This Week You Just Will Care About:
- a crazy plan
- sports coverage
- two big artists
- food documentary
- succinct writing!
Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!
Gabriella Paiella at GQ discovers… M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap is somewhat based on a true story?
“Somewhat” is the key word here. The loose inspiration for Trap is Operation Flagship, a plan hatched by the U.S. Marshals Service’s Fugitive Investigative Strike Team in 1985. They needed to catch a bunch of fugitives in Washington, DC. In order to keep both costs and risks down, they planned an elaborate sting operation to lure in wanted men: F.I.S.T. sent letters to the last known addresses of over 5,000 fugitives, telling them that they had won two free tickets to an upcoming Washington Redskins (now the Washington Commanders) game against the Cincinnati Bengals, plus an opportunity to win additional tickets to the Super Bowl. Shyamalan—an Eagles fan, by the way—cited it as a direct influence for Trap in an interview with Empire Magazine. “It was hilarious,” the director said. “The cops were literally cheerleaders and mascots. These guys were dancing as they came in. And they were all caught. It was so twisted and funny.” There’s an ongoing debate about how intentionally funny Shyamalan’s movies are, but that quote reveals a lot—especially about Trap.
Wired‘s Brian Stelter praises the triumph of streaming Olympics coverage:
You may experience the Olympics in a totally different fashion. Maybe you swipe through videoclips on TikTok. Maybe you stream the raw feeds of your favorite obscure sport on Peacock. Maybe you watch NBC’s whiz-bang prime time recap. Maybe you tune into some highlight show I haven’t even discovered yet. Ultimately, we’re all still watching the same global spectacle, albeit from different angles and with different narrators. It’s a rare instance of fragmentation being to streaming’s benefit; the Olympics illustrate how all the shattered pieces can be stuck back together.
At The Reveal, Keith Phipps investigates the conflicting stories about the collaboration between Bob Dylan and Sam Peckinpah on Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid:
The nebulousness extends to every aspect of the Peckinpah/Dylan collaboration. If the director felt like the singer had been forced on him, why does the film make such extensive use of Dylan’s music and give him a prominent supporting role in the film? If Peckinpah dug Dylan’s contributions so much, why, in the last cut of the film the director approved before MGM took it out of his hands (after threatening to take over the film throughout filming), did he choose only to use the instrumental passage of one of Dylan’s songs? It was a late addition that Dylan had not planned to write, a track requested by Peckinpah’s usual composer Jerry Fielding. Fielding then dismissed it as “shit,” an opinion that Peckinpah’s decision not to include it in full suggests he might have shared. That song? “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”
For Crooked Marquee, Rob Nixon celebrates “the culinary ethnography” of Les Blank:
Blank treats his food subjects the same as the music and other cultural details he captures, without comment, preferring to let the talking be done by the people on screen and showcasing the music as a primary means of expression. His is an art of observation, not an attempt at exposé. The films don’t step outside the environment to impose a point of view or cater to audience perspectives. (Although he did express late in his life that if he were to make Dry Wood today, he might leave out the cringe-inducing hog slaughter.) This approach yields cinematic works of rough humanity and lush beauty and does valuable service to preserve the folkways and lifestyles that were already starting to disappear when he created his films.Herzog put it best: “Les has put stakes into the ground literally all around America. I have the feeling I do now know more about America than anyone who has read 500 books about the country.”
Eric W. Bailey talks about how Dungeons and Dragons taught him how to write useful alt text for images:
A red dragon attack is a significant event, so additional detail and emotion helps. I feel confident in both editorializing the experience as well as punching it up, given that the larger goal is to communicate a frenetic, action-packed encounter. The same also applies in reverse. Smaller, more succinct descriptions can be equally helpful in situations where the content is not a major contributor of the overall thing you’re trying to communicate.