Riding Out a Twister: “What Stands in a Storm”

Last week, tornados were touching down in Oklahoma, spreading death and destruction in their wake.  Personally, I know tornados only from movies, like 1996’s Twister. But those who’ve actually survived them tend to laugh at Hollywood’s portrayal of storm chasers, the hardy (and sometimes faintly crazy) souls who risk their lives while trying to study extreme weather events.

Kim Cross knows about tornados first-hand. A resident of Birmingham, Alabama,  she’ll never forget April 27, 2011.
That was the climax of a three-day outbreak, when 349 tornadoes raked 21 states in the American South. One of them, a so-called EF4 multiple-vortex tornado, flattened huge swaths of Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, seat of the University of Alabama. Like everyone else on that fateful  day, Kim stayed glued to the TV broadcasts of meteorologist James Spann, who forecast the path of the oncoming twister. As it seemed to head straight for her neighborhood, she grabbed a helmet and hunkered down with her family in her home’s safest room. Fortunately for Kim, the tornado struck seven miles away, leveling almost everything in its path. Others weren’t so lucky. That tornado claimed hundreds of lives, not to mention property damage. Many of Tuscaloosa’s stately oaks, hundreds of years old, were toppled by the force of the winds. The city will never look the same again.

As a journalist at Southern Living, Kim was asked to cover the superstorm’s aftermath. That’s how she came to unearth dozens of heartwarming stories of survivors helping one another get past the tragic day. After receiving multiple awards for her magazine work, she was primed to write a book. What Stands in a Storm: Three Days in the Worst Superstorm to Hit the South’s Tornado Alley was published in 2015. It’s a powerful narrative, which follows the storm’s path by way of the experience of both survivors and victims. In one chapter, “Slouching Toward Tuscaloosa,” Kim vividly cuts between the stoic men at a fire station, storm chasers photographing a funnel that’s heading straight toward them, a vigilant hospital administrator, and three college seniors exchanging frantic text messages with their loved ones back home. Binding these vignettes together is the TV voice of James Spann, warning one and all to get out of harm’s way.          

As a trained journalist, Kim was hugely concerned with accuracy. That’s why she established for herself some ground rules based on the way cinematographers capture the visual landscape: “I couldn't let you, the reader, see or know anything the character in that scene didn't see or know at that moment . . . . To help me do that, I imagined myself as a camera operator. In the first scene, we are panned out, seeing the big picture. In the second scene we zoom in a bit and can see the inside of a firehouse. In the third scene we zoom in even more, on two college students in a car.” Suspense comes from the fact that the reader never knows ahead of time who will live and who will die. Kim understands these people so well that she can convey their essence through their actions and social media exchanges, without ever putting into their mouths dialogue she can’t verify.

And she’s terrific at using words to set the scene: “At the Salvation Army, thirty-five people sought refuge in the dining hall as the wind blasted open the doors and stripped away the roof. A steel building that crumpled like a wad of foil was hurled into the seventy-bed shelter, which collapsed upon the impact. An electrical substation twisted like a telephone cord, and the lights went dark across town.” 

Kim Cross, the 2016 recipient of ASJA honors for full-length non-fiction,  will be a featured speaker on my “Award-Winners: From Pitch to Publish” panel at the annual conference of the American Society of Journalists and Authors in New York City. It all takes place May 21, and the public is cordially invited.

By the way, the paperback edition of Kim’s book has a new subtitle: A True Story of Love and Resilience in the Worst Superstorm in History. And here’s a sample of the elaborate timeline she created to help tie the storm’s moment-by-moment progress to her narrative.  

On the left are weather maps charting the advance of the tornado

Woody Allen: Schlemiel and Stud, Coward and Hero

Woody Allen is having a moment—again. His whimsical face (he wears his 80 years lightly) is gracing the cover of this week’s Hollywood Reporter, because his latest film, Café Society, is opening the 2016 Cannes Film Festival on May 11. He’s a deeply shy man, one who is hardly a publicity hound. But with a career that spans six decades, and encompasses both prestigious awards and personal scandal, he has had to accept the fact that he’s a public figure, like it or not. He’s also surprisingly gracious to writers who want to understand what makes him tick.

