these day” tweet. I didn’t watch the show because I’m old the music on the show appeals to the young, but I will confess that I would have loved to have watched Brandi Carlile’s tribute to the late John Prine, who won a posthumous Roots Music Grammy for his last album, recor.
Brandi Carlile performing John Prine’s “I Remember Everything”
Movie director James Gunn has had his own personal run-in with the so-called “cancel culture,” aka being held accountable for things you have said.
As you may recall, long before Gunn became a big-time Marvel Cinematic Universe director of the the Guardians of the Galaxy films, he had posted some highly offensive homophobic, pedophiliac rape “joke” tweets. When these tweets were publicized by alt-right activist Mike Cernovich, Gunn was fired by Disney from GOTG3. As I wrote back in 2018, Gunn accepted his firing with grace and apologized for the old tweets.
Since that time, he has rebounded professionally and is now apparently back for directing Guardians 3 as well as a Suicide Squad sequel for DC. But nevertheless, Gunn took extensive criticism for his tweets and got at least temporarily fired by one of his biggest potential employers.
Back in the the late 1980s, early 1990s, the television business started going through some big changes. For the first time ever, the original Big Three television networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) started changing ownership, going from the founders to new non-media company owners.
The broadcast networks of this era were essentially a printing press for money. They had no real competition for home entertainment. You watched what the networks put on the air, when they showed it, and you liked it. A few people watched the relatively new Public Broadcasting System non-commercial channel, and if you were lucky you might have an independent station or two that showed old movies and reruns. But for the most part, these three networks had a monopoly on programming coming into the home.
As an illustration of this, in 1976 the average household had a choice of seven broadcast channels, the Big Three, PBS, and three indie stations.
In the late 70s, early 80s, VCRs started to become common, and people could start recording programs to watch when they wanted to. They could also rent movies as an alternative to what was being broadcast. By the late 1980s, Rupert Murdoch had the Fox Broadcast Network running on UHF broadcast stations that previously had no original programing.
With the growth of cable TV, by 1991, the Big Three networks had lost a third of their viewership to cable, VCRs and new networks. The average home had a choice of 33 cable channels. (For much more on this, see Ken Auletta’s great history of the time: Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way)
This has continued on through the growth of Direct Broadcast Satellite TV and digital cable, until we reached the point we had literally 100s of channels to choose from.
Auletta refers to this as the “earthquake in slow motion” – a massive change in the television marketplace that happened so slowly that the original broadcast networks were blindsided by it.
Unfortunately, this came with a cost. We would be watching perhaps six-to-ten of these channels on a regular basis, but we had to pay for all of them. The pipe dream people had was a la carte pricing – pay only for the channels you want. You don’t like sports? Don’t pay the $8 a month for ESPN. Don’t like conservative talk shows, don’t pay the $2 a month for Fox News.
But here’s the problem – The reason you get so many channels for your monthly subscription fee is that cable companies are mostly paying for the lead channel – Fox News, not Fox Business News; ESPN, not ESPN2, ESPN U, ESPN Classic; History Channel, not all the range Discovery Channels. The system works so that if your cable channel pays a big price for the lead channel, they get the second string ones for almost nothing.
So streaming would seem to be the way to get just what you want – Netflix for movies and Hulu for the equivalent of basic cable. But if you want all the Disney/20th Century Fox/Marvel/Star Wars movies, you need a subscription to Disney+. And if you want all the new WarnerMedia first run movies, you need HBO Max. And now Paramount is expanding CBS All Access into a new streaming service, plus there’s Amazon Prime, and Peacock, and Discovery+ and, and, and….
Why did it take so long for Quaker Oats to abandon Aunt Jemima as a pancake brand?
Aunt Jemima has a new name: the Pearl Milling Company.
Quaker Oats announced it would drop the name Aunt Jemima last summer after the killing of George Floyd and the widespread protests over racial inequality. https://t.co/RlgO9OrRSP
With Oscar season approaching, was the filmed version of Hamilton a movie?
Golden Globe considers it a movie musical. What should the Academy think?
Big controversy: Is the filmed version of Hamilton a movie musical or just a video of a play? (I think it’s a movie musical, given that there was a day of filming with cameras up on the stage, but this isn’t a hill I will die on.) https://t.co/liU6rHBt1V
— RalphIsNow@rhanson40@threads.net (@ralphehanson) February 3, 2021
Will social media companies ever step back from having algorithms push users to maximum engagement?
Apple CEO Tim Cook thinks they need to.
Hear hear: "#Apple CEO Tim Cook has said it is time to face the consequences of having algorithms push users towards more engagement at any cost… too many companies are asking what they can get away with, rather than what happens if they follow through…" https://t.co/2mEop0PGiD
With all of the awful news over the last few weeks, from the more than 400,000 people dead from the pandemic, to people out of work, to the insurrection attack on the U.S. Capitol, we’ve really needed something wonderful as a distraction online instead of the latest horror. The memes based on the mittens Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wore to the Biden inauguration on Wednesday have provided that relief. When Bernie entered the congressional seating wearing his parka, paper mask, and an incredible pair of mittens, every eye instantly turned to him. And since then, there have been literally hundreds of meme images popping up everywhere we turn.
The best thing about these memes is that most of them are completely apolitical and kind spirited. They have nothing to do with what Bernie’s politics but everything about who he is. Here’s the back story on Bernie and his mittens along with a number of my favorite images.
A lot of comments on Bernie’s mittens. They were made by a teacher from Vermont 💙 https://t.co/Kcu0gcqE1D
With the growth of cable TV, by 1991, the Big Three networks had lost a third of their viewership to cable, VCRs and new networks. The average home had a choice of 33 cable channels. (For much more on this, see Ken Auletta’s great history of the time: 
