Horowitz either didn't realize he was going to be debating someone (as opposed to giving a speech) or didn't realize he was going to be debating a libertarian (as opposed to a conventional liberal or leftist), and a few weeks before the event he called me to try to get me to pull out. Debating someone who might be construed as another member of the political right was not on his agenda; he didn't like how that might look in the media. (This point was moot, since as far as I know there was no press coverage.) He proposed instead a "private" debate, to be held before a select audience either after or before his public speech.
The head of the college libertarian club refused to co-sponsor such an affair and instead proposed a slightly revamped version of the initial idea, in which the debate would be billed as a "discussion" and the topic would be broadened from the Academic Bill of Rights to academic freedom in general. Horowitz agreed and so did I, though it left me a bit uncertain as to just what I was going to be addressing when I spoke.
The next day I privately circulated an account of the evening. After Horowitz passed away, I dug it up to refresh my memory of what had happened. I did not post it here immediately, because it didn't feel like the sort of thing to publish right after a man died. But now more than a week has passed, and so—in the interests of the historical record, and also because it's kind of funny—here it is. I have fixed a few typos but otherwise have not changed a thing:
* * * * *
He very nearly didn't show up. The student who picked him up in DC had his car break down on the way to UMBC. Apparently someone else was following in the car behind him (part of the crack Horowitz security team no doubt), but despite this he was still delayed. At one point we got a call about him from a police station, Lord knows why. But he did finally turn up, half an hour late, and delivered a rambling talk to the forty-odd attendees in which he said (I paraphrase) "I'm going to show you how you're not getting both sides of the story. I'm going to give you some conservative views that I'm sure you're not getting in the classroom." He then gave some garden-variety libertarian-conservative comments about the inner city, DDT and malaria, and one other topic that I've already forgotten. When it was my turn to speak the first thing I did was ask how many people *had* heard these views. As I expected, nearly everyone raised their hands. (I had asked the heads of the campus Republican and libertarian clubs before the talk what the state of intellectual diversity on campus was, and they both said, "Actually, it's pretty good.") If I won the debate, it happened right then.
Or maybe I won it way before the talk began. At the end of the evening, a couple of the College Republicans who organized the thing complained to me about what a prima donna Horowitz had been. They also thanked me for actually sticking to the topic when I spoke.
But it was a civil discussion, and we agreed about a number of things. (It's hard not to when so much of his speech is given over to talking about how inner city schools are mismanaged and how banning DDT hurts people in Africa.) The main difference between us was that he seems to think it's inappropriate for a college professor to ever spend time presenting a political point of view in class. He's also opposed to putting political cartoons on doors. Someone asked him about his, um, polemicist streak, and I took the opportunity to razz him about an article he'd written on an antiwar march that he had headlined "100,000 Communists March On Washington To Give Aid and Comfort to Saddam Hussein." (I also asked him if he still wanted to add political and religious diversity to Title IX, and he said he'd given up on the idea.)
The most bizarre part of the evening was dinner, though. Mostly the conversation was dominated by an elderly Libertarian activist who's a fan of both Horowitz and Reason and who, like most Libertarians, loves to talk. (I didn't mind this, as I wasn't really up to making a lot of conversation with my sparring partner.) But there were other exchanges as well. Horowitz had said during his speech that ordinarily—when his car doesn't break down—he comes to campus early and spends hours interviewing students about the state of affairs on campus. I hope his interview method doesn't ordinarily consist of trying to browbeat students into seeing that they're being discriminated against—why, how much money do you get compared to the campus gay and lesbian group?
"Actually," says the libertarian, "we get more." And he begins to explain how student fees are distributed on campus, and to suggest that the culture of UMBC isn't much like that of UCLA or the University of Wisconsin.
"I'm shocked," says Horowitz. "That's very rare." But then he seems to forget what he's been told, because he goes back to his main theme of the evening: the fact that the one administrator at the university who attended the debate didn't approach him to introduce himself afterwards. This was an insult, he kept saying—not just to him, but to all conservative or libertarian students on campus. "If Angela Davis were here, this room would be packed with deans."
"I don't think it would," says a student. "It's not a very political campus."
"Oh, it would," says Horowitz. "You don't see how you're being insulted. You don't see how all this is connected. I go to campuses all the time, but I'm almost NEVER invited by the administration, and the administrators almost NEVER introduce themselves to me. I could make three times, FOUR times as much as I do now if I were a leftist."
There was also a loud conversation at dinner about just what was good and bad for black people in America. The only black person present was the lady silently collecting our dishes. I abstained from that one.
I'm supposed to speak today on the question, "Does radio have to be lousy?" Before I can answer that question, though, I should probably address another one: "Is radio lousy to begin with?"
The answer to that is going to vary from person to person, since we all listen to the radio for different reasons and since we all like different sorts of programming. Furthermore, it's not enough to say that most radio is lousy, because the important point isn't whether we like everything that comes out over the dial. One consequence of great diversity is that whatever you like will probably seem to be drowning in a sea of trash. What's important is for the stuff you want to be out there and for you to know where and how to find it.
