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An exploration of the benefits and costs of stubbornness. If you're a 15-year-old boy, and you don't want to fall in love, maybe you can just decide not to do it. Ever. Stories of trying to cheat death, love, political reality, and memory with only an idiosyncratic vision and a lot of stamina.
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Prologue
Host Ira Glass talks with Larry Wegielski. For almost 50 years, Larry and his wife Ve-ve were inseparable. They worked together 13 hours a day, 6 days a week in a liquor store. If Ve-ve had an appointment somewhere in town, Larry would drive her. They even had a slogan: "Side by side, baby." When Ve-ve died, Larry wasn't ready to stop being together, so he came up with a plan to continue spending time with her. Sort of.
Ira interviewed Larry at The Woodlawn Cemetery, located in the Bronx section of New York City. The cemetery is home to many notable deceased, including Miles Davis, Celia Cruz, and Irving Berlin.
Also, Ira was filmed on top of a mountain just outside Breckenridge, Colorado. He kept warm by putting hand-warmer packets in his pants. But it wasn't as cold up there as it should have been, and, in fact, global warming almost foiled this shoot. Rising temperatures in Colorado have exploded the population of the pine bark beetle, an insect that eats and kills pine trees. Nearly half of the state's pine trees have died as a result of this global warming-fueled beetle infestation. So entire hillsides that were supposed to serve as majestic, green alpine backgrounds were dead and turning a weird, burnt rust color. When we were doing our final mixes and color-corrects on this episode, the orange trees looked so strange behind Ira that we were afraid they'd be distracting, and we had to turn them green on the computer. If only global warming itself could be fixed in post-production. |
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Act One.
Joe's 14, and all around him his friends are going crazy: getting crushes, flirting, asking people out, having their hearts broken. Joe doesn't want any of this—the acting stupid, the pain—so he decides just to opt out...and never fall in love.
We shot Joe at his house in Northampton, Massachussetts and at his school, Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter High School.
A lot of the scenes in this story were shot in slow motion using a Panasonic HVX200 (for you film students), which records images and sound directly to a disk instead of to videotape. You can shoot at higher frame rates with this camera, which produces the smooth, high-definition slo-mo with which Joe and his classmates glide through the story.
Appearing in this story:
• Joe Kendrick
• Naomi Klayman—Joe's mom |
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Act Two. And Nothing but the Truth.
Reporter Nazanin Rafsanjani brings us the story of Brad Blanton, a psychologist who founded a philosophy called "Radical Honesty." Brad believes that the way to be happy is to tell the truth all the time. This philosophy helped him help a lot of people as a therapist. But it got in the way a little when, in 2006, he left his practice, ran for a seat in the US Congress, and became that rarest of things: a political candidate who never lies.
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Act Three. Still Life.
Marcus Halevi is a documentary photographer who has photographed victims of war and injustice all over the world. But there's one sequence of photographs, which he took right here in the United States, that haunts him more than any other. Director Josh Seftel is making a film about Halevi's life, and we collaborated with him on this story.
That big machine you see in the very beginning and throughout this story is called a rostrum camera. It's the contraption they used to use in all those Ken Burns documentaries. It creates the effect of panning across an old document or photo—like, say, a beautifully faded daguerreotype of a handsome-but-weary Civil War soldier, with the pan starting at his feet and ending at his sad, sad eyes. The rostrum camera is tipping towards extinction now that everything it could do slowly and expensively and laboriously can be done quickly and cheaply and easily by an off-the-shelf software program. Apple iPhoto even has an effect named after this technique called "the Ken Burns effect."
Appearing in this story:
• Marcus Halevi |
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