Art vs. Science in the 20th Century
J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Beatles, and the benefits of transparency
There’s no way that the current strike by screenwriters (WGA) and actors (SAG-AFTRA) comes to a good end, because the core issue is the lack of transparency that streaming services have introduced to Hollywood. Since the collapse of the studio system, moviemakers have tied their compensation to box office performance and television ratings. That program may have been flawed, but everyone understood how it worked.
Now we have a new business model. Silicon Valley magical thinking convinces investors that proprietary secrets are necessary to protect a company’s competitive edge in the marketplace. Netflix notoriously refuses to release ratings for its programming, and the lack of access to that information is a big concern for the guilds. Everyone lined up to mimic Netflix’s tech company approach to film and TV, but no one really understood how this new secrecy about performance would impact the studios’ relationship with creators.
Those of us who are looking to collect music royalties know something about this problem, since few of us have any idea how streaming royalties are calculated. The movie strikes may go on for a long while, damaging fragile business models, and how they’re resolved will have implications for the future of music accounting.
Of course, one of the biggest problems for musicians, producers, and engineers is that we’ve never managed to organize the guilds that would give us the benefit of collective bargaining with the record companies and music streamers. Every single one of us is essentially on our own, so you can see how much leverage we have.
I’d like to remind my friends in the WGA and SAG-AFTRA that your guilds were less than encouraging when some of us in music tried to start a movement to organize back around the turn of the century. In spite of that lack of interest back then, I think it’s important that other creatives recognize the stakes in 2023 and offer support to the strikers.
Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer is yet another Christopher Nolan movie that seeks to connect the creative struggles of art and science. The movie portrays J. Robert Oppenheimer as plugged into cutting-edge culture, and equates the science behind the atomic bomb with creative process behind some of the 20th century’s most challenging works.
Robert Oppenheimer admires Pablo Picasso’s painting Woman With Crossed Arms. He reads T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and listens to Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (I'm listening to the Leonard Bernstein/NY Philharmonic recording these days: Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify). He reads aloud from the Bhagavad Gita in the original Hindi, while naked in bed with his mistress. Bob’s a thoroughly modern man.
The physicist is also overwhelmed by the testing and shattered by the results of his work. Aside from an astonishing sequence during the Trinity bomb tests in New Mexico, Oppenheimer is a three-hour movie about process and who gets the credit and blame when the project winds down.
Nolan based his script on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer and says he wrote the movie for Cillian Murphy, whose performance as Oppenheimer makes it seem as if he’s the only actor who could’ve ever played the role. Robert Downey Jr. has never been better, and the Moscot Lemtosh eyeglasses he wears in Lewis Strauss’ later years deserve their own special recognition from the Academy.
Actors lined up for a chance to be in a Christopher Nolan movie. Everyone’s great, but I especially enjoyed Benny Safdie as the dirtbag Edward Teller, Olivia Thirlby as physicist Lilli Hornig, and Macon Blair as Oppenheimer’s attorney Lloyd Garrison. Both Casey Affleck (as Army intelligence officer Boris Pash) and Gary Oldman (as President Harry Truman) make excellent runs at drive-by Supporting Actor Oscars, with the screen time under six minutes that’s required for true drive-by awards status.
Ludwig Göransson’s breathtaking score echoes all the modernist influences that Nolan claims for Oppenheimer in the film. I’ve been listening to the soundtrack LP (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify) since I saw an early screening last week and, while I’m not sure it works quite as well for standalone listening, the music was my favorite part of the movie while I was watching it.
If you want the Oppenheimer soundtrack on vinyl or CD, you currently have to preorder it from the Mondo web store. The site implies that this release is a Mondo exclusive, but it never definitively states whether the website will be the only place to buy a physical copy or if they’ll eventually flood the retail market after they’ve gotten the most hardcore fans to buy direct from them. I’d venture that this is the most frustrating part of owning a record store in 2023, the not being able to tell your customers when or if you might have a particular title in stock because the record company refuses to be transparent about release plans (see movie strike above).
