Dave Weigel, at Bloomberg Politics:
On August 9, 2014, the day that Ferguson, Mo. teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson, Phelim McAleer was watching a play. The Irish journalist-turned-filmmaker was taking in “verbatim drama” at Edinburgh’s annual Fringe Festival. He didn’t really see coverage of the happenings in Ferguson until they had made it into the European media, as a straightforward tale of violence against an unarmed black man who’d had his hands up.
“When it’s simplified like that you can see there’s something wrong with the story,” McAleer says. “If I’d been in the United States, I might have seen the details come out one by one. In the U.K. the story was presented in a storybook way. From the moment I saw it, I thought: That’s a great, great story. Therefore, it’s too good to be true.”
McAleer is attempting to correct that by staging a play. Ferguson, which will play at Los Angeles’s Odyssey Theater next month, adapts the grand jury materials from the case into an interactive drama…
“It’s going to be a dramatized stage reading,” says McAleer. “Witnesses are going to describe what happened, just as they described it in the grand jury room. We’re going to have cast at least 13 people, playing 20 different characters. Very interestingly, the one cast member who won’t be there is Michael Brown, because he didn’t give evidence before the grand jury. He couldn’t. So he’ll be a spectral, ghostlike presence. He won’t be there, but his picture won’t be there. The documents accompany the testimony will be on a large screen.”…
The dramatic goal: Getting the audience to live out the roles of jury members. Performances will end with the audience voting, through some electronic focus-group-style mechanism, on whether charges should be brought against Wilson.
A call to Benjamin Crump, the attorney representing Brown’s family, was not immediately returned….
From the Deadline story:
… “There are 5,000 separate documents in the grand jury testimony and there are 20 different perspectives from law enforcement and forensic experts, but a lot of it was from eyewitness testimony and even Brown’s friend,” said McAleer. “There were liars on both sides and everyone I’ve shown the script to were shocked by the details of it that they didn’t know.”
Why did he decide to do a staged reading of the grand jury testimony? “I’m a journalist originally so that is my first love. That is where my heart is covering crime and bringing the truth to life so it is a natural extension of that,” he said. McAleer previously covered the conflict in Northern Ireland for The Irish News and UK’s Sunday Times. He was also a foreign correspondent with the Financial Times and The Economist covering the post-communist chaos in Eastern Europe. He is currently a regular columnist for the New York Post…
As the boilerplate would have it, No stranger to controversy. McAleer’s first “independent” film was the pro-fracking FrackNation, and he’s now producing an anti-abortion film called Gosnell. But it looks like Ferguson may be his first truthiness experiment in front of a live audience. Whether or not it succeeds (and however McAleer defines ‘success’ here), I suspect it’s a bid to jump into the front ranks of the top-dollar Wingnut Wurlitzer performers.
ruemara
ugh. An asshole. perfect.
Tree With Water
I would advise the producer to open in Compton for maximum publicity.
lamh36
Posting this again, cause it’s fuckin’ hilarious. Mike Pence writes op-ed in WashPo, and the largest paper in the state will have this as it’s front page.
I’m LMAO at the front page of the Indy Star tomorrow…basically 3/4 of the front page is a black box with white lettering that says “FIX THIS NOW”…its the tagline for the front-page editiorial…lol.
twitter.com/CBSNews/status/582742377967816704
NotMax
Damning with faint praise. What more need be said?
lamh36
I’m heading off to bed early tonight. I’ve been busy editing my videos from the Stevie Wonder tour last week for my blog post. it took me basically a full week to finish the video edits and to write up the blog post on the Songs In The Key Of Life tour last week in NOLA.
I don’t know how people do it all day every day. I mean it took me a week to do just one post
So go ahead and check it out. Please excuse my video recording skill, I’m no Spielberg…lol. Also please ignore the talking between me and my friend…lol. We had running commentary all night, but not loud enough to distract from the recording. So go ahead, to the youtube playlist, close your eyes and imagine you were there.
ONE LESS THING TO DO BEFORE I KICK THE BUCKET …SONGS IN THE KEY OF LIFE TOUR!
Villago Delenda Est
@NotMax: Amazing. A tool of the unspeakable scum that is Rupert Murdoch.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
It actually would be pretty interesting to have people read out/act the Ferguson grand jury transcripts and vote on them … if they were completely unedited. Given this asshole’s history, I suspect they’re going to be carefully “redacted” to give the result he wants.
Mike J
@Mnemosyne (tablet): And lets not forget that the official transcripts will include the testimony of a “witness” the prosecutor knew was lying.
Mike E
@lamh36: Seth Meyers just did a great segment on the Pence appearance on This Week, where George Snufalufagus repeatedly asked him “Does this law exonerate florists/bakers/etc from discriminating against gays, yes or no?”…Pence failed to answer all five times that question was posed to him.
Fred Fnord
@NotMax: It’s hard to believe, though, that anyone that full of shit could be ‘regular’.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Just as the Grand Jury itself was played by an ethics free prosecutor acting as public defender for a killer cop.
David Koch
Cruz issues statement supporting Pence and freedom to discriminate.
People think Pence is merely an idiot, but while he isn’t the sharpest knife drawer, this was his attempt to become a martyr for the fundies. Pence was just telling Robert Costa last week he wants to run against Hillary in 2020.
