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Late Innings
September 7, 2010
John Ford directed a handful of television shows, but the most Fordian television episode I've ever seen is "A Head of Hair," a Have Gun Will Travel from 1960.
Scripted by the unsung master Harry Julian Fink, "A Head of Hair" sends Paladin deep into Indian country to find a long-ago kidnapped white woman, who may or may not have been spotted from a distance by a cavalry officer (George Kennedy). The girl is blonde, but we'll learn that hers is not the head of hair to which the title refers. As a guide, Paladin recruits a white man who used to live as a Sioux, but who is now a destitute alcoholic. The first sparse exchange between them lays out the impossibility of the mission and establishes BJ's quiet self-contempt:
PALADIN: Would a couple of men have any chance at all?
ANDERSON: Men? A couple of Oglala Sioux, maybe. Maybe even me, seven, eight years ago. But you? They'd stake you out between two poles and flay you alive.
But Anderson takes the job because he needs drinking money. The series of tense confrontations with the Nez Perce through which he and Paladin then navigate are not standard cowboys-versus-Indians stuff. They are precise, specific rituals of masculine and tribal pride, none of which take a predictable shape. Because Paladin is a novice among the Nez Perce and Anderson is an expert, Fink has a clever device by which to clue the audience in on what's at stake in each conflict. Gradually, these question-and-answer sessions also disclose a profound philosophical schism between the two men. Paladin is preoccupied with personal honor and ethics, while Anderson is consumed with a self-abasing nihilism. Both are deadly pragmatists, but only one of them will take the scalps of dead braves.
The Nez Perce mission concludes in victory, but it comes with a price. Success turns the two trackers against one another, for reasons that Paladin cannot understand until after violence erupts between them. "Why? Why?" are Paladin's last words to Anderson in "A Head of Hair," and only the answer is the unsatisfactory moral of the story of the scorpion and the frog: because it was in his nature.
Maybe it's a coincidence that "A Head of Hair" falls chronologically between the two John Ford westerns that depict a two-man journey into the wilderness in search of a missing white woman (or women) in the custody of Indians. Both of the films imagine such captivity as a kind of unspeakable horror. "A Head of Hair" doesn't dwell on that aspect of the story, but it does glance at the repatriated Mary Grange (Donna Brooks) long enough to construe her as lost, maybe for good, in the breach between two cultures. Another spare Fink line: "I would have gone with him," Mary says, looking sadly after a departing Anderson. "They say the Sioux are kind to their women."
I haven't yet identified the actor who plays Anderson because that's the blinking neon sign that points to Ford. It is Ben Johnson, the ex-stuntman who was an important member of Ford's "repertory company" during the late forties and early fifties. Johnson delivers what may be his finest performance prior to the Oscar-winning turn in The Last Picture Show: understated, unadorned, just barely hinting at a deep well of sadness and self-loathing. Imagine that line – "maybe even me, seven, eight years ago" – in Johnson's voice and then picture the flicker of a weary smile that goes with it.
There's another Ford fellow-traveler in the mix here, too: the director, Andrew V. McLaglen, was the son of Victor McLaglen, who won an Oscar for The Informer and overlapped with Ben Johnson in two of the Cavalry Trilogy films. McLaglen didn't have Ford's eye but he did get to shoot "A Head of Hair" on location (in Lone Pine?), and frame his actors against the landscape in a way that reminds us the wilderness is part of the story. The precision in McLaglen's compositions match the precision in Fink's scenario; when those three braves whose scalps are about to be up for grabs turn their backs on Paladin, there's room to believe that maybe gunplay really has been avoided. All that's left is something to give "A Head of Hair" some size, and that comes via Jerry Goldsmith's sweeping brass- and woodwind-driven score. It was one of only two that Goldsmith wrote for Have Gun Will Travel.
"A Head of Hair" falls within a string of amazingly strong segments that opened Have Gun's fourth season. There's another Fink masterpiece, "The Shooting of Jessie May," a four-character confrontation that ends in a really shocking explosion of violence; "Saturday Night," a jail-cell locked-room mystery with a dark underbelly; "The Poker Fiend," a study of degenerate gambling with an existential component and a mesmerizing, atypically internal performance from Peter Falk; and "The Calf," a cutting allegory about a man (Denver Pyle, also a revelation) obsessed with the wire fence that marks his territory. Lighter entries like the baseball comedy "Out at the Old Ballpark" and "The Tender Gun," with Jeanette Nolan as a crotchety female marshal under siege (Nolan, like Walter Brennan, had a with-teeth and a without-teeth performance; guess which one this is), are not as strong but they do demonstrate the impressive tonal range of Have Gun. One measure of a great television series – one which The X-Files taught me – is the extent to which it can avoid being the same show each week while still remaining, on a fundamental level, the same show each week.
The source of the fourth-season shot in Have Gun's arm? A new producer and story editor, Frank Pierson and Albert Ruben, took over, and it's not a coincidence that both were superb writers. By that time, the star of the series, Richard Boone, had seized control of it in a way that would soon be common for TV stars but that was unprecedented in 1960.
Boone got to direct a lot of episodes but, more importantly, he had approval over the story content and the behind-the-camera personnel. A snob who thought he should be doing serious acting, not westerns, Boone set out to make Have Gun as un-western a western as possible. That's probably how Pierson and Ruben got their jobs: Boone wanted bosses (or "bosses") who would be down with phasing out the cowboy schtick in favor of broad comedies, existential tragedies, pastiches of Verne and Shakespeare, and so on. Of course, Pierson and Ruben fell out of favor with Boone and he kicked them to the curb after a year or so . . . but that's a story for another day.
Regime change and star ego-trips also characterized Wanted: Dead or Alive in its third and final season. Steve McQueen had always been the whole show, but by 1959, everybody knew he was destined for major stardom, including McQueen himself, who seemed to be using the final run of episodes as a laboratory in which to determine exactly which tics and slouches to incorporate into his definitive screen persona. Wanted: Dead or Alive also got a new producer for its home stretch, a man named Ed Adamson. Supposedly McQueen drove him crazy. Adamson was a prolific writer and, either to save money or time or just because McQueen was all the hassle he could take, he took the unusual step of divvying up all twenty-six of that year's script assignments between himself and one other writer, Norman Katkov.
Katkov was one of my first oral history subjects. Since I published that piece, I've used this blog to weigh in on some of Katkov's work that I hadn't seen at the time of our interview. The most important of the shows that were unavailable to me then was Wanted: Dead or Alive. Katkov's fourteen episodes represent his only sustained work on a series other than Ben Casey, and so I am a little disappointed not to be able to call them another set of overlooked gems. In most cases, without consulting the credits, I'd have a hard time telling which episodes are Katkov's and which were written by Adamson, a straight-arrow action and mystery man.
Katkov managed a couple of idiosyncratic scripts, like "The Twain Shall Meet," in which Josh Randall teams up with a fancy easterner named Arthur Pierce Madison (Michael Lipton). Madison is a journalist, which allows Katkov (a former beat reporter) to get in some knowing gags. Contrary to the usual genre expectation of the western hero's stoic modesty, Josh is intrigued, even flattered, at the prospect of having his exploits recorded for posterity. Mary Tyler Moore has an amusing bit as a saloon girl who's even more dazzled by the prospect of fame. Katkov focuses on the differences in how Josh and Madison make their respective livings: the contrast between physical and intellectual (and, amusingly, steady versus freelance work). In a quiet moment, Madison asks, "Is it all you want?" Josh replies, "Almost." Westerns did not thrive on introspection, so it's a shock to see a show like Wanted: Dead or Alive take a pause to contemplate whether its hero is happy in his work.
Does it seem as if this space circles back sooner or later to a small group of very good writers? I would argue that the history of television circles that way, too. Anthony Lawrence: another oral history subject on whom I've followed up here, first on The Outcasts and now on Hawaii Five-O. Lawrence logged one episode each in the third and fourth season, and the trademarks I described out in my profile are evident in both. There are the show-offy literary allusions: "Two Doves and Mr. Heron" ends with a quote from the Buddha. There is the interest in topical issues, which began on Five-O with the germ-warfare classic "Three Dead Cows at Makapuu" (germ warfare). Lawrence followed that up with scripts on homosexuality (Vic Morrow, fruity in more ways than one, as a whack-job who fondles John Ritter in "Two Doves") and Vietnam ("To Kill or Be Killed").
There is also what may be Lawrence's defining trait as a writer: the unpredictable burst of emotional intensity within otherwise routine material. "To Kill or Be Killed" reminded me of how puzzled I was that the same Outer Limits writer could have come up with both the heart-rending "The Man Who Was Never Born" and the diffident, heavy-handed "The Children of Spider County." In "To Kill or Be Killed," Lawrence caps three hit-or-miss acts of family melodrama (dove son vs. hawk father) with a long, exhausting monologue – a tape-recorded suicide note that plays over horrified reaction shots of the other characters. It might seem like lazy writing, and maybe it was, to withhold all the emotion from a script and then dump it into the final minutes. But I think Lawrence was crazy like a fox. That monologue concerns My Lai (under a different name), something a lot of people watching Hawaii Five-O probably didn't want to hear about, and with his crude structural tactic Lawrence drops the topic in their laps like a turd on the dinner table.
