Waiting for Brando: A disastrous 1961 film production of the Iliad
laphamsquarterly.org
laphamsquarterly.org
> Her father, who owned a travel agency, among many other companies, provided us with first-class tickets to Athens on a KLM “sleeper” flight.
It's true what they say, everybody wants to think of themselves as middle-class
If this woman's father bought her a trip in 1959, then he may have made his money in the 1920s, when the middle class was only just firming up. It would have been correct at the time to think of him as middle class, even though to us today he seems pretty wealthy. That's because his class status was defined by him being a businessperson who presumably did it himself, as opposed to having inherited wealth, land, or title.
The rise of the middle class was the cause of much cultural introspection at the time. There's a lot of thoughtful and beautiful literature about it, like Howards End[1] and The Forsyte Saga[2].
Of course, today "I'm middle class" means "I earn enough to own a car and take a vacation once a year." But that's a modern shift of definition and not quite what it meant for this woman's father in the first half of the century.
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/e-m-forster/howards-end
[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/john-galsworthy/the-forsyt...
I think a reasonable meaning (that the author might accept given the quoted statement) might go like “I live in a neighborhood with a bunch of other successful business owners or highly paid professionals, I must be pretty middle class”. As you rightly point out, that makes you pretty dang successful — more than “middle” seems to imply.
Of course, historically, that is the middle class. But no one cares about history.
From what I can tell, anyone richer than me is clearly not middle class; those bastards are rich. I’m clearly middle class, and hardworking, too. And damn it would suck to be poor in the US.
> Because even if the numbers say that you are doing well, if you don’t feel rich, then it doesn’t matter. You could be making $10M a year, but if you feel like you need to make $20M, then you will feel poorer than someone making $100,000 who only feels like they need to make $50,000.
* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/what-is-considered-rich/
> This is why when I ask, “Who feels rich really?” the answer is—no one.
> Because you can always point to someone else who is doing better.
* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/who-feels-rich-really/
Morgan Housel: "The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, 'I can do whatever I want today.'"
Which is something only those wealthy enough to have paid off their house and have sufficient expenses for the rest of their life or passive income. A reality that has nothing to do with whether you feel rich, it's simply an economic reality
Yeah, but there is still very material difference between these two people. The difference is not just the feeling in the moment. It is difference in "if I get sick, how much healthcare I can pay" or "if I get into legal trouble, can I afford justice or layer" ... and either of those situations will change their feelings quickly.
As a Canadian I do not have this thought at all. I'm sure many Europeans are the same.
The bottom of that 1% doesn't have to worry about spending money for daily things, but going higher, the upper portions can spend on _anything_. So, the difference at least feels large between the rich and "obscenely" rich, as opposed to the 50%ers vs the 75%ers.
Hell, you could make a pretty good movie out of this story, actually.
So he comes up with this plan to do a movie -- having never done such before -- and have her star in it as his idea for how to try to pursue her. At no point does this piece suggest they were ever an item.
This is an excerpt from a book and it sounds like he was borderline a stalker. Ugh.
The rest of the first paragraph describe an interaction that sounds to me like she was probably trying to deflect his interest. He goes on to say he persisted with a tenacity he did not know he was capable of.
If that doesn't sound borderline stalkerish to you, I don't know what to say. We likely won't see eye-to-eye on the topic.
> I was living at my parents’ home in Rockville Centre and feared that asking Zervos to reply to Ed Epstein c/o Betty & Lou Epstein might cast my credibility as a producer into question. Susan’s sorority house at Cornell, Alpha Epsilon Phi, had a similar problem, but Susan found the solution: her father.
> David Brockman, a successful financier, had an impressive address, which I used as my return address.
and:
> I returned to Greece with Susan. She would supervise the design of the costumes, chariots, and other artwork. She took the costume design from vases she found in museums.
She certainly was involved in the project and seems to possibly have known of his romantic interest because she told him when she told him when she had become romantically involved with Willem de Kooning.
If a woman is too picky about completely avoiding men who are interested in her where her answer is definitely no to their romantic interest, it can make it impossible to pursue a career at all and doing so may not even protect her from having to put up with his unwanted attentions.
#NotAllMen, obviously, but it's an excessively common issue for some women.
Stalker is a word better used more carefully in my opinion, for bad people. Not hopeless romantics perusing hopeless relationships.
This was the 1950s and 60s. Women with any career ambition put up with a lot more sexist BS and sexual BS than they typically do today. She may have felt this was an opportunity she could not afford to pass up.
Why are you pushing this dreamed up narrative so hard without a single piece of evidence?
Do you have personal knowledge of something that isn’t included in this story?
Let me reframe that:
If there is no hope she will ever say "yes", he knows that and pursues her anyway, he is a stalker, not a hopeless romantic.
