BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN
By Charles Bock
417 pages. Random House. $25.
February 9, 2008
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Microsoft Yahoo Buyout,Lipstick Jungle,Georgia Refinery Blast,Novel in Las Vegas,Federal Reserve
- Microsoft and The Yahoo Buyout
- Talking Business
A Giant Bid That Shows How Tired the Giant Is
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
This may seem like an odd way to characterize a company that just announced its willingness to plunk down $44.6 billion to make its first hostile takeover ever. A company that will probably generate somewhere around $60 billion in revenue when its fiscal year ends in June. A company whose market share in its two core products is still so high — despite recent inroads by a certain flashy competitor — that it qualifies as a monopoly.
But this is Microsoft we’re talking about, and if its proposed acquisition of Yahoo signals anything, it serves as a confirmation that Microsoft’s glory days are in the past. Having failed to challenge Google where it matters most — in online advertising — it has been reduced to bulking up by buying Google’s nearest but still distant competitor. In many ways, the company has become exactly what Bill Gates used to fear the most — sluggish, bureaucratic, slow to respond to new forms of competition — just as I.B.M. was when Microsoft convinced that era’s tech behemoth to use Microsoft’s operating system in its new personal computer.
The I.B.M. PC was introduced in the summer of 1981. Here we are nearly 27 years later, and Microsoft’s core product is still its operating system, now called Windows — that and its suite of applications, called Office, that run on Windows. They generate billions of dollars annually for the company. The most recent version of Windows, released almost exactly a year ago, has already been installed in 100 million computers. Yet in technology, 27 years is a lifetime, and there is a powerful sense that while it has spent enormous effort over the years protecting its monopoly, the world has passed it by. In particular, the technology world now centers on the Internet, where Google reigns supreme, and Microsoft has never succeeded in making serious inroads. Years ago, it started its own online service, MSN. It has made efforts to develop a search engine that could compete with Google’s. It has developed an advertising infrastructure to both place ads on other Web sites —another Google specialty—and to generate its own ad revenues. In every case, it has come up a day late and a dollar short. For instance, only 4 percent of Internet searches worldwide are done with Microsoft’s engine, compared with over 65 percent done with Google’s.
“Of its five major divisions,” said Brent Thill, the software analyst for Citigroup, “the online division is the only one that loses money. They are software engineers at Microsoft,” he continued, “and their DNA is very different from the DNA of someone who builds online assets. It’s just a different mind-set.”
Besides, the old strategies that once worked so well for Microsoft — strategies that worked when the world still revolved around Windows — have no place in this new world. In the mid-1990s, when Netscape posed a threat to Microsoft’s hegemony, Microsoft created its own competing browser, Internet Explorer, made it an integral part of Windows, and used its desktop monopoly to fight back. Eventually, Netscape was reduced to also-ran status — and the Justice Department took Microsoft to court on antitrust violations.
Today, Microsoft lacks both the weaponry and the nimbleness to compete with Google. Its operating system monopoly gives it no advantages in this battle. People can use Microsoft’s operating system and browser to get to the Internet — and to Google — or they can use Apple‘s. It truly doesn’t matter. Meanwhile, with every new Internet fad, like the current frenzy over social networking, Microsoft is invariably caught flat-footed and has to race to just get a foot in the game. But that’s always the way it is when companies get big — and it is why real innovation always comes from small companies that don’t have a predetermined mind-set, or monopoly profits to protect.
Will the purchase of Yahoo — assuming it goes through, which is far from a foregone conclusion — be a game-changer for Microsoft? Anything is possible, I suppose. I spoke to a number of technology experts Friday who were convinced that it made some sense. Andy Kessler, the technology investor and writer, called it “a smart offensive move.” Mark Anderson, the president of Strategic News Service, said, “They are getting the No. 2 online guy in the ad business at a good time and a good price.” Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group told me that it was only a matter of time before somebody made a bid for Yahoo — “and it makes sense that it’s Microsoft.”
But let’s be honest here. Microsoft isn’t exactly buying a high-flier. Even after a Microsoft-Yahoo merger, Google would still have twice the search market of its competitor. Its ad placement service is superior to either Microsoft’s or Yahoo’s. And Yahoo has struggled enormously in the last few years. It, too, could have been early in social networking; its chat rooms could have lent themselves easily to something that might have rivaled Facebook. Just like Microsoft, it missed the opportunity. It is quite clearly a company that has lost its way, and the question of whether Microsoft can refocus into a viable Google competitor, well, let’s just say I’m dubious.