Hawaii Five-O, in its fourth year, is almost exactly the same show as it was in its first. It's still a show that allows for a lot of variety in its formula – or rather, the alternation between six or eight different formulas. Unlike on Wanted: Dead or Alive, one can detect an individual authorial touch in many of the episodes. The lurid pulp shocker "Beautiful Screamer" is pure Stephen Kandel. The dullest espionage outings and the most heavy-handed McGarrett lectures usually trace back to the team of Jerry Ludwig and Eric Bercovici, who, unfortunately, wrote quite a few of each.
One of the most popular Five-Os, "Over Fifty? Steal," falls into this stretch of the series. It was penned by a writer new to the show, E. Arthur Kean. It's a semi-comedy in the cuddly-oldster-as-criminal-mastermind genre, featuring a smug Hume Cronyn as a serial robber who goes out of his way to taunt McGarrett and crew. I like "Over Fifty," but Kean's second script for the series deserves more attention. More diamond-hard than heart-shaped, "Ten Thousand Diamonds and a Heart" is another caper, but played deadly straight this time. It starts with a parking garage prison bust and turns into a jewel heist, which Kean sets up as a battle of wits between another master criminal (Tim O'Connor) and an impregnable high-rise. Kean fusses over the details: scale models, elevator schematics, medication for a bum ticker. Somehow, he makes the minutiae fascinating. They're the diamonds, and the heart is the clash between O'Connor and the "banker" (the guy who's funding the heist) played by Paul Stewart. It's a portrait of two paranoid career criminals who can't trust anyone but themselves, gnashing at each other until they tear their own caper apart.
I had seen a few of Kean's earlier scripts, for The Fugitive and The F.B.I., without having much of a reaction. But the Hawaii Five-Os that mark him down as, in the Sarrisian lexicon, a Subject For Further Research.
Also this year I've watched most of the fourth and penultimate season of NBC's Dr. Kildare, a once near-great doctor drama that slowly turned mushy and bland. Further research department: one of those turkeys marked the prime-time debut, as far as I can tell, of one E. Arthur Kean.
A few fourth-year episodes written by series veterans like Jerry McNeely and Archie L. Tegland still felt the old Dr. Kildare: tough, smart, sagacious. Tegland's "A Reverence For Life" trots out one of the standbys of the medical drama, a story of a patient who refuses life-saving treatment due to her religious convictions. My own inclinations always favor science over superstition; but Dennis Weaver, with his innate humility, is so perfect as the Jehovah's Witness whose wife is dying that I was rooting for him to prevail in his faith.
I am also partial to Christopher Knopf's "Man Is a Rock," a terrifying study of a heart attack victim (Walter Matthau) forced to confront his own mortality, and "Maybe Love Will Save My Apartment House," a zany romp by Boris Sobelman, who wrote a handful of very funny black comedies for Thriller and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. But Kildare's fourth year includes duds from other good writers, like Adrian Spies (Saints and Sinners) and Jack Curtis (Ben Casey), and that's often a sign of tinkering from upstairs.
By 1964 Richard Chamberlain was one of TV's hottest stars, a heartthrob with a viable recording career. MGM (which produced Dr. Kildare) had cashed in on his popularity by building three medium-budget feature films around him in three years. Both the studio and the network had a big investment in Chamberlain, and I'm guessing that executive producer Norman Felton may have capitulated to pressure to give viewers a maximum dose of Chamberlain romancing and singing. I'm not kidding about the singing: "Music Hath Charms" is a plotless let's-put-on-a-show show about an amateur night for the hospital staff. I can't decide which episode is the series' nadir: "A Journey to Sunrise," a vanity piece that gives Raymond Massey (who co-starred as Kildare's windbag boss Dr. Gillespie) a dual role as a dying Hemingway-esque writer, or "Rome Will Never Leave You," a prophetically titled, turtle-paced three-parter that contrives gooey romances for both Kildare and Gillespie during an Italian business trip.
I've proposed corporate greed as the major cause for the de-fanging of the once sharp Dr. Kildare, but there's also the David Victor factor. In the years before signing on as Norman Felton's right-hand man, Victor was a hack genre writer (with a partner, Herbert Little, Jr., who disappeared after Victor hit the big time). In the years after he and Felton parted ways, Victor copied the Kildare format and quickly ran it into comfortable mediocrity as the head man on Marcus Welby. Was Victor the source of the blandness that set in on Kildare as the show's exec, Norman Felton (by all accounts a discerning producer), turned his attention to developing The Lieutenant and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Maybe he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time – but if so, Victor was in an even wronger place at an even wronger time a year later, when he moved over to The Man From U.N.C.L.E. as the supervising producer who supervised that show's second- and third-season slide into cringeworthy camp.
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.: When we last checked in on TV's favorite spies, we found a mortified Robert Vaughn frugging with a man in a gorilla suit. I had hoped to follow that cheap shot with a report on how The Man From U.N.C.L.E. rebounded in its final half-season, as new producer Anthony Spinner followed the network's oops-we-fucked-up orders to take out the yuks and put back the action. I'd heard that the fourth season was "too grim," but hey, I like grim. Especially if it's the alternative to Solo and Kuryakin partying with Sonny and Cher or riding on stinkbombs (funny for Kubrick, not for Kuryakin). Grim is good.
Didn't work out that way. The fourth season isn't grim, it's dull. The plots are perfunctory, the characters cardboard, the casting uninspired. The books say that Spinner tried to bring U.N.C.L.E. back to its roots, but the shows play like nobody much cared what went on the screen. I gave up when I got to "The THRUSH Roulette Affair," which rien ne va pluses with one of the laziest deus ex machinas I've ever seen. See, THRUSH baddie is torturing some guy with a machine that figures out the victim's worst fear and then gets him to talk in a room full of (not at all scary) footage of said fear. In this case, the poor sucker is more afraid of being run over by a train. Wouldn't you know it, when the shit hits the fan, the evil scientist bursts out with a clumsy load of exposition: turns out he tested the machine on the main THRUSH baddie (Michael Rennie), and his greatest fear is exactly the same as the other guy's. Two trainophobes in a row! Which means that when the U.N.C.L.E. guys shove Rennie into the scaring-to-death machine, all of that (not at all scary) train stock footage is already cued up!
Usually I don't even notice plot holes but, seriously, this one's just insulting. How could Spinner or the writer (Arthur Weingarten) or the story editor (Irv Pearlberg) not come up with anything better than that? Especially since they swiped the idea from 1984 in the first place?
Another of the fourth season U.N.C.L.E.s spieled some boring Latin American palace intrigue (featuring not-at-all-Latin American Madlyn Rhue), which got me to thinking. The Lieutenant ended by sending its stateside serviceman hero off to die in Vietnam. U.N.C.L.E. should've gone out the same way, with Solo and Kuryakin headed off to Chile to assassinate Salvador Allende. That would've been my kind of grim.
An Interview With Jason Wingreen: Part One
May 13, 2010
Jason Wingreen wants me to know two things before we begin. First: He was born on October 9, 1920, and not in 1919, as the references books would have it. This makes him only 89, one year younger than I and anyone else who ever looked it up has always believed. These matters are important to an actor. Second: I must promise never to divulge his phone number, which is unlisted and, indeed, immune to all my usual tricks for digging up unlisted phone numbers on the internet. If it gets out, the "Star Wars people" will drive him crazy. More on them in a minute.
Why do I, and why should you, care about Jason Wingreen? Perhaps because, as the saying goes, there are no small parts, only small actors. Wingreen is not a small actor. He is, to trot out another much-abused cliché, one of those actors whose name you may not know but whose face you will recognize. Even if you do happen to know his name, perhaps you sometimes mangle it. One movie buff I know persists in calling him Jason Wintergreen.
In the face of your indifference and imprecision, Wingreen has played at least 350 documented roles on television and in the movies since the early fifties. The actual total may be well over 500. A handful of those roles have been meaty, like the guest shot as the would-be rapist who gets his ass kicked by Steve McQueen on Wanted: Dead or Alive. A few have been semi-prominent, like the recurring part he played (that of Harry the bartender) on All in the Family and its successor Archie Bunker's Place for seven seasons. Many have been minor, but in shows that have been repeated a million times, like The Twilight Zone or Star Trek. One of them was literally invisible: in The Empire Strikes Back, the second film in the Star Wars saga, Wingreen provided the voice of Boba Fett, the bounty hunter who captures Han Solo. The weird cult that now surrounds the character of Boba Fett was not foreseen, and Wingreen received no screen credit. His place in the history of Star Wars did not emerge until 2000, and when it finally happened, it changed his life.
Most of Wingreen's roles have been what are rather harshly called "bits": characters who walk on and off, say a line or two, function as deliverers of exposition or as background color. With rare exceptions, small-part actors like Wingreen have been neglected by historians. It's easy enough to ask actors like Collin Wilcox or Tim O'Connor, the first two subjects of my occasional series of interviews with important early television performers, about their best roles. They spent weeks or months creating those characters, and received a lot of attention for the results. But how to interview an actor who toiled in anonymity, spending a day or less on most jobs? Years ago, I looked up a handful of iconic bit players – Tyler McVey, Norman Leavitt, David Fresco – and quizzed them over the phone, with disappointing results. Neither they, nor I, could remember enough detail about any one project to generate a substantive conversation.
