Monday, April 16, 2018

We rented a great movie tonight on DVD. Some of you may be interested in watching it as well. It is called THE GLASS CASTLE (2017) and stars Woody Harrelson. He should get an award for his acting as the father, as should Ella Anderson who plays his young daughter Jeannette Walls.

That daughter in real life wrote a book about growing up in a poor, extremely dysfunctional and nomadic family. The movie based on that book is dark and depressing at times, but it is actually redemptive. The Walls children show such strength, banding together as they grow up to survive their crazy family life, eventually turning out to be sane and happy adults.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2378507/reference


We watched the Academy of Country Music Awards show on CBS Sunday night. It was great entertainment, and not a nasty political comment or "social justice" protest song. Thank goodness.

As a former union theatrical stagehand, I appreciated the amazing stagecraft, set and lighting designs, special visual effects, flawless audio quality, the stagehand's frequent and fast set changes, as well as Reba McEntire's hosting.

Performers I enjoy who were on the show: Reba McEntire, Lauren Alaina (Angela's mother knows the family well, and we have been cheering Lauren on since she started performing), Carrie Underwood, Kenny Chesney, Luke Bryan, Lady Antebellum, Florida Georgia Line, Alan Jackson, Blake Shelton, Toby Keith, and Kelly Clarkson. I do not like the trend of pairing Rap music with country. That performance was a fail. I DO like Bobby Ray Simmons Jr. and his group B.o.B., though.

Thanks for a good evening CBS.

www.acmcountry.com/

Monday, October 20, 2014

I OWN A PIECE OF THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE, AND AMERICAN HISTORY


Illus. in: Harper's weekly, 1883 June 2, p. 341. Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/93512102/

     Sitting on one of my many bookcases at home is an item I use as a book-end
something that most people don’t use, a large, heavy piece of cast iron from the 19th-
century called a turnbuckle. But this isn’t just any turnbuckle; you see, it came from one
of the most historic and iconic manmade structures in the world. More than twenty
years after it came into my possession, I still can’t believe I own this special object.


     Think of a turnbuckle as a kind of huge nut used to tighten cables and wires. It is
about a foot long, eight inches thick and cylindrical, with flat sides to make tightening
with a huge wrench easier. It weighs about 20 pounds. My turnbuckle is one of thousands
used in the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. It, like the others, is
hollow and threaded at either end, used to connect two, two-inch-thick steel suspension
cables together. The Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883 after 13 years of
construction, was the first steel-wire suspension bridge in the world and is the world’s
oldest. My turnbuckle has “Brooklyn 1881” stamped deep into the cast iron.

     As a child I traveled across the Brooklyn Bridge in automobiles and saw it from a
distance many, many times. My father was born and raised about twenty-five miles from
Manhattan Island in Montclair, New Jersey, so our family traveled to New York every
year for summer and Christmas vacations to see my grandparents and all of our relations.
While I consider myself a southerner, raised in Dallas and Houston, Texas, I am also part
“Yankee”. The Versfelt Dutch-American ancestry dates back in New England to before
the American Revolutionary War, and my mother’s British-American heritage goes back
even further to the early 1600’s near Boston. The Brooklyn Bridge is one of many very
visible icons of our family story in New York. My grandfather Porter Versfelt Sr. told me
throughout my childhood about his encounters with that bridge (He was born the year it
was completed.), traveling across it over some 90 years of his life on foot, by train, by
automobile and via street car. So you can understand why, in the early 1990’s, when I
finally had the opportunity to stand on the Brooklyn Bridge myself, receiving that
turnbuckle as a gift was a very special event for me.

     At that time I worked as a public television producer, director and scriptwriter for
the PBS station at The Pennsylvania State University and its state-wide educational TV
channel. I had chosen the Brooklyn Bridge as one of the backdrops for important parts of
a documentary I was producing about the state of the American economy, in partnership
with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. In 1993, re-building America’s infrastructure of
highways, roads and bridges was an important topic of the national conversation and I
felt that what better prop could one use to illustrate the importance of transportation
infrastructure than THE Brooklyn Bridge. Plus, I really wanted an excuse to have an all-
expense paid trip to New York City.

