In 1952, Harry Truman was stumping for Adlai Stevenson in Batavia, New York. At his stop there, he delivered a speech that took direct aim at the conservatives that were attacking the social policies that FDR had implemented.

These were policies that not only helped pull American out of the Great Depression, but the economic and societal infrastructure they created helped kickstart the post-war boom that so many people think of as a Golden Era for this country.

At the end of his speech, he summed up his argument with a very simple phrase: “Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.”

That’s why I’m embarrassed and appalled that my representative in congress signed a resolution “decrying the horrors of Socialism.”

Socialism and socialist policies brought us such horrors as:

• The US Postal Service
• The National Weather Service
• Fire Departments
• Public Libraries
• Public education
• Social security
• Medicare and Medicaid
• SNAP and WIC
• Regulatory protections on food, drugs, workplaces, and much more.

Many of these are things that Representative Vasquez has recently gone to the mat for. I get his weekly newsletter. I’ve read his rhetoric.

This resolution denouncing the horrors of Socialism is nothing more than an attempt to reach a mushy middle that doesn’t exist. Instead of decrying the political philosophy that brought about many of America’s greatest improvements to our way of life, he should embrace it, educate the people who have benefited from it on both sides of the aisle, and serve in the interest of the people, not the ballot box.

The post An Open Letter to Representative Gabriel Vazquez (D-NM) appeared first on BeacoupKevin.com/blog.

Born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, Lynch grew up in a Norman Rockwell-esque series of small towns, living the idyllic Boomer life that saturated TV in the 50s and 60s. However, he also saw the gloom and secrets that lurked behind closed doors and in dark alleys.¹ He took that suburban darkness with him to Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia, which he attended from 1966 to 1967.

His time at PAFA was brief but transformative. A watershed moment occured one night when he was staring at his latest piece, a pure black painting, when he saw it move despite the fact that it was literally just a canvas completely covered in paint. Outside, the wind was blowing, and it gave him the idea of combining movement with his art work. Soon after, he debuted his first animation project, “Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times),” which was basically a sculptural film installation with looped animation projected onto a specially prepared screen with built-in sound.²

After leaving PAFA, he bounced between Philadelphia and Boston, picking up work to support his art, including a short gig at a frame manufacturing company. In 1970, he got accepted into the American Film Institute Conservatory in Los Angeles and with him he brought a 45-page script that would become his first film, Eraserhead.

It would take him five years to finish the movie. He’d get started, funding would dry up, and he’d have to take side gigs (including a paper route) to get things moving again. This took a heavy toll on his personal life; he basically lived in the stables-turned-film-sets where they were shooting the movie while his first marriage was falling apart.

The sounds of the industrial wasteland around the studios, combined with the urban decay fueled the final film, a black and white masterpiece about parenthood and industrial anxiety established Lynch’s signature style: dream logic, oppressive soundscapes, and that uniquely Lynchian ability to make the mundane terrifying.

Eraserhead hit the midnight movie circuit in 1977. It initially baffled critics (early reviews read like people trying to describe a Nyquil dream), but it gradually emerged as a crucial puzzle piece in American avant-garde cinema. The film didn’t just launch Lynch’s career – it basically created its own aesthetic category. That densely layered sound design, those impossibly dark corridors, the way mundane objects become menacing? That DNA exists in the works of David Cronenberg and Darren Aronofsky, to name just two of the creators who were informed by his work.

Producer Mel Brooks (who deliberately kept his name off the credits to avoid people thinking it was a comedy) saw Eraserhead and hired Lynch to direct The Elephant Man (1980), a Victorian-era drama based on the life of Joseph Merrick, often called John Merrick in historical accounts and in the film. The Elephant Man marked Lynch’s transition from experimental filmmaker to someone who could work within the Hollywood system while maintaining his artistic vision.

With (again, stunning) black and white cinematography and an extraordinary performance by John Hurt under complex prosthetic makeup, the film tells Merrick’s story through his relationship with Dr. Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins). Lynch brought a deep humanity to the material, finding a perfect balance between his surrealist instincts and historical drama.

The film was a critical and commercial success, earning eight Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Director. Its exclusion from the Best Makeup category actually led to the creation of that Oscar category the following year. The movie helped establish Lynch as a serious filmmaker who could work with major stars and studios while preserving his unique sensibilities.

Perhaps most importantly, Lynch brought dignity to Merrick’s story, avoiding exploitation while exploring themes of humanity, cruelty, and compassion that would recur throughout his later work.

After The Elephant Man’s success, Lynch took on an ambitious adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune (1984), a project that would become one of his most challenging experiences. Infamous producer Dino De Laurentiis gave Lynch a $40 million budget and remarkable creative freedom, but the filmmaker soon found himself trapped in a complex production that strayed far from his comfort zone.

Lynch created some truly memorable visuals for Dune: the massive sandworms, the truly alien Guild Navigators, the grotesque Baron Harkonnen, and the industrial-gothic architecture of the Harkonnens’ home world Giedi Primem to name a few, all backed by a fascinating electronic score by yacht rock icons Toto and Brian Eno. That wasn’t enough, though.

The need to compress Herbert’s dense novel into a theatrical runtime³ resulted in a confusing narrative filled with clunky exposition (including the infamous internal monologues). The studio’s interference and final cut left Lynch so disappointed that he has largely disowned the film. Despite its commercial and critical failure, Dune remains a fascinating entry in Lynch’s filmography, showing what happens when his surrealist sensibilities collide with big-budget science fiction.⁴

Blue Velvet (1986) marked Lynch’s return to personal filmmaking, establishing many of the themes and aesthetic touches that would define his later work. The film begins when Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) discovers a severed human ear in a field, leading him into the dark underbelly of his seemingly idyllic hometown of Lumberton.

The film masterfully weaves between the bright, artificial wholesomeness of small-town, White America (complete with white picket fences and bobby sox) and its shadow world, embodied by Dennis Hopper’s nitrous-huffing gangster Frank Booth and Isabella Rossellini’s troubled lounge singer Dorothy Vallens. Lynch creates an atmosphere where these two worlds exist simultaneously, recreating the imagery he’d had in his head from a young age.

What makes Blue Velvet particularly striking is how it combines Lynch’s experimental sensibilities with noir storytelling conventions. The opening sequence – moving from bright suburban imagery to a closeup of insects writhing beneath a lawn – perfectly encapsulates the film’s exploration of surface and depth. The film’s sound design, mixing Bobby Vinton’s titular song with industrial noise and Angelo Badalamenti’s haunting score, would become a Lynch trademark. Controversial upon release, Blue Velvet is now considered one of the defining films of the 1980s.

