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While Chaz was attempting to live the American Dream, I went to see a film about a man who managed to achieve it in real life… at least, for a while.
“American Gangster” is a gritty, realistic film set in the gloomy streets of New York City (and parts of New Jersey) during the early 1970’s.
It stars Denzel Washington as Frank Lucas, the man who managed to corner the market on the heroin trade thanks to some great connections and no small amount of Chutzpha.
Frank runs away from his North Carolina home at a young age, apparently to escape rampant racism and poverty (referred to by him very late in the film). He comes to the Big Apple and becomes driver, then protégé, to Harlem’s leading hood, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson.
When “Bumpy” dies of a heart attack, Frank slowly begins moving to consolidate power and establish his own reign. Bumpy’s dying words complain about how in modern life, “direct sales” from the manufacturer have forced out the middle man.
Frank decides to apply the principle to the drug trade, and travels all the way to Southeast Asia to hook up with a major heroin manufacturer.
Thanks to help from relatives in the U.S. Army, Frank soon has a pipeline delivering the purest heroin around – at the lowest price.
His major rivals in the drug trade: the “special investigators” in NYPD who are supposed to be enforcing the law, but instead skim off the drug dealers.
Meanwhile, a New Jersey cop with a troubled domestic life has developed a reputation as a trouble maker and a maverick. Richie Roberts, portrayed with a passably decent Jersey accent by Russell Crow, destroys his reputation by finding nearly a million dollars in unmarked bills in a car trunk – and turning the money in instead of keeping it.
From that time on, Richie is a marked man who apparently can’t be trusted by his fellow cops, who now worry that he’s a rat.
His partner dies from a heroin overdose, leading Richie to begin hunting for the crime kingpin behind the massive influx of nearly 100% pure heroin on the streets (cleverly marketed in little blue baggies as “Blue Magic.”)
Now Frank, as portrayed by Washington, is a dapper, well-mannered, generally soft-spoken person given to the occasion homicidal rage. Lucas dedicates himself to his family, bringing the whole clan up from North Carolina, installing his mother in her dream home, and employing dozens of family members in his drug empire.
He’s also capable of putting a gun to a man’s forehead in broad daylight and pulling the trigger to pass along a lesson in etiquette.
To say he’s a complicated character would be to understate the obvious; to say that Denzel does him justice seems inadequate. Denzel Washington, an extremely gifted actor, has the ability to emote subtext like few people ever captured on film.
And since this is a Ridley Scott film, there’s plenty of subtext.
To his credit, Scott has us cheering at one point for Frank, at another point for Richie, and sometimes for both against those evil NYPD cops.
He doesn’t flinch from showing how Frank’s happiness, success, and power came at the expense of thousands of junkies, their families, their children – and their souls.
Scott’s film contains the requisite amount of violence and sex required in any gangster pic.
It also captures the desperation and grit of the inner city without stooping to cliché.
The plot – though rather simple and not terribly original – kept moving at a decent pace, aside from the domestic angst between Richie and his wife. Their relationship and custody battle really didn’t seem to add anything to the film, nor to Russell Crowe’s character, other than one somewhat altruistic gesture he makes toward the end of the film.
Speaking of the end, this reviewer found it satisfying, although one would have to say there were no real winners.
Naturally, since the film’s based on real characters, Scott could only take so much dramatic license with the ending. That said, I don’t think anyone will walk away thinking it could – or should – have ended differently.
Perhaps the discovery by the two principle characters of just how much they truly had in common – despite coming from completely different worlds – carries a message for all of us.
I’ll give this film an A-, my only quibbles being that it ran a bit long at nearly 2 ½ hours, and that Richie’s domestic troubles could have been left on the cutting room floor with no real harm done to the development of his character.
Enjoy!
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Several times in the last few days I have had emails and phone calls about KJRH coverage of particular news stories. Someone also posted at some length in our forums about a story involving a road rage incident in which one man shot another to death.
Although I now work full time on the Internet, I still write a lot of news. I have many years' experience working in a news room, both in an editorial capacity and as a producer. Thus, I feel qualified to reply to some of the concerns I've heard.
Let's examine three examples, beginning with the above-mentioned story of road rage. In the post, "magz" writes:
What makes the local news stations pick and choose what information they choose to air and what information the choose to leave out? is it to be un-bias or is it to be bias one way or the other? Im sure every news station looks at each others news cast aswell as internet, police scanners and you have what you call "reporters" to find out what happen.
News writers don't pick and choose information, we report what we can confirm -- and we cite our sources. We don't report rumor, innuendo, guesswork, or information that we simply don't have. "magz" goes on in another post to say people at the scene were intoxicated, and other supposed facts that Channel 2 failed to report. However, the post didn't say how "magz" came to have that information. Was "magz" an eyewitness? Did he/she hear the story from someone else who was there?
I'm trying to make the point that sometimes we don't get all the information from the sources who supposedly have the job to fill us in, for example the spokespersons who work for the police or fire department. Other information might fall under certain laws which protect people's privacy, which means we aren't allowed to even ask the questions. If we do our job properly, then we don't report what we can't confirm.
Example two: Layoffs at First Data Corp. in Tulsa. The company warned its employees not to speak to the media, a typical scenario. Still, word got out -- how naive of a company to think it wouldn't -- and I believe everyone in town had the story by 5:00 p.m.
Funny thing -- because of the media reports, several companies contacted First Data Corp. with offers of help for the employees, and possible job opportunities. Thus, ironically, the employees actually would have suffered more had they kept quiet about the layoffs. First Data Corp. doesn't look very positive in this scenario, in my opinion. I'm pretty sure they don't care what I think, but shouldn't a company that large have a better plan in place for handling the media and its employees in such a situation?