That said, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that, yes, radio really is lousy—or at least a lot lousier than it could be and should be. I wrote a book about this, and the closest I've gotten so far to a negative review came from the conservative magazine Chronicles, which suggested that maybe there's more choices on the radio band than I was willing to admit. I quote:
"A survey of the average metropolitan area will yield broadcasts in Spanish, Korean, and Russian; sports talk shows; Gregorian chants; country and new country; classical music; National Public Radio; soft rock, hard rock, jazz, blues, oldies, classic rock, and Christian rock; fundamentalist preachers railing against all rock music as a tool of the devil; evangelical answer men telling listeners that they can't lose their salvation; Jewish geologists admonishing callers to sober up and take responsibility for their pitiful lives; call-in sex-advice shows; and outraged Republicans and libertarians whipping their listeners into a froth over Democrats, moral outrages, and Big Brother."
Now, that's an extraordinary list, in part because it describes an "average metropolitan area" that doesn't exist. Most cities do not have a Russian-language station or a program devoted to Gregorian chants, and in a lot of places you can't even get jazz or blues—or if you do, it's only for a few hours a week. There is a lot of variety out there: There's around 11,000 stations on the AM and FM dials, with dozens of formats for listeners to choose from; and even if there's no Russian station in your listening area, if you're in a big city there's a good chance that there'll be at least one station that offers non-English, non-Spanish programming. But you'd be shocked at how little variety there is within those stations. I went back to my old high school in North Carolina late last year, to help some students put a station on the air. We toured some of the local broadcasters, and the program director at one of them, an oldies station in Durham, was just beaming when he told us how big his music library was. Most places only have about 400 songs to pick from, he told us, but at this station, there were 1200 songs.
Later on, we dropped by the Duke college station, which is very good—a bunch of kids playing interesting and unusual music and doing a good job of it. I mentioned what the oldies guy had told us, and his jaw just dropped. That station—a tiny little place—had thousands of LPs and CDs crammed into it. The idea of limiting themselves to just 1200 songs was just completely foreign to them. But unfortunately, stations like that are fairly rare. For the most part, what we see out there is diversity without depth: an ether carved into a hundred niches, each of which is only an inch deep.
There's an even bigger problem with the claim that American radio listeners have enough diversity. It's true that in every American city there's a number of formats to choose from. But in every city, there's something else as well: a deafening silent sound of all the things that aren't being broadcast.
I'm going to give you samples of those things.
* * * * * * * * * *
play Wilmouth Houdini: "Uncle Jo' Gimme Mo'!"
We’ll start with something old. This was calypso in the days before Belafonte—the Arhoolie label, which put this out, collects all sorts of amazing folk music of the past and present, along with various ethnic flavors of pop. Most of it won't turn up on the radio.
play Bhundu Boys: "Ring of Fire"
African music. Anyone recognize this song? It's a cover of a Johnny Cash song—from Zimbabwe, where Dolly Parton and Don Williams are very popular. There’s very little African music on American radio, and what there is can't possibly reveal all the variety of music from that continent—a case in point.
play Marius Cultier: "Ouelele"
Where the Bhundu Boys were mixing Zimbabwean music with American country-western, this fellow from French Antilla was mixing the local sounds with American funk and jazz.
By the way, what I'm doing right now is itself something that's increasingly rare on the radio: I'm actually telling you what you're listening to.
play Orishas: "Represent"
Another combination. In this case, it's Cuban hip hop—or Cuban-American, anyway. I actually did hear this on the radio, in fact that's how I found out about the record, but it was a tiny college station in California—much as I love the Buena Vista Social Club CDs and what they've done for Cuban music, the way it's been presented, especially on public radio and public TV, has given the false impression that Cuban music (and traditional music in general) are frozen in time, and that they need to be quote-unquote "preserved." I'm all for preserving the music of past, but vibrant musical traditions evolve, and part of how they evolve is by getting influenced by the other music around them, even if the results don't fit into any obvious radio formats or marketing categories.
play Wally Brill: "A Loop in Time"
This is even more unusual. A DJ took took some ancient 78 rpm records of Jewish cantors, and remixed them. You might hear stuff like this in a progressive dance club, but it's pretty unlikely you'll hear it on the radio. The thinking is that people want to dance to electronic dance music, but not listen to it in the car or anything like that. Of course, there's people who've tried it: I know a fellow, Jerry Szoka, who combined the two, by setting up an unlicensed radio station in a gay dance club he owned and broadcasting the evening's entertainment to his listeners in Ohio—he had a fair number of listeners, but eventually the FCC shut him down. We'll talk more about cases like that later on.
play Jorge Ben: "Ponta de Lança Africano"
If you recognize this song, it's probably not because you heard it on the radio. It's because it was used in an Intel commercial. These days, the people who pick music for TV ads are actually more daring than the people who pick music for radio playlists.