After shooting a pilot for TV⁵, Lynch would adapt Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart (1990). A hyperkinetic love story about Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern), two young lovers fleeing Lula’s maniacal mother (a like-you-never-saw-her-before-or-since Diane Ladd). Lynch infuses the film with references to The Wizard of Oz while amplifying the novel’s more lurid threads to a violent, sexually charged road movie through the American South.

The film pulses with raw energy, fueled by uninhibited performances by Cage and Dern. Sailor’s snakeskin jacket and Elvis fixation, Willem Dafoe’s appearance as the grotesque Bobby Peru, and surreal touches like a burning match filling the screen create an atmosphere where love story meets fever dream. While some critics (wrongly) found it excessive, the film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

It’s overlooked by many, but Wild at Heart stands as Lynch’s most direct exploration of romantic love, albeit filtered through his unique sensibility. The film’s heady blend of extreme violence, dark humor, and genuine tenderness makes it one of his most emotionally accessible works.

Oh, and that TV pilot he shot? You may have heard of it.

Twin Peaks (1990-1991) revolutionized television by bringing avant-garde filmmaking and surrealist storytelling to prime time. Created by Lynch and journeyman screenwriter Mark Frost, the series kicks off with one of medium’s greatest pilots, in which the discovery of homecoming queen Laura Palmer’s body wrapped in plastic, leads the avuncular FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) to the titular Washington town where nothing is quite what it seems.⁶

The show expertly blends genres – soap opera, supernatural horror, police procedural, and comedy – while exploring themes of hidden evil in small-town America. Lynch directed several key episodes, including the pilot and the devastating revelation of Laura’s killer, bringing his distinctive visual style and sound design to television. The show’s dream sequences and Black Lodge scenes, with their red curtains, zigzag floors, and backwards-talking characters, remain some of the most striking images ever broadcast on network television.

While the series famously lost its way for many people in the second season⁷ due to Lynch’s absence, its influence can’t be overstated. Twin Peaks created a template for serialized mystery shows with supernatural elements, creating a tone that echoes through everything from The X-Files to True Detective. More importantly, it demonstrated that television could be a medium for genuine artistic experimentation, helping usher in our current era of prestige TV.

He’d continue the story (in his own way) with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), a movie that serves as both prequel and dark mirror to the TV series, focusing on Laura Palmer’s final days before her murder. In a move that confounded many fans of the TV show, Lynch strips away the show’s quirky humor to create a devastating portrait of trauma and abuse. Sheryl Lee gives a haunting performance as Laura, transforming the series’ dead homecoming queen into a complex character struggling with generational evil and her own fractured identity.

The film delves deeper into the series’ supernatural elements, particularly the bizarre realm of the Black Lodge and its inhabitants. Lynch’s sound design reaches new heights of discomfort, while his imagery becomes more explicitly nightmarish. Despite the initial reaction being less than favorable, Fire Walk with Me has been reappraised as one of Lynch’s most powerful works, especially in how it gives voice to Laura’s story rather than treating her death merely as a mystery to be solved.

After Twin Peaks, Lynch briefly experimented with two other television series. On the Air, co-created with Frost, was a beautifully crafted and period-accurate slapstick comedy about a live 1950s TV show called The Lester Guy Show. Of course, ABC canceled it after just three episodes.

There was also Hotel Room, an HBO anthology, that presented three stories set in the same New York City hotel room in different decades. Lynch directed two episodes, laden with his recurring themes of identity and violence. It goes without saying that it only ran for three episodes as well. Both programs demonstrate Lynch’s interest in television’s potential for experimentation, even if neither found an audience.

Lost Highway (1997) marked Lynch’s return to feature films, delivering a noir-tinged⁸ psychological thriller that splits into parallel narratives. The film follows Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), a jazz saxophonist who mysteriously transforms into young mechanic Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) while on death row. Both men become entangled with women who may be the same person (Patricia Arquette), creating a Möbius strip of identity, jealousy, and murder. The film’s use of The Mystery Man (Robert Blake) and its industrial soundscape created some of Lynch’s most unsettling sequences.

Typical for Lynch’s work, Lost Highway initially divided critics and audiences, with many finding its narrative fractures and dream logic impenetrable. But like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the film has gained significant appreciation over time, particularly for its exploration of identity and jealousy through a noir⁹ lens.

The soundtrack became iconic, mixing Angelo Badalamenti’s brooding score with carefully chosen songs from Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie, Marilyn Manson,¹⁰ Rammstein, and The Smashing Pumpkins. Trent Reznor served as music supervisor, creating a dark industrial-rock soundscape that perfectly matched the director’s nightmarish vision. The soundtrack album was a commercial success and helped introduce Lynch’s work to a younger alternative music audience.

Then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, was The Straight Story (1999), a G-rated Disney film based on the true story of Alvin Straight, who drove 240 miles across Iowa on a lawn mower to visit his ailing brother. Richard Farnsworth, in his final role while battling terminal cancer, brings remarkable dignity to Alvin, a stubborn old man making one last journey to reconcile with family.

It’s very straightforward and lacks a lot of Lynch’s stylistic touches, but The Straight Story maintains his fascination with American landscapes and the peculiar characters one meets on the road. Shot in sequence along Straight’s actual route, the film unfolds with patient beauty, finding profound meaning in simple encounters and conversations. Freddie Francis’s cinematography captures the heartland’s golden light and rolling fields, while Badalamenti’s score emphasizes the story’s gentle emotional core.

Mulholland Dr. (2001), originally conceived as a TV pilot, emerged as Lynch’s definitive statement on Hollywood dreams and nightmares. The film centers on Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), an aspiring actress who helps an amnesiac woman (Laura Harring) investigate her identity. Then, like Lost Highway, it fractures – revealing a darker reality where Betty is actually Diane, a failed actress consumed by jealousy and despair.

The film’s exploration of Hollywood’s dark side, identity, and desire earned Lynch an Oscar nomination for Best Director. It’s also a movie that rewards multiple viewings, with seemingly random elements (like the mysterious blue key and the terrifying figure behind Winkie’s diner) taking on deeper meaning within the film’s emotional architecture.

Shot over several years on consumer-grade digital video,¹¹ Inland Empire (2006) represents Lynch’s most experimental feature film. The film follows actress Nikki Grace (Laura Dern)¹² as she takes a role in a cursed film production. From there, the narrative splinters into a kaleidoscope of parallel stories, involving Polish sex workers, sitcom rabbits, and multiple versions of Dern’s character moving through increasingly nightmarish scenarios.

