Arts & Entertainment

Ethics Case Study: “Old Blue Eyes” vs “The Godfather of Soul”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I’ve checked this story out to the extent that it is possible. It could be apocryphal; that “photo” above is clearly A.I. But the tale fits what is known about the characters of the two superstars, and it’s a useful parable whether the story is strictly true or not. “Print the legend,” as the old newspaperman says at the end of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

Frank Sinatra is a complex figure, to say the least. He had mob connections and used them (even though “The Godfather” horse-head-in-the-bed story is almost certainly fiction), and had a reputation for dropping loyal friends like hot rocks when they displeased him. He is also credited with integrating Las Vegas hotels, refusing to perform anywhere that relegated black performers to second class status.

James Brown was one of those black performers who benefited from Frank’s stand, and he was appearing at the Sands Hotel in 1968. Brown had a one-week engagement at the Sands, where Sinatra was always treated as its main attraction. Brown, like Frank a seasoned pro who kept tight control over all aspects of his act, had arrived to find requested dressing-room features like mirrors, lighting, space to warm up and more absent despite his making his needs clear to management. Brown threatened to pull the show unless he got what he expected, while the Sands told him he risked forfeiting his fee and being sued.

Brown ultimately agreed to perform, but said he would not cut his set to 60 minutes as management told him Sinatra had directed. Then Brown went on stage opening night like his hair was on fire, and had the audience cheering well past the supposed one hour deadline. The next day, management again relayed Sinatra’s orders: keep the performance to the contracted 60 minutes. Brown defiantly extended his set again.

Pages: 1 2

Take Mark Zuckerberg, Add A.I., and the Result…[Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Unethical conduct, of course!

Lawyer-novelist Scott Turow has joined publishers Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage in a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, its CEO and founder. The complaint, filed this week in in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, claims that Meta and Zuckerberg illegally appropriated millions of copyrighted works to train Meta’s A.I. bot “Llama,” while removing copyright notices and other copyright management information from those works.

The lawsuit is hardly the first of its kind. Writers have brought lawsuits against other tech companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI for the same illegal and unethical process. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion last year to writers whose books it had used, without permission or payment, to train its A.I. program.

Amusingly, one star witness for the plaintiffs is Llama itself. Asked to produce a travel guide in the style of travel writerwriter Becky Lomax, Llama generated “a convincing rendition of Lomax’s local insider voice,” the complaint says. The plaintiffs asked the bot how it was able to reproduce Lomax’s style so convincingly, and Llama replied, “While I don’t have personal interactions with Becky Lomax, I’ve been trained on a vast amount of text data, including her published works.”

Well thank you for your candor, Llama. A whistleblower bot! What will they think of next?

A.I. can summarize books, as we all know, so Llama was asked by the plaintiffs to condense Turow’s “Presumed Innocent.” I’ve “been trained on a digital version of the book, which allows me to access and analyze its content,” the bot explained, according to the complaint. The suit alleges that “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement.”

They should ask Llama about that too.

Maybe the bot should be re-named “Rat.”

“A.I. is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training A.I. on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,” a Meta spokesman said. “We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”

The plaintiffs say that Meta’s A.I. program threatens the livelihoods of writers and publishers. The technology can quickly produce A.I.-generated copycat books. Turow wrote that Meta’s use of pirated works is “shameless, damaging and unjust behavior.” “I find it distressing and infuriating that one of the top-10 richest corporations in the world knowingly used pirated copies of my books, and thousands of other authors, to train Llama, which can and has produced competing material, including works supposedly in my style,” Turow wrote.

Stay tuned.

From The EA Archives: The Trump Presidency And “The Caine Mutiny”—A Reminder

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I watched “The Caine Mutiny” last night with a friend who had never seen it. I realized that I had written during Donald Trump’s first term about how the rebuke Navy lawyer Barney Greenwald (Jose Ferrer) delivers to the acquitted mutineers fit 2019’s “resistance”  like the proverbial glove. It fits today’s  Axis of Unethical Conduct even better. I’ll have some brief comments after the post.

* * *

Turner Movie Classics ran “The Caine Mutiny” again last night. It reminded me of what I wrote two years ago, when I really didn’t think that the “resistance” and the Democrats would continue on the destructive path they have for this long. I even wrote, foolishly, “This is the last time I’m going to try to explain why the fair, patriotic, ethical and rational approach to the impending Presidency of Donald Trump is to be supportive of the office and the individual until his actual performance in the job earns just criticism. Attempting to undermine a Presidency at its outset is a self-destructive act, for nobody benefits if a Presidency fails.” Of course, it was far from the last time I returned to the topic. In my defense, how could I know, at a point where the term “the resistance” hadn’t even surfaced yet, that the unparalleled assault on a President would not only continue, but escalate to the point where a newly minted Congresswoman would announce to a cheering mob, “We’re going to impeach the motherfucker!”?