But when I spoke with Jason Wingreen, he unspooled anecdote after anecdote in his polished, slightly metallic voice. It was as if this actor who never played a leading role had saved up all the dialogue that his hundreds of characters didn't get to say on screen and, now, was loosing it for the first time. Wingreen's recollections were often funny, occasionally startling, and always precise and detailed. They were so detailed, in fact, that for the first time on this blog I am presenting an interview in two parts. In the first, Wingreen discusses his formative years as an actor, his involvement with one of the 20th century's most important theaters, and some of his first television roles.
Tell me a bit about your background and your childhood.
I was born in Brooklyn. My parents moved from Brooklyn to a town called Howard Beach, in the borough of Queens, and that's where I grew up. I went to John Adams High School in Ozone Park, Queens, and graduated from there and then went to Brooklyn College. In order for me to get from Howard Beach to Brooklyn College, I would have to take a bus, the Fulton Street El, and the Brighton Line, and then walk about half a mile to the college. Which took about an hour and a half, approximately. Each way, going and coming. Three hours of travel for four years, for my college education. We didn't have an automobile.
What did you study?
I majored in English and Speech. What I wanted to be when I grew up was a sportswriter, a sports reporter. I was very much interested in sports, from an academic standpoint, although I did play baseball. I was a skinny little kid. In those days, kids could get skipped in the lower classes, and I was skipped twice, which was a big mistake. For me. I was advanced, twice, into a class with boys who were not only older than me but bigger and stronger than me. The fact that I could play baseball saved me from a lot of bullying from the older boys.
At Brooklyn College, there was a mandatory speech class in your freshman year. The course that I took was taught by an actor, a Broadway actor who was out of work and got a job teaching in the Speech Department at Brooklyn. His name was Arnold Moss.
Oh, yes, a fine character actor with a deep, Shakespearean voice.
He was a dynamic teacher. So when the term ended, I thought, I'm going to look for something else that this guy teaches. I searched around and found out that he was teaching an acting class. I signed up for it for the following semester, and I got hooked. That was the end of my dream of my becoming a sportswriter.
Was your family affected by the Great Depression?
My father was a tailor. He had a store that was just opposite a Long Island Railroad station in Howard Beach. There were people living in Howard Beach who went into the city to work, [and] Howard Beach had a lot of firemen and policemen living in the town, and they were all customers of my father. They'd bring their uniforms in, the cops and firemen would, and the accountants and the lawyers and so on who would take the Long Island Railroad into town would bring their clothes in to my father to be dry cleaned or pressed. And that way my father was able to get through the Depression. It was tight, it was very close, but he was able to do so.
My father was not an intellectual man, but he loved music. When he'd open the store every morning, he would turn the radio on to WQXR. Classical music, all day long in the store. My sister grew up with that too. My sister, Harriet Wingreen, has been the orchestra pianist of the New York Philharmonic for about thirty-five years. She is five years younger than I am. She really got the music life, and music itself drilled into her. She went to Juilliard, and on from there. I would say she's the real talent of the family. I'm just an actor.
From where does your family name originate?
It originated from, I think, Hungary, but we're not Hungarian. My parents both came from Lithuania. We're Jewish. The name was Vengeren when my father got to Ellis Island, and at Ellis Island they Americanized it and gave him Wingreen. They did that with all immigrants in those days. My father met my mother when they were both in this country. It was an arranged date, by the families. My father came to this country – he was born in 1890 – when he was sixteen years old. Alone. He took a boat here with nothing except the name of a family, who were not relatives but friends, going back to the old country, and an address in Brooklyn. He went to these people and they took him in and helped him to grow up there and to get a job.
So after you started studying acting with Arnold Moss, then what happened?
I joined the undergraduate theater group, called the Masquers. Ultimately, in my senior year, I was president of the Masquers, and played the lead in the school play that the undergraduates put on every year. I graduated in June 1941.
At that time, The New York Times was running an ad campaign, and it was "I Got My Job Through The New York Times." That was their slogan. Well, I got my job through The New York Times. I answered an ad in the Times one morning, which said, "Wanted: Young man to assist with marionette production. No experience necessary. Must have driver's license."
Well, I had a driver's license. I certainly had no experience being a puppeteer or a marionette, but I was a would-be actor. So I answered the ad, and got a postcard back from the people inviting me to meet with them at their loft studio in Manhattan. So I went, and auditioned for them with my voice. They said they would teach me puppeteering, but they needed someone who could act the roles. It was a company called the Berkeley Marionettes. It was run by a man and his wife, Stepan and Flo, and their daughter. They had two puppet companies which toured the city school system in New York, and in outlying areas too – Connecticut, New Jersey. Stepan was the booker. He would got to the various schools and book the shows, and Flo would preside over the actual puppeteering and write the scripts. They were pretty much all shows based on classic children's books. The Mark Twain books, The Prince and the Pauper, Tom Sawyer, that kind of material.
There were two companies. I would be in the number two company, which consisted of two men and one woman. The woman in this case was the daughter of the owners, and the other man was the young fellow who had just married her. Now, what's interesting is that the young fellow who was my cohort was named Paul Bogart. Paul became one of my closest friends, and became a very successful director. He married the daughter of the marionettes, whose name was Alma Jane.
The war then came. I, at that time, stood five feet and ten and a half inches, and I weighed 119 pounds. Can you picture that? And they put me in 1A! 1A. I couldn't lift a barracks bag! However, I did my time in the army, in the war. I went down to Oklahoma, to Eastern Oklahoma A&M, and studied to be a clerk. Dirty job, but somebody had to do it. I ultimately wound up with a fighter squadron: the 81st Fighter Squadron, 50th Fighter Group, 9th Air Force. I was in a town called Leamington, right on the coast behind the Isle of Wight. The Isle of Wight is where all the boats lined up for the invasion [of France on D-Day]. You could just look out over the water and there they were, ready to go.
I kept records of the flights, and did other things. One of my jobs was to get up very early and go into the office and get the fire started, so when the pilots came in they'd be warm. When there was a flight planned, I would be the guy who would drive the pilots to the planes. Pilots did not drive themselves to their planes in the jeep. It had to be done by an enlisted man. I think the thinking was the pilot could drive himself to the plane, but if he doesn't come back, who's going to bring the jeep back? That was my theory. I didn't express it to anybody, but I think that's the reason.
What did you do after the war?
I was in Germany when the war ended. Came back on the Queen Mary with about 13,000 other soldiers, back to Howard Beach. I went to the New School on the G.I. Bill, and I studied playwriting with a man named John Glassner, who was a professor, a teacher, a critic. I still wanted to do some writing.
I went back with the puppet company. They had a home in Woodstock, New York, where during the summer off-season when there was no school, no work, they would go up there and prepare for the following season. Paul Bogart would write the scripts, and I would go on up there and stay with them and rehearse, and hang out with the Woodstock crowd.
There I met a few people who were interested in starting a theater group, and I attached myself to them. We became very, very close friends, and then we got together in the city, in New York, and I did as much as I could with them. Rented a loft and started working on a play, Alice in Wonderland. In the summer we were able to rent the Maverick Playhouse in Woodstock, which had been built in 1912. A wooden shack, practically, but a place that in the last row, you could hear somebody whispering on stage. The acoustics were so fantastic. It had been built by an actor named Dudley Digges, an old character actor, and Helen Hayes had played there once, way, way back when. We put on a summer of plays, a Saroyan and an O'Neill play, and several others that I don't recall. But Alice in Wonderland was our first big production, and I played the Duchess, with a great big head!
When the summer ended, we decided we were going to look for a place to continue our theater group in New York City. We found an abandoned nightclub, the Greenwich Village Inn, which had been closed by the police department for cabaret violations, and we rented it. There was a central group of, at that time, six of us. What I'm trying to get at is that I'm one of the founders of the Circle in the Square. I was a producer, and one of the leading actors in the productions. The others were Jose Quintero; Ted Mann; Eddie Mann, who was also a newspaper cartoonist; Aileen Cramer, who became our publicity lady and also did some acting; and a girl named Emilie Stevens, who was an actress and did costume designs, set designs. That was our nucleus. Eddie Mann and Aileen left after a year or two.
Ted Mann is still running the Circle in the Square, the one uptown, on 50th Street. He still has it, after all these years. He is the lone survivor of all that group. Ted and I never really hit it off, even all the years that I was there. I wasn't there for that many years, but I was there for, certainly, five of them. We saw a lot of things in different ways. And as a result, when Ted wrote a book on the history of the Circle in the Square, in some cases I was the invisible man. He did not give me credits that I should have had, and I called him on it when the book came out. He said, "Well, I didn't remember." I said, "You know, you have my phone number. You could have checked with me." The truth was that he didn't want to. He wanted to take all the credit for everything that transpired at the theater for himself.
What do you remember about Jose Quintero? What was he like?
Absolutely brilliant director. Funny kind of a guy. I can't really describe him too well, except that I admired him. We got along very, very well.
Did he direct you in any productions?