I also have to wonder about what Yahoo gets out of the deal — other than a premium for its depressed stock. “Does it help their brand?” asked Mark Mahaney, who covers Yahoo for Citigroup. “No. Does it give them better search technology? No. Does it give them a better ad sales force? No. I suspect this is the question being asked in Yahoo’s boardroom right now,” he added.
What was most striking to me Friday was Microsoft’s own expectations for the deal. To put it bluntly, they are awfully low. When I spoke to Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s senior vice president for strategic partnership — and the man who had been driving much of its online efforts in recent years — he never once talked about crushing the competition, or even catching up.
A Yahoo deal, he told me, “will be good for consumers who want another search engine, Web publishers who want another ad placement service, and syndicated advertisers” — who also want a choice other than Google. He continued: “Because of Google’s heavy volume and its algorithms, they are a very efficient buy. But people are rooting for a credible No. 2. We got lots of calls today from Web sites and others saying, ‘We’re with you.’ “
Was he really saying that Microsoft would be content as a “credible No. 2?” I had a hard time believing it. But when I pushed him on this point, he reiterated it. “Online advertising revenues are going to be $80 billion within a couple of years,” he said. (They’re about $50 billion now.) “That is going to mean a tremendous opportunity to all players. There has to be a place for another credible player.”
I think back to the fall of 2005, when Bill Gates visited The New York Times, and an editor asked him if Microsoft “would do to Google what you did to Netscape?”
“Nah,” laughed Mr. Gates, “we’ll do something different.” This ain’t it.
- Six Dead in Georgia Refinery Blast
Carl Elmore/Savannah Morning News via European Pressphoto AgencyAn aerial view of the Imperial Sugar plant in Port Wentworth, Ga.
Six Dead in Georgia Refinery Blast
Six bodies were recovered in the ruins of a sugar refinery near Savannah, Ga., that was rocked by an explosion Thursday evening and burned all night.
John Oxendine, the state’s fire and insurance commissioner confirmed in a broadcast interview that search crews had found the remains of six workers in the lower levels of the Imperial Sugar plant where they had evidently sought shelter.
Earlier in the day police and fire officials made it clear they did not expect to find any survivors when they said the actions at the plant had been converted from a rescue effort to one of recovery. In addition to the dead, who had earlier been listed as missing, dozens of others remained hospitalized, many of them in critical condition with extensive burns.
Michael Berkow, the chief of the Savannah Metropolitan Police Department, said that authorities planned to meet with the families of the six workers.
Officials said efforts at the plant on the Savannah River in Port Wentworth said recovery efforts were impeded by the unstable condition of the plant, parts of which were still burning.
Lt. Cmdr. Kevin Lynn of the Coast Guard said the river was closed to ship traffic from the Port of Savannah, about six miles downstream, while the river was searched for possible victims. None had been found. Charles Middleton, the Savannah fire chief, said the “instability of the building may hamper recovery operations, but they are anxious to get the process moving.” He said he did not want to expose rescue crews to any “more danger than absolutely necessary.”
Eighteen of the more than 40 plant workers injured in the blast and fire were airlifted to the Joseph H. Still Burn Center in Augusta, Ga., for treatment, said Beth Frits, a spokeswoman for the hospital. As of Friday morning, 15 were listed in critical condition and three were listed as serious, Ms. Frits said.
Some 30 to 35 additional patients were being treated locally, and burn specialists from medical centers outside the city were being sent to help. Dr. Jay Goldstein, an emergency room doctor at Memorial University Medical Center said in a televised interview that most of the plant workers had “significant burns.”
Officials had not determined what caused the explosion, which happened shortly after 7 p.m. Thursday night, but said they were suspicious of sugar dust, which like grain dust, can be volatile.
“There was fire all over the building,” said Nakishya Hill, a machine operator who said she escaped from the third floor of the refinery, according to The Associated Press.
“All I know is, I heard a loud boom and everything came down,” said Ms. Hill, who was uninjured except for blisters on her elbow. “All I could do when I got down was take off running.”
Kelly Fields, 40, who worked the night shift at Imperial Sugar for five months, handling 10-pound bags of sugar, was among the victims with burns over 70 percent of his body.
Just two months ago, Mr. Fields was married at a church in northern Georgia by Glenn Burnsed, 36, a former pastor. Mr. Fields, was airlifted from Memorial University Medical Center in Savannah last night to the Joseph M. Still Burn Center at Doctors Hospital in Augusta, where Mr. Burnsed told reporters that his brother-in-law lies bandaged, unconscious, and in between surgeries.
Mr. Burnsed said he and Mr. Fields’s boss, have taken to teasing the victim, in the hope of encouraging him.