The film’s low-fi digital imagery creates a uniquely unsettling atmosphere, with Lynch using the medium’s limitations to generate new forms of visual anxiety. Close-ups of Dern’s face become distorted landscapes of emotion and identity. The three-hour runtime allows Lynch to fully embrace dream logic, with scenes flowing into each other without conventional narrative connections.

It’s polarizing even by Lynch’s standards, but Inland Empire represents his purest exploration of identity dissolution, the dark side of Hollywood, and the way trauma fractures both memory and reality. It would be his last feature film until Twin Peaks: The Return.¹³

Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) emerged as one of the most ambitious and radical works of television ever created. Lynch, directing all 18 parts and co-writing with Mark Frost, used the shift to pay cable¹⁴ to transform the original series’ format into something far more experimental and challenging. The show follows multiple threads, including FBI Agent Dale Cooper’s 25-year imprisonment in the Black Lodge and his doppelganger’s crimes in the real world, but conventional storytelling takes a back seat to pure cinematic experience.¹⁵

The series reaches its apex in Part 8, a mind-bending hour that travels from a nuclear test in 1945 to the birth of evil itself, rendered in some of the most striking monochrome imagery ever broadcast. Lynch embraced digital technology to create new forms of uncanny imagery while still maintaining his handcrafted approach to sound design and atmosphere.

The show expands far beyond the town of Twin Peaks, creating a cosmic mythology that encompasses multiple dimensions and timelines. Kyle MacLachlan delivers a tour-de-force performance in three distinct roles, while Lynch himself brings unexpected depth to his returning character, FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole. The series also serves as a meditation on time and aging, with the original cast 25 years older and some, like the late Catherine Coulson (The Log Lady), filming their scenes while seriously ill.

The finale, rather than offering resolution, opens up new questions about the nature of reality and identity, ending with Laura Palmer’s primal scream echoing through multiple universes. It’s a fitting culmination of Lynch’s career-long exploration of dreams, trauma, and the mysteries that lie just beyond our understanding.

As we moved into the social media era, Lynch became a personality that was bigger than his work for many. The painter, musician, YouTube weather guy, transcendental meditation advocate, and even coffee brand owner¹⁶ was a touchpoint, a common thread that brought together Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z through an uncommon kind of art.

To parallel with his online popularity, Lynch’s late-career acting appearances revealed him as a surprisingly nuanced character actor. In Lucky (2017), he delivers a touching performance as Howard, a man distraught over his missing tortoise – bringing both humor and genuine pathos to what could have been a purely eccentric role. The fact that he was working with his friend Harry Dean Stanton in one of Stanton’s final films makes his performance especially poignant.

Most popular, though, was his appearance in Steven Spielberg’s quasi-autobiopic The Fabelmans (2022). Spielberg cast Lynch in a memorable cameo as pioneering director John Ford. Lynch captures Ford’s gruff demeanor and no-nonsense approach to filmmaking, delivering the famous horizon composition lesson to young Sammy with perfect crusty authority.

As a creator in multiple mediums, Lynch’s work consistently explored the darkness lurking beneath seemingly perfect surfaces, the enigmatic nature of identity, and the power of dreams. His influence extends far beyond cinema – you can see traces of his aesthetic in everything from modern television to video games to music videos. While it’s frequently misused, the appellation “Lynchian” came to mean a creation’s unique ability to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar.

Throughout his career, Lynch remained steadfastly true to his artistic vision, refusing to explain his work’s meaning and encouraging viewers to find their own interpretations. As he famously said, “The thing about ideas is that they come to you, and you fall in love with them and… you’ve got to stay true to those ideas.”

In an era of increasingly formulaic entertainment, Lynch reminded us that cinema and TV both could (and perhaps should) be dangerous, mysterious, and genuinely surprising. His legacy isn’t just in the films he made, but in the doors he opened for other artists to explore the dark, strange and surreal in their own work.¹⁷

The world is a little less weird today, and that’s not a good thing.

The post David Lynch (1946-2025) appeared first on BeacoupKevin.com/blog.

Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street stands as one of the most visceral and authentic crime films of the 1950s, its gritty realism stemming directly from Fuller’s own experiences as a teenage crime reporter. At just 17, Fuller worked the streets of New York for the Evening Graphic, soaking up the raw material that would later inform his filmmaking. This firsthand knowledge of the criminal underworld permeates every frame of the film, from the accurate portrayal of pickpocket techniques to the street-level authenticity of its dialogue, where terms like “cannon” (the real insider slang for pickpockets) pepper the characters’ exchanges.

Fuller’s path to 20th Century Fox was as unconventional as his filmmaking style. His early independent productions, particularly The Steel Helmet (1951) and Park Row (1952), caught the attention of studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, who recognized in Fuller a unique and uncompromising voice. Their resulting arrangement was remarkably unusual for the studio system: Fuller would be contracted to Fox for only six months of each year, leaving him free to pursue independent productions during the remaining months.

This hybrid approach allowed Fuller to maintain his creative independence while accessing studio resources, a balance that would prove crucial for films like Pickup on South Street. It also allowed him to keep his budget-friendly filmmaking ethos, even when on the Fox lot.

“Sometimes you look for oil, you hit a gusher.”

This is a movie that really does showcase Fuller’s sharp instincts as a storyteller. When Zanuck presented him with Dwight Taylor’s script Blaze of Glory—a courtroom drama about a female lawyer falling for her criminal client — Fuller saw the potential for something more immediate and kinetic. After all, he knew how long court cases could take and how difficult it was to make one genuinely exciting without resulting to the kind of narrative tricks he disdained.

In Fuller’s story, Skip McCoy, a skilled pickpocket fresh off his third conviction, unknowingly lifts a piece of microfilm bound for communist agents from the purse of Candy. She’s a tough-talking woman who believes she’s merely carrying “business papers” for her ex-boyfriend Joey.

When both the FBI and Joey’s communist handlers begin pursuing Skip for the film, Candy finds herself caught between her growing attraction to Skip and pressure to retrieve the microfilm. Meanwhile, Moe, an aging street peddler who sells ties and information with equal shrewdness, becomes entangled in the increasingly dangerous situation.

As the stakes escalate, what begins as a simple pickpocketing evolves into a complex web of loyalty, patriotism, and unexpected romance, culminating in one of the best examples of the genre.

The film’s casting is as masterful as its plot. Richard Widmark, already established as a noir powerhouse through his unforgettable performances as the maniacal Udo in Kiss of Death (1947) and the desperate conman Harry Fabian Night and the City (1950), took on the role of Skip McCoy. Widmark’s portrayal of the three-time convicted pickpocket manages to be inexplicably charismatic despite the character’s unrepentant nature. His natural ability to imbue morally compromised characters with magnetic charm made Skip McCoy one of noir’s most compelling antiheroes. (Unfortunately, Widmark’s next collaboration with Fuller in 1954’s submarine thriller Hell and High Water, would prove far less successful, lacking the electric energy of their first pairing.)