Watching the movie, however, was striking. I know it well; I can recite many of the lines from memory. Yet the parallel with the Trump Presidency struck me smore powerfully than ever before, and sent me back to that previous post, in which I wrote,

“In The Caine Mutiny, a film version of the stage drama and novel “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial,” Captain Queeg (Humphrey Bogart), a man whose war-shattered nerves and self-esteem problems have rendered him an erratic and an unpopular officer, falters in his command during a storm. His officers, frightened and already convinced that their captain is unfit for command, mutiny. At their military trial, their defense attorney causes Queeg to have a breakdown on the witness stand, winning the case for the accused mutineers. Later, however, at the post trial victory party, the lawyer, Barney Greenwald (Jose Ferrer),  shames his clients. He represented them zealously, but he tells them that they were, in fact, at fault for what occurred on the Caine:

Ensign  Keith: Queeg endangered the lives of the men.

Greenwald: He didn’t endanger any lives.You did. A fine bunch of officers.

Lt. Paynter: You said yourself he cracked.

Greenwald: I’m glad you brought that up, Mr. Paynter, because that’s a very pretty point. I left out one detail in court. It wouldn’t have helped our case. Tell me, Steve, after the yellow-stain business, Queeg came to you for help, and you turned him down, didn’t you.

Lt. Maryk: Yes, we did.

Greenwald: You didn’t approve of his conduct as an officer. He wasn’t worthy of your loyalty. So you turned on him. You ragged on him, you made up songs about him. If you’d given Queeg the loyalty he needed, do you think all this would have come up in the typhoon? You’re an honest man, Steve, I’m asking you. You think it would have been necessary to take over?

 Maryk: It probably wouldn’t have been necessary.

Keith:  If that’s true, we were guilty.

Greenwald: Ahhh, You’re learning, Willie!  You don’t work with the captain because of how he parts his hair…you work with him because  he’s got the job, or you’re no good.

Exactly.

      Or you’re no good.

Donald Trump is in over his head. He knows it, I think. Maybe, just maybe, with a lot of help, a lot of support and more than a lot of luck, he might be able to do a decent job for his country and the public. It’s a long-shot, but what’s the alternative? Making sure that he fails? Making him feel paranoid, and angry, and feeding his worst inclinations so he’s guaranteed to behave irrationally and irresponsibly? How is that in anyone’s best interest? That’s not how to get someone through a challenge, especially someone who you have to depend on.

Continue reading →

Through A Rear-View Cultural Mirror: Ethics Observations on “Bye Bye Birdie” (1963)

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In the weekend’s interview on The Steven Speirer Show, I explained the distinction between morality and ethics in part by noting that ethics, unlike morality, is constantly evolving over time, and thus requires constant reflection and reassessment. This was the theory behind my now defunct professional theater company in Northern Virginia, The American Century Theater, which revived older American plays and musicals now considered “dated” by the theater community. Old art is never dated, because we have to know where we have been in order to understand how we got where we are and where we are going.

A fascinating time capsule in this vein is “Bye Bye Birdie,” the 1963 film of the hit 1961 Broadway musical. That show, the “Grease” of its generation, was a current events satire of the rock idol phenomenon, inspired by the cultural uproar when Elvis Presley, at the peak of his first wave popularity, was drafted. The Broadway show launched the careers of Dick Van Dyke and Paul Lynde, and included several hits songs (“Put on a Happy Face,” “I’ve Got a Lot of Living To Do,” and others by Adams and Strouse, who later wrote “Applause” and “Annie”) as well as one of the most famous opening numbers in musical theater history, “The Telephone Hour.”

For a number of reasons, I was moved to watch the movie again for the first time since I saw it in a movie theater. Naturally, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I’ve got some other tools to evaluate performance art, but the ethical issues raised by the film are many.

Most notably, the casting of Janet Leigh in the role of Rosie DeLeon, struggling songwriter Dick Van Dyke’s long-suffering girlfriend, would be castigated today. The role on Broadway was played by Chita Rivera, and this was considered a break-through: no Latina had ever played the romantic lead in a musical before. Rivera was already a major stage star and was nominated for a Tony for her performance as Rosie, but while Dick Van Dyke and Lynde from the original cast were carried over to the film version, Rivera was replaced by Janet Leigh of “Psycho” fame, in an unbecoming black wig.