     Looking back all of these decades later, that moment when I first stepped out of our
TV crew van onto the asphalt surface of the Brooklyn Bridge roadway will be forever
burned into my mind’s eye. It was mid-July, cold and overcast for a New York
summer day. The wind whipped us around relentlessly as we unloaded ourselves and our
TV gear. I was concerned that we wouldn’t have enough sunlight to film our segments
with the host of our program, Patty Sattalia. Despite having a large steel construction
hard hat on her head, as we all did, that vicious wind blew her hair out from underneath
the hat like a scene from a Wagner opera. I could almost hear the off-stage thunder claps
and feel the sense of foreboding in the story. I had just turned thirty-six years old and
I was, frankly, feeling a bit full of myself; I was in charge of a big budget national TV
documentary, head of a crew of some eight people and the instigator for shutting down
one lane of traffic on one of the busiest highway bridges in the world for a good part of
the day.

     After a time, we had our camera and audio equipment set up along with our lights.
Police arranged especially for the occasion were directing traffic safely around us, but
they couldn’t keep the aggravated car, truck and bus driver’s anger at being delayed at
bay. We were not the only impediment on the Brooklyn Bridge that day, a multi-year
renovation project had begun recently and all of the thousands of miles of steel-wire
cables and thousands of original 1870’s and 1880’s cast iron turnbuckles were being
replaced. I had been told by the construction supervisor that the wiring and the
turnbuckles could probably last another 50 years at least, but engineers and politicians
were worried anyway, so hundreds of workers were being employed. It was a boost
to the economy, and that was the subject of our documentary.

     Because we started shooting in the morning, and the Brooklyn Bridge ran roughly
northwest-to-southeast, I wanted the sun at our backs and behind the camera so our on-
camera host Patty would be illuminated well. It also didn’t hurt that the western end of
the bridge had that lovely and timeless (or so we thought) view of the lower Manhattan
skyline of tall buildings. From our perspective behind the camera, we saw the western
terminus of the bridge behind Patty and just to the left, standing majestically over the
Battery at the tip of the island stood the twin towers of the famous World Trade Center. A
huge American flag, some 20 feet wide and 50 feet long hung vertically from the
overhead girders on the bridge. Those towers and the flag and the New York skyline
added up to one impressive image all in one shot. We had no idea, of course, on that Jul
day of 1993 that just eight years later those towers would be gone, destroyed by 19 Arab
Muslim men and their handlers who wanted to send a terrible message to the United
States. Every time I watch our completed documentary, seeing the old and original World
Trade Center on the screen makes me well up with strong emotions of sadness, regret and
anger. As I write this and bring my memories back to that scene, I listen to Albinoni’s
classical Baroque musical piece Sonata #5 in G Minor and I can’t help but see the old
news video of the passenger jets crashing into the Trade Center towers and a montage of
dust-covered and frightened people running away from them in terror with that music as
the accompaniment.

John A. Roebling, engineer and designer 
of the Brooklyn Bridge. Painting (c. 1930?) 


      After we completed filming our documentary segments that day on the Brooklyn
Bridge, I walked over to the renovation supervisor to thank him for all of his help. He
surprised me with a present, that huge turnbuckle. It was made of cast iron, the iron ore
mined and shipped in from western Pennsylvania. The iron rock was smelted and cast
into this turnbuckle just on the other side of the bridge, in its shadow, in fact, in
Brooklyn. Stamped on my turnbuckle is “Edgemoor - Brooklyn - 1881”. Edgemoor was
the name of the iron foundry. All of the physical strain and risk taken by the men who
mined that iron ore, transported it by railroad and river barge from Pennsylvania to
Brooklyn, the many years of dreaming, planning and personal sacrifice by the engineer
who designed the bridge (John Augustus Roebling), the men who died from the
“bends” (nitrogen narcosis) while digging the underwater stone foundations, all of these
things and much more are wrapped up in my turnbuckle. It is not just a hunk of iron, but
a part of American history. Our history. My history.


Copyright 2014, Porter Versfelt III

The Secret Lives of Teachers - Not What You May Think



     Many teachers in the United States remain at their school until 6, 7 or even 8 o'clock at night writing lesson plans, fulfilling school district, state and Federal education bureaucratic requirements and mandates, and many take their work home with them on the weekends. God love the teachers who have emotional and physical energy, and time, left over to lead "secret lives". But, some do, and that ultimately benefits their students.

     "The Secret Lives of Teachers" is an interesting new reporting series from National Public Radio about what America's public school teachers do in their spare time.

"The Secret Lives of Teachers" - National Public Radio

Copyright 2014, Porter Versfelt III

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State." 