Yes, he directed Summer and Smoke, the big hit with Geraldine Page in 1952. In that production, I played old Doctor John, the father of the hero of the play. Tennessee Williams watched some of the rehearsal with Jose, and it was decided by both of them that it needed an extra scene. A scene between Miss Alma, played by Geraldine Page, and old Doctor John, played by me. So Tennessee wrote that scene, and we included it in the production. It's not in the printed version of the play. At any rate, it was a short scene, five to six minutes, just the two of us. I tell you, I could have played that scene with her for ten years, she was so fabulous.
Tennessee became very active in that production, because it had been done on Broadway and failed. What we did, particularly in the early years – this was my idea, and it seemed to work fairly well – we could take plays that we thought were good but didn't make it on Broadway, and we would do them. We turned failures into successes. It happened on two or three different occasions.
One of those was called Burning Bright, by John Steinbeck. On Broadway, it had Barbara Bel Geddes in it, and Kent Smith, Howard Da Silva, and Martin Brooks. It was a four part play. The lead, the man that Kent Smith and [later, at the Circle in the Square] I played, played three different characters in it: a circus clown, a ship captain, and a farmer. The play was divided into those three elements.
At that time, Life magazine was running a piece called "Life Goes to . . ." Well, we got a call saying Life wants to come down and do a piece called "Life Goes to an Off-Broadway Theater." So we said, fine, we'll have a special performance on Monday night, our dark night, with an invited audience. John Steinbeck came, himself, with his agent, and sat next to my mother. My mother said to me, after the play, "You know, I sat next to John Steinbeck. I said to him, 'You see that man? That's my son!'"
Steinbeck said to her, "Oh, really? He's very good."
We lived there, in the building, above the Circle in the Square. Totally and completely against the law. Like David Belasco had his own room above his theater, I had my room above my theater. We really did have a firetrap, and it was finally closed by the fire marshal, and that was the end of my association with the Circle in the Square, for a year and a half.
Were you also doing live television while you were with the Circle in the Square?
Yes, I was on some of David Susskind's shows. He had a few series on: Appointment With Adventure, and Justice. I did a Goodyear [Television Playhouse], either a Goodyear or a Kraft [Television Theatre], when I had the opening line of the show. I was in the first shot and had the first line, and the cameraman was mounted on something. The cameras were up a little higher than the ground, and as the scene started, the cameraman started waving bye-bye to me! They were pulling the camera back. Apparently something had fouled up, and they weren't getting the shot. But the show was going on anyway, so I went on with the lines and apparently the director in the control room picked it up with a different camera. So I wasn't necessarily seen, but my voice was heard delivering the opening lines of the show.
Oh, I got a job on a TV version of "Arsenic and Old Lace" [for The Best of Broadway, in 1955] with Boris Karloff. Helen Hayes and Billie Burke played the old ladies. Boris Karloff, of course, was the heavy character, and mine was a very, very small role. I played a medical attendant. I was a late hire, so I was only in for about two or three days, and they'd already worked on it for about two or three weeks. Years later, I'm on a Playhouse 90 with Boris Karloff. The first day of rehearsal, I went up to Mr. Karloff to say hello and tell him my name. And I say, "You won't remember me, but I worked with you in New York."
He said, "Did you really?" in that wonderful Karloff voice. And he said, "Ohhhh, yes. With that bitch Hayes."
I was a little shocked to hear that come out of Boris Karloff's mouth, so I said, "Oh, really?" He said, "Oh, yes. She did everything she could to get Billie Burke off the show." Billie Burke used to be married to Flo Ziegfeld, way, way back. She really was an elderly lady, and she had some trouble with lines and things like that. Hayes, according to Karloff, tried everything to get rid of her because she wanted to get one of her friends to play the role. But she didn't succeed.
What else can I say about live TV? I wasn't crazy about it. It's not like theater, where you have time to really rehearse. The rehearsals were very quick. I liked television very much when it was not live. If you flubbed something, you did take two, or take three if you had to. I was in a movie called A Guide For the Married Man. I played the husband of the lady that Walter Matthau was after, played by Sue Ane Langdon. We come in from the party we'd been at, we come back to our apartment, and I immediately go to the refrigerator and start building myself a Dagwood sandwich. Sue Ane goes behind me and puts her hand over my eyes and says, "Who was the prettiest lady at the party?" I'm fixing my sandwich and I say, "You were." And she says, "What was I wearing?" And I start describing the outfit of another one of the women of the party.
A wonderful scene, right? Anyway, Gene Kelly, had us do that scene, I think, eleven or twelve takes. Around the sixth or seventh, he came up to me and whispered in my ear, "It's not you. I'm trying to get her to do something, and she doesn't do it. Or doesn't want to do it." And I'm there grappling with all this building a sandwich [business], about eleven times. That's what I like about TV that's not live. You could have some fun with it. Live TV was too much pressure. For me, anyway.
Did you ever go back to the Circle in the Square?
After the fire marshals closed us down, we had a little office somewhere for a year and a half, with nothing doing, nothing happening. No place to take ourselves, nothing available for us to start another Circle in the Square. We couldn't live there any more, so I got an apartment on 28th Street with the lady who became my wife a couple of years later, and who had been an actress in the company. Her name was Gloria Scott Backe; she was called Scotty.
During the period of nothing happening, my wife and I went to a party uptown, where Jose and Ted Mann were also in evidence there. We drove back down to the village in a cab, at which time Ted Mann said to me, "We found out that if we do some structural changes, we can reopen the theater at the original place. You want to come back?" And to tell you the truth, I had had enough of Ted Mann, and I'd also tasted a bit of TV and Broadway, and I decided. Without even questioning my wife about it, I said, "No, I don't think so." And as a result of that decision, I would no longer become co-producer of Long Day's Journey Into Night, or The Iceman Cometh, all the big O'Neill successes that they had. But I don't care. Because I went to Hollywood, and I did okay here, too.
How did that come about?
I got a Broadway show, called Fragile Fox. It was a play about the war, written by Norman Brooks and directed by a man named Herbert Bayard Swope, Jr. The stars were Dane Clark and Don Taylor, and others in the cast were James Gregory and Andrew Duggan. We toured Cincinnati, Philadelphia, came into New York after six weeks, and it folded. But Herbert Bayard Swope, Jr., got a contract at Fox out here in Hollywood, to come out and produce movies. He sent for me. Literally said, "Come on out here. I can get a part for you on a couple of these movies."
That was the beginning of the big move for me. I was here for about five months, and it also led to Playhouse 90. I was in the very first Playhouse 90 when that series came on, because Ethel Winant, who was the casting director at CBS, [had been] an agent in New York, and I knew her from New York. So she cast me in a small role as a pilot in the first episode. It was a script written by Rod Serling.
What I did on Playhouse 90, which was awfully good at the time, was to assist with the blocking of the show. The casts were all high-octane stars, name actors. Well, we rehearsed for fourteen days for each episode, and you don't have these people available for fourteen days. You only bring them in after a show has been blocked for them, and then they take over. So I would assist the director in blocking. I'd have the scripts of the various characters. Whatever had to be done, I would run the lines and the movements while the camera crew is watching, making their notes, and while the director is watching and making corrections and so on. In each case, in addition to that, I would be given a small role to act in that show. So I got double salary. I got paid by the hour for the blocking work, and I got paid by the role in the acting part. It worked out wonderfully for me, because as I can recall, that I did about twelve of them during that period.
Wingreen, at right, in "Forbidden Area," the premiere episode of Playhouse 90.
Then I got homesick. I wanted to go back and see my wife again. She was doing a play, The Iceman Cometh, at the Circle. My wife was very unhappy that I did not go back as a producer at the theater. She never made a big deal out of it, but she was disappointed that I said no. We never made a big thing out of it, but that was the way she felt.
So I went back to New York, and then the next year, which was 1957, I got a call again from Hollywood. Ralph Nelson, who was one of the producers of Playhouse 90, wanted me back to play a small role in a production of "The Andersonville Trial" that he was doing, with Charlton Heston and Everett Sloane. I was to play Everett Sloane's associate prosecutor on "The Andersonville Trial." [This was actually "The Trial of Captain Wirtz," an episode of Climax, a dramatic anthology that was, like Playhouse 90, broadcast from CBS Television City. It was produced by Ralph Nelson and likely directed by Don Medford. – Ed.]
I did the show, and what did I have? One word! Six thousand miles back and forth just to say one word. Charlton Heston makes a great, long-winded speech in this trial, and Everett Sloane turns to me and says – I'm sitting next to him at the table – he says, "What do you think of that, fella?" And I reply with one word. I have to tell you, unfortunately, I don't remember what the word was. It was not a short word, it was a long word, but I don't remember what it was. And that is what I was summoned three thousand miles to do.
I guess Ralph Nelson valued your work!
My presence was very important to Ralph Nelson, I suppose. I don't know why. Maybe the part was longer, and when they finally got to shooting it, they cut a few speeches that I had originally made. I didn't see the original script. All I got was the one that they were shooting that day. Maybe for time purposes they cut it back, or maybe because Charlton Heston took too long making his speech.
The final move that I made was in 1958, when, again, Herb Swope, the man who got me out there the first time, said there was a part in a movie in Mexico with Gregory Peck, called The Bravados. He said, "Do you ride?"
I said, "You mean a horse?"
So I discussed this whole thing with my wife and she said, "Yes, of course you can ride. We'll go on up to one of the riding academies here in Manhattan, and you'll take a lesson or two."