In case you're curious, this is a Brazilian rock song. It came out in 1976, though most Americans didn't get a chance to hear it until David Byrne put it on a collection of Brazialian pop he pulled together in 1989.
play Muslimgauze: "Romania Abuse"
I want to jump back to electronic music for a second. At least the dance stuff gets played in clubs. Music like this, which isn't really very danceable, has a very devoted audience, believe it or not. It's really flourished online, but you're not likely to hear it on the radio. Some of you might think that's a good thing, and while I like this CD, I have to admit that the chief use I've put it to is to blast it when the neighbors are being too loud. But barring this stuff from the airwaves isn't very fair to the people who like it, and more importantly, to the people who might like it if they stumbled on it while scanning through the dial but aren't exactly about to go looking for it, since they don't know it exists.
play 3Tripper: "My Unfinished Novel"
This, by contrast, is really good pop, with clever lyrics by a local band from Hawaii that releases their own music. You can order it from MP3.com. Leave aside the fact that it's not likely to be a hit in general, and consider instead the fact that it's not likely to get much airplay in Hawaii itself. There are exceptions, but the days of the "regional" hit are mostly over, at least as far as radio is concerned, which is a real shame.
play Orson Welles: "Dracula"
Radio drama is pretty much dead as well. Some public radio stations will play old serials or plays like this one, which is also available online by the way, but you can count the number of stations regularly producing new radio dramas on one hand.
play Carl Stalling: "Porky in Wackyland"
I'm just tossing this one in—it's the score to a Porky Pig short called Porky in Wackyland, one of the best short films ever made. Everybody loves this music, but heaven knows you aren't likely to hear it on the radio. In general, film music is rarely heard outside its original context, though occasionally a noncommercial station will devote a program to it. This was composed by Carl Stalling, who's regarded in some circles as one of the most creative forces in twentieth-century music.
play Soggy Bottom Boys: "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow"
This time I'm cheating: You can hear this music on the radio. It's the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou. The amazing thing is, this sold millions of copies without any radio airplay, became the best-selling country music album in the United States, finally got some airplay on TV, and still it's considered daring to play it on commercial country radio. The market is finally responding to it, as you can tell from the success of quasi-bluegrass bands like Nickel Creek, but the fact that radio was so timid, even in the face of such a big hit, tells you a lot.
Don't let public radio get away with claiming that they're the home of bluegrass and old-timey music. WAMU in Washington used to have a bluegrass format, but now it’s all-news except on the weekend, even when that means playing the exaxt same programs you can hear on another public station across town at the same time. Given that, it's possible that on balance, public radio is playing less of this kind of music now than before.
play Merle Haggard: "Bareback"
Meanwhile, bluegrass and old-timey are hardly the only kinds of country music that have had a hard time getting on the air. There's a whole movement of so-called “alternative country” music, some of it ultra-traditional and some of it crossbred with punk rock. This is arguably the most interesting and exciting music coming out today, but it's almost entirely absent from the airwaves. What's worse, onetime commercial gods of country music, like Merle Haggard, have been crammed into this category, now that most commercial country stations either ignore them completely or play only a bare handful of well-remembered hits. Haggard put out this album, If I Could Only Fly, on a small independent punk rock label the year before last. It's the best work he's done in 20 years, but it didn't get much airplay, certainly not on mainstream country radio.
* * * * * * * * * *
There's two more things you usually can't find on the radio, and in some ways they're the most unfortunate gaps. One is a station that wouldn't simply play one of the styles of music I just played for you, but would mix and match all of them in the same show. This is called "freeform," and it used to be fairly common, but now is limited to a certain number of noncommercial stations and less than 10 commercial ones. There are a number of different definitions of freeform radio out there, but they all require the DJ to pick his own records, something that's incredibly rare these days.
The other thing you usually can't find on the radio is a place for you to do what I just did: to stand in front of a microphone and be a DJ. If you want to play CDs on the air, as opposed to through a couple of loudspeakers in a hotel, you'll find that it costs a lot of money to get the government's permission. A radio dial that isn't lousy wouldn't just give us more freedom to choose among different styles of programming. It would allow us the freedom to create programming of our own.
So what do we hear on the radio instead? On some stations, you're not just going to have trouble finding DJs who pick their own records. You're going to have trouble finding DJs at all. Some of you might have seen an article in The Wall Street Journal last month about the biggest commercial radio chain, a behemoth called Clear Channel, and its efforts to propogate a format called KISS-FM. Around the country, 47 different stations with different call letters are all calling themselves KISS-FM and offering pretty much the same programming (though with some variations). On these stations, prerecorded DJs add bits of local color without ever stepping into the town that hosts the station that's broadcasting them. Clear Channel, by the way, has been trying to establish a trademark on the phrase KISS-FM, which sometimes means threatening lawsuits against other stations that call themselves KISS — except for the station that has the actual call letters KISS-FM, which isn't owned by Clear Channel and follows a different format. You'd think that if there were a trademark to be claimed, that's the station that would hold it.