The role of Candy produced its own behind-the-scenes drama. Marilyn Monroe, then rising rapidly through Hollywood’s ranks, actually sat in on rehearsals and read for the part. Fuller, while impressed with Monroe, made the bold decision to reject her, diplomatically citing her “overwhelming sensuality” as wrong for the character. Even more surprisingly, Betty Grable, one of 20th Century Fox’s biggest stars, lobbied for the role, initially demanding the inclusion of a dance number. When Fuller refused, Grable offered to do the film without the dance, but by then, the director had found his Candy in Jean Peters. Fuller’s instincts, proved correct, just as they usually did; Peters brought exactly the right mix of toughness and vulnerability to the role.

Perhaps the film’s most memorable performance comes from Thelma Ritter as the street-wise informant Moe Williams. Her portrayal earned her a fourth consecutive Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, following nods for All About Eve (1950), The Mating Season (1951), and With a Song in My Heart (1952). Despite the strength of her performance, she would lose to Donna Reed for From Here to Eternity. Ritter would earn two more nominations in her career but, remarkably, never won the award.

Technically, the film showcases Fuller’s sophisticated yet understated approach to direction. A standout example is the luxuriously long take that introduces Moe in the police office. The scene feels remarkably modern, even Spielberg-esque, in its invisible technique that prioritizes character development over technical showmanship.

For a man who reported hated violence, Fuller was a master at using it on-screen, much like Sam Peckinpah. His unflinching approach is particularly evident in the still-shocking confrontation between Joey and Candy, a scene that maintains its power to disturb today’s audiences.

The current restoration of the film (available through Criterion on a well-appointed disc) highlights these artistic choices, with pristine black levels and shadow detail that enhance the noir in film noir.

“Even in our crummy line of business you gotta draw the line somewhere.”

The film’s political context proved as explosive as its on-screen action. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was so disturbed by the film’s portrayal of an unpatriotic protagonist—particularly Skip’s initial indifference to the communist threat—that he demanded a meeting with both Zanuck and Fuller. When Hoover pushed for changes to the film, Zanuck stood firmly behind Fuller’s vision, though this principled stance came at a cost. The studio’s previously close relationship with the FBI was severed, and all references to the agency were stripped from the film’s marketing materials.

Despite mixed critical responses — both Variety and my most the Times’ Bosley Crowther ended up kind of shrugging at the whole picture — Pickup on South Street proved a commercial success and helped secure Fuller as an asset at Fox.

Oddly enough, the movie’s apolitical plot (everyone’s in it for the money) proved controversial overseas. After it was deemed to be anti-communist propaganda, it was was released as Le Port de la Drogue (The Drug Port), with the Cold War espionage elements completely rewritten to focus on drug trafficking instead. This curious transformation speaks to the film’s malleable themes of loyalty, survival, and moral ambiguity that transcend specific political contexts.

Fuller’s fusion of hard-boiled crime drama with Cold War paranoia created something unique in American cinema—a film that works both as pure genre entertainment and as a complex exploration of loyalty and patriotism in morally ambiguous times. Pickup on South Street remains a testament to Fuller’s journalistic eye for detail, his unflinching approach to violence, and his ability to find humanity in the most hardened characters. The film stands as one of the most distinctive entries in the noir canon, its influence visible in countless crime films that followed.

The post Pickup on South Street (1953) – Sam Fuller’s Apolitical Cold War Noir appeared first on BeacoupKevin.com/blog.

You might be wondering why we’re showing a film bathed in blinding sunlight and vivid Eastman color on our usual noir night. Well, first of all, it’s because I pick the movies. Secondly, because this movie’s got something to say, something distinctly dark about not just the people you’ll see on screen, but about this country and its legacy.

Released in 1955 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and filmed in glorious CinemaScope, this isn’t your typical shadowy thriller. But don’t let the panoramic vistas fool you – this flick packs a noir-tinged punch that’ll leave you breathless.

Picture this: a tiny ramshackle town baking under a merciless southwestern sun, somewhere between Phoenix and Los Angeles. It’s one of those places that’s barely on the map, a blip where the train never stops – until today.  When a black-suited stranger with one arm steps off onto that dusty platform, things are never going to be the same in Black Rock.

That probably sounds a lot like a Western, but Bad Day at Black Rock is a one of a kind, multi-genre masterpiece that’s part Western, part war movie, and yes, part film noir. Set in 1945, it uses the weight of the recently concluded war and America’s actions against some of its own citizens to great effect.

This film boasts some serious pedigree. It snagged three Oscar nominations – Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Actor. And speaking of actors, we’ve got a powerhouse cast led by the incomparable Spencer Tracy, with Robert Ryan, Walter Brennan, Lee Marvin, and Ernest Borgnine rounding out an ensemble that’s nothing short of spectacular.

The story behind the making of this film is almost as fascinating as the movie itself. It started life as a short story by Howard Breslin, caught the eye of actor-turned-writer Don McGuire, and eventually landed on the desk of MGM’s production chief Dore Schary. Schary saw echoes of his earlier hit “Crossfire” – both films unfolding over 24 tense hours, both revolving around men protecting an ugly secret.

You might think an actor of Spencer Tracey’s caliber would jump at the chance to star in a movie like this, but that wasn’t the case at all. In fact, Tracy initially hated the script. He felt the role of John J. Macreedy lacked character, especially since Macreedy was a man of few words. Additionally, at 54 years old, Tracy also felt he was too old for the part – and he wasn’t wrong, really. After all, the film was set to shoot in Lone Pine, California, where temperatures could soar past 100 degrees, and he’d be wearing a suit the whole time. On top of that, Katherine Hepburn had ordered him to stay off the bottle while working.

You can’t blame the guy for thinking he’d rather kick back in Palm Springs with a G&T, can you? 

However,  producer Dore Schary had a couple of tricks up his sleeve. First, he told the screenwriter to add a gimmick to the character that he knew Tracy couldn’t resist – Macreedy would have only one arm. Then, in a brilliant bit of Hollywood maneuvering, Schary told Tracy that Alan Ladd had already agreed to play the part. If you know anything about how Hollywood worked in the fifties, you won’t be surprised to hear that Alan Ladd hadn’t even heard of the movie.