We went up to an academy that was up on 62nd Street, and I checked in and there was a man that was sort of in charge. He said, "The first thing we have to do is go downstairs and get ready with a saddle to fit you," and all of that stuff. Anyway, down we go. He gets a bottle and two glasses, pours a big shot of scotch, and he says, "You start with this."
So without knowing anything more, I took a shot of scotch. Then I went up onto a horse. He's got a big whip in his hand. He gives the horse a whack, and off we go. I'm hanging on for dear life, going around and around and around. And I think I might have done some screaming, too, while I was at it. My wife is looking at all of this, absolutely appalled. We went around a few times and I got off. He says, "That's fine, that's fine. Tomorrow we're going to go out to Central Park."
We got home that night and my wife says, "You're not going back there tomorrow. He's going to kill you sooner or later!" I said, "No, I don't want to go back there. We'll get somebody else."
So she looked it up in the telephone book and we [found] a place down around 23rd Street, run by an English lady. She had a horse called Pinky. When I went there, she introduced me to the horse. She said, "Pinky, this is Mr. Wingreen. Mr. Wingreen, this is Pinky." Then she gave me a carrot to give to Pinky. Then I got on that horse and we went slowly, slowly around. We went around a few times and she says, "Mr. Wingreen, smile, you're on camera now!" And that's how I learned to ride. Then I could call Herb Swope and say, "Yeah, I'm ready to come. Tell me the date when you want me and I'm off."
And so I went out to Hollywood, and then off to Morelia, Mexico, for six weeks of this film. Henry King, the famous old director from the silent days, was directing, and we had a cast of Gregory Peck, Stephen Boyd, Albert Salmi, Henry Silva, Joe DeRita, George Voskovec, and Andy Duggan, an old friend of mine, playing the priest.
I was going to play the hotel clerk who got involved in the chase after the bad guys, and that's why I had to learn to ride, to be in the posse. There was quite a bit of riding, and a Mexican horse was not a Hollywood horse. Hollywood horses know "action" and "cut." They go and they stop. Mexican horses don't know those words. They have to be hit to go, and you have to stop 'em! You have to pull on the reigns to stop them, and I wasn't successful every time we tried it. Going up a cobblestone street, a sharp turn, holding on to a rifle. It's a wonder I'm still alive.
I had a very nice scene with Peck, though, when he rides into town [and learns that] his wife has been killed by some men while he was not home, and one with Joan Collins. That was a nice experience. So that sort of settled it for me as far as staying in Hollywood.
I called Scotty and I said, "Get somebody to replace you and come on out here. Take a look and see whether you think this might not be it. I have a feeling this is where we should finally settle in." So my career out here started. It was slow at the beginning, but I made some good contacts. I was helped by people I knew who had been here already, and they gave me tips on various things. A lot of individual shots, just one day or three days. Then the occasional series started.
Did your wife continue to act after you moved to Los Angeles?
She got one job, on a John Wayne movie directed by Henry Hathaway, who was very tough. There was a scene with a big fair where they had food, and he placed her at a spit where they were roasting a pig or something like that. They were shooting it up at Big Bear Lake, and it was the first scene of that day, the very first shot. They've got fifty people out in canoes on the lake, and fifty or seventy-five people at this great big fair, and lights are going to come on very quickly as soon as they start shooting. The first shot is right on my wife as she's turning the spit. And Hathaway, she said, had such a voice that he didn't even need anything to holler through. He was just using his own voice to yell "Action," and they could hear him out there on the lake.
So he screams, "Action," and the lights come on, and my wife, who was having trouble with her eyesight anyway, flinched and turned her head. So then Hathaway yells "Cut!" and he goes up to her, and he sticks his face right into hers and says, "What's the matter, honey? Lights get in your eye?"
She says yes, and he screams right at her, "Well, you ruined the fuckin' take!"
So she said to him, "I guess I'll never be a movie star." For the rest of the week he called her Miss Squinty. Then she said, "I'm through. No more movies for me. I want to be a housewife and a mother."
One of your first roles in Los Angeles was on The Twilight Zone. Do you remember your three Twilight Zone episodes?
Yes. I played a conductor on a train which had James Daly going home to his house in Connecticut and falling asleep and thinking that he's stopping at a town called Willoughby. I played the conductor on the real train. Jim Maloney played the short, round conductor on the dream train. I had a couple of nice scenes in that, and at the very end I had the scene where I tell the trainmen that Jim Daly had jumped out. He had hollered "Willoughby" and just jumped off the train and was killed. And then when the hearse arrives, I help the guys pick up the body and put it into the hearse of course, and the door closes and it's "Willoughby and Sons Funeral Home." I thought that was a terrific episode.
Serling wrote the script, and I had a feeling that he was getting something off his chest. He was being bedevilled by the CBS brass, the big shots. They wanted something from him that he wasn't able to or willing to do, so he was kind of getting at them. He made Howard Smith, who played the boss, a really miserable human being. He said, "Push, push, push, Mr. Williams. Push!" Rod Serling was getting even [by caricaturing network executives in this character], I think.
Of the other two, one was an hour show, "The Bard." I played the director of a TV show. An old Hollywood director, David Butler, directed it. When I went to meet him he said, "Now, when I direct, I sit down. So when you're directing here, I want you to sit down too." So I played the role sitting down. The wonderful English character actor John Williams played Shakespeare, and Jack Weston was in it, an old friend of mine. He played the writer who had writer's block, and he came upon a magic shop that was run by a great character actress named Doro Merande. Burt Reynolds did a Marlon Brando impression on that one, and Joseph Schildkraut's wife [Leonora Rogers] played the young woman on the show I was "directing."
The third one was "The Midnight Sun," with Lois Nettleton. This was the one where they're losing water on earth, and I played a neighbor and I came by to say goodbye to her because I was taking the family up to my brother in the mountains, where there was still some water. A nice little scene. I've only been to one convention, a Twilight Zone convention, and I met an awful lot of fans who told me that two of their favorites were "Willoughby" and "The Midnight Sun."
Another of your early television roles, in 1960, was in a Wanted Dead or Alive episode called "Journey for Josh."
Ah, that's my big story. I was saving that one for you. It goes back to 1952, to the production of Summer and Smoke at the Circle in the Square. The theater was an arena theater, like a horseshoe, and it led right out onto the sidewalk. It was hard to keep the sound of the street out. McQueen was a young, would-be actor at that time, and he had come for an audition to meet Jose Quintero for a part in one of the plays. He had been rejected. But he was a hanger-out in the Village, and he rode a motorcycle.
When Summer and Smoke became the tremendous hit that it was, every couple of nights Steve McQueen would park his motorcycle right outside the theater, at the curb, and wait for a quiet moment. Then he'd rev the motorcycle. He did that two or three times, with maybe a day in between. During the third time, I was not on stage at the time. I went out to the curb to him, and I said, "I know what you're doing and I know why you're doing it. If you don't cut this out, I'm going to get a cop to come over here and arrest you for disturbing the peace." So he gave me a last "Fuck you," revved it one more time, and took off. But never came back, for the rest of the run of the show. That was my first encounter with Steve McQueen.
Now, it's eight years later, 1960. I'm in Hollywood, and I get a job on Wanted: Dead or Alive. It's a nice little part. There are just three of us in this episode: McQueen, a young lady who's living alone somewhere out on the prairie, and me. My character is a kind of a drifter, who comes by and finds this young lady and tries to make a pass at her, and is interrupted by the arrival of Steve McQueen. We have a battle, and he gets me, and that's the end of my work on the show. A three-day job, directed by a director named Harry Harris.
They hired a stunt man to do the fight scene for me. Any time I had a job where I had to fight, I'd have a stunt guy. In fact, there was one guy that used to do all of my work that way. He didn't really look that much like me, but he did all the fighting for me. Harry Harris comes up to me and says, "Listen, I know we've got this guy to do the fight scene with you and Steve, but I want to use a hand-held camera on this one. That means I have to get up close for some of the fight stuff. We'll choreograph it. We've done that Steve before. We'll rehearse it a couple of times, and then when we do it it will work out fine."
So I said, "Okay, fine."
Now, meanwhile, before that, when I arrived for the first day of shooting, I'm introduced to everybody. You know, "This is Steve McQueen," and I shake hands with him. I certainly did not say, "I know you from the Village," and he didn't indicate to me that he remembered me in any way. He said hello, and a handshake, and then we go to work.
So now we're in the third day of the shoot, and we come to the fight scene, where we struggle for a gun. We're on the ground, and he straddles me and picks me up by the collar, pulls me forward and hauls off and whacks me. And of course I duck in the right place as we rehearse it, but I fall back. That's my last shot; I'm out of the picture.
Once we're on camera, we go through all the same motions. He pulls his hand back, I duck, and he whacks me right across the jaw. Tremendous smash against my jaw. I wasn't knocked out, but I was stunned. Of course, turmoil occurs on the set after this. They rush to see how I am. Before you know it, I'm in somebody's care, being taken to the first aid station. I'm sitting in the nurse's office. The nurse says, "Oh, that's Steve, he does that to everybody. There's a long line of them that come in here."