Now, some people would point to KISS-FM and say, "Obviously, listeners are satisfied with this kind of radio. The market has spoken." But the market hasn't spoken, and not every listener is satisfied. For more than a decade, according to the analysts at the industry publication Duncan's American Radio, the percentage of people who listen to the radio has gone steadily down, except for one brief uptick during the talk-radio boom of the early '90s. Meanwhile, radio broadcasting is encumbered with a ton of regulatory barriers which have prevented upstart stations from coming on the air and transmitting something new. Even direct-satellite radio, which promises to tremendously increase the number of listening choices we have, is limited. The National Association of Broadcasters fought hard to prevent it from going on the air at all, and for all the new channels that are now being unveiled for those willing to pay for them, the Federal Communications Commission, under industry pressure, only granted two companies the right to engage in satellite broadcasting.
At any rate, we could have a lot more variety even on the AM and FM bands, without paying for a special satellite receiver, if only the FCC would ease up on its entry barriers. There's a lot of talk about radio deregulation these days, and that can obscure a very important point: We do not have a free market in radio broadcasting. In a free market, you could go out this afternoon, buy some equipment, and start broadcasting whatever you want, and as long as you weren't seriously interfering with someone else's signal, no one would shut you down. The technical cost of starting a low-power FM station is within most Americans' reach: anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand, depending on how elaborate a station you want to put together. The legal cost is much higher. Your startup costs are going to be $100,000 at the very least. If you get a low-power FM license, it may be less, but as I'll explain later, most Americans are in no position to get a low-power FM license.
What sorts of stations are kept off the air by these entry barriers? Would they be interesting and lively, or would they just be more of the same? It's surprisingly easy to answer that question, because for the last decade or so, a lot of people who don't have $100,000 to spare have gone on the air anyway, without the Federal Communications Commission's permission.
Now, as you might expect, some of them did programming that was of no possible interest to anyone but themselves. Here's a sample:
[play excerpt from aircheck]
I actually listened to this entire tape once. I can't imagine that anyone else has, except maybe the guy who made it. Stations like that one tend to drift off the air long before the FCC notices them—in this case, the station shut down because some of its equipment broke. The really good unlicensed stations find a niche for themselves in their communities, and stay on the air until the government asks them to cut it out. Some of them keep broadcasting even then.
Consider Human Rights Radio in Springfield, Illinois. This was started by a blind guy in a housing project, and originally, you couldn't hear it outside the boundaries of the John Hay Homes. Along with playing music and books on tape, Human Rights Radio covered local issues very intensely, especially police brutality. In January 1989, for example, after some Springfield cops beat up a boxing coach and his son, the fellow who started the station, M'banna Kantako, interviewed the victims in their hospital beds and then broadcast the tape.
Later that year, a domestic dispute turned into a hostage crisis and a hundred or so heavily armed cops showed up at the housing project. The standoff lasted for three days, and Kantako covered the whole thing live. It ended when someone started shooting, and three people from the projects were killed. Kantako investigated the standoff and the shootings, and concluded that by overreacting to the initial dispute, the police had paved the way for the deaths. He also probed the question of whether it was police bullets that had killed the three dead. Needless to say, no other local radio station, or any other media outlet, was giving these events this kind of attention.
In the early days, Kantako also trained kids from the John Hay Homes in the basics of radio production, though this project fell off when those same kids started getting harassed by teachers and the police. Eventually, the John Hay Homes were demolished, but the station is still on the air, covering issues of interest to the poor people of Springfield.
Another station: Excellent Radio, run by Charley Goodman in downtown Grover Beach, California. Only two weeks after its debut in 1995, a storm knocked down all the region’s radio towers except for Goodman’s. Charley monitored his scanner closely, passing storm news and emergency announcements along to his listeners. Not long after that, Goodman asked the city council if he could broadcast its meetings live to his listeners. After a few months, he got the go-ahead. The city attorney understood that the station had no license, but that, he felt, was a matter between it and the FCC. California’s open meetings act, on the other hand, guaranteed the station the right to cover the council.
The station's volunteers ranged from skate punks to retirees, from white hippies to Spanish-speaking cumbia DJs. There was an afternoon kids’ show called Treasure Ivan, hosted by the 1960s tunesmith Ivan Ulz, who'd written songs for the Byrds, the Four Freshmen, and several other pop groups. There was a swing show, a ska show, and a weekly helping of “pure pop for now people.” One pair of programmers started interviewing the stars of the World Wrestling Federation. And a retired teacher who'd become an environmental activist had a show called Pollutions—Solutions. Once more, the fact that the station was technically illegal didn't keep local officials from coming on her show—for members of the Planning Department, for example, to talk with their constituents about the contamination of the nearby dunes. Also, unlike Human Rights Radio, Excellent Radio maintained cordial relations with the police, who faxed it the same press releases they sent to all the other local media. The station even had a retired highway patrolman on its staff. He did a jazz show.