One such is a friend and colleague of mine, biographer David Evanier. David, who has previously written about Bobby Darin, Tony Bennett, and wiseguy balladeer Jimmy Rosselli, makes no secret of the fact that he’s a Woody Allen fan from way back. Hoping to deliver the first serious chronicle of Allen’s life since Eric Lax’s 1991 biography, he wrote Woody, which was published by St. Martin’s Press last fall. David, a serious researcher, has done a masterful job of locating people of importance in Allen’s world, including boyhood chums and the shy first wife he married when he was 20 and she 17. (They used to entertain one another by playing recorder duets.) He also managed to initiate an ongoing email conversation with the man himself, and finally was able to meet him in person.

A writer for Time magazine once hailed Allen’s screen image as that of as “a champion nebbish, one that every underdog in America could—and soon would—identify with. Allen had invented a perfect formula for an anxious new age: therapy made hilarious.” David Evanier, though, emphasizes that the Woody seen on screen is not identical to the writer-director who early on perfected this persona. The real Woody Allen is altogether smarter, shrewder, and trickier than the character he’s known for playing. That’s not to say that his life has been altogether admirable. He has the long-ingrained habit, for one thing, of walking away from people and institutions when he tires of them. This happened with his stand-up career and also with his first wife, Harlene. (In fact, like his character Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, he seems to resist being a part of any club that would have him for a member.) Then, of course there was the awkwardness of his breakup with longtime partner Mia Farrow when she discovered his stack of nude photos of her adoptive daughter Soon Yi Previn. This episode is hardly Woody Allen at his best. But, David provides plenty of evidence refuting Farrow’s claim that her former lover had molested her seven-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan. Farrow comes off, in fact, as a pathologically troubled woman.

David seems happiest, though, when exploring Allen’s artistic accomplishments. Sadly, despite his enormous talent for making people laugh, Woody tends to disparage comedy as an art form, yearning instead to be known for serious drama. Nor is he easy on himself in general, saying, “The only thing standing between me and greatness is me.” He respects only six of his forty-plus films: The Purple Rose of Cairo, Match Point, Bullets Over Broadway, Zelig, Husbands and Wives, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. David Evanier is far more enthusiastic than Woody himself abut what Woody has wrought.  As he writes, “All the time we thought [Woody Allen] was a neurotic mess, he was playing the ultimate magic trick on us. Broken, needy, an impractical dreamer, a shlepper on screen, in life he was the artist who kept going, was never destroyed, who got it all.”

Meta Carpenter Wilde and the Script Supervisor’s Unblinking Eye

Is there any movieland job more thankless than that of the script supervisor? But directors can’t do without her. Yes, it’s generally a her – for generations she was known in movie credits as the “script girl.” And in the parlance of movie folk, her duties were that of the perfect secretary or the perfect wife: to stand at the (usually male) director’s side and keep him from running off the rails.

I thought about this while listening to a tribute to Tracey Scott, who just died of cancer at the sadly young age of 46. In the course of her career, Scott moved from television into movies, working closely with some of the industry’s most promising directors. Starting in 2013, she plied her craft on Her (for Spike Jones), American Hustle (for David O. Russell, with whom she also worked on Joy), Whiplash (for Damien Chazelle), Foxcatcher (for Bennett Miller), and Black Mass (for Scott Cooper).

But what does a script supervisor do, exactly? It’s not what you’d call a creative job, but rather one that requires precision, a great eye, a talent for record-keeping, and a willingness to go without personal glory. I tried it myself once, while shooting – with a team from Women in Film -- a 60-second PSA for a charity called My Friend’s Place. Standing at the director’s elbow, I was required to document, by way of carefully codified notes, every single take, noting the camera position in each. My notes would eventually be turned over to the film editor, who used them to assemble a rough-cut that made logical and dramatic sense.

My task on the PSA was relatively simple, compared to that of the script supervisor who oversees a 90-minute feature film shot (probably in many different locations) over a period of weeks and months. Experienced script supervisors, like Tracey Scott, keep tabs on every detail of the film-in-progress. They are always on the watch for continuity errors (like a necklace that changes positions in relationship to the collarbone from shot to shot, or a Band-Aid that sometimes appears on the wrong arm). And they know precisely what time of day it needs to be at various points in the story, so that the gaffer can appropriately light the set. Above all, as David O. Russell made clear in an interview following Scott’s death, they serve to keep the director focused on the minutiae of the task at hand.