“Me and Jimmy are here, and we got a lot of stuff for you to do,” he described them as saying. “He’s got to hurry” back to work. “If any of that’s getting through, I hope that helps,” Mr. Burnsed said.
“It’s just difficult to see them bound up and laying there with a lot of stuff in and out of them,” he said, noting that not all the victims’ family members here wanted to see their loved ones.
But for Mr. Burnsed, who struck an optimistic chord in relaying his relative’s state, his faith and the nascent community of survivors’ relatives are a lifeline.
“I think for us and a lot of the families involved, we’re leaning on our faith,” Mr. Burnsed said. “We’re Christians, and we’re calling on our Christian faith to say a lot of prayers, asking God to give the doctors wisdom. I think you see kind of a community forming in the waiting room. I don’t know if camaraderie is the right word, but a lot of helping each other out and sharing each other’s stories about how their loved one is doing.”
Mr. Burnsed said he and his wife had signed a three-month lease on an apartment near the hospital today because they were told to expect that Mr. Fields might be here that long.
Dr. Fred Mullins, the medical director at the burn center, said 17 others from the sugar plant were patients at his center, 15 of them in critical condition.
Dr. Mullins said most patients with such severe burns usually require a year to several years of outpatient rehabilitation to strengthen muscles and optimize their range of motion. .
He went on to say that when someone’s body is 70 percent burned, that means nearly everything but their feet and ankles are involved. It means the person uses up their “protein stores” to fight the burns and becomes very weak. Someone very muscular will leave the hospital very thin, Dr. Mullins said.
Emile Delegram, 58, a board member of the Southeastern Firefighters’ Burn Foundation, was at the hospital looking for family members of burn victims and giving them his business card. He talked to Mr. Burnsed, about supporting his rental costs for his stay in Augusta.
The foundation has set up a center near the hospital with food, computers and a rest area for the victims’ families, he said, adding that it is working with more than 60 churches that to bring meals to the families. Mr. Delegram estimated that four to six people were at the hospital to accompany each patient.
The plant is owned by Imperial Sugar and is known in Savannah as the Dixie Crystals plant. Imperial markets some of the country’s leading consumer brands, Imperial, Dixie Crystals and Holly, as well as supplying sugar and sweetener products to industrial food manufacturers.
Brenda Goodman contributed reporting from Atlanta. Rachel Pomerance contributed from Augusta, Ga., and John Hulusha from New York.
- Characters Adrift on the Fast Track to Nowhere A Novel Set in Las Vegas
Suzanne BarkerCharles Bock
William P. O’Donnell/The New York TimesBooks of The TimesCharacters Adrift on the Fast Track to Nowhere
Among the lost souls drifting through Charles Bock’s avidly seedy Las Vegas novel, “Beautiful Children,” there is a loner named Kenny. There are three things about Kenny that the reader needs to know.
First of all, he has an inner life that is embodied by the detritus in his car. “He saw segments of tangled ribbons from cassette tapes,” Mr. Bock writes, as Kenny gazes around. “He saw loose magazine subscription cards and the hardened remains of deformed french fries.” There are diner place mats, burger wrappers and the detached metal spine of a spiral notebook. Ominously, there are also a couple of shotgun casings buried in this mess.
Second: Kenny earns the playful nickname “Chester the Molester” from the 12-year-old Newell Ewing, a bratty, disaffected kid who devastates his parents when he chooses Kenny’s company over theirs — and then fails to come home. “He’s gonna take me out tonight and abuse me,” Newell jokingly tells his mother just before he vanishes. “He told me so.”
Third: Kenny has hidden talents. Along with the book’s other principals he shares a love for all that is lurid, cartoonish and profane about popular culture, with comic books and pornography at the red-hot center of his enthusiasm. So Kenny has taken an image from one of his father’s stash of hard-core magazines. He has focused on a woman’s face. And he has carefully, fastidiously reproduced it as a pencil drawing.
Kenny has done this with such disproportionate skill and tenderness that the image, while impressive, is way out of whack with its squalid subject matter. Mr. Bock has written his ambitious debut novel in much the same way.
“Beautiful Children” purports to see something new in the woozy, wasted lives of its principals, most of whom are rootless young drifters on a fast track to nowhere. It eagerly amplifies even the most negligible things they do. Using sleaze as his trustiest resource Mr. Bock establishes a workaday honky-tonk world that is only marginally different from the stereotypical Las Vegas fantasyland.
With a slight shift of emphasis, for instance, he can describe Newell’s mother, Lorraine, and stress something other than her gaudy days as a showgirl. Instead, in what passes for authenticity and grit (Mr. Bock grew up in the city’s equivalent of a real world), he can explain what happened after Lorraine quit dancing, dropped into domesticity, lost her son and began compulsively taking in stray cats.