Suddenly, Tracy’s tune changed. The challenge of playing a one-armed character was too intriguing to pass up. But the drama didn’t end there. Tracy didn’t get along with the original director, Richard Brooks, so John Sturges got the directing gig instead. Tracy had enjoyed working with Sturges the previous year on The People Against O’Hara and the two hit the ground running. Tracy ended up delivering a performance so powerful it earned him an Oscar nomination. Like Marlon Brando in The Godfather, this goes to show that sometimes the roles actors are most hesitant about can turn out to be their greatest triumphs.

Coincidentally, Spencer Tracy lost the Oscar for Best Actor to co-star Ernest Borgnine, who absolutely blew the doors off  in Delbert Mann’s working-class romantic drama Marty the same year.

No discussion of Bad Day at Black Rock would be complete without mentioning the formidable Robert Ryan. A titan of noir cinema, Ryan brings his trademark intensity to the role of Reno Smith, the town’s menacing unofficial leader. Ryan was no stranger to complex, often violent characters, having cut his teeth in the 1949 boxing picture The Set-Up, where he delivered a gut-wrenching performance as a washed-up prizefighter. Three years later, he’d portray a volatile cop in the gritty winter noir On Dangerous Ground, which you might have seen in this very theater a while back. In Bad Day at Black Rock, Sturges uses Ryan’s steely gaze and simmering rage as  the perfect counterpoint to Tracy’s stoic determination. It’s a masterclass in screen tension, with Ryan embodying the dark heart of a town harboring terrible secrets.

On top of the Oscar nominations, the movie saw love from the British Academy Film Awards, Cannes, the Directors Guild of America Awards, and it ended up fourth in the the National Board of Review’s Top Ten films of 1955.  The studio and the producers were happy with it, too; it made three times its budget back.

So, as you prepare to watch “Bad Day at Black Rock,” keep in mind the behind-the-scenes struggles and triumphs that went into bringing this unique film to life. It’s a testament to the power of clear, concise storytelling, tight editing, and trusting a cast of professionals to carry that weight.

The post “Bad Day At Black Rock” is a Sun-Blasted Southwestern Post-War Noir with a Dark Heart appeared first on BeacoupKevin.com/blog.

1961’s Underworld U.S.A.was written and directed during a rough time for Sam Fuller: he was in the middle of a divorce; his mother had just died; his passion project, The Big Red One, had fallen through despite having John Wayne on board, and his previous picture The Crimson Kimono had underperformed at the box office. 

The first was understandable; he’d fully admit in later interviews that he was a difficult man to live with. The second was inevitable; death comes for us all. It was the one-two punch of The Big Red One not getting in front of cameras and Columbia’s mishandling of The Crimson Kimono ¹ that left him feeling truly adrift. In retrospect, it’s a bit of a surprise that Fuller took on another Columbia project so quickly, but maybe he saw the crime picture as offering him a liferaft, a return to familiar material that had helped make his name in his time at Fox.

Based on a series of Saturday Evening Post articles written by Joseph Dineen that had gotten a proper book release in 1956,² Underworld U.S.A. promised to offer the frankest depiction of the world of organized crime yet from a major studio. It had everything a guy like Fuller loved – prostitution, drugs, violence – and he had even bragged to Variety that it was going to be a no-holds-barred look at the entire mess. 

That didn’t quite come to happen. Without the protection of a producer like Daryl Zanuck, Fuller found himself butting heads with both the Production Code Authority and the studio over the screenplay. He wanted to open the picture with a monologue by a prostitute who would try to sell the audience on the idea of not just legalization of her chosen field, but the unionization of sex workers as well. As she went into the details of how much her and her peers contributed to the American economy, the camera would pull back to reveal a map of the United States made up of near-naked women and the title of the picture.

You won’t be seeing that tonight. Sorry.

With all of his struggles to write a screenplay that met the desires of the studio while also scripting a movie he would be proud to helm, it took Fuller over a year to get Underworld U.S.A. ready to shoot. He would later say that the movie was compromised but he was still proud of what he got on screen, a riff on The Count of Monte Cristo where Cliff Robertson’s Tolly takes on the organized crime cartel responsible for his father’s death by any means necessary. 

That cartel, by the way, is presented in a way quite unlike any previous filmmaker’s approach to the mob. They wear suits. They pay taxes. They work out of offices and boardrooms. They’re not embarrassed by what they do; they just don’t want to make a show of it.³ That makes Tolly’s anarchic, brutal approach to revenge even more effective for the audience. 

Fuller may not have been able to get all 18 “sick, disturbing” murders of his initial screenplay on screen because of the PCA. Sure, the director had to tone down organized crime’s connections to police departments across the country because the studio didn’t want to make the public feel insecure about the cops. Despite ample evidence of the truth of the matter, he wasn’t allowed to go into length about just how much money drugs made, nor how many people made a healthy living off them.  

But what Fuller did get on screen, it sings. Robertson’s a force of nature, an unstoppable engine of vengeance who is as charismatic as he is repulsive. When it does go into the workings of the mob, the movie goes further than any movie made by Hollywood would manage for at least another decade. 

Sam Fuller would make one more movie for the studios (the war pic Merrill’s Marauders) before going his own way with the one-two punch of Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss and while he may never have made another crime picture on the scale of Underworld U.S.A. again, what he left the audience with is a triumph of working within the studio system, limits and all.

The post Sam Fuller’s “Underworld U.S.A.” is a studio system triumph despite compromise. appeared first on BeacoupKevin.com/blog.

1944 was a great year for noir — you had Otto Preminger’s Laura; George Cukor’s Gaslight; Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, to name a few — so it’s easy to understand when a picture worthy of consideration gets shuffled to the side, even when it’s as good as tonight’s feature, Phantom Lady.

Phantom Lady is one of those movies that really benefits from knowing as little as possible before going in, so I’m going to spare you any analysis or plot details up front. Just know that a man, played by Alan Curtis, has a fight with his wife and ends up taking a woman he meets at a bar to a show in her stead. This sets off a chain of events that ends up with that man on death row and his loyal secretary trying to figure out what happened. It’s gripping to say the least, taking the source material from genre stalwart Cornell Woolrich and elevating it through creative camerawork, great performances, and some hot jazz.

It’s the first film produced by Joan Harrison, a natural extension of her work as screenwriter and collaborator with the great Alfred Hitchcock. Starting as his secretary she soon became a trusted member of his inner circle, providing research and contributing to the screenplays of movies like Jamaica Inn as she learned the ropes of film production. She moved to the states with Hitch and his wife Alma in 1939 and would go on to help write Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Suspicion and Saboteur. 

