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Uncle Orson Reviews Everything
October 9, 2005
First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.
Helping Out, Golf, Nancy Drew, and Christian Videos
When a disaster like Katrina or the tsunami or 9/11 hits, there is a great
outpouring of sympathy and help. Because there's so much news coverage, we
become aware of the suffering and loss, and good people want to do something
to help.
But in between major disasters, there are many smaller-scale tragedies, and
suffering that will never make the news.
Those who have their eyes open -- and their hearts! -- see the smaller needs as
well, and do what they can.
I recently heard a story about a woman in Eden who learned of a school on the
Navaho reservation in Arizona that lacked even the most rudimentary of
supplies. She wanted to help. But since she lives solely on Social Security, it's
not as if she had a lot of extra money.
But she took this school into her heart and began to ask friends and
acquaintances to donate this or that. Soon she had enough for a boxful, and
took it all to the UPS Store in Eden to have them weigh it for her.
She explained what she was doing, and that she didn't actually have the money
to ship the package yet. She needed to find out from them what the cost would
be so she could go and ask her donors to contribute the cost of shipping.
Soon after she got home, they called her to tell her that the package was done
-- and that the employees at the store, taking her cause to heart, had chipped
in together to pay for the cost of shipping themselves.
She has since sent several more boxes of donated supplies, and now that she
knows the approximate shipping costs, she makes sure to raise the money for
shipping before she goes to the store -- she wouldn't want them to think she
expected such generosity every time.
But it meant a lot to her -- and to me -- that strangers would join in with her
project without even being asked. People who work at UPS Stores are not
famous for being overpaid. But I've learned over the years that some of the
most generous people are those who don't have a lot -- but they also
understand about need, and therefore have all the more compassion.
*
I don't care about golf. So when there's a movie about golfing, I don't go.
(This is the same rule I follow about vampire stories. I think the whole idea of
vampires is so mind-numbingly dull that if I know a story or novel or movie or
videogame or conversation is about vampires, I get away so quickly my shoes
smoke.)
I would provide you with a list of golf movies that I've stayed away from, but I
blot them out of my memory.
There is a set of golf clubs in my garage, but they belong to my father-in-law.
He keeps them here so he can go golfing with his golfing buddies whenever he's
in Greensboro. All of his golfing buddies are friends of mine, but when they're
in golf mode, I don't know them. They don't exist to me. Nor do the golf clubs
in my garage. I know, abstractly, that they're there. But I never see them,
except to avoid bumping into them.
I say all this so it's completely clear to you that I only went to see The Greatest
Game Ever Played because I love my wife and daughter and they were going to
see it. Also, I like the actor Shia LaBeouf, so I thought, Maybe, between naps,
I'll enjoy watching him perform.
You know where this is going, don't you?
I still don't care about golf. But this movie made me care about the characters.
It made me care about the outcome of a game -- a U.S. Open that was really
played a few generations ago.
The movie begins with children who, for various reasons, have their lives
changed by golf. Young Harry Vardon's peasant family is evicted from their
home on the Isle of Jersey to make way for a golf course -- he grows up to be
England's greatest professional golfer. And young Francis Ouimet (a name
almost as hard to figure out from the spelling as Shia LaBeouf [SHY-uh luh-BUFF {"LaBeouf" is French for "the cow"}]) grows up caddying on a golf course
that would never allow someone of his social class to be a member.
Francis is still a child when he meets the adult Vardon, who has come to
America to give exhibitions of his golfing prowess. He reads Vardon's book on
golf in order to perfect his game. And in this movie, because of a few men who
believe in Francis's talent and because of his own skill and passion, Francis
leaves the ranks of the caddies and gets to face Vardon and other champions in
the titular game.
The screenplay is by Mark Frost, the author of the book -- a shocking
precedent -- and directed by Bill Paxton -- you know, the actor who had to say
the sappiest lines in Titanic (which is saying something). The script is simple
and clear, the characters well written. And Paxton, as a director, not only
knows how to get excellent performances out of every single actor, but also
directed amazing camera work.