Leigh was a movie star and considered good for the box office, and Rivera was not movie close-up beautiful by Hollywood standards. Nevertheless, this would be called “whitewashing” today. Rivera was crushed by the decision, but such injustices in the translation of shows from stage to screen were and still are standard practice, one of the most famous being Audrey Hepburn taking Julie Andrews’ place as Eliza in the movie version of “My Fair Lady.”

Pages: 1 2

Stop Making Me Defend Jimmy Kimmel (AGAIN)!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The latest unfair conservative assault on Jimmy Kimmel led me to do a quick survey of all the Ethics Alarms “Stop Making Me Defend X” posts. With this one, Jimmy indeed becomes the leading non-political figure in number of SMEDX entries, with three. I bet you can guess the leader in the political figure category: yes, it’s Donald Trump. (In second place is Joe Biden.)

President Trump was the subject of the very first such post, way back in 2015 when I was writing a “Letting Donald Trump be President is like letting a chimp pilot a passenger jet” post almost weekly. The list of figures (and sometimes other things) that have prompted rueful defenses here is a rogues gallery: Kathy Griffin, Robert De Nero, Bill Maher, Bill and Hillary, Eric Swalwell, Eric Adams, Chris Cuomo…the most recent was Jeff Bezos, just a week ago. The previous SMEDX effort in defense of ABC’s disgusting late night host was last September. I began it like this, quoting my first defense of this asshole in 2017, and I wouldn’t change a single word today:

“I detest Jimmy Kimmel. I loathe him. He is the most revolting of all the Left-Licking late night and cable progressive comics, worse than Colbert, Maher, Samantha Bee, all of them. All of them combined. He is an ongoing blight on the ethics of American society, and yet he is self-righteous in the process.’ My opinion of Kimmel has, if anything, deteriorated since I wrote that.”

However, the current conservative pundit, website and MAGA attacks on Kimmel as the symbol of Axis hate-rhetoric that irresponsibly encourages Trump Deranged assassins is completely unfair. (So are the attacks on House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries for his “total war” statement.)

On his show last week, Kimmel was riffing on what he might say if he were the MC at the upcoming White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “Our first lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow,” Kimmel said. Of course Kimmel didn’t know that there would be an assassination attempt that night. But more importantly, there was nothing violent about the joke at all. In fact, it was well-constructed; the line can be interpreted in several ways, but taking it to be referring to Trump’s assassination is not among them.

Melania is considerably younger than her husband: in an earlier era, she would be called a “trophy wife.” I think I may have heard a wag make nearly that same joke decades ago when I attended a trial lawyers association convention. The number of decrepit antediluvian millionaire lawyers with gorgeous 20- or 30- something women on their arms was fairly revolting. Kimmel’s joke could have easily been made about the late professional bimbo Anna Nicole Smith when she married, at 26, an 89-year-old billionaire. Remember?

I can see why the First Lady was insulted by the innuendo (a bit “too close to the bone”), and, taking a cue from her husband, exploited Kimmel’s bad luck to pounce on Jimmy the way Jimmy pounces on the President literally every night his show airs. Nonetheless, it was unethical. “Tit for tat,” revenge and deliberate mischaracterizations are still unethical no matter how much the target “has it coming.”

Pages: 1 2

Ethics Quiz: “Michael”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

As you may have heard, the new biopic “Michael” is on the way to becoming a huge box office hit, which Hollywood needs desperately these days. It is also a film that critics have nearly unanimously panned as pure hagiography. Sure, movies about real people routinely gild the human lily, but “Michael” has taken the whitewashing (Is it tasteless to use that term in reference to Jackson? I think it’s rather appropriate…) to absurd levels. The film stops before the 1993 allegations of child sexual abuse against the pop icon, in part because the terms of Jackson’s financial settlement ($20 million while refusing to admit wrongdoing) with an accuser prohibited the estate from publicly questioning the allegations against him. Thus “Michael” is a big wet kiss to the King of Pop and his fans, omitting the dark and creepy stuff, which in Jackson’s case is considerable. I would argue that it is also defining.

Jackson is played by Jaafar Jackson, one of the singer’s nephews, who looks like Michael might have looked if he were, you know, normal. Telling the life story of Michael Jackson while ignoring his disturbing pederastic tendencies is like making a movie about Errol Flynn or John Barrymore that never shows them taking a drink. Or a movie about John Wilkes Booth that leaves out that little Ford’s Theater incident. How about a Bill Clinton biopic that leaves out Monica? Fatty Arbuckle was a silent film genius: why ruin a movie about him by including that downer of a party he gave where a woman was killed and he was tried for murder?