Phantom Lady represented her taking what she learned in her time with Hitch and applying it to the leaner, more budget-friendly noir style. After making a few other movies, she’d return to the Hitchcock fold with as producer of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, a show that proved that visually interesting, well-made television didn’t need to cost a fortune.

Phantom Lady was the first noir directed by Robert Siodmak.  Siodmak’s an interesting cat, a German director who fled the Nazis — Joseph Goebbels himself talked trash about his film The Burning Secret — and found himself in France in 1933. France was a fantastic place for the 33-year old filmmaker; he got to collaborate with some greats like Maurice Chevalier and Erich von Stronheim white tackling a wide variety of genres. Of course, that’s until the Germans did what they did at the time, and he found himself in Hollywood in 1939 along with his brother and frequent collaborator Curt.

After Phantom Lady, noir would dominate his filmography for the rest of the decade. The same year, he helmed The Suspect (also starring Ella Raines, this time opposite the powerhouse Charles Laughton), 1945 saw Siodmak teaming up with Raines and producer Joan Harrison again, this time with Zero Mostel in the woefully underrated The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, followed by The Killers, The Dark Mirror, Time Out of Mind, Cry of the City (a movie that single handedly made me revise my opinion of Victor Mature), Criss Cross, The Great Sinner, The File on Thelma Jordan and Deported.

So, that’s it. A first-time producer, a director taking on a genre that would define him in many film nerds’ eyes, Ella Raines as a character you’ll fall in love with, a top-billed actor who doesn’t show up until 45 minutes into the movie, and, of course, Elisha Cook Jr.

Enjoy Phantom Lady and come back next month for Sam Fuller’s Underworld U.S.A, starring Cliff freakin’ Robertson.

The post “Phantom Lady” or: How Two First-Timers Made a Genre Classic You Really Should See appeared first on BeacoupKevin.com/blog.

I don’t know if there’s an American filmmaker whose work I admire more than Sam Fuller.

A high school dropout who became a journalist, then a screenwriter, then a soldier in World War II before directing his first film, I Shot Jesse James in 1949. That movie was a revisionist western before those were even a thing, the story of John Ireland’s Bob Ford grappling with his titular legacy. From there, Fuller quickly became a b-movie staple, cranking out war pictures and period pieces before the critical and box office success of the noir classic Pickup on South Street gave him a chance to direct some headliners at Fox like the submarine flick Hell and High Water and the western Forty Guns.

Around 1959, though, he started losing some of his luster, with The Crimson Kimono leaving audiences and critics both a bit cool and Verboten! underperforming despite raves.¹ Crime flick Underworld U.S.A. saw him butting heads with producers at Columbia and 1962’s Merrill’s Marauders was his final big studio picture for almost a decade.

Others would be daunted by this turn of events, but for Fuller, the need to create was stronger than the need for recognition. He went back to his b-picture roots with 1963’s Shock Corridor — a psychological thriller about a journalist who goes undercover in a mental institution — and made what I consider to be his most visceral, gutsy movie with tonight’s selection, The Naked Kiss. 

In The Naked Kiss, Constance Towers plays Kelly, an itinerant prostitute who uses the guise of a champagne seller to meet and engage with her clientele. When she arrives in Grantville, though, she does her usual bit and meets with the local constabulary to smooth things out. However, Captain Griff² makes it clear after their liaison; her services are not welcome in his town. She can ply her trade over the river, at Candy’s.

With a head full of champagne, Kelly wakes up the next morning and has a realization: she wants more from life. And she works hard and gets it…or so she thinks. Despite offering up what appears to be the idyllic American town (especially if you’re a white person in the 1960s), Grantville’s got a dark secret, one that’s likely to make your stomach turn, even a full sixty years after the film’s release.

If you can’t tell by the fact that I have a tattoo featuring David Lynch and a quote from the series, I’m a big fan of Twin Peaks. Like Fuller, Lynch and collaborator Mark Frost engaged with the American Dream and its darker side and there are some plot parallels that a fan of both the movie and the TV series can pick out, but what stands out to me the most is how both The Naked Kiss and Twin Peaks are steadfastly weird. 

There’s a sequence in which Kelly sings along with some kids from the local hospital that’s as sincere as it is surreal. The brothel across the river uses the kid-friendly facade of a sweets shop to allow the women to meet their clients. The prostitute quotes Goethe and Byron with a familiarity that belies her past. With one exception, not a single character has an entire name in the movie. And it works, it all works.

Fuller (with cinematographer Stanley Cortez) is a pretty primitive filmmaker. In fact, outside of the bravura opening and the occasional long-ish take, there’s not much to distinguish the vast majority of his shots from what was on TV at the time. However, there’s a raw energy there, a sense of intent lacking in many of his peers that is undeniable, and it’s easy to see why the French New Wave and people like Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes all fell so hard for the director.  I hope you join them tonight.

The post Sam Fuller’s “The Naked Kiss” is sordid, weird and revealing. I love it. appeared first on BeacoupKevin.com/blog.

Tonight’s movie has four Oscar nominations (best picture, best supporting actor, best original screenplay, and best editing.) It was named to the AFI’s top ten list for 2016. It’s got the hunky-ass Chris Pine acting up a storm alongside Ben Foster with Jeff Bridges taking his cantankerous persona from the Coens’ True Grit and bringing it to the modern day! Yet people don’t talk about Hell or High Water nearly as much as they should. Maybe it’s the surface similarity to No Country for Old Men? 

Anyway. 

It’s one of my favorite crime flicks of the last decade or so and it continues to offer new rewards every time I watch it. It’s also a terrific example of how noir can shift to maintain its relevance as a genre.

Classic film noir frequently used PTSD from World War II as a plot device. A lot of men, including the writers and directors of those features, experienced shit that no one should ever be exposed to on the battlefield, and they were expected, whether it was explicitly stated or not, to just come home and go back to selling Buicks or reading gas meters or whatever. That failure to take care of those who went to battle is a powerful part of movies like The Blue Dahlia and Crossfire.

That parallel failure of the quote-unquote system to take care of the working class that give everything they have to it is at the core of Hell or High Water. You can tell that screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s mad about what’s happening to Americans at the behest of banks and corporate boards Chris Pine’s Toby and Ben Foster’s Tanner may be bank robbers, but they carry a righteous anger that informs the whole movie. It shows up in the graffiti, the roadside signs for debt consolidation and payday loan services, and at the very center of the plot: a desperate need to pay off a reverse mortgage with abysmal terms that the brothers’ mother had to take out to cover her medical debt. 

This movie makes it plain: there’s a war happening right now, in America. The working class is at war with capitalism, and the plutocrats are winning.

Enough of the high-minded film critique. Let’s get to the fast facts we all love.