Script supervisors are usually unsung heroes. One, though, had her own small bit of celebrity. Meta Carpenter, who was then secretary and script girl to the director Howard Hawks, had a serious fling with the novelist William Faulkner, who  in the 1940s was trying to earn money as a Hollywood screenwriter. Carpenter’s 1976 memoir, A Loving Gentleman, details their trysts at what was then  a romantic out-of-town destination, a cozy bungalow at Santa Monica’s seaside Miramar Hotel. Carpenter’s first script supervisor jobs (on films like Hawks’ To Have and Have Not) were uncredited. Later, as first Meta Rebner and then Meta Wilde, she worked on such award-winning productions as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and In the Heat of the Night (1967). She also was a fixture on Mike Nichols’ first films. On the set of The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman recalls her as a stickler for accuracy, who never allowed him to deviate one iota from what was written in the script. He still remembers her objecting, in her soft but firm Tennessee drawl, to the way he read one particular line, saying, “That wasn’t a period, that was three dots.” 

Presidential Politics 2016: Choosing the Real American Idol

Ted and Carly?

Those who tuned in to see Senator Ted Cruz announce Carly Fiorina as his running mate (on the off chance he’s named the 2016 presidential candidate of the Republican Party) were in for a surprise when she started singing. Who knew that the former CEO of tech giant Hewlett-Packard had musical aspirations? But it started me thinking. We’re all totally sick of this never-ending presidential primary season. Who wants to read more about Cruz speeches, Bernie rallies, Trump tweets?  Caucuses schmaucuses – how about something completely different? Something fun and telegenic. Like, perhaps, a TV reality show.

The biggest challenge would be which format to pick. There’s the aptly-named Big Brother: dump all the candidates in an isolated house (Camp David, maybe?) and watch the dogfight. Along the same lines, there’s Survivor: wouldn’t it be lovely to send everyone to some distant island, full of scorpions and other nasty critters, and discover just who is capable of emerging triumphant? And let’s not forget the very weird Naked and Afraid. I suspect that Hillary Clinton would not look presidential if she had to shed her pantsuit and go on a wilderness adventure in the altogether, but it would be instructive to learn which of her male opponents has the balls (sorry!) to compete minus jockey shorts and hair gel. (Of course, if candidates’ spouses were included on this trek, Melania Trump would have a clear advantage, since she seems to be quite comfortable wearing little or nothing. I can’t imagine Heidi Cruz enjoying this, though Bill Clinton would certainly be up for getting into the spirit of things.)

But let’s dial it back a bit, and consider formats that require less nudity and more talent. Carly Fiorina has already made it clear that she enjoys singing. So what about reviving the now defunct American Idol for the duration of the presidential campaign? Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man” would be a natural for Hillary. For the Donald, I suggest reviving a ballad from Frank Loesser’s 1961 hit Broadway musical, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. (You may not recall – I certainly didn’t – that the show is based on a humorous parody of a how-to manual, whose subtitle is “The Dastard's Guide to Fame and Fortune.”) Anyway, the song I have in mind is called “I Believe in You.”  Here are the opening lyrics:

            “You have the cool, clear eyes
            Of a seeker of wisdom and truth;
            Yet there's that upturned chin
            And that grin of impetuous youth.
            Oh, I believe in you.
            I believe in you.”

Yes, the leading man sings the song—to himself, as he’s looking into his shaving mirror. As for the other candidates, I can think of more than one (John Kasich? Chris Christie?) who’d be well suited to warbling “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” 

Or maybe—on behalf of candidates who are certainly tone-deaf from time to time—it’s better if our show is a variation on Dancing With the Stars. I can imagine Jeb Bush scoring with a sedate little waltz. Ted Cruz probably does a mean Texas two-step, and Marco Rubio (who has a Cuban heritage and high-heeled cowboy boots) is surely a whiz when it comes to salsa dancing. Given his kibbutz years, Bernie Sanders might be able to manage a spirited hora. And I’d certainly like to see Dr. Ben Carson do the cupid shuffle.

There’s a brides-choosing-wedding-gowns show I love, called Say Yes to the Dress. How about, this primary season, something like Say No to the Blow-Hard? Or, perhaps, simply Say No to the Schmo?  Works for me!