Bill Cosby's Crimes Against Cinema

Now that Bill Cosby has been voted out of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts, I thought it might be interesting to briefly comment on some of his most "memorable" films. I do not mean to be flippant about the whole subject or to devalue (with my blog title) the importance of the testimony of women against Cosby. To the contrary, I think his films offer an interesting counterpoint to the narrative that Cosby successfully hid behind the facade of his "perfect dad" as seen on The Cosby Show or the fun-loving, Pied-Piper-like character he embodied for Coca-Cola and Jello ads. If we had only paid attention, we would have seen this awful man on full display in some of his most cynical and heartless cinematic offerings.

Let's start with the easy target. Leonard Part 6 is famous as an example of a well-funded movie gone horribly wrong, a disaster of a film that even Cosby urged people not to see.  The film critic for the Washington Post said the best thing about the movie is that "we didn't have to see Parts 1-5." The movie was partly funded by Coca-Cola, so there's plenty of product placement, including Cosby drinking a Coke.

This kind of product placement gets to the heart of what I mean about these bad movies revealing something about Cosby's character. Anybody can make a bad movie, but to be the man behind such a soulless, awful movie clearly designed (and miserably executed) to separate moviegoers from their money says something about the inner workings of that man. This is not what art should be about.

If you think Leonard Part 6 is low-hanging fruit, let me remind you of a little turd-basket called Ghost Dad, which came out just a few years later, as if Cosby hadn't learned his lesson. Film critic Roger Ebert, while naively wondering how someone like Cosby gets involved with a mess like this, called it a "desperately unfunny film."  Maybe we overestimated and overvalued Cosby's funniness, because he was good at putting together marginally quality TV like The Cosby Show and Fat Albert. But that's TV. TV proves nothing.

This is an original photo of a TV. Maybe somebody
watched "Fat Albert" on it.

I have a personal grudge against Bill Cosby for inflicting Ghost Dad upon the world. When the film came out, I was working at a summer camp. This was long before the Web as we know it, and the summer-camp staff lived and worked in relative isolation during the week -- very little TV or reading of newspapers. We would go into town on the weekend and see whatever movie seemed best considering the limited viewing times. (This was back when mid-size towns like San Marcos, Texas, had a single theater with maybe 4 movie screens.)  Mostly it was nice just to sip iced drinks in the cool of the air-conditioning, but we tried to pick entertaining films.

So in addition to a lot of other bad films (such as Lifeforce), this method of blindly picking films led to Ghost Dad one Saturday. I wasted my $4 to see Bill Cosby do slapstick as a ghost trying to continue to take care of his kids (or something). I remember it being awful, and I remember being annoyed that I had spent my hard-earned cash on this dreck while wasting precious Saturday off-time. I never blamed director Sidney Poitier for this, though god knows what he was thinking. I blamed Bill Cosby. I blamed him for not being funny and for thinking we would fall for this crap. He's the one we trusted, just based on those ads for products we knew were good (though this was also just a few years after Coca-Cola had its PR disaster with New Coke) and who had been behind Fat Albert, which we had all liked pretty well. What the hell was this crap? The Cosby Show didn't matter that much to me as an older teenager at the time, but I could see the man was an icon. Why was he selling us movies like this? 

This is an original picture of a Diet Coke and muffaletta in New Orleans,
Bill Cosby spent years as the spokesperson for Coca-Cola and Jello. He also shilled for Kodak and Texas Instruments.

Head of the Class

The 1980s TV sitcom Head of the Class has been playing late at night on one of the broadcast subchannels in Houston. I have memories of watching this show and liking it at the time, which concerns me in that I believe it was broadcast on Fridays. What was I doing watching TV on Friday night?

The show centers on the relationship between an unconventional, 1960s-holder teacher (Mr. Moore, played by Howard Hesseman) and a special class of gifted students who are allowed to pursue individualized programs of instruction and inquiry. Although Hesseman famously trashed the show and seemed to think it didn't do enough to rise above being a mediocre, formulaic sitcom, I think his perspective was flawed. There were definitely stereotypical aspects of the show (the Lucy-Ethel antics of Dennis and Arvid, and the introduction of new and "sassier" characters as the series continued), but it was atypical and aspirational in other ways.