“Revealed in her eyes,” the book says, with one of its not infrequent, not subversive dashes of soap opera, “a pain that would not end.”
Mr. Bock puts most of his emphasis where the smart money goes: on tattoos, piercings, comics, stripping, drugs, nonconsensual sex and various shocking states of delirium. (“She was pretty baked, her thoughts vomiting forth, shooting straight from her brain into her mouth.”) He appears to have done considerable research in order to get these details right.
So his book’s most compelling characters include Cheri Blossom, a stripper whose stage act is admiringly described. (“Remaining perfectly still while completely naked and surrounded by a roomful of horny guys, this took a certain amount of poise.”) This book is intrigued, in seemingly equal measure, that Cheri peels off a girl’s Catholic school uniform for the delectation of her customers — and that she imagines she is being guided toward moral redemption by a nun.
Cheri’s boyfriend, who goes by the name of Ponyboy and has so many studs in his face that they resemble pimples (though what he’d really like for personal decoration is a triple-A battery stuck through his nose), is another strongly envisioned figure — with another kind of conventional characterization hidden beneath his hipster trappings. Ponyboy is devoted to Cheri, but he can’t resist the opportunity to exploit her. When he winds up behaving badly even by the decadent standards that prevail here, Ponyboy seems guided more by the book’s desperate need for dramatic momentum than by any human failing.
And “Beautiful Children” has no real built-in trajectory. Beyond knowing that his characters are en route to trouble, Mr. Bock has few clear destinations in mind for any of them. This book’s structure is so slack that it seems like a string of overlapping individual sketches, some much better than others. At his most revealing Mr. Bock creates a bravura riff for a drifter named Lestat, after Anne Rice‘s vampire. (One place he has drifted haplessly is to New Orleans, in vain search of his favorite author.)
Late in the book Lestat gets lost in the midst of a desert concert, an evocatively described panorama with “fans bouncing up and down like human bingo balls in a popper” and mass anxiety in the air. After he wanders through both this literal landscape and his own interior, he becomes Mr. Bock’s most eloquent stand-in.
“Lestat wanted to be someplace safe and warm where he could write down everything he had ever seen,” the book says. “He wanted to write a book that would change the world.”
With “Beautiful Children” Mr. Bock expresses that same desire. He even makes fun of it: one character here is a famous, jaded comic-book illustrator, Bing Beiderbixxe, whose cheesy ideas include a variation on the “Beautiful Children” plot.
But in the end Mr. Bock knows more about easy anomie than hard-won resolution. “Each and every one of us moves toward fates we cannot possibly know,” he writes in conclusion. “Each of us struggles against the pain of the world, even as we are doomed to join it.” And each character in this covertly mundane novel winds up asking some version of Kenny’s ultimate and pointless question: “Just what am I supposed to do now?”
Making Lipstick Jungle
Chatting with Brooke Shields about growing up famous.
Updated Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008, at 7:32 A.M. E.T.From: Andrew McCarthy
Subject: It’s a Miracle This Show Got Off the Ground
Posted Monday, Feb. 4, 2008, at 5:34 P.M. E.T.Nov. 8, 2007—I am sitting at a table in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, about to do a table read of the first two episodes of Lipstick Jungle, a new television show for NBC based on Candace Bushnell’s novel of the same name. At any given point in the last six months, I would have told you that the odds of my sitting here were 50-50—at best. Candace is the person responsible for creating Sex and the City, and because of that, there has been a lot of time and attention focused on Lipstick Jungle in the hope that lightning might strike twice. But the history of this project has been fraught—even by television’s fickle standards.
We shot the pilot in March, were picked up in May, and were scheduled to begin shooting in late July. Then, just over a week before our start date, I got off a plane and checked my messages; there were calls from my agent, my manager, and Tim Busfield, the man responsible for the show’s day-to-day operation. I knew I hadn’t been fired; if that were the case, I would have received only one sheepish call from whomever had drawn the short straw. But something was no doubt up.
As it turned out, a few weeks earlier, NBC had changed leadership, and the new regime decided to replace the writer/producer on the show. The upshot: We were “shutting down” while a new team could be put in place. For the next few weeks, phone calls and rumors flew as everyone speculated on what had happened and what it meant for the future of the show. Eventually a new writer/producer was hired, and we were told that the show would go forward.
No one I spoke with actually believed that.
There are a lot of ways to bury a show, and having been disappointed more times than I care to admit over the last 25 years, it was easy to see what was happening—or so I concluded with defensive pessimism. Then, one of the lead actresses announced she was pregnant, and the show was officially pushed to late November.