Before he made the move to full-time writing, Taylor Sheridan was an actor with roles on shows like Sons of Anarchy and Veronica Mars. He wrote Sicario, then Wind River before becoming the boomers’ favorite with the TV series Yellowstone and its prequels, Mayor of Kingstown, and Tulsa King. Originally called Comancheria, Hell and High Water was at the top of Hollywood’s annual Black List of unproduced screenplays in 2012.

Director David Mackenzie’s Scottish. He would later direct the Netflix film Outlaw King, which starred Pine as Robert The Bruce. He was joined behind the lens by English cinematographer Giles Nuttgen (who did the infamous Battlefield Earth in 2000). The duo’s European background gave them an outsider view of the US akin to what Wim Wenders and Robby Müller brought to Paris, Texas. Those sunsets we take for granted are a long way away from they get on the moors.

I rattled off the awards it won and the prestige it earned at the beginning. You know you’re in for a good time, so let’s get to it.

The post “Hell Or High Water” – Western Noir about the Working Class and Capitalism appeared first on BeacoupKevin.com/blog.

When I select a movie for this series, I sit down and watch it again with a notepad, making note of things I want to highlight in these introductions. It’d been at least a decade since I’d watched Lone Star but as a Blockbuster manager in the late 90s, I’d seen it at least a half-dozen times when it was new to the shelves, so I felt pretty good about being able to take notes while watching the movie.

Well, this time, there’s three short bullet points  and then the rest of the page is blank. That’s a testament to how well this picture grabs your attention and doesn’t let it go, even if you’ve seen it before.

Sayles attended the same cinematic bootcamp as luminaries like Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola and James Cameron: he worked for Roger Corman. He wrote the Joe Dante-directed Piranha and Lewis Teague’s The Lady In Red as a way to fund his first feature, The Return of The Secaucus Seven, and would continue this pattern over the next few years. He’d script Alligator, Battle Beyond The Stars, The Howling and others to get to make his breakthrough The Brother From Another Planet and from there, his path was set. That leads us to where we are tonight, Sayle’s tenth feature, Lone Star.

This is the textbook definition of a rich film. It touches on a lot of subjects, many of which will be naggingly familiar in 2024, while its central mystery — What happened to Kris Kristofferson’s Sheriff Charlie Wade, and how was Matthew McConaughey’s Buddy Deeds involved?  — unspools at a deliberate but never boring pace.  With help from some clever in-camera editing and a script that knows exactly when to reveal what, the audience learns about all the connections and buried secrets in Rio County’s past alongside Buddy’s son Sam, now sheriff himself (played by the always-terrific Chris Cooper).  It’s a mature film, to say the least, one that the audience can enjoy more as they also experience things like long-lost love, broken families, and marriages that don’t work out for whatever reason.

Everyone loves trivia, so here’s some:

• This movie was shot in Del Rio, Eagle Pass, and Laredo, Texas, and while the script called for it, there wasn’t a drive-in theater available to use in the area. So, they built one and screened the dailies on the big screen there on the last night of filming.
• You may catch a brief glimpse of a movie playing there in one of the flashback scenes. That would be Black Mama, White Mama, a production of Roger Corman’s American International Pictures.
• The movie was extremely well received by critics and audiences, costing $3,000,000 while making $13,000,000. That makes it a textbook moneyball picture to me. Not a blockbuster, but certainly profitable enough to make everyone happy.
• Joe Morton, who plays Delmore Payne, is actually 18 months older than Ron Canada, who portrays his father Otis. It works, somehow, and the scenes with the two of them perfectly capture the tension between a father who abandoned his son and the younger man who succeeded despite it.
• From the opening shot, it’s obvious that real thought was put into things like color grading, lighting, framing, etc. That’s the work of cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh, who got praise for bringing a David Lean aesthetic to a Zane Grey western.

Martin Scorcese’s fond of talking about how some movies are in dialogue with another, whether intentionally or not. This is definitely of a piece with Touch of Evil, with many of the same touchstones: law enforcement, buried secrets, the border, while remaining resolutely about the personal and that’s why I wanted to feature it in this series. Even if their two styles couldn’t be further apart, this piece of borderlands noir has an ending that will haunt you, much like Welles’ epic.

Lone Star is currently available from the Criterion Collection in a stunning 4KUHD presentation.

The post “Lone Star” – Borderlands Noir at its Most Mature appeared first on BeacoupKevin.com/blog.

I work in SEO. More specifically, I work in content-focused SEO. I know that search engine optimization is a forbidden phrase among people who only associate it with spam farms and bad-faith attempts to drive traffic,² but it’s a discipline that I am quite happy to be employed in a lot of the time. Helping businesses and individuals drive interested parties to the right page on their website is a combination of science (how often should you use what words and where) and art (what do people actually want when they get there).

So, you can imagine that my whole industry flipped out when OpenAI gave us regular folks access to ChatGPT, their Large Language Model interface that was friendly and easy to use. Finally, you could just ask this magic machine with access to a massive amount of information to do things in plain English: list ten people who have played Hamlet in order of acclaim; describe the fundamentals of orbital mechanics in language a tenth grader could understand; recite three jokes by Mitch Hedburg. And it would do it! 

Kind of. 

Sort of.

It’s had problems, as you probably know. It will make up facts and it’s weirdly bad at math, which is the one thing I thought that computers were good at with no questions asked?

And, of course, there’s the whole “writing” thing.

I’m going to get this out of the way right now: ChatGPT does not actually write. You should not use it to replace actual writers who can provide insights or unique points of view.  It chews up a lot of other people’s work and spits out something that approximates real writing. That may not be entirely bad, as it turns out, but more on that later.

First, I want to address the true elephant in the room:

ChatGPT Is Not A True AI, And I Will Not Tolerate People Acting Like It Is (Same for you, Bard and Gemini. Don’t think I don’t see you.)

Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker described ChatGPT as something that trains on content from “the darkest corners of the web” and then uses “a massive amount of computational power to predict what will be the next word in a sentence.” This is not wrong. This is, in fact, deeply correct.

ChatGPT’s interface is friendly and anyone can use it. For a lot of people, it feels like a genuine interaction with something instead of offering inputs into an algorithm and getting a pre-chewed response back.  That’s how it’s programmed: to use its however many teraflops of processing power to give you a fast, human-seeming back and forth. But it’s running a program. A very complex program, to be sure, but it’s just a program.