So anyway, I get my consciousness back, pretty much. The door opens, and Steve McQueen comes in. He comes towards me, and he says, "I'm sorry about that. But, you know, you didn't go back like we rehearsed it." Which was bullshit. It wasn't true at all.
I said, "Okay, Steve, forget it. Just forget it."
And he walked to the door, turned around to me, and said, "Say hello to Jose when you see him for me, will you, please?" And out he goes. He waited eight years for his revenge!
Click here for Part Two, in which Jason Wingreen talks about All in the Family, Steven Spielberg, Andy Griffith, Boba Fett and George Lucas, and more.


text:
When is Community-Based Monitoring Effective? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Primary Health in Uganda
By Martina Bjorkman and Jakob Svensson (2012)
Access to quality services has been recognized as fundamental for wellbeing and economic development. However, in Africa and other developing countries, service delivery is often poor or nonexistent. Many argue that government bureaucracies may be ill equipped and lack incentives to improve the quality of public services. In response, development practitioners have started to experiment with involving beneficiaries in monitoring public service delivery and making service providers accountable to users. How best to design such interventions, and the impact of them, have been addressed in a handful of recent randomized field experiments. The results, to date, are mixed. While Banerjee et al. (2008) and Olken (2007) report minor or no effects on learning outcomes (in a project in primary education in India) and on corruption (in a road construction project in Indonesia), Bjorkman and Svensson (2009) and Duflo et al. (2009) report large positive improvements on average in a primary health intervention in Uganda and a primary schooling intervention in Kenya, respectively. What can explain these diverging findings? And more specifically, to what extent does the local sociopolitical environment influence users ability and willingness to monitor public service providers?
Using data from Bjorkman and Svensson (2009), linked to recently assembled data on ethnic and linguistic composition at the sub-national level for Uganda (Alesina and Zhuravskaya, 2008), and income data from the Uganda National Household Survey 2005 (UNHS, 2005), we test whether social heterogeneity, in income and ethnicity, can explain why some communities managed to push for better health service delivery while others were less successful. The results suggest that income inequality and, particularly, ethnic fractionalization adversely impact collective action for improved service provision.
As policymakers in developing countries search for ways to improve health and education for the poor, it is becoming clear that more is required than just additional funds. A key obstacle to better public services looks to be the weak incentives that providers face. Schools and health clinics are not open when they should be. Teachers and health workers are frequently absent from schools and clinics, and even when there, they spend significant time not serving the intended beneficiaries. Equipment, even when working, is not used. Drugs are misused, and public funds are expropriated. In response, a growing number of experts argue that more emphasis must be placed on strengthening beneficiary control that is, strengthening providers' accountability to citizens/clients.
While there is evidence that such an approach can have large positive effects on service provision, there is also evidence of signiÖcant variation in outcomes. Using data from a randomized experiment in Uganda, we show that social heterogeneity, and specifically ethnic fractionalization, adversely impact collective action for improved service provision. As a result, the intervention resulted in a smaller increase in the quantity of primary health care provision in heterogeneous communities.
Our results have implications for both the design and evaluation of interventions aimed at strengthening beneficiary control in public service delivery programs. On program design, interventions should be adjusted to the local sociopolitical situation. As little is known about how this is to be done, our results open up an important agenda for research: How to enhance collective action in socially heterogeneous communities. On evaluation, ideally the researchers should design the evaluation protocol so as to be able to assess the impact conditional on the sociopolitical environments.
Read full study here [PDF].

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Video of the Day: Coming soon - service robots for home or work
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text:
Implicit Associations in the 2008 Presidential Election
Posted by The Situationist Staff on March 24, 2008
Gregory Scott Parks and Jeffrey J. Rachlinski have posted a new paper, "Unconscious Bias in the 2008 Presidential Election," on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The 2008 presidential campaign and election will be historic. It marks the first time a Black person (Barack Obama) and a woman (Hillary Clinton) have a real chance at winning the Presidency. Their viability as candidates symbolizes significant progress in overcoming racial and gender stereotypes in America. But closer analysis of the campaigns reveals that race and gender have placed enormous constraints on how these two Senators can run their candidacy. This is not surprising in light of the history of race and gender in voting and politics in America. But what is perhaps more surprising is how the campaigns have had to struggle not only with overt sexism and racism, but with unconscious, or implicit, biases in their campaigns. Recent research from social psychologists indicates that unconscious race and gender biases are widespread and influence judgment. Because existing anti-discrimination law is designed to combat overt, or explicit, biases, it does not address unconscious biases well. If even Senators Clinton and Obama, with an array of consultants and advisors behind them, find unconscious racism and sexism to be a stumbling block in what is nothing more than the most elaborate, grandest job interview of them all, then what must it be to the average Black person or woman seeking a job or promotion?
* * *
Gregory Parks published a two-part series on Huffington Post in February about this research (link to Part I or Part II). We have excerpted sections of those posts below.
* * *
* * *
In areas dominated by whites, black electoral success is rare. Not all researchers have found an interactive effect of voter and candidate race. Those who have not, however, have indicated one major methodological shortcoming of their, respective, studies — the possibility that study respondents were not honest about their opposition to black candidates. As such, a better predictor of the role that race plays in voter decision-making would be their implicit attitudes about race. With that in mind, let me make a few points:
An implicit construct is "the introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) trace of past experience that mediates [the category of responses that are assumed to be influenced by that construct]." Implicit cognition reveals mental associations that people do not want to or are unable to report. This is because such cognitions might conflict with expressly-held values or beliefs, or such cognitions may be politically incorrect. Moreover, implicit cognitions reveal information that is not readily available to introspection for people with a desire to retrieve and/or express such information. Therefore, the key feature of implicit measures of attitudes is that subjects are often unaware that their attitudes are being measured and are thus unable to exert conscious control over their responses. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a popular measure of the relative strength of associations between pairs of concepts, including positive/negative attributes and race.
A large percentage of whites harbor anti-black/pro-white biases — some 70-90%. That means that they demonstrate an implicit preference for white over black, manifest as faster responding for the white/pleasant combination than for the black/pleasant combination. These results are quite robust as seen in individual experiments with dozens of subjects as well as in web-based studies of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
Implicit racial bias is not a mere abstraction. It is linked to the deepest recesses of the mind — particularly the amygdala. The amygdala is a part of the brain that is involved in emotional learning, perceiving novel or threatening stimuli, and fear conditioning. Neuroscience research indicates that whites' amygdalas are activated far more when they are subliminally shown black faces as compared to white faces. Moreover, the degree of amygdala activation is significantly correlated with participants' IAT scores. Implicit racial bias is also implicated in numerous forms of seemingly benign as well as consequential behavior.
One important study that should be mentioned demonstrated how "racialized" names trigger racial schemas. Researchers responded to more than 1300 help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago with fictitious resumes. The resumes were crafted to be comparably qualified with the only difference being that half of the resumes were randomly assigned stereotypically black names (e.g., Lakisha Washington). The other half were assigned "white" names (e.g., Emily Walsh). The white resumes received 50% more callbacks. Jerry Kang (UCLA law professor [and Situationist contributor]) rearticulated these results in terms of racial schemas such that employers use the names of applicants to categorize applicants into racial categories. Once the names are racially mapped, some set of negative racial meanings are automatically activated. In turn, these stereotypes and prejudices result in fewer callbacks for blacks.
Implicit racial attitudes not only predict behavior, generally; they also predict voting behavior. I think most folks can understand that political conservativism is positively correlated with automatic associations between black/bad and white/good. However, among Democrats, those who hold the least favorable implicit attitudes towards racial minorities are nearly four times less likely to prefer a racial minority candidate over a perceived white candidate. This is compared to Democrats who hold the most positive implicit views towards a racial minority candidate.
A voter's implicit biases do not have to dictate how they will vote in the 2008 election or any other election. Individuals who harbor implicit biases, and who wish to be unfettered of those biases, may de-bias themselves and cast their vote based on where candidates stand on issues and not their race or gender. Current models of prejudice and stereotype reduction contend that the reduction of such attitudes require that individuals must: 1) be aware of their bias; 2) be motivated to change their responses because of personal values, feelings of guilt, compunction, or self-insight; and 3) possess cognitive resources needed to develop and practice correction. Of note, whites who are more internally motivated to reduce their levels of race bias show less implicit prejudice, whereas those who are more externally motivated display more implicit prejudice. Furthermore, repeated exposure to an admired black person (e.g., Denzel Washington) and a disliked white person (e.g., Jeffrey Dahmer) decreased the magnitude of automatic preference for whites over blacks. And this reduced race preference effect was not fleeting; it endured for at least 24 hours.
* * *
. . . . [I]n light of this research, generally, how do I make sense of the caucuses and primaries? Political science research and accounts of the Bradley, Dinkins, and Wilder elections give some hint as to what took place in Iowa in and New Hampshire. I sense that in Iowa, given that caucuses are conducted such that others are aware of your vote, Whites were less apt to be guided by implicit bias and vote for the White candidates, because they had to be publicly accountable for their votes. In the New Hampshire primary, no public accountability took place and thus no checking of implicit attitudes at the door. Additionally, part of what might explain New Hampshire is the noted study on exposure to liked (Black) and disliked (White) persons. Obama and Clinton were near polar opposites on the likeability spectrum, which may have abated some Whites implicit racial attitudes vis-à-vis he and Clinton. However, her noting during the New Hampshire debate that she was hurt by not being "liked" by voters and then tearing-up at the café, she served to humanize herself. In doing so, she may have unwittingly washed out the effect of this Black (liked)/White (disliked) contrast and its diminishing effect on Whites' implicit racial bias.