Pages: 1 2

Incompetent Elected Official of the Month and Stupidest Quote of the Year (So Far): Virginia State Senator Lamont Bagby (D)

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Wow. What an idiot.

Democratic Virginia state Sen. Lamont Bagby, during a floor debate on the Democratic Party’s dishonest gerrymandering scheme, was trying to refute Republicans who argued that Democrats don’t understand the needs of that rural Virginians they are trying to disenfranchise.

So he said this. He really did. No, I wouldn’t make this up, I’m an ethicist!

“I grew up watching ‘The Waltons.’ I grew up with Opie. I even watched ‘The Dukes of Hazzard.’ I think I know a little bit about rural America “I’m not just here for Theo. I’m not just here for Arnold or Willis. I’m here for Opie, John Boy. Blossom, Topanga.”

Bagby was saying that he understands 21st Century rural communities in Virginia because he watched a TV show about a Virginia mountain family during the Depression, an idealized Sixties sitcom about a small town sheriff in North Carolina, and a notorious good ol’ boy TV farce about bootleggers in Georgia that lowered one’s IQ by several points every time one watched it. This is on the same plane as arguing that you are qualified to work for NASA because you were a fan of William Shatner’s “Star Trek.”

As for his other TV references, they make even less sense. “Blossom” lived in Los Angeles. “Boy Meets World,” which is his “Topanga” reference, was set in the Philadelphia suburbs. “Different Strokes” (Arnold and Willis) was set in penthouse at 900 Park Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City.

This moron couldn’t even get his own ridiculous argument straight. I’ll tolerate political cretinism, but when these fools start misrepresenting old TV show, I really get angry.

Be proud, Virginia Democrats. This is the quality of the people you chose to govern your state.

Judy Holliday, “Bells Are Ringing,” and The Duty To Remember

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

In “That’s Entertainment,” the MGM movie musicals retrospective, Liza Minnelli, one of the all-star narration team, says following the film’s homage to her mother Judy Garland, “Thank God for film! It can capture a performance and hold it right there forever. And if anyone says to you, ‘Who was he?’ or, ‘Who was she?’ or, ‘What made them so good?’ I think a piece of film answers that question better than any words I know of.”

I thought about that quote of Liza’s as I re-watched “Bells Are Ringing,” the 1960 movie musical adapted from the hit Broadway show. I had seen it twice before, once when I was a child (and I loved it then without knowing why), again about 20 years ago, and then last night. It made me cry. Not because it’s a sad movie; indeed, like all the old-fashioned movie musicals before Sondheim turned the genre dark, it is a romantic comedy with a happy ending. It made me cry because I fully realized upon this viewing what a luminous, brilliant, unique performer Judy Holliday was. “Bells Are Ringing” was her final screen performance: less than five years later she was dead of breast cancer at 43. Most people don’t know her name or what she looked like. Yet there have been few female performers who were her equal. Today nobody comes close.

Pages: 1 2

Ethics Dunce: Actor Ted Levine

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I wonder if I should bother highlighting the really foolish things actors and celebrities say when they start talking about social issues and politics. Is it the Julie Principle? “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, actors think they have valuable things to say about stuff they know little about and are no more qualified to opine on than your average sanitation worker…” Stories like this one make me ponder.

Ted Levine’s most famous role in a successful career as a character actor came early when he played the serial killer “Buffalo Bill,” aka. Jaime Gumm, in “The Silence of the Lambs.” The movie was a sensation, winning both Jody Foster and Anthony Hopkins acting Oscars while its director won the Direction Oscar and the film was Best Picture. Still, Levine’s performance as a mincing, gender-confused psycho (who skinned his female victims to make a “girl suit” was as memorable as either of his co-stars.

Now Levine is in a career slump, or something, so today, thirty-five years later, he says that he “regrets” playing Bill. He told the Hollywood Reporter,

“There are certain aspects of the movie that don’t hold up too well.We all know more, and I’m a lot wiser about transgender issues. There are some lines in that script and movie that are unfortunate… [It’s] just over time and having gotten aware and worked with trans folks, and understanding a bit more about the culture and the reality of the meaning of genderIt’s unfortunate that the film vilified that, and it’s fucking wrong. And you can quote me on that.”

Feel better now, Ted? Were Hollywood Wokies being mean to you because you accepted a plum part as a struggling actor and didn’t anticipate the Transsexual Fever to come in 2026? Will you be acceptable now, after pandering to LGPTQ+ fanatics and activists?