I looked for other work.
But as the weeks turned to months, word occasionally filtered out that scripts were being written, and by the time the writers went on strike, just a few days before the table read, we were sitting on six production-draft scripts, enough to take us to early February before we ran out of material. Earlier this week, I had the obligatory medical exam—a ritual of insurance protocol. Next came a wardrobe fitting and camera test—during which Candace announced, “I wouldn’t fuck you in those shoes,” and then walked out for a cigarette—and now here we are, in early November, sitting around three tables pushed together. And there is no one here more delighted about it than me. As an actor, you know when a character suits you well, and the truth is, no part has fit me this well since I did St. Elmo’s Fire 20 years ago. The ideal meeting of actor and role does not come along that often, and so when it does, you want to grab at it.
Traditionally, table reads are notoriously dull affairs in which the director, writers, actors, and producers, along with various crew members, hear the script aloud for the first time. It can be a stressful moment—up to this point, the show has just been words on a page, and it can be nerve-wracking when it suddenly begins to take on three-dimensional life. Typically, actors react in one of two fashions: They either mumble their lines into their laps, or, worse, “perform” them with a gusto that I always find embarrassing. For years I had been a mumbler (most young actors are), until somewhere along the line I realized that I was going to be judged by everyone anyway, so I might as well speak like a normal human and be heard by the 20 or so assembled in the chairs lining the walls around us. After a brief introduction by Tim, the large cast, crammed close at tables cluttered with scripts and coffee, launches in. Perhaps it’s the relief of finally beginning after such a long and uncertain path, but there is a gathering momentum in the room as the pages turn. The scripts read very well—they’re funny, and sharp, and poignant—afterward, the room is filled with excited chatter.
The only thing left to do now is shoot.
From: Andrew McCarthy
Subject: Things You Never Want To Hear From Your Director
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2008, at 7:41 AM ET
Nov. 16, 2007—I’ve always said that on a shoot, there is the first day, and then there is every other day, and it’s best to just get the first one out of the way. But maybe because I already played the part of Joe Bennett—the billionaire who has the world by the tail—when we shot the pilot eight months ago, there are none of the usual first-day nerves this time. Like many actors I know, my mundane, doomsday anxieties about work (will this be the time I can’t pull it off? Will I be fired?) can manifest as anxieties about physical appearance, which means the first morning in any hair and makeup trailer can get complicated. But today I glide through the rituals with surprising ease.The vanities of film and television acting—and more specifically, my inability to let them go, to get past them—I continue to find very disquieting. But there is not an actor I know, male or female, who is not at the mirror’s mercy. As men, we have it relatively easy: Just don’t get too fat, and if you can keep your hair, even better. Women are subject to much more scrutiny. It’s no wonder so few ladies in Hollywood are able to move their foreheads.
The scene to be shot is a fairly straightforward one in which I drop off lunch at my girlfriend Victory’s apartment. Victory, as embodied by Lindsay Price, is a fashion designer and one of the three powerful women around whom the show centers. Wendy, a movie studio head, and Nico, a magazine editor, played by Brooke Shields and Kim Raver, respectively, round out the trio. When we shot the pilot, Lindsay and I discovered that we had an easy, workable chemistry, which is something you have no idea of until you’re on the spot. Acting with a new partner is a lot like a blind date. You either click or you don’t. When you do, it can carry you a long way, and when you don’t, no matter how hard you work, the struggle always shows. Talent is great, but chemistry just works.
After a few technical rehearsals, the director, Tim Busfield, calls, “Action” from the far side of the sound stage. The days of the director sitting under the camera and watching an actor’s performance with the naked eye are long over. Usually he can be found at the distant end of a thin, winding cable that leads to a remote corner, where he watches the performance on a small, often grainy, monitor while wearing headphones to hear the dialogue. I have become so accustomed to this setup (which I initially found unnerving in its remoteness) that on the rare occasion when a director does sit and watch my work up close and in person, I feel scrutinized and self-conscious. “Go back behind your box and leave me alone!” I want to shout.
The thing that most directors fail to realize is that during the time between “action” and “cut,” the actor is in a vulnerable state (hopefully), and the first words spoken after the take is over fall on very sensitive ears. I have seen offhanded feedback—”Cut. Again. Right away!”—affect an actor like a cold slap of water, whereas a few words of simple encouragement—”Cut. Okay, good. Let’s do just one more.”—will wash over and ease him into a more relaxed state, helping him to feel like he is a part of a whole, instead of an isolated fool in front of the camera with everyone waiting for him to get it right so they can go to lunch. It’s just simple psychology, but you’d be surprised how few directors put themselves in the actor’s shoes enough to realize it.