Some of you might remember an article Michael Lynch wrote for Reason a couple of years ago about pirate radio in Florida. (Pirate radio is another name for unlicensed radio. Some unlicensed broadcasters regard it as a term of abuse, but others have embraced it.) One of the stations Michael mentioned was Hot 97.7, based in Liberty City, better known as the Miami ghetto. This station was run by a fellow named Brindley Marshall, a.k.a. Bo the Lover. Bo used to be a gangster; back in 1984, he even managed to smuggle a gun into a courtroom. After five years in prison, though, he turned his life around, and became one of the most popular disc jockeys on the Miami club circuit. Hot 97.7 first went on the air in 1996, broadcasting from a warehouse called the Pure Funk Playhouse. At first it was a low-power station, but by the time the FCC shut it down, it was transmitting at 2,000 watts and covering all of Miami and then some.
Now, Liberty City is the poorest, most run-down part of Dade County. Jobs are scarce there, litter covers each corner, drug abuse is rampant, and crime is high. The Pure Funk Playhouse is only a few blocks from the dumpster where a little girl was killed in the crossfire between rival gangs. For a while, the local cops set up a camera in an abandoned bank across the street, to keep an eye on the young blacks who’d hang out in front of the Playhouse all day long. According to Bo the Lover, "They were sure we were fronting for something. They kept sending undercover cops over here, trying to buy crack." But the cops always came away empty-handed. Unlike some of Miami’s pirate stations, Hot 97.7 would never, say, broadcast where to score some coke or where someone had spotted some cops. They always told pushers to stay off their corner, and after that initial period of mistrust, the local police decided that the people in the warehouse weren’t just real DJs, but were real allies in the fight to keep kids away from drug abuse and gangs. Michael and I talked with the beat cop on Bo’s block, Sgt. Frank Dean, and he was full of praise for Bo. Naturally, he wouldn’t condone broadcasting without a license, but he actually had nothing but kind words for the station and its founder.
In a neighborhood where there just isn’t much to do, Hot 97.7 gave people a creative outlet. It also broadcast community announcements, and not just bland stuff like a local events calendar. Once, when a kid ran away from home, the police told his parents that they’d have to wait a day before they started searching. So Mom and Dad went to Bo’s radio station, the call went out over the air, and by the end of the day the runaway had been found. Bo's station also aired some talk shows. Kat, a teen mother turned community activist, hosted a weekly program called Underground Teen Talk, in which service providers and others took teenagers’ calls about pregnancy, HIV, and related issues.
But the most interesting thing about Hot 97.7 might be how popular it was. This wasn’t unusual for pirate stations in the Miami area, though it caught a lot of record companies by surprise. The companies kept wondering why some of their releases were selling well in Miami without getting any local airplay. Then they found out that a lot of stations were playing them—it’s just that those stations weren’t licensed. According to Vibe magazine, Big Pun’s album Capital Punishment topped Miami’s Soundscan charts weeks before any of the legal stations in town were playing it. After that, record companies routinely sent their new releases to the pirates.
Needless to say, Miami's licensed stations wanted the FCC to shut their unlicensed competition down. At the same time, though, some of them started copying their illicit competitors. So in 1996, when a Liberty City pirate called The Bomb started making waves, WEDR—that's a legal station—started a show called The Bomb and hired a former pirate DJ to host it. And in early 1998, when some fully licensed businessmen launched a Tampa station called WILD 98.7 FM, their disc jockeys claimed to be kids broadcasting illegally from a boat in Tampa Bay. Even after the hoax was exposed, some listeners still thought they were real pirates—just unaccountably lame ones.
So that's a small selection of the stations that have gone on the air without the FCC's permission. There's a lot of others, ranging from Panthers to Promise Keepers. There have been left-wing stations, right-wing stations, Hasidic stations, Haitian stations, high school stations, church stations, a station run by migrant farmworkers, a station based in a discount mart, a station based in a retirement home. There have been some really interesting programming experiments: I know of at least two stations, for example, which were basically programmed by their own listeners. The audience sends in music, newscasts, and promos via e-mail, as MP3 files. The station then broadcast them.
When you look at the tremendous variety that's been put on the air in defiance of the law, and then stop to ponder how much more there could be if you weren't weeding out the people who'd rather not break the law, you can't help think of contemporary radio as lousy. We could have all the variety of the Internet on our boomboxes, and we don't.