Cruz will use this as a purity test in the primaries, which is great, as Jeb! and Walker will lose moderate republicans if they agree with discrimination or lose fundies if they don’t.
Jewish Steel
Kinda like justice in communities like Ferguson.
jl
@lamh36: Thanks for the explanation. Took me a while to figure out it out when you posted it at an earlier thread. I am slow on the snarkuptake sometimes.
As for the.. what should it be called… documentary, mockumentary, shockumentary… sclockumentary…
I tend to dislike this kind of heightened reality theater. It seems uplifting on when put on a stage, but it usually ends up all whispy evocation and not much else. Lazy stage theater, there I said it, even though many of them have been taking the liberal side. Some of them have been very moving, the one on Matthew Shepard comes to mind. But after I leave, I feel like I don’t really have the reality, and I really don’t have an honest artistic statement from the playwright, or reality stager, or whatever the ‘writer’ is.
But this thing sounds much worse. Especially the idea of having the audience vote at the end. You know who else experimented with audience voting to end a play? No not Adolph, silly. Ayn Rand. Anyway, sounds like a recipe for turning bad theater into disastrous theater in more ways than one.
Cliff in NH
@Mike J:
Have guys on the corners of the stage with red and green signs labeled:
FBI: Whatever they said – true/untrustworthy/suspicious/false
Local PD: Whatever they said – true/untrustworthy/suspicious/false
Witnesses: Whatever they said – true/untrustworthy/suspicious/false
That could make it interesting.
jl
@David Koch:
” Pence was just telling Robert Costa last week he wants to run against Hillary in 2020. ”
I agree that Pence is not the sharpest blade, but I hope that he has a chance to do just that (or whoever Dem is in office), and his implicit prediction is just a case of a blind squirrel bumping into a nut here.
lamh36
@David Koch: Jeb hasn’t already come out and said the Pence did the right thing.
jl
Read the links. I think this guy is a confused mess, and is going to make a confused mess.
I mean, sure, you don’t have to make a whole lot of sense to write or put together a play. Was it Feydeau who said that to be a good playwrite you need a little talent and a lot of malice? Or maybe it was Jarry.
But at least Mamet could write interesting dialogue and make some suspense and mystery type ‘evocative’ that don’t add up to much.
This guy can’t decide whether he is an artist or a journalist. If he thinks himself as a journalist trying to get at the truth through reality based drama, he flunks. Since,,. there is evidence that the prosecutor fixed the case. But from what I read, everything is conditional on what the prosecutor chose to present.
So, I doubt this guy even adds up to a talented ideological hack. I predict it won’t end well. If we are lucky it will be like the ideological reactionary topical rip-offs of The Daily Show. Some rightwing money will prop it up on a crutch for awhile until it limps off into the oblivion of complete disinterest.
Edit: and he is copying a dramatic device that, as far as I know, was introduced to serious drama (as opposed to farce) by Ayn Rand, one of the most atrocious writers of all time.
Gene108
anybody alive in here…nobody but us in here
El Caganer
@jl: He’s neither artist nor journalist; he’s James O’Keefe hoaxing on the proscenium.
jl
@El Caganer: I think the thing would work as a black bitter farce, including the audience voting thing, Sort of a reality theatre of cruelty with audience participation and humiliation. The prosecutor’s own statements trying to defend his choices should definitely be part of the reality that is staged. I’d aim for sparking a
white riot.
I wouldn’t even think about bringing it to Ferguson, MO, If it worked and got people to ripping up the theater, I wouldn’t want the results of staging it at ground zero to be on my head.
Tommy
@jl: I live a few miles from Ferguson. We don’t need this. A conversation about race, yes. Let’s have that conversation. But a play about the darn thing, don’t see how that is a positive thing.
David Koch
@lamh36: wow. just read the article.
Flailing to the right like this indicates his internal polling must be in the shitter.
Joey Maloney
The Star – which was a rag back when it was owned by the Pulliam family, and hasn’t improved with age – endorsed Pence for Governor. Now they’re crying because they got what they asked for. Surprise, elections have consequences. I think some commie Kenyan said that.
Another Holocene Human
@lamh36: I don’t have a WP login so let me just say it here: awesome. I am just a little bit younger than you and let me just say this about Stevie Wonder, not only is he a great musician and a wonderful ambassador, but when I was a kid I thought he was so cool. And he is still so cool.
brantl
So an inveterate asshole, in other words.
SWMBO
@Joey Maloney:
I love BB!
youtube.com/watch?v=x4iHan7BjqY
No One of Consequence
Oi, I read this, and remembered reading something like it here a long time ago. Maybe not that long, but I thought the original word substitution for ‘Kokomo’ was read here by me.
Am I mis-remembering, or should someone point out to them here that:
patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2015/03/31/loveless-ethics-and-the-enormous-mendacious-disembodied-anu…
That was not an original thought? Or am I being petty?
Thanks,
– NOoC
NeenerNeener
I had to google to figure out what “Kokomo” was all about since it was before my time here:
fatmixx.com/2005/08/13/i-wish-i-were-remotely-this-funny/
Yep, I’ll never be able to listen to that the song again without the alternate lyrics running through my head.