Lastly, what has likely gotten Obama this far among Whites is their efforts to check their implicit biases at the door when caucusing or voting during primaries. If South Carolina is any indication, however, he still has a long way to go. It seems that he may be able too broaden his appeal among White voters, but he is short on time. If Whites with egalitarian beliefs wanted to truly consider Obama's candidacy free of implicit racial bias, many could, but Obama's difficulty is that neither he nor his campaign can directly raise the issue of White "prejudice" dampening his votes among them. It would be nice if Whites knew their implicit racial biases (by taking the IAT) and then sought to square those biases with their professed, non-racist attitudes. In addition to various forms of external debiasing, I think this is the only way Obama truly has a shot at the presidency.
* * *
To visit the Project Implicit website and find out more about implicit associations, click here. Click here to take the "PRESIDENTIAL CANDITATES IAT." To review previous Situationist posts discussing implicit associations click on the "Implicit Associations" category in the right margin or, for a list of such posts, click here.
For a sample of previous posts examining situational elements of voting or, specifically, the 2008 presidential election, see "On Being a Mindful Voter," "Lopez-Torres, Justice Scalia, and the Situation of Elections," "Heart Brain or Wallet?" "Your Brain on Politics," "Al Gore – The Situationist" and "Irrelevant Third Options in Presidential Campaigns."


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Can Your Dog Fetch You a Tax Deduction?Published:
When it comes to deducting pets or pet expenses on taxes, like just about any question that begins 'Can I deduct,' the answer is 'It depends.'
NEW YORK (MainStreet) — Over the years many clients have asked me, most of them jokingly, if they can deduct the costs of keeping their dog or cat. One would think the obvious answer is no (and certainly not as a "dependent"). But when it comes to deducting pets or pet expenses — like just about any question that begins "Can I deduct" — the answer is "It depends."
What about the owners of the cat who plays Morris in the TV commercials, or Moose, the dog who played Eddie on Frasier? And pet breeders who sell the purebred offsprings of their pets, or, as with horses, charge a stud fee for mating with another purebred? The animals generate business income for their owners, so related ordinary and necessary expenses are deductible.
I've seen a business deduction allowed for cat food used by a scrapyard owner to attract wild cats who chased away mice and snakes from the yard, and for the costs of guard dogs.
And did you know you can deduct the cost of moving the family pet to a new home? It's true, if the move is job related and meets certain tests.
The IRS tells us:
"You can include in medical expenses the costs of buying, training and maintaining a guide dog or other service animal to assist a visually impaired or hearing-impaired person, or a person with other physical disabilities. In general, this includes any costs, such as food, grooming and veterinary care, incurred in maintaining the health and vitality of the service animal so that it may perform its duties."
Expenses incurred by a person who raises guide dogs for a charitable organization, such as Guide Dogs for the Blind, can claim an itemized deduction.
If you foster or rescue animals for an IRS-approved charity, your expenses for food, litter and veterinary bills may be deductible. In June 2011 the Tax Court upheld a charitable deduction for unreimbursed out-of-pocket expenses incurred by a woman while taking care of cats in her home for the organization Fix Our Ferals.
And if you elect to deduct state and local sales tax instead of state and local income tax on Schedule A, you may be able to deduct the sales tax paid on pet food.


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ARMR Raiden S950 Leather Gloves
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ARMR Raiden S950 Leather Gloves
ARMR Raiden S950 Leather Gloves
- Cowhide Outer Construction
- TPU Wrist Protector
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- Vented Finger Protectors
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- Anti Slip Palm Overlay
- Stretch Panel in Fingers and Thumb
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ARMR Moto Gloves Size Guide
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To find the delivery costs for an item simply place the item in your basket. Our delivery costs for most items are based on each item's size and weight. Delivery and handling estimates that appear in the basket are calculated with our lowest cost delivery method
Free delivery over £25. Next day delivery if ordered before 3pm.
Orders to UK Mainland addresses over £25 (i.e. excluding Highlands and Islands) will be sent with free carriage.
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- Orders will be shipped free of charge to areas other than the UK when the order total is over:
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- Items Shipped outwith the EU will include a form which can be used to claim back approx 10% V.A.T. Unfortunately this excludes BFPO addresses. Please note, V.A.T. is not applied to crash helmets.
Who's behind ARMR Moto?
ARMR Moto was created by Brand Distribution company, Tri-Motive, which is run with genuine motorcycling passion by vastly experienced industry professionals who are also keen motorcyclists themselves (road and off-road).
Having collectively worked with and for wide range of well known motorcycling apparel brands, the guys at Tri-Motive were frustrated that every brand seemed to compromise in one way or another, with either quality/style/choice suffering to sell low priced apparel or prices being forced unaffordably high to offer the necessary quality/style/choice.
Quality, it's said, has it's price. At ARMR Moto we agree, we just happen to believe that great quality can still be affordable, which is we created the range in the way we have.
Motivated by passionately shared belief's there was a better way based on industry knowledge, experience and insights, ARMR Moto was created. Quality, protection, comfort and style conscientiously brought together at the best possible price, rather than compromising any of what we see as essential components made to a targeted low price.
Why ARMR Moto?
ARMR Moto is designed for rider's sake and not just for design's sake around 4 guiding principles
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product performance also depends on ARMR Moto apparel being worn/used in exactly the right way whilst understanding attention to detail guarantees every garment is supremely comfortable to wear, time after time.
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each product specification is designed around high quality and technologically proven materials manufactured to stringently monitored standards, to create a consistently perfect finish that performs, is easy to take care of and lasts and lasts…
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we believe passionately that brilliant product performance and individuality of style shouldn't have to come at a premium, which is why you'll find quality and many features normally only found on much higher priced brands and all in a style that's uniquely ARMR Moto.


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Embed a map or directions
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- Open Google Maps.
- Make sure the map, Street View image, or directions you'd like to embed shows up on the map.
- In the top left corner, click the Menu .
- Click Share or Embed map.
- At the top of the box that appears, choose Embed map.
- Choose the size you want, then copy the HTML embed code and paste it into the source code of your website or blog.
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Short and sweets: Bostic key to stopping run game
Treat yourself to a collection of Sugar Bowl tidbits
Key matchup
Louisville running back Jeremy Wright vs. Florida linebacker Jon Bostic
The Cardinals lost top tailback Senorise Perry to an ACL injury late in the season and have turned to Wright, but Louisville has struggled to run the ball.
In his last three games, Wright has managed to gain only 89 yards on 48 carries and the Cardinals rank 100th in the nation in rushing offense.
Florida has one of the nation's best run defenses and one of the biggest reasons is Bostic, who has blossomed in his senior year.
"Jon's a very mature guy and has what we call in the coaching world very good football intelligence," said Florida defensive coordinator Dan Quinn. "He's a smart guy, but not all smart guys are able to carry it over onto the grass and do that."
While the focus for Florida's defense may be on Louisville quarterback Teddy Bridgewater, the Gators can't let the Cardinals establish any hint of a running game and Bostic is the key.
Bowl standouts
Florida's top five passing performances in bowl games:
1. 2010 Sugar Bowl — 482 yards by Tim Tebow. The Gators passed at will against Cincinnati as Tebow completed 31-of-35 passes in the easy win.
2. 1995 Sugar Bowl — 394 yards by Danny Wuerffel. Wuerffel had a big game, but it wasn't enough to overcome Florida State.
3. 1992 Sugar Bowl — 370 yards by Shane Matthews. Florida was able to move the ball on Notre Dame, but the Gators settled for too many field goals.
4. 1966 Sugar Bowl — 352 yards by Steve Spurrier. Spurrier led a furious fourth-quarter comeback, but it fell short against Missouri.
5. 2003 Outback Bowl — 323 yards by Rex Grossman. Grossman played well but Florida lost to Michigan when UF's final drive ended on a botched trick play.
UF in the Sugar Bowl
1992 -- Notre Dame 39, Florida 28.
The Gators were not only coming off their first official SEC title but a stirring win over FSU in the season finale. But the Gator defense was no match for Jerome Bettis in the second half.
The Gators led 16-7 at the half, but Notre Dame rallied in the third quarter to take a 17-16 lead. In the fourth quarter, the Irish scored 22 points and Florida had injury issues at linebacker.
Bettis scored all three touchdowns in the quarter, the last two on runs of 49 and 39 yards. "The Bus" finished the game with 150 rushing yards on only 16 carries.
Shane Matthews threw a pair of scoring passes and Arden Czyzewski kicked five field goals for UF in the game.
Key stat: Notre Dame won the game despite committing four turnovers, including three fumbles.
MVP: Bettis.
Quote, unquote
"We know it starts up front. I feel like with the O-line, we have the most strenuous practices, and it has to be that way. If we're driving the machine, then the machine doesn't go. And that's how it's been all season."
-- Florida offensive guard James Wilson
Senior salute
(This will be the last game of the college careers of Florida's seniors. Each day we'll take a look at the career of one of those players.)