ChatGPT has no desires, no wants, no innate curiosity. ChatGPT does not dream. It has no life experience to use when considering a subject. It can’t connect seemingly unrelated ideas. It has no emotional intelligence because it has no emotions. Most of all, it doesn’t create: it rehashes, remixes, and reworks a highly specific set of  existing material in ways that are close to, but not quite analogous to what individuals do when they’re given the opportunity. 

Individuals make; ChatGPT generates. 

Okay, now that that’s off my chest…

What Should You Use ChatGPT For?

Not fiction, never fiction. (Yes, there’s a section called “What Shouldn’t You Use ChatGPT For?” right under this, but I wanted to get that out in the open immediately. Stop asking it to plot your Star Trek novels³ or write a short story. Even setting aside the generally poor prose it generates, it’s never going to genuinely surprise a reader or allow them to connect with you. It’s a hard truth for ChatGPT Evangelists to acknowledge, but the fact that an LLM can generate better prose than you doesn’t mean that it’s a good writer on its own; it just means that it’s a better writer than you.

However, since I’m an SEO (which is how we started this whole rant), I will give you some use cases in which I’ve found it’s very useful.

• It’s very good at web page outlines and determining what topics and subtopics those pages should cover.
  • It also can provide supporting phrases commonly associated with those topics.
• It can help you structure a silo of web pages quickly, with a parent page, child pages, and even grandchild pages.
• It can generate a list of FAQs around a product or service. 
• It can generate a series of questions to ask an interview subject to glean insights on a topic at a very high level.
  • If you go a bit deeper and give it some specific topics you’d like to cover, it plunders the web really effectively and makes you sound like you know what you’re talking about.
• It can analyze a piece of web content and give suggestions about additional topics to be included.
  • This tends to be pretty hit or miss; it will sometimes recommend something you’ve covered using different language than what the LLM recognizes around that topic, but then you know to incorporate some of that language into your existing page.
• It can break down complex topics (particularly those around math and science) in a way that enables others to comprehend them better.
  • My wife has used it to quickly take science lessons aimed at readers operating at an eighth-grade level and break it down to something more appropriate for someone reading at a fifth grade level. She polished the result a bit, but it has reduced her workload from a minimum of an hour on each lesson to five minutes. Every minute like that a teacher gets back in their day is a minute that can be spent with a kid.
• It’s really good at rewriting product descriptions for individual web pages, which is key for trying to rank your ecommerce site.

I’m sure you can find more out there, but these are things that I’ve done where using a lot of computing power to do something I would do in much less time made sense. (I’ll get to the energy use issue; stick with me.)

And as far as actual writing goes, I’m about to say something that will make some people mad. They’re going to be going to the pitchfork store and asking for something extra pointy. Then they’re going by the torchery and getting something rated for castle-sieging.

For some web pages, with very specific prompts,⁴  you can create perfectly serviceable web copy. An example would be a plumber’s website. When you land on a page for, let’s say, bathroom plumbing repairs in your area, what do you do? 

You scan the page and look for hooks. You look through the subheadings on the page, scan any bulleted lists. You then look for signs of human life, the kind of stuff that ChatGPT and other LLMs can’t manage: testimonials from individuals, photos of actual humans, links to relevant content elsewhere on the web.

In other words, you’re not reading. You’re processing. You’re trying to see if they do the thing you need (fix a leaky faucet, unclog your toilet, replace your shower head) and if other people say they do a good job. You want to see if they operate in your area and if they can be at your house quickly. That’s it. 

I understand the impulse some of my colleagues and peers have to make this kind of content really special and personal, but I think their energies are better spent elsewhere. You’re not looking to make a 1:1 human connection with this business; you’re looking to see if they do the thing. That’s it. That’s why this is the kind of page where you can use copy that’s not great; it just has to be highly functional and well-formatted. 

What Shouldn’t You Use ChatGPT For?

This list may seem shorter, but each item is much broader.

• Fiction. Duh. (See above rant.)
• Writing that you want actual humans to read. Writing where you need to persuade them on that 1:1 level.
  • I think it’d be awful for landing page copy, for example.
• Anything where you want to show your expertise on a topic.
  • Related, and this could probably be a footnote but I’m just going to put it here anyway. This is something that college professors in particular are going to need to figure out how to work with because so much in the way of writing for higher education is actually pretty rote. How do you get a student to demonstrate core competency around a topic without basically saying “Write something that synthesizes a bunch of other people’s writings”?
• Anything journalistic, period. A journalist’s job is not to just spew out press release copy or say “so-and-so said X.” A journalist’s job is to find the actual, essential truth and contextualize what’s been said and acted upon around that.
  • Even sports journalists, the ones you think could be most easily replaced because so much of their expertise is statistically driven, have a point of view and ability to realize connections.
• Anything where the idea of LLM-created content is morally or ethically dubious.
  • This is open to interpretation. Somebody told me that they used ChatGPT to write a condolence note and I blanched at how cold that seemed.

Now, finally, the thing that I have to mention because if I don’t mention it, people are gonna be even madder at me. (Also, because it needs to be discussed, obviously.)

All Of This Assumes That ChatGPT and Bard Are More Efficient Than They Actually Are

I was really struck with the statistic that making an image with Generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone. ChatGPT slurps down 500 milliliters of water every time you ask it a series of prompts.⁵ These stats are roughly in-line with how much energy and water that many data centers use, mind, but it’s still concerning.

If LLMs are going to become the pervasive, large-scale societal change their investors wants them to be, then they have to find more energy-efficient methods, period.  I am not going to pretend that they do not.

Here’s the thing, though, and I’ve not found a good comparison: how much energy would a person use searching 20 different plumbing websites, writing up an outline based on what they found, conducting keyword research to support all those topics, and then writing the serviceable⁶ copy? 

Of course, it’s all a matter of scale. Let’s say the energy usage is 1:1 but the LLM model means that the page is created 25 times faster. Someone using an LLM doing 25 pages in the time it takes one means 25 times the energy usage.

Businesses may not care about any of this because it’s more profitable, but there’s a cost to society as a whole that needs to be addressed.

Okay, This It. The End…For Now?

Thank you for reading this far. This is not meant to be any kind of definitive post about the topic of large language models and how they’re used; I just wanted there to be more nuance in the conversation. It seems like every platform I go on features two distinct groups of people: those who are bloviating about how life-altering and perfect LLMs are, and those who hiss “AI grifter” whenever someone brings up the fact that they use them. Since this is my platform, I can belong in neither camp quite happily.

And for the record: the algorithmically-fueled Yoast plugin⁷ says that this page is deeply unreadable. I hope you disagree.

The post My Obligatory Post About ChatGPT (Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Use — Not Love, Never Love — The Plagiarism Machine.) appeared first on BeacoupKevin.com/blog.