1802 January 1. (Thomas Jefferson to the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut).
From: http://www.monticello.org


Wednesday, August 6, 2014

ATTENTION YOUNG JOURNALISTS - BE YOUR OWN BRAND

Journalism has obviously been a cyclical profession and is reflected in journalism school enrollments (1), especially since I started my career in the mid-1970's. When I left the University of Missouri-Columbia J-school in 1979, jobs and good pay were plentiful, especially in local TV news where I worked as a reporter/photographer in Missouri, Kansas, Texas and Florida.

One thing I've learned since then - you will be penalized by journalism employers for growing older and being more expert at what you do, especially in TV news. I also learned that with such a nomadic and volatile employment environment, it's best to have additional non-journalism skills that can serve as a back-up "day job". That's why I morphed in the mid-1980's into corporate TV production, public relations, movie and network TV production. Now, I am on a path to teach middle and high school history and am attending college again.

Today, compared to the 1970's and 1980's, young people with a journalism degree have so many more opportunities to do what they love because of the dramatically increased numbers of ways they can reach a news audience - print, "radio", magazine, TV - as a result of the Internet and wireless device revolution. The medium is no longer the message (sorry Marshall McLuhan), the CONTENT is now finally the message.

You Tube, podcasts, blogs, Internet radio channels and networks (iTunes, IHeartRadio, etc.) and other ways of connecting with an audience proliferate now. Back when I started as a journalist, there were local TV, radio and newspapers to work for and to gain experience with, and of course the big national newspapers and network television news programs were there for a select few achievers to join. No CNN or Fox News, no Yahoo News. The opportunities were limited.

Porter Versfelt III in the Florida Everglades working for 

WCKT-TV (NBC) in 1981. The station news helicopter is on the left.

I and my young colleagues back then would have killed to have so many ways to distribute our work. Today I believe, if you are a good journalist and writer, and perhaps also have a good on-camera presence (video), you are in control and do not have to be dependent on working for a news organization. I urge you to freelance, BE your own brand. There are no limits to your future. You are now in the age of Free-agent Journalism.

(1) Anderson, Monica, Pew Research Center: "The Job Market Tightens, But New Journalism Grads Remain Upbeat" (06 August 2014) Source: Journalism Enrollment Study

Copyright 2014, Porter Versfelt III

Monday, September 2, 2013

Atlanta Is On The Map Now For Movie & TV Production

NEW STUDIO COMPLEX FOR ATLANTA

Well, the latest news this past week that EUE/Screen Gems will lease the old Lakewood Fairgrounds near downtown Atlanta as motion picture and television production facilities is GREAT news.

We in the movie production community heard about this months ago but the news is only just recently becoming public.

More jobs (an estimated 1,000) are foreseen for the production industry here and this will be a further cementing of Atlanta and Georgia's growing pivotal role in movie and network TV series production.

VCGTV shot EPK promotional material for Screen Gems at the 2008 BET Hip Hop Awards in Atlanta.
The focus of this production was the cast of the motion picture NOTORIOUS who attended the event and the after party at an Atlanta mansion.

Now, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is claiming that the Screen Gems facility will be "state-of-the-art". Whoa there AJC. Not quite. Not YET.

http://www.ajc.com/business/ready-for-your-close-528580.html

Uh, this is NOT the first Atlanta-area "state-of-the-art studio complex".

Riverwood Studios was built years ago south of Atlanta in Senoia, Georgia and still operates. Tyler Perry opened his studio and backlot complex in November 2008.

Screen Gem's studio facility will be the latest. But it won't be state-of-the-art for a while. Word on the street is the first movie shooting there - FAST AND FURIOUS IV - will use existing, upgraded Lakewood Fairgrounds buildings. New construction will occur at some point in the future.

Every week we receive job applicants from veteran Los Angeles production people who are moving to Atlanta. This is, after all, where much of the work is going. Atlanta hosted more than two dozen major movie productions to LA's nine in 2009 is my understanding.

Let's hope we Atlanta-based folks who worked and lobbied hard for the state tax incentives for movie and TV production, honed our craft and lived in the shadow of LA for so long will get many of these new jobs.

MUSIC LIBRARY FIND

Last night I stumbled upon a great spin-off web site from Wikipedia that offers free, high-quality, downloadable music of many genres. Wikimedia Commons.

Wikimedia Commons offers public domain, high-quality and downloadable photos. They also offer music as well.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Music_sound

Many of these music cuts are public domain. These photos and especially the music will be a huge low-cost public service to those of us editing finished product for TV and movies.

Copyright 2014, Porter Versfelt III