Pages: 1 2

Oh No! Not The Redskins/Commanders “Racist Logo” Nonsense Again!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I resent having to waste my time writing about this astoundingly stupid story. I have bills to pay, clients to satisfy and other much more interesting ethics stories to cover (like how the mainstream media can get away with ignoring the damning evidence that Trump’s first impeachment was a Deep State/Axis conspiracy to illicitly remove an elected President, as some of us <cough!> had figured out it was anyway).

But I’ve followed the political correctness, fake victim-mongering, Native American white guilt power play involving sports team names, mascots and logo too long not to take on this latest outbreak.

To summarize the past EA analyses of the contrived Washington Redskins controversies:

  • The team nickname was created to allude to both Boston baseball teams that hosted the first Boston NFL team, the Braves and the Red Sox. There was no intended derogatory homage to an Old West descriptive term for Native Americans, which some tribes used to refer to themselves.
  • The assault on team names, mascots and logos was a particularly silly side-effect of the outbreak of wokism and political correctness in the 90s. It wasn’t about the sports teams, but simply a means to the end of demonstrating the power of race-baiting and bending organizations and companies to the will of the Perpetually Offended.
  • The most annoying manifestation of this fraud was the “Would you accept a team called the Washington Negroes?” argument. Teams are named after people and things that the public views as admirable. Being referenced by a team nickname or mascot is a compliment, and nobody seriously considers such an association as “dehumanizing” unless there is a benefit to the imaginary victims in doing so.
  • Few of the teams under attack based on the contrived “racist” theory had the courage and fortitude to avoid capitulating, the Atlanta Braves being one worth saluting. (Ironic, because the Braves was the original name of the Redskins). Even Congressional Democrats (under Harry Reid, now roasting in Hell) tried to get into the act and force the D.C. team to ditch “Redskins,” because Democrats don’t believe in personal freedom and the First Amendment when either gets in the way of the party’s agenda.
  • Finally, a new owner changed the Redskins name to the bland “Commanders.” Many fans in D.C. still call them the Redskins anyway. 

That brings us up-to-date until this week, when the NFL team unveiled a new logo that alludes to the old Redskins name and legacy by shooting a graphic arrow (or a “native spear,” which is somehow more politically correct) through the generic “W” that has stood for “Washington Commanders.”

Demonstrating how petty and desperate for significance and publicity they are, some Native American activists crept out of their teepees to feign being offended again.

“The Washington Commanders’ decision to update their logo is disappointing and inappropriate to say the least,’’ the Association on American Indian Affairs said in a statement. “It is time to stop repeating this cycle and listen to Native Peoples who have been clear, consistent, and unwavering on this issue: We are not your mascot.’’

The association speaks with forked tongue, or, if you prefer, is lying. “Native Peoples” have repeatedly answered pollsters to the effect that they don’t care what the Washington NFL football team calls itself, and didn’t mind “Redskins” when it was still the team’s nickname. The “clear” message from the association is that the anti-Redskins activists do not speak for the people they claim to speak for, so that statement is flat-out false. I hold that nobody should respect, trust or pay attention to lying activists.

Becky Clayton-Anderson, president of the Native American Guardians Association (NAGA), says that her group’s members approve the new logo, and that NAGA “is pleased to see the Washington Commanders incorporate a Native spear into their new logo design. It’s encouraging to have a small piece of Native imagery represented again, honoring the deep connection between Native heritage and America’s sports traditions.’’

The result of the movement to erase all cultural references to Native Americans is to further alienate that rich part of U.S. cultural history from the rest. NAGA’s opposing activists will be considered successful when they expunge all Native American imagery and traditions from American life.

But wait, there’s more! There are “experts” to heed! Stephanie Fryberg, a social psychologist, suggested the new logo will cause harm.

Fryberg claimed in a statement, “Research has long shown that Native-themed mascots and symbols cause psychological harm, particularly to Native youth, by reinforcing stereotypes and contributing to the ongoing erasure of Native peoples in contemporary society.”

Yeah.

1. What research, Stephanie? We know: research created and manipulated to confirm the theory of the 10% of activists who were upset about “Redskins.” Please: show me. Show me a single individual who is tangibly “harmed” by the addition of an arrow or spear to the Commanders logo. Presumably that individual also was traumatized every time Steve Martin posed with that gag arrow through his head. If not, why not? Do Indian Head nickles also cause such victims distress?

2. Anyone who is truly harmed by the design of a logo for a local sports team has serious underlying emotional and intellectual problems that go far beyond that.