(Nearly as bad as negative feedback is false praise. Nothing makes me feel more unsafe in the hands of a director than when he goes up to an actor and overenthuses, “Great, great!” for what anyone can see is just plain bad acting. In a case like this, when he approaches with his next suggestion, you simply say, “OK, good idea”—and then ignore him and protect yourself. It’s not a very satisfying way to work, and it happens more often than you might think.)
Perhaps directors are just too busy. It was only after I had directed a film myself that I realized the director is rarely, if ever, entirely focused on what the actor is doing. He is worried about myriad other things: After all, he has a movie—or in this case, 42 minutes of television—to get in the can. And the motivating force behind many of his decisions is the need to expedite things so he can make his day. But a good director, like an overextended but attentive parent, will catch the important moments.
So naturally, when Tim calls out, “Cut. Great! Print. Moving on” after just the first take, I proclaim him one of the good ones, and after a few more shots from different angles, I’m back in the van on my way home after a few less-than-grueling hours.
From: Andrew McCarthy
Subject: The Acting Skills of New York City
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2008, at 8:48 AM ET
Nov. 20, 2007—One of the unique things about being an actor based in New York for so long is my relationship with the city: Certain locations are forever set in my mind as touchstones. I can never walk past the boat pond in Central Park without thinking of the day when I pushed a young kid into the water for a scene during the shooting of Weekend at Bernie’s, and it’s impossible for me to go to Coney Island and not remember kissing Mary Stuart Masterson under the boardwalk in a scene from Heaven Help Us, and I always think of that weird indie film I shot in a warehouse way over in the far western reaches of 42nd Street whenever I’m in that neighborhood. The town is peppered with these memories, and whenever I pass one such spot, I feel a small, private flash of pride and twinge of gratitude.Today we are on a very congested Upper East Side. And something you need to always keep in mind when shooting in the city is, if you fight it—the noise, the traffic, the chaos—you can’t win. But when you give in, it’s your best friend. It’s the extra character, often the most important (and interesting) one in the scene. And it can reveal things that the text alone cannot. Today, for example, we’re shooting my side of a phone conversation. (We shot Lindsay’s half the other day in the studio, and I’m chatting now on the phone with the script supervisor who is reading Lindsay’s lines to me from over by the monitor.) There is nothing particularly memorable about the scene—I’m just inviting her to dinner—and after a rehearsal in which I simply walk down the sidewalk talking into my cell, I wonder aloud if it might not be more interesting for me to cross the street during the conversation. We try it, and as I cross, I stop in the middle of the road to chat. Cars pile up behind me and drivers honk and shout. Not only is New York—in all its glory—brought into the scene, but the moment reveals a lot about what kind of a guy my character is. (As in, it’s Joe’s world.) And a scene that was simply functional becomes playful, funny, and revealing.
There are certain types of scenes that remind me of, and reignite, the infatuation with filmmaking I felt when I starting making my living as an actor, nearly 100 jobs ago. One that has always thrilled me is the night shoot on the streets of Manhattan, and next up we shoot Lindsay and me taking an evening stroll under the old-fashioned street globes of Central Park. It is a scene that is at once romantic and sophisticated and simple—the kind of thing that Hollywood has done so well since the movies began nearly 100 years ago. It’s the kind of scenario that people can identify with—and yet it all somehow seems so much better on-screen.
Our crew has lit up the facades of the brownstones along East 79th Street, and since cinematographers love their light shimmering, the pavement glistens with the fresh sparkle of a wet-down. New York has its best face on, and the city feels much like it does when one is first falling in love—there’s a sense in the air that “It’s all for us.” Once again, Manhattan has done most of the work, and the only way to fuck it up would be to try too hard. So after a few takes in which Lindsay and I meander arm in arm, chatting freely, everything falls into place, Tim calls out “Cut. Print. Wrap,” and Fifth Avenue and 79th Street is added to my list of private landmarks.
From: Andrew McCarthy
Subject: Chatting With Brooke Shields About Growing Up Famous
Posted Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008, at 7:32 AM ETNov. 30, 2007—New director today. It’s a phenomenon unique to episodic television; every episode has a new man or woman behind the camera. It’s an odd thing, really—the one variable is the person at the center of the wheel—but it works because, in television at least, once the machine is up and running, the director doesn’t have as strong a voice in the outcome as you might think. Once actors have done a particular show for a while, they tend to become “director-proof.” After all, they live with the characters week in and week out, sometimes for years, and the director is often just passing through. But he still needs to come in and take charge without stepping on toes, not always the easiest thing in the world.