Speaking of the Internet: I'm not going to get into the field of Internet radio, which is obviously very diverse despite some new costs that have been heaped onto it by the intellectual-property lobby. One thing the Internet has proved, though, is that forms of music that allegedly aren't commercially viable can actually do quite well when they're allowed to find an audience. In 1999, when Arbitron released its first ratings for Web broadcasters, the two stations with the most listeners were a pair of FM outlets—that's licensed outlets, not pirates—with Internet simulcasts: KFAN in Fredericksburg, Texas, and KPIG in Watsonville, California. (We might be able to catch KFAN here in San Antonio—it's at 107.9 FM, if anyone wants to try.) Both of those stations broadcast a lot of alternative-country music mixed with rootsy rock and blues, and both of them have done very well in their local listening areas. But they haven't been imitated much in other markets, where the conventional wisdom is that listeners prefer the polished Nashville brand of country music. Obviously, there's an audience for this kind of stuff after all; and maybe, if the entry barriers to broadcasting weren't so steep, some more stations like these might emerge.
So why do we have all these entry barriers? One of the stated rationales—the main one—is that there simply isn't room for all these new stations. But the fact that so many unlicensed microbroadcasters managed to run stations without causing any serious interference should stand as a response to that argument. It's true that some microbroadcasters have run sloppy operations and stepped on other people's signals, just as some licensed broadcasters have done the same. But most don't.
When you actually talk to broadcasters, you find that the reasons for the entry barriers are a lot more cynical. A lot of them honestly believe that letting more stations on the air will result in a lot more signal interference. But mostly, they just don't want the competition. They're also sitting on some valuable licenses whose prices would sharply drop if more broadcasters were allowed on the air.
Also, some of them will say flat-out that you need to make sure broadcasters made a substantial investment in their stations, even if you need to gin up that investment artificially, because that way they won't waste their frequency on something frivolous. I've actually seen one activist trying to convince broadcasters that low-power FM won't be a threat because there will still be enough restrictions to keep the dabblers out. I'm going to quote him directly:
"How many of the 'nutcases' do you really think will be willing to spend a year trying to get a CP [construction permit], then spend ten grand or more (substantially more for a station with any sort of profit potential) to actually put the station on the air?"
And that's from a supporter of low-power broadcasting. So this is the mentality we're contending with.
OK. So how could we make room in the law for all these different sorts of radio stations? One step would be to allow broadcasters to transmit at lower levels of power. A new high-powered station set between another two high-powered stations might cause a lot of interference; a station with a weaker signal might not. The FCC used to issue so-called "Class D" licenses to schools and community groups to transmit at just 10 watts of power, until the public broadcasting establishment complained that all those little stations were sitting where they might put big NPR outlets instead, leading the government to stop issuing the licenses in 1978. More recently, Clinton's FCC Chairman William Kennard put forward a fairly conservative plan to license 100-watt noncommercial stations on the FM band. The FCC approved the plan, though it met some opposition from the Republicans on the commission. One of them, Michael Powell, is now the head of the FCC and is regarded as a booster for free markets; he often says that the FCC should not be in the business of picking winners and losers. But he dissented in part from the low-power FM plan, specifically citing the possibility that the new stations might erode the economic vitality of existing broadcasters. The other Republican commissioner at the time, Harold Furchgott-Roth, is regarded as a radical free-marketeer, but he voted completely against the plan. To be fair, he raised some significant issues, such as whether the new stations would face the same red-tape requirements endured by other broadcasters. But rather than propose answers to these questions, he used them as an excuse to oppose the plan altogether.
After the plan passed the FCC, the National Association of Broadcasters and National Public Radio started lobbying Congress to kill it, and a sizable number of Democrats, plus every Republican in the House except Ron Paul and Ed Royce, voted against low-power broadcasting. They didn't wipe out Kennard's plan altogether, but they did pile on yet more restrictions, to the point where there's no room, for example, for legal low-power broadcasting in any American cities. Some rural areas will still get new stations, and that's it.
Another step toward better radio would be to allow stations to broadcast closer together. To avoid interference, there must be buffers between broadcasters. That is why there are no stations at, say, 101.2 FM—the FCC won’t risk interfering with the outlets at 101.1 and 101.3. Similarly, and more importantly, if a station is transmitting at 101.3, you have to be a substantial physical distance away before you can be licensed to transmit at 101.1 or 101.5. No one disputes the need for such buffers. But the current rules are based on the technical standards of the 1950s. It’s now possible for far more stations to fit onto the spectrum without stomping on each other's signals.
The FCC is already pragmatic enough to allow stations some leeway in bargaining with each other to set the actual boundaries of their coverage areas. It should let them actually sell interference easements, allowing both established and new broadcasters to set up shop at a closer frequency if they pay for the privilege.
Then there's perhaps the most significant act of deregulation the government could do: It could open up new spectrum to broadcasting. Simply turning over unused UHF spectrum to FM radio would make room for hundreds more channels in every city. Beyond that, if the FCC would open even more of the ether to broadcasting, manufacturers could sell so-called downconverters: small devices that would attach to or sit near a radio and convert signals sent over other sections of the spectrum. This would work a lot like DirecTV, which allows a TV set built to receive UHF and VHF signals pick up broadcasts made in the SHF band. But if you want to bring down the price of the converter, you’ll need a highly integrated device without a high parts cost. And in order for companies to invest in developing such a machine, you’ll need a regulatory regime that will allow the product to be put to the use for which it was devised.