Most anyone who’s going to read this is far too young to remember what the world was like before nuclear war, so it’s instructive to see a movie that aims to capture the world-changing horror of that moment. That’s not going to stop me from thinking the movie’s actually about the terrors of being an artist, but great work like this can be about more than one thing at a time.
Finally, it was incredibly weird to go to the Warner Bros. media site to look for a photo to run with this post and then remember that the previous regime at the studio pissed Christopher Nolan off so much that he left them behind and made this movie for Universal. Sure, Barbie will generate more cash for Warner Bros. Discovery, but I’m reasonably certain which movie’s going be more valuable over the next few decades. Plus they could’ve had both of them.
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Steve Turner - Beatles '66: The Revolutionary Year
Anyone who’s heard me claim that the Beatles are overrated might be surprised to know how much I revere Mark Lewisohn’s book Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years Volume 1, a 2013 history of the band that takes the members from birth right up to the end of 1962. Lewisohn thought he’d publish Volume 2 in 2020 and Volume 3 in 2028, but there’s been no news of the next book.
I’ll confess that I’ve only read the 900-page abridged version of Tune In and not the uncut edition that includes another 700 pages. Even in its abbreviated form, Lewisohn captures the day-to-day grind of forming a band, being in a band, figuring out how to get into a recording studio, and all the other allegedly tedious stuff that gets glossed over in other rock biographies. It’s The Power Broker of music books.
Here’s hoping that Lewisohn covers 1966 in Tune In: Volume 2 and doesn’t kick it to Volume 3. In the interim, I just read Steve Turner’s excellent (if not as detailed) approach to covering a crucial year in the life of the Beatles.
We get the reaction to the release of Rubber Soul (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify), the full story of Revolver (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify), early sessions for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify), and the final tour dates the band would ever play.
I look forward to a more comprehensive story of this period, but Turner hammers one particular point that’s worth noting. The explosion of British culture in the mid-’60s wasn’t an accident. Lennon, McCartney, David Hockney, David Bowie, David Bailey, Brian Eno, Bryan Ferry, Freddie Mercury, Vivienne Westwood, Keith Richards, Pete Townsend, Charlie Watts, Eric Clapton, Ray Davies, Eric Burdon, and Jeff Beck all came from working class backgrounds and attended art college before embarking on their respective careers.
Those art colleges existed because the U.K. government decided to offer affordable education opportunities to its citizens after World War II, and that impressive list doesn’t include the creative kids from middle class families who attended art college because they didn’t have the grades to get into elite universities or members of the punk rock generation who managed to get some schooling before Margaret Thatcher shut down the educational opportunities she claimed were a grift for the poor.
Turner does an excellent job of analyzing how education gave John Lennon and Paul McCartney the perspective to handle their fame and inspired the curiosity that allowed them to pursue non-musical interests that eventually had a powerful influence on their music.
Even if you don’t understand the cultural and social reasons to support arts education, there’s compelling evidence that it’s a great financial investment for a society. British culture continued to dominate through the ‘70s before it flamed out, right around the time they started sending the working class to art school.
Sure, our movies and television shows are still loaded with actors trained in England but if you look at the backgrounds of the ones under the age of 50, you'll find out that they’re almost always from wealthy or middle class families. We’ve got the same class problems here in the U.S.A. and not just in the arts. The inexpensive education opportunities that gave my parents a shot at social mobility has mostly disappeared.
So, thanks “socialism” for educating a generation of British men who gave the 20th century some of its most compelling art. You did a lousy job giving those same opportunities to women, but maybe it’s time give it another shot so you can do better the second time around.
8-Track of the Day
It’s hard to imagine that Steve Wonder released this one 50 years ago next month. It’s even more surprising that he’s only 73 years old now and had one of music’s most impressive three-album runs (Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale) when he was in his early twenties.
Great movie with Nolan staying focused on Oppenheimer, resisting the temptation to delve further into the race with the Soviets. I would have loved to see this cast as a mini series and see more of the German and Russian perspectives. Particularly whether or not the information Klaus Fuchs passed along made any difference.