I remember being a guest star on a show and watching as a prima donna lead actor poisoned the atmosphere on an entire set. The director could do very little. But none of that ego/fear exists on Lipstick Jungle, at least not yet. Everyone is getting on well, and the work is flowing fairly easily and quickly. The other night, “the girls,” as Brooke, Kim, and Lindsay are called around the set, lit the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center and announced that the show will begin airing on Feb. 7 at 10 p.m., in the E.R. time slot. The best way to know how much the network believes in a show is to look at the time slot it assigns. This news is better than anyone had hoped, and there is a quiet excitement that feels in keeping with what is happening day in and day out.
After the scene I shoot today—Lindsay and I chattering away in the back of a limo—I run into Brooke in the makeup room. I mention to her that I was in the Guggenheim the other day and saw a famous photograph of her that was taken when she was a young child. In it, she is standing in a tub of water, naked. Her body is that of a prepubescent girl, but her face and hair are made up to appear much older. It is a provocative, unsettling image that was made famous when Richard Prince photographed the original photograph, making a piece of appropriated art out of it—that is what now hangs in the museum. “I remember that day,” she tells me. “It didn’t seem like anything, taking that picture. Weird.” We launch into a discussion of fame and how it affects and alters people, especially the young, before they are even aware of it.
I mention to her that only in hindsight was I really conscious of the degree to which I had become popular figure for a certain generation. And we both acknowledge there was no great plan at work in our careers. “I just took what came next,” she tells me, and I nod my head in agreement. But despite the accidental nature of this kind of success, mutations and repercussions inevitably follow. Early in her career, Brooke became a unique figure of youthful sexuality and exploitation, from Pretty Baby and the Calvin Klein ads onward, something she simply shrugs off: “It’s just the way my life was,” she says. “I never thought about it.”
As we talk, I become conscious that the usual chatter that fills the makeup room has fallen silent as people bend an ear. And I’m made aware that this is a conversation that can only be had by people who, however different the details of their specific lives, share an innate understanding and a mutuality of experience that is fairly unusual.
During our conversation, Brooke has been going through a pile of faded clippings—comic strips and articles and photos from her youth—in which she was featured, both flatteringly and otherwise. It seems she was clearing out a drawer at home and is deciding what to throw out and what she wants to keep, in case her children might someday be interested in what kind of an existence their mother had way back when. It’s a different life, and one she seems at home in—I like her a lot.
Andrew McCarthy plays Joe Bennett on Lipstick Jungle.- O Wise Bank, What Do We Do? (No Fibbing Now) Federal Reserve
Dave Plunkert
ExposedO Wise Bank, What Do We Do? (No Fibbing Now)
THE Federal Reserve’s surprise early-morning interest-rate cut last Tuesday has calmed, at least for now, a stock market storm that began in the Pacific Rim and roared around the world a day earlier. It was the Fed doing what it does best — simultaneously reducing the cost of money for the nation’s financial institutions and signaling to investors that it would act quickly to counter fears of a consumer-led recession.
But for all its power, the Fed cannot change this troubling fact: trust in much of the financial system — banks, brokerage houses, ratings agencies, bond insurers, regulators — has been severely damaged by the subprime mortgage crisis. And that damage cannot be reversed with a quick cut in interest rates.
It is not just a matter of attracting fresh capital from overseas to replace some of the $100 billion lost or written off so far — a figure that is sure to grow. The underlying problem for some of the world’s largest financial firms is restoring confidence, among big institutional investors and 401(k) nest-egg holders alike. That’s what has to happen if the capital markets are to run smoothly over the long term.
It is easy to see why the executives and directors of blue-chip firms like Merrill Lynch and Citigroup lost sight of the importance of risk management and vigilant oversight. Their companies have been prodigious profit machines for so long that complacency had set in.
For generations, while other industries experienced booms and busts, financial services pretty much kept chugging along, making money off the swings and shifts in the economy. Standard & Poor’s index analysts said 2001 was the only down year for financial sector earnings since they began collecting data in the late 1980s. Even the recession of 1990 did not interrupt the industry’s rising profits.
But analysts estimate that financial company profits fell 25 percent in 2007 (the year’s actual numbers aren’t yet in), and financial stocks experienced a significant decline, losing 21 percent of their value, the biggest drop since 1990.
Richard E. Sylla, professor of market history at New York University‘s Stern School of Business, said one had to go back to the Great Depression, a period of regular bank failures and relentlessly falling stock prices, to find a time when losses at a broad swath of financial firms were as profound as they were last year.