Frankie Hammond Jr.
Hammond came to Florida as part of the 2008 recruiting class and redshirted his first year. In the next four years, he has 61 catches for 787 yards and six touchdowns.
He had only four catches as a redshirt freshman in 2009, but played on Florida's kickoff team all year. The following year he had his best season in terms of catches with 22 and yards with 276.
As a senior, Hammond has 20 catches for 273 yards. That's not a lot of catches, but he has caught at least one pass in all but one game this season.
Hammond has shown the ability to get open deep, but hasn't been one of those receivers who makes guys miss. Still, he has had a solid career in his five years as a Gator.


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Russians investigating adoptee's death in Texas
Russian authorities have blamed "inhuman treatment" for the death of a 3-year-old boy adopted by an American family, but Texas officials say they are still investigating claims that the child was abused before his death.
Russia's Investigative Committee said Monday that it had questions about the death of an adoptee authorities identified as Maxim Kuzmin. The committee is the country's top investigative agency.
Texas Child Protective Services spokesman Patrick Crimmins confirmed the agency had received a report on Jan. 21 of the death of a 3-year-old named Max Shatto, and that the Ector County Sheriff's Office in West Texas was investigating.
Crimmins said CPS had received allegations of physical abuse and neglect, but had not determined whether those allegations were true. Sgt. Gary Duesler, spokesman for the Ector County Sheriff's Office, said no arrests have been made and authorities are waiting for autopsy results.
An obituary for Max Shatto published Jan. 26 by the Midland Reporter-Telegram says he was born on Jan. 9, 2010, in the town of Pskov, near Russia's western border with Estonia. The boy lived with a family in Gardendale, about 350 miles west of Dallas, before his death on Jan. 21, according to the obituary.
The boy's listed adoptive parents, Alan and Laura Shatto, did not return phone messages Monday, though their voicemail message said they would have no comment for media outlets.
The death comes weeks after Russia announced it was banning all American adoptions in retaliation for a new U.S. law targeting alleged Russian human-rights violators. The ban also reflects lingering resentment over the 60,000 Russian children adopted by Americans in the past two decades, of which at least 19 have died.
Russian Foreign Ministry official Konstantin Dolgov said in a statement that the boy's death was "yet another case of inhuman treatment of a Russian child adopted by American parents."
Duesler said he could not immediately confirm or deny Russian allegations of abuse. Most U.S. government offices were closed Monday in observance of a federal holiday.
Dolgov also accused the U.S. Department of State of not helping Russian consular officials investigate the death. A State Department official said the government is aware of the case and "takes very seriously the welfare of children, particularly children who have been adopted from other countries."
"We will continue to assist the Russian Embassy and consulate officials in making contact with the appropriate authorities in Texas," said the State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak on the record about the matter.
Crimmins said the Russian consulate had contacted Child Protective Services.
Associated Press writers Merrill Hartson and Pete Yost in Washington and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.
Follow Nomaan Merchant on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/nomaanmerchant


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Tied in knots by radical Islam ;Nations must separate faith, destructive jihadism
In 2009, Ruslan Tsarni and his nephew, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had a bitter argument over the implications of their faith. Tsarnaev announced he had chosen "God's business" over work or school. "I was shocked when I heard his words, his phrases, when every other word he starts sticking in words of God," says Tsarni. "There is someone who brainwashed him, some new convert to Islam." The falling-out ended their relationship.
This was more than a family disagreement. It is a debate being conducted, in various forms, in Egypt, Nigeria, Indonesia, the Caucasus, the Palestinian territories and other places. Over the past several decades, traditional forms of Islam have been challenged by radical variants, which often latch onto ethnic and tribal resentments. Disaffected, angry young men can be particularly receptive, causing turmoil in families, mosques, regions and countries.
In our country, such radicalism is rare — a tribute to America's special superpower of assimilation — but not unknown. And it seems particularly difficult for us to account for. As the circumstances surrounding the Boston bombings have clarified, some of the reactions have been ideologically reflexive and counterproductive.
Portions of the left turned to any artifice, including an attack on "white privilege," to avoid a serious discussion of radicalism and terrorism. Even the use of the word terrorism is viewed as a threat to multiculturalism or the prelude to a new round of civil rights abuses in the war on terrorism.
But the threat of terrorism is real, regardless of whether a given ideology finds it convenient. Consistent pressure on terrorist networks, including drone strikes, has made spectacular, al-Qaida-like attacks less likely. Yet homegrown, jihadist-inspired violence is a continuing danger. A number of attacks — including in Times Square and on the New York subway — have been prevented. Until the one in Boston that wasn't. It was the arrival of a long-held fear: decentralized violence against "soft" targets, as soft as the spectators at a sporting event.
When suspected of radicalism, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was hardly subject to abusive or oppressive treatment. If anything, his case raises the question of what it would take — in addition to the warning of a foreign government, defiance during an FBI interview and international travel to a terrorism-prone region — to trigger heightened scrutiny.
Yes, the Boston bombing is an isolated case, but it is one that proves an isolated case can cause a million people to shelter in place. And one reason it doesn't happen more often is that an extensive apparatus of homeland security — designed, equipped and trained over the last decade — helps keep it from happening.
Elements of the right suffer their own form of ideological impairment. Their tendency is to regard terrorism and Islam as interchangeable. During the Boston manhunt, Rush Limbaugh predicted that the politically correct media would "circle the wagons" and say that "this is not because of Islam."
Yet some things, rather than being politically correct, are just correct. The Boston bombing was not because of Islam, as most Muslims understand it. Islam is a diverse religious tradition including more than 1 billion people and millions of our fellow citizens who overwhelmingly reject the murder of random strangers as an expression of their faith. Terrorism is the expression of a violent ideology that has, disturbingly, taken root among some Muslims.
Debates over the meaning of terms such as "jihad" and "sharia" are at least as complex as Christian debates over "just war" and "social justice." For an outsider to assert that Islam should be generally identified with its most radical theological and political interpretation is both presumptuous and uninformed. When considering the religious argument between Ruslan and Tamerlan, why should conservatives assume that Tamerlan's interpretation of Islam was the more authentic?
This working assumption is entirely unworkable for anyone charged with leadership. While it is hard to even imagine such reckless folly, consider an American president who, following a terrorist attack, would say, "This is because of Islam." He would alienate an entire faith tradition from the American experiment. He would insult every Muslim ally and Muslim soldier who fights at our side against terrorism. He would fulfill the fondest hope of Islamist radicals: to turn the war against terrorism into a civilizational conflict between the West and Islam.
Somehow Americans of every ideological background need to be able to hold two ideas in their heads at once. The threat of terrorism is lethal and ongoing. But a war on Islam would make a war on terrorism impossible.
Gerson is a Washington Post columnist. His email is


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Will a New York couple's marriage suffer when the husband veers into insider trading?
The Privileges: A Novel. By Jonathan Dee. Random House, 258 pp., $25.
By Janice Harayda
Adam and Cynthia Morey – young, rich New Yorkers with two beautiful children – are the marital equivalent of a highly profitable but closely held company: two chillingly self-sufficient people who show little need for the family, friends, and faith of their youth. They are also, in the fine phrase of James Wood of The New Yorker, "moral invertebrates." You can read their marriage as a metaphor for Wall Street in the age of deregulation – it makes its own rules. So you can't assume that the Moreys or their children will suffer after Adam becomes the prime mover of an insider-trading scheme that exploits information picked up at his private-equity firm.
This uncertainly lends a modicum of suspense to this tale of the first 23 years of the couple's marriage. But The Privileges is a low-energy and somewhat exposition-heavy novel that has an appeal more intellectual than emotional. The Moreys resemble figures in the carpet of a certain New York social world instead of fully realized characters. And many of their actions are unearned, including some of Cynthia's cruelties to others and Adam's abrupt tossing of a Patek Philippe watch into the Hudson River during a charity benefit on a ship.
Jonathan Dee is an intelligent and graceful writer who never trivializes his subjects. And he shows you what this novel might have been in a climatic scene in a hospice that brings in two characters from the sidelines who finally make you feel all you ought to feel for the Moreys' victims. Elsewhere, if Adam and Cynthia are moral invertebrates, Dee leaves you looking at them through the glass walls of a diorama and not, as you would like to be, standing inside it with them.
Best line: No. 1: "After four years at Morgan Stanley, an operation so vast that Adam's true bosses existed mostly on the level of gossip and rumor, a feeling of toxic stasis had begun to provoke him in the mornings when he arrived at work." No. 2: "'If you're ever hard up for money, just fly the family to LA, and both kids will have agents before they're out of baggage claim,' Conrad said."
Worst line: "Unconsciously she pulls at the neckline of her bridesmaid's dress to try to keep her tattoo covered."If she's trying to keep her tattoo covered, is the movement really "unconscious"?
Published: January 2010. The paperback edition of The Privileges is due out in October.
Consider reading instead of or in addition to this book: Michael Dahlie's award-winning novel, A Gentleman's Guide to Graceful Living,which deals more effectively with monied New Yorkers.
About the author: Dee is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.
You can also follow Jan Harayda (@janiceharayda) on Twitter.
© 2010 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.