I loathe directors who do flashy things to make sure you know who's in charge
and how arty and/or edgy they are. But in Greatest Game, while Paxton's
shots are downright flamboyant, it is almost always in the service of making
the golf sequences comprehensible and fast-moving.
Mostly, though, the camera work is about letting us get an idea of what the golf
game feels like from the inside. Instead of thinking, "Cool shot!" about the
camera work, we're thinking, "That's how it feels -- the whole world getting
shut out while you concentrate," or "Yes -- it feels so close and then it looks so
far."
On some shots we ride with the ball (undoubtedly inserted using computer
graphics) and on others we watch the grass torn up. Sometimes we watch
them contest a particular hole; other times we get a quick montage to carry us
through the holes that don't mean anything to the outcome.
Through it all, though, it's not so much the game as the people we care about.
What matters to us most are Francis's relationship with his mother and father,
his growing friendship with his delightful young caddy, his hero worship of
Vardon, his resentment of and intimidation by the rich people who consider
him an upstart; and even Vardon's own feelings about what golf means to him
as a fellow upstart from the lower classes.
It is, in fact, a movie about class warfare. Set in an era when the upper classes
openly disdained the lower as if they were of different species, it's hard to
believe that people could be so blindly cruel -- but they were. We know that
they were only a couple of wars and an income tax away from the breakdown of
those class barriers; but they didn't know. They thought people like Harry
Vardon and Francis Ouimet might be talented, but it didn't make them
somebody.
Don't go see this as a sports movie. See it as a movie about people you can
believe in and care about, movingly acted and beautifully filmed. It's getting
murdered at the box office by the Wallace and Gromit movie, but let's just say
there probably isn't that much overlap between the two audiences.
None of the characters is handicapped and it is neither anti-American, anti-middle-class, nor anti-religious, so it's not going to get any Oscar
consideration. But it deserves to have a place in the memories of people who
love beautiful things.
*
My first memory of reading was in the Nancy Drew book The Mystery of the
Hidden Staircase by Carolyn Keene. My sister Janice was helping me; I
remember running into the word "knew" and, not yet knowing about silent
letters, I pronounced it "canoe," which of course made no sense in the
sentence. Janice laughed and introduced me to one of the great mysteries of
English spelling.
I continued reading Nancy Drew books for many years, raiding Janice's
collection whenever I could. I liked the Nancy Drews better than my older
brother's Hardy Boys and Tom Swift, Jr., novels; the only books I liked better
at that age were the Thornton W. Burgess talking-animal stories.
My parents explained to me that "Carolyn Keene" was a pseudonym, but they
had no idea who actually wrote the books.
Now that mystery is completely solved by the excellent research and writing of
Melanie Rehak -- her real name, I believe. Rehak is the author of Girl Sleuth:
Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her.
Actually, the originator of the Nancy Drew series was Edward Stratemeyer. I
was stunned to realize that Stratemeyer was the originator of practically every
children's book series I ever heard of. The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift and Tom
Swift, Jr., the Bobbsey Twins, the Rover Boys, Bomba of the Jungle -- and
dozens of other series -- all came from Edward Stratemeyer.
At first he wrote all his books himself. But he soon realized that demand far
outstripped the pace of his writing, and so he began hiring other authors to
write books using his outlines.
Because the storylines were all his invention, he considered himself the source
of all the books, and therefore he did not share royalties with the actual writers
of the prose. Instead, they were paid a flat fee of several hundred dollars,
which in pre-Depression America was not bad money.
In return, they produced books of the right number of pages, on time, and then
agreed to keep their mouths shut about who was doing the writing. All the
books were published with pseudonyms, so that if he needed to, Stratemeyer
could change writers in mid-series and the readers would never know the
difference.