“I don’t think it will be as bad this time because we have better management by the Fed,” he said. “But people are much more skeptical of the wisdom of these banks now. There will be less trust.”
The Federal Reserve that investors have learned to rely on so heavily was created after the Panic of 1907, a classic bank run that began when the Knickerbocker Trust Company in New York could not satisfy its depositors’ calls for their money. Like many panics, this one began with the ruin of a single speculator, F. Augustus Heinze, who had tried to corner the market in United Copper Company shares.
His failure might have gone unnoticed but for the fact that Mr. Heinze was president of a bank and deeply involved in the world of New York finance. One of his business associates was the president of Knickerbocker Trust and when that relationship emerged, the bank’s depositors clamored for their money. One day in October, Knickerbocker tellers paid out more than $8 million in three hours, then had to close its doors.
The financier J. P. Morgan stepped in, asking a committee of bankers to examine the trust’s books. He decided not to bail it out, choosing instead to help another institution, Trust Company of America, that was less troubled. Later, Mr. Morgan persuaded bankers to put up $25 million to rescue problem banks and trust companies. The crisis abated.
With the exception of the Depression, which saw the failure of thousands of small banks unable to withstand demands from depositors, panics have been rare since the Fed’s creation in 1913 set up a national system of banks serving as fiscal agents of the United States Treasury. One of the Fed’s marching orders is to protect the nation against such liquidity crises. Lowering interest rates and injecting money into the system are powerful tools because they help skittish banks get back to the business of lending.
Warding off a credit crisis like the one created by the lax lending of recent years is quite a different matter. The Fed cannot turn a bad mortgage loan into a good one. And it may not be able to convince investors that their money is safe in institutions whose risk management was so lax that their shareholders have absorbed billions in losses.
Indeed, while the Fed’s rate cut soothed investors, it treated only a symptom of the ailing markets, not the ailment itself. That illness is the loose lending that produced complicated securities whose risks were vastly underestimated by the institutions that bought them.
One of the more disturbing aspects of the current woes, and a reason that this crisis is unfolding in slow motion, is the inability of these sophisticated institutions to assign accurate values to their holdings. Morgan Stanley shocked investors last month when, just a few weeks after estimating its mortgage-related write-downs at $3.7 billion, it added another $5.7 billion to the figure.
Firms have had difficulty computing their losses because the securities central to this mess are complex, even incomprehensible. A share of stock is a stake in a business. But a mortgage security includes thousands of loans, some more risky than others.
Investors who bought these securities clearly did not know what they were buying; they relied on credit rating agencies like Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings to tell them whether their stakes were risky or not. But the rating agencies were disastrously wrong in their risk assessments and spent late 2007 downgrading securities they had recently rated as solidly AAA. Their reputations have been tarnished.
“In the latter part of the 1970s and early 80s we had the problems of Brazil, Argentina, Mexico not paying their debts,” said the economist Henry Kaufman. “Those were kind of nice, isolated items and could be clearly defined. They weren’t as opaque and they weren’t as heterogeneous as the problems in the credit market now.”
Even though the credit crisis has been unfolding for almost a year, the complexity of the securities and the fact that their ownership is not easily tracked means new losses are still being tallied. Just last week, Credit Suisse analysts said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored buyers of home mortgages, may face losses of $16 billion because of declines in values of subprime mortgages on their books.
Last November, Mike Mayo, an analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities, estimated that losses from falling values of subprime mortgages could reach $400 billion. But that figure does not include losses in other areas of the credit market, like those that may crop up in prime mortgage loans or corporate debt.
In other words, it is likely to take many more months to plumb this well of losses. And it will far exceed the $150 billion federal stimulus plan being hashed out in Washington.
“The financial markets have become more and more opaque and so we don’t know enough about where the weaknesses are and what the magnitude of those weaknesses may be,” Mr. Kaufman said. “So far the Federal Reserve and other supervisory authorities have done little about removing the opaqueness and setting new ground rules for financial disclosure. And I have not heard a call from Congress for an investigation where it will ask the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal and state banking regulators, ‘What did you miss and why did you miss it?’ “
Certainly, greater disclosure of the risks in these complex securities and the institutions that hold them is in order. And investors must be confident that the values assigned to these holdings reflect market reality. So far, no one has come up with a plan to correct these market shortcomings.
“You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett wrote in a letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders six years ago. Unfortunately, this crisis’s outgoing tide has exposed some of the nation’s most esteemed institutions. Naked truths like these are never a pretty sight. And even after the tide comes back in, they are not likely to be soon forgotten.