You're free to call it creepy or frightening or anything else, it's just not what stalking is though. You've made up your own definition of the word.
The term “stalking” means engaging in a course of conduct directed at a specific person that would cause a reasonable person to fear for his or her safety or the safety of others or suffer substantial emotional distress.
https://www.justice.gov/ovw/stalking
At some point, someone told me (to my surprise -- they were rebutting some comment I made online) that horror movies tend to have mostly female audiences. A lot of horror movies have plot lines that sound a fair amount like stalking or some exaggerated fantasy version of stalking.
A lot of women suffer substantial emotional distress and fear for their own safety due to the behavior of men they know who will not give it a rest. Men tend to be bigger than women, outweigh them, have a strength advantage, are more likely to have combat training or martial arts classes, etc.
One article I read years ago indicated that when asked what they most feared from a woman, men feared being laughed at. Women feared being killed (by men).
Men may not be comfortable hearing that their behavior can be taken as threatening and scary to women when they think they are just being "a hopeless romantic." But I am absolutely not making up my own definition of anything.
To be clear I wasn't challenging you on how you personally feel, you don't need to justify that to me. And I'm not being pejorative or trying to say your feelings are less valid with "reasonable", just following the legal term.
His own statements indicate he pursued her with a tenacity he did not believe himself capable of, in spite of his first attempt to chat her up going badly. At no point does he appear to have had any success in establishing some kind of romantic relationship to her.
She was far from the only person in this tale to extend him forbearance on the strength of his empty promise that he would get Brando.
The title of the piece mirrors the title of Waiting for Godot, a play in which everyone's thoughts, discussions and actions revolve around a character who never shows up. Brando never showed up but was the reason so many doors opened for the author.
He offered her a leading role at a young age, a role she told him she had always wanted to play. There is no evidence his interest in her was ever reciprocated.
He did this movie largely to have an excuse to remain in contact with her, apparently having no prior experience in the industry. If that isn't targeting her in specific, I don't know what is.
You can't just pick words out of the statute and fit them to thought or behavior. "Targeting" -- of course you can "target" a specific person for a friendship or relationship. That isn't stalking, how else are you going to do it? You have to apply the entire test, and "reasonable person" is one of big ones here.
A general observation I made that If there is no hope she will ever say "yes", he knows that and pursues her anyway, he is a stalker, not a hopeless romantic. and my original statement that the author sounds like borderline a stalker.
At no point did I assert definitively that the author was clearly a stalker. If it looks that way to you, that's perhaps because this is an overwhelmingly male forum and I am getting a lot of replies essentially fairly strongly shooting me down and I happen to be choosing to reply to many of those replies to me.
That's kind of an unfortunate numbers game on HN and it's sometimes a no-win situation if a woman chooses to make a remark on an issue of this sort and it happens to get a lot of push back.
At this point, you are implying that I am not a "reasonable person" and you are doubling down on insisting I did things that I never did. That's veering into territory that the guidelines suggest should be avoided and I am stepping away from this conversation.
That is what I am addressing, whether or not they sound like a stalker based on the article.
> At no point did I assert definitively that the author was clearly a stalker. If it looks that way to you, that's perhaps because this is an overwhelmingly male forum and I am getting a lot of replies essentially fairly strongly shooting me down and I happen to be choosing to reply to many of those replies to me.
I'm not arguing that you would have a tough time proving it beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal court. I'm saying that wouldn't even be a consideration. It would never get to trial because there would not eve nbe probable cause. It's not stalking.
Unless there was anywhere that says or suggests she asked him to leave her alone and he did not, or that he secretly followed or observed her, sent messages or tampered with her property, was violent or threatening around her, or anything of that nature. That might change things. Man going to great lengths to impress woman isn't though.
> That's kind of an unfortunate numbers game on HN and it's sometimes a no-win situation if a woman chooses to make a remark on an issue of this sort and it happens to get a lot of push back.
Whether or not that's true does not change that this is not stalking though.
> At this point, you are implying that I am not a "reasonable person" and you are doubling down on insisting I did things that I never did. That's veering into territory that the guidelines suggest should be avoided and I am stepping away from this conversation.
I do not imply that. I am saying I don't think would meet the legal "reasonable person" test, but there are lots of ways that we could disagree other than simply you being unreasonable. Mistaken in other ways in understanding of the situation, or the statute or the law, for example. Not only that if a person does not match legal reasonable person test in all their feelings on everything that doesn't make them an unreasonable person, IMO.
And the remaining ~200 paragraphs describe an interaction that sounds to me very much like a director and producer collaborating on a doomed Hollywood production with one of his staff and the investors she brought on to the production.
The context provided by the entire rest of the piece is pretty important.