For starters, the show depicted an interesting model of progressive education, focused on Socratic discussion. In addition, at least in the name of the school's program (Individualized Honors Program) and in the way the students presented themselves (one had a computer, and another always sat on his desk), it also dramatized a model of student-centered learning that we have rarely seen on TV. In a more general sense, too, since many of the plots deal with Mr. Moore helping students navigate social problems and become more well-rounded individuals outside of the class, the series illuminated some of the problems that gifted students face, particularly when they are left to their own devices and presumed to be doing fine simply based on the evidence of grades. Advanced and gifted students often struggle socially, and they need assistance in realizing the potential of their gifts and understanding the larger importance of living a meaningful life. As the recent book Off the Charts reminds us, often gifted students, while advanced for their age, end up in more "average" position later in life. Such students need to be prepared for the complexity of such a journey.

The series also featured pointed political humor, timely for its day but now dated, such as jabs at then-vice-president Dan Quayle (of the three or four episodes I watched recently, every episode featured an insulting joke aimed at Quayle). If I remember correctly, poking fun at Quayle was sort of easy sport at the time, and probably not that controversial, but it was still more topical than most sitcoms were willing to be. (Since topical humor dates a show, it's often avoided in sitcoms seeking to preserve maximum syndication potential.)

Perhaps most importantly, though a subtle attribute of the show, in between the more personal plots and conflicts, the characters touched on and discussed many intelligent topics, with accurate references to Abraham Lincoln, FDR, World War I, and other historical events and persons. Even though this material was usually in the background or used as a humorous parallel (FDR and his relationship with his wife was referenced as two characters argued about their relationship, for instance), the allusions were not "dumbed down" and reflected careful and on-point knowledge and research on the part of writers. Sometimes, as in one episode that involved an extended allusion to Melville's short story, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," the intelligent reference point was even used as a turning point for the plot.

Hesseman thought the show turned out to be just another silly sitcom that didn't live up to its premise, because of its three-camera format, bright lighting, and insistence on formulaic joke timing, but it was this kind of content that elevated the series and made it brighter than most shows on at the time. Even a relatively silly romantic plot, such as the retroactively-famous episode involving a young Brad Pitt in a guest spot as the not-so-smart boyfriend of Maria, made an important, often-ignored point about the need for young women to own their intelligence and for all of us to be honest in our relationships.

Hesseman was wrong when he said that television would never aspire to become great or more daring than it had been in the past; since this series aired, we've seen a renaissance in quality-TV programming (alongside a parallel nadir in the form of reality TV). He also misjudged the quality of the show that he helped to make a success, even if it was only for a short while. 

Donald Trump's Misspellings

As the  Twitter frenzy in August over Donald Trump's confusing "heel" with "heal" shows, the current president is prone to misspellings that seem to be the result of frantic and careless tweeting.  Anybody can make an occasional typo or misspell a word, and as the book by Marilyn Vos Savant and others have argued, bad spelling says little about a person's intelligence. Maybe he has a "disorganized" and distracted or scattered mind, but that is not the same as being unintelligent.

For Trump, as some gleefully pointed out in this particular case, the misspelling may be a kind of Freudian slip. Because the mistakes are made repeatedly, it seems unlikely to just be a result of being rushed, although rushing with public statements made via such a public form as Twitter is never a good idea.

His dismissal of the importance of regular spelling mistakes reveals that he doesn't quite understand or care how such mistakes might hurt his credibility with a broader audience. More likely, and more importantly, the continued typos this far into his presidency reveal a kind of isolation and lack of process. As stated, bad spelling is not in and of itself an indication of lack of smarts, but an educated writer at least learns to know when he might need to take additional time, or get help with proofreading. You should learn what kinds of errors you are prone to make and work to avoid making them in print.

As Internet commenters have noted, this may in fact be a rather trivial matter to focus on, but it is not the spelling that matters as much as how these kind of repeated errors indicate some larger issues at work.

Of course, other authors have been more meticulously cataloging the president's errors, some as a springboard for discussing language issues. (His aggressive use of quotation marks is particularly amusing.) On a darker note, some columnists have presented arguments for Trump's cognitive decline based on his struggles with language; Charles Pierce's piece makes a particularly compelling case that squares with my own experiences. 

Either way, if the president continues to be convincing to a certain percentage of people in spite of these errors, it reinforces the idea that we live in an increasingly post-literate society that places undue value on emotional rhetoric and even distrusts overly polished prose. This is not a new development in rough-and-ready America, which has always had a strong anti-intellectual vibe, but it is disturbing to see it codified via social media and the Internet through such official and powerful channels.