Naturally, alarmists regarded these "fifty-cent novels" as a corrupting influence
on children -- it seems that anything children actually like will cause some
mean-spirited grownup to declare it a pernicious influence and try to ban it.
The fact is that these books made readers out of a lot of children long before
Harry Potter came along.
But Rehak's book is not really about Edward Stratemeyer, mostly because he
died only a few books into the most famous and successful and enduring of all
his series: Nancy Drew.
When he died, his daughters, Harriet and Edna, at first tried to find a buyer for
the syndicate. But they soon realized that the Depression, which had just
started, made it unlikely that they would get a serious buyer -- who had the
capital right then? Besides, what was the syndicate except for their father's
story outlines and their list of reliable co-authors?
So the sisters decided to keep the goose laying those golden eggs by writing the
outlines themselves. A few were written during the interim by Edward's
longtime secretary, also named Harriet; but as soon as his daughter Harriet
Stratemeyer took over the running of the office, the secretary retired, and
Harriet and Edna began writing those outlines.
It wasn't very long before Edna dropped out of the running of the business,
though she continued to have strong opinions and to criticize her sister's
running of the syndicate, which led to some hard feelings down the road. Still,
it was Harriet who kept the whole thing alive, and most of the outlines were
hers.
They struggled through the Depression, cutting the payments to writers as the
publishers cut back on their payments. The Stratemeyer sisters themselves,
because of Harriet's good management, never suffered any income loss; but lest
we pity the writers they exploited, it's worth pointing out that Grosset &
Dunlap, their publisher through all those early years, grossly underpaid the
Stratemeyer Syndicate, too, giving them deeply substandard royalties and
refusing to consider any renegotiation.
(A foolish decision, since Nancy Drew is what kept Grosset & Dunlap in
business during the Depression and after; and eventually they lost that
lucrative business to Simon & Schuster, which paid the Stratemeyers
something closer to the value of their work.)
But who actually wrote the words we read in those old books? Through most
of the early history of Nancy Drew, the writer was the redoubtable Mildred Wirt,
who kept the books coming through childbirth, her husband's many strokes,
and her fulltime job for a newspaper in Toledo.
A couple of volumes early on were written by a man, but his work required so
much revision in the main office that the Stratemeyers came back to Mildred.
Then, as various series were dropped, Harriet realized that she might as well
write the Nancy Drew books herself, and stopped farming them out at all. This
enabled her to make Nancy's character exactly what she wanted it to be; for
there had been inevitable creative differences as Mildred felt -- quite naturally
-- that she had as much right to say what Nancy would or would not do as the
Stratemeyers.
In the 1960s, though, Grosset & Dunlap began, without permission (but within
their contractual rights) to drastically revise the Nancy Drew books in order to
update them. The result was sad -- the flair that Mildred and Harriet had
brought to the series was wiped out, and a sort of generic adventure-story
prose took its place.
But few readers seemed to notice. And it did enable the publishers to eliminate
the casual racism that permeated the books. They were, after all, creatures of
their time, and racial stereotypes were simply taken for granted as they were in
movies of the era. By the 1960s, though, American attitudes had changed, and
the racism had to go.
There was no reason that the wit and verve needed to be removed along with it,
but that was the unfortunate truth.
When Harriet died, there was a spate of news stories about the death of
"Carolyn Keene," and because in her later years Harriet had taken to claiming
sole credit for the series, that's all the most reporters knew.
But Mildred finally got her dander up, and with the help of a few reporters her
story then replaced Harriet's version, so that when she died many years later,
the news stories once again reported that the Carolyn Keene had died.
Rehak's achievement is to set the record straight. Both women wrote Nancy
Drew books, and both of them contributed, directly or indirectly, to the other's
work. So even though neither one liked to admit it, the whole series was a
collaboration between them (though we mustn't forget that a couple of men
played a part in creating the series, too).
Rehak is a good writer, and her history, though quite detailed in places, is
always entertaining. She does a fine job of sketching the lives of both women,
and places them into the context of their time. For those of us who loved
Nancy Drew, this book makes everything clear.
It also makes me want to go back and reread the originals. Fortunately,
enough people have regretted the poor quality of the "updates" that facsimile
editions of many of the originals have been made available.
*
Frankly, I dislike most Christian television shows.
The gospel they teach to children is, to me at least, offensively simplistic and
often just plain wrong. And the adult programming puts a monetary value on
religion that seems to me the opposite of Christ's attitude toward money.
That's why we block out the Christian stations on our television. Our children
learn Christianity from us, from scripture, and at church.
So I did not have high hopes for Junior's Giants. I was drawn, though, to the
slogan under the title: "A modern David and Goliath ... kinda." So I checked
out the website (www.juniorsgiants.com) and saw some highlights from the first
episode. They were actually funny. There was wit and honesty in it.
I bought a copy.
In most ways the video lives up to the promos. Junior's family is quirky but
believable. The father is obsessive about the fancy new overflow-proof toilet he
has installed in the house, and the mother and sister and baby are eccentric
and funny as well.
The writing in the sections about domestic life is often hilarious -- my
11-year-old and I laughed out loud many times, though both of us were older
than the target audience.
But ... it's still a Christian video, and my daughter knew what was coming.
"The 'lesson song' is boring," she said. True enough -- in fact, the whole
religious part of the video is the normal mind-numbing trivialization of religion.
The concept is that whenever Junior starts to lose his temper (episode one is
entitled "Anger's Everywhere"), he is suddenly taken out of reality to an arena
where fake newscasters show him fighting with that episode's giant. There's
some humor in this -- mostly satire on sportscasters, but also some cleverness
about the giant.
But the fact is, I wanted to see what Junior actually did in the real world to
control his temper, not some unrelated struggle with a giant that merely
represented his anger. They skipped over reality in order to show us the
concept, and it's a poor tradeoff.
Still, what bothered me most was the shallowness of the religious teaching. It
trivialized prayer by putting it within the ridiculous unreality of the imaginary
giant.
Wouldn't it be better to teach children that prayer is real?
Stopping to say a prayer might distract a child from his anger long enough to
let him get control of his temper, but "saying a prayer" is not enough to solve
truly vexing moral problems. God doesn't just hear a prayer and fix everything
that's wrong in your life. If it were that simple, everybody would be religious,
since the effects would be obvious.
Instead there's effort -- no, struggle -- involved, and I wonder whether it really
helps children to be given lollipop answers to life's problems.
Come to think of it, though, adults like lollipops, too. The title of Don't Sweat
the Small Stuff -- and It's All Small Stuff was so offensively shallow it made me
angry every time I saw it (ooooh ... got to go fight my giant), so it's not as if
purveyors of children's Christian videos have a monopoly on puerile treatment
of deep issues.
The children's videos that I wrote many years ago were closely tied to scripture,
and I played it as straight as the producers would let me, sticking to the meat
of the scriptural story and relying on drama rather than gimmicks to make my
point.
But we have no evidence that the greater realism of the videos I wrote has
made much difference in the marketplace. I wonder if most parents even think
about the quality of the religious programming they provide for their children.
Come to think of it, how many parents monitor any of the television and videos
their children watch?
The children's Christian video market exists, and many people like it, and so
within the expectations of that genre, I have to say that Junior's Giants is
extraordinarily good in the comedy and family-life portions. And during the
moral lesson bits, I never actually had to grind my teeth.
So go to the website and check it out. What's good is very good; what's bad is
average. And that's as close to a four-star review as you're likely to see from
me in this particular genre.
The video is not sold through Amazon. Netflix has it; Blockbuster Online
doesn't. WalMart does. When I first visited the Junior's Giants website, it
provided no information about where to buy it, but apparently they recently
noticed their oversight and now display a prominent link to the WalMart
website.
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