Okay, example three: Toddler wanders off from a daycare, DHS closes the place down for two weeks. Now I understand, and we reported, that this particular daycare has never had any major problems. Still, DHS took action against it and we reported it, and I would seriously challenge anyone to explain why we shouldn't have.
We received two emails this morning complaining about the coverage, basically stating that the term "shut down" was incorrect because the closure was only temporary, and going on to state that we "didn't present the whole story."
Now I can understand that the semantics of the term "shut down" might come into question. What's more, and this may surprise readers of this post, but I agree that the story (as originally written) did not adequately explain the terms of the temporary closure. In fact, I have already edited the online version of the story to bring it more in balance.
In doing so, I changed the headline to add the word "temporary" and added a single sentence detailing the length of the DHS investigation.
All that said, I would like to point out that we did have an interview with a parent who completely backed the daycare owner. We also reported that the parents of the toddler who wandered off in the first place left him at the daycare and went back to work... Clearly, they weren't overly concerned that the daycare had become dangerous.
Might I point out that the daycare owner refused to talk to us? Honestly, I think she would have better served her cause by explaining what happened, but I understand her reluctance.
Then, this morning's scripts more carefully detailed the temporary nature of the closure, and reiterated the facts that the daycare had a clean record. Once again, we heard from parents who support the business. Finally, I will write a follow-up story as soon as I finish this blog entry, as I would on any fairly major story.
In summary, I think we should all remember some basic realities. Sometimes a reporter or editor's opinion might color the way a story gets presented -- sad, but true. Sometimes facts get omitted or misreported because the authorities or other sources simply give out incorrect or incomplete information. Yet sometimes, the personal feelings or bias of the listener, viewer, or reader affect the way they hear, see, or read the story. Despite what some might believe, I think most people who have been in the business for any length of time can tell you that in between black and white lies a massive spectrum of grays -- and it can be very tricky to find the middle road.
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I first came to KJRH March 30, 1995. Less than three weeks later, I got my first taste of a major international news story breaking out in our backyard -- the Oklahoma City bombing.
As our wall-to-wall daily coverage began to taper off, our news director at the time (Peggy Phillip, well known for her forward-looking management style and the first news director ever to post her own blog) asked me if I'd like to start putting up articles about the bombing and other news on the Internet.
I jumped at the chance, and while I've held several other positions here at the station -- primarily producer and assignment editor -- I've also been the primary "web" guy for more than 12 years now.
KJRH was an early leader in bringing local news and information to the Internet. We were the first station in Oklahoma to post a website, the first to write local news, the first to stream audio, the first to stream video, the first to post weather radar... In other words, we led the way into the new age.
Then, shifting priorities led station management to de-emphasize the Internet, although some of us still believed that the web will only grow in importance as we move further into the 21st Century.
Early on, I was asked to write an article about the convergence of television and the Internet. I'd like to quote from the article I wrote for "The Antenna" in March of 1998:
Television stations provide a better base upon which to launch an assault on the infobahn market for a number of reasons. To begin with, TV stations are inherently more amenable to new technologies, undoubtedly because television itself is still a fairly new technology, and one which is constantly evolving.
The industry was barely 20 years old before it had its first major leap, from black and white to color. Stereo audio signals, closed-captioning, digitization, satellite communications, cable, fiberoptic networks, HDTV -- the parade may never end. Television stations have had to cope with these changes, and will continue to cope with them, on an almost constant basis.
Newspapers, naturally, have seen technological advances as well, but the end product has not changed nearly as dramatically. The very fact that television stations are fully equipped with audio and video equipment gives them another major advantage over the print industry.
Moreover, the training required to record, edit, and write to moving images and sound means station employees can more easily be trained to create content for a multimedia website. Is multimedia an absolute necessity on a website? Perhaps not yet, but it is swiftly becoming increasingly important. As bandwidth issues are solved and more consumers buy multimedia computers, sites which offer simple text and static images will fall further behind. An obvious example to consider is video.
MSNBC web affiliates have used AVI clips, which are slow to upload and download. They are also somewhat time-consuming to produce; the video must be re-recorded onto disk, edited, compressed, and then the audio track must be compressed as well. The result is a file that still requires a 5 or 10 minute download for a video clip that may last 30 or 40 seconds at a frame rate of 6 fps. But MSNBC is preparing to switch to NetShow, Microsoft's video streaming software (version 3.0 is supposedly just around the corner).
Streaming means download time becomes much less of an issue, but more importantly, it means that video on demand becomes possible. Imagine an end user being able to pick which stories to view from the evening's 6 p.m. newscast and in which order to view them. That technology is upon us, almost before most television stations are ready to take advantage of it.
Not exactly prophetic, but I definitely saw the importance of video... and anyone reading this who hasn't visited YouTube or a similar site probably doesn't own a television set either  .
So what's the point of this little essay? Basically, to reintroduce kjrh.com as a new entity, and to reassure our viewers/readers that this time -- we're here to stay. We know that video is becoming a prime driver of quality websites, and our goal is to provide more -- and better -- video than any of our competitors.
We'll also have the in-depth reporting and information users want to complement what they see on the air. And when we fail to do so, I hope to hear from you personally. You can respond to this blog, you can visit our forums, you can send me an email -- and I promise that even when I can't change the way we do things, at the very least your voice will be heard by those who make the decisions here.
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