Meanwhile, we need a regulatory regime that will allow radio itself to be put, not just to the use for which it was devised, but to all the new, creative uses that broadcasters can conceive.
If we've got time for questions, I'll take some now.
Ordinarily at this point I would tell you who won the Oscar for Best Picture, sometimes to praise the choice but usually to use it as a foil. But the Oscars didn't exist yet in 1924. The champion at the box office was The Sea Hawk, but that doesn't work well as a substitute, since I haven't seen it. I guess I should just jump into the list:
1. Sherlock Jr.
Directed by Buster Keaton
Written by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, and Joseph A. Mitchell
Here sit the seeds of both The Purple Rose of Cairo and Duck Amuck.
2. L'Inhumaine
Directed by Marcel L'Herbier
Written by L'Herbier, Pierre Mac Orlan, and Georgette Leblanc
A brilliantly demented spectacle that eventually becomes science fiction. Among its many attractions: a vision of television in which the performer views her audience instead of the other way around, changing channels to watch one fan after another.
3. Cartoon Factory
Written and directed by Dave and Max Fleischer
My kinda Clone War.
4. Ballet Mécanique
Directed by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy
Written by Léger
A Cubist ballet.
5. Au Secours!
Directed by Abel Gance
Written by Gance and Max Linder
A haunted-house farce, featuring a flurry of gags, camera tricks, and surrealist insertions.
6. He Who Gets Slapped
Directed by Victor Sjöström
Written by Sjöström and Carey Wilson
The slapping routine just might be the darkest comedy act in Hollywood history.
7. Girl Shy
Directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor
Written by Taylor, Tim Whelan, Ted Wilde, and Thomas J. Gray
In the climactic chase, Harold Lloyd's character commits a series of larcenies and puts dozens of people's lives at risk, all to prevent a wedding that could have been easily annulled after the fact. But it's OK, because it's funny.
8. The Last Laugh
Directed by F.W. Murnau
Written by Carl Mayer
The most silent of silent dramas.
9. The Crazy Ray
Written and directed by René Clair
This list didn't have room for Clair's most celebrated film of the year, the enjoyably loopy experiment Entr'acte. But I couldn't leave out this sci-fi comedy about a machine that freezes a city in time.
10. The Navigator
Directed by Buster Keaton and Donald Crisp
Written by Keaton, Clyde Bruckman, Jean C. Havez, and Joseph A. Mitchell
"He had completed all arrangements—except to notify the girl."
* * *
Of the films of 1924 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Aelita: Queen of Mars.
I have not watched enough good movies from 1914 for a top 10 list, so we'll stop the tour here. For the record, my favorite film of 1914 is Les Vampires (or at least those installments of the serial that came out that year) and my favorite film of 1904 is The Impossible Voyage. And of the handful of motion pictures I've seen from 1894, I guess the best is Autour D'une Cabine. If I've missed a masterpiece from that year, let me know.
When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at 1934, it gave its Best Picture award to the proto-screwball classic It Happened One Night. This is one of those rare years where the prize at least arguably went to the right movie. But on my list, another film edged it out:
1. The Black Cat
Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer
Written by Ulmer and Peter Ruric
This isolationist fable is Ulmer's best feature, the best film to star Karloff and Lugosi together, and perhaps the purest example of a picture that claims to be based on a Poe story while ignoring Poe's plot entirely.
2. It Happened One Night
Directed by Frank Capra
Written by Robert Riskin, from a story by Samuel Hopkins Adams
There's a lot to love in this movie, but it's the "Flying Trapeze" scene that's closest to my heart.
3. L'Atalante
Directed by Jean Vigo
Written by Vigo and Albert Riéra, from a story by Jean Guinée
Romance on a floating Cornell box.
4. The Thin Man
Directed by W.S. Van Dyke
Written by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, from a novel by Dashiell Hammett
"Ever heard of the Sullivan Act?" "Oh, that's all right, we're married."
5. Dames
Directed by Ray Enright with Busby Berkeley
Written by Delmer Daves
This cheerfully amoral musical feels like a product of the pre-Code period, though it appeared about a month too late for that. It spends about an hour mocking the bluenoses, then morphs into a series of psychedelic Busby Berkeley sequences that feel more like 1960s pop art than 1930s pop culture.
6. The Scarlet Empress
Directed by Josef von Sternberg
Written by Eleanor McGeary
A thoroughly ludicrous drama, and I mean that in the most favorable way possible.
7. Granton Trawler
Directed by John Grierson
One decent movie that didn't make it onto this list is Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran. Like Flaherty's film, Grierson's documentary about a Scottish fishing boat is a lyrical look at lives lived close to northern Europe's waters. But while Flaherty's film is a romanticized recreation of the way people may have lived long before the movie was made, this attempts to show us what fishermen were experiencing in 1934.
8. The Mascot
Written and directed by Wladyslaw Starewicz
The Nightmare Before Christmas of the '30s.
9. Lieutenant Kijé
Directed by Aleksandr Faintsimmer
Written by Yury Tynyanov
A brief thaw in Soviet cinema allowed a movie like this to be released: an anti-authoritarian satire where a bureaucratic error creates an imaginary officer and then the SNAFU Principle lets him rise through the ranks. The story had to take place in czarist times, of course—but before long, even that wouldn't work as camouflage.
10. Soldier's Story
Directed by Čeněk Zahradníček and Vladimír Šmejkal
Written by Šmejkal
It's an eight-minute abstraction of every antiwar saga set in World War I, and it's more effective than at least 90% of them.
Honorable mentions:
11. The Merry Widow (Ernst Lubitsch)
12. Ship of the Ether (George Pal)
13. The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock)
14. Crime Without Passion (Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur)
15. We Live in Prague (Otakar Vávra)
16. Ha! Ha! Ha! (Dave Fleischer)
17. The Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright)
18. The Old Fashioned Way (William Beaudine)
19. A Dream Walking (Dave Fleischer, Seymour Kneitel)
20. Babes in Toyland (Gus Meins, Charles Rogers)
Of the films of 1934 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Accordion—the movie that prompted Joseph Stalin to say, "Never make such rubbish as Accordion again." (I said the Soviets saw a thaw. I didn't say they were free.)
When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at 1944, it gave its Best Picture award to Going My Way. That's not a bad movie, but it's a trifle; it feels perverse to hand it the prize in a year that produced as many great films as this one.
1. Double Indemnity
Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, from a novel by James M. Cain
It's a bleak and ugly story about murder and betrayal, and at times it's as funny as any of Wilder's comedies.
2. To Have and Have Not
Directed by Howard Hawks
Written by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, from a novel by Ernest Hemingway
A lot like Casablanca, but better.
3. Laura
Directed by Otto Preminger
Written by Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Betty Reinhardt, from a novel by Vera Caspary
Roger Ebert called this film's allure "a tribute to style over sanity." He didn't mean that as a put-down, and I don't either.
4. The Curse of the Cat People
Directed by Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch
Written by DeWitt Bodeen and Val Lewton
This sweet fantasy film about a lonely child has what just might be the most misleading title in Hollywood history.
5. Hail the Conquering Hero
Written and directed by Preston Sturges
"You don't need reasons. Although they're probably there."
6. The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France
Directed by Laurence Olivier
Written by Olivier, Dallas Bower, and Alan Dent, from a play by William Shakespeare
It's a propaganda picture, but don't get hung up on that. It's also the most visually inventive Shakespeare movie I've seen, a film that feels like an illuminated manuscript come to life.
7. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
Written and directed by Preston Sturges
Between this and Conquering Hero, you'd never dream Sturges' career was about to crash.
8. A Canterbury Tale
Written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
A tale of love, war, and a mysterious figure who assaults women by pouring glue in their hair. And it's actually even stranger than that makes it sound.
9. It Happened Tomorrow
Directed by René Clair
Written by Clair, Dudley Nichols, and Helene Fraenkel, from a story by Hugh Wedlock and Howard Snyder and a play by Lord Dunsany
This one was nearly made by Frank Capra instead, and the story is certainly suited for the Capra treatment. But it works as one of Clair's American fantasies too. Indeed, it comes in a slot ahead of the bona fide Capra movie on this list.
10. Arsenic and Old Lace
Directed by Frank Capra
Written by Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein, from a play by Joseph Kesselring
Surely the finest portrait of Teddy Roosevelt ever to grace the screen.
Honorable mentions:
11. The Old Grey Hare (Bob Clampett)
12. Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk)
13. At Land (Maya Deren)
14. Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock)
15. Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang)
16. The Suspect (Robert Siodmak)
17. Jammin' the Blues (Gjon Mili)
18. Little Red Riding Rabbit (Friz Freleng)
19. The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang)
20. The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks (Edgar Neville)
Plus a nod to the Halloween sequence in Meet Me in St. Louis. The rest of the picture doesn't do much for me (aside from "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"), but if the Halloween segment were a standalone short it might make it into my top 10.
Finally: Having wrapped up my 1954 list with a shoutout to what is probably the only Ingmar Bergman movie to climax with a girlfight in a jazz club, I'll wrap up 1944 with a shoutout to what is probably the closest Bergman ever came to writing a film noir. Torment was his first produced screenplay, he got an assistant director credit too, and it's a pretty solid debut.
Of the films of 1944 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Battle of China.
When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at 1954, it gave its Best Picture award to On the Waterfront. You will find that one below, but not at number one:
1. Rear Window
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by John Michael Hayes, from a story by Cornell Woolrich
The first time I saw this, I thought it was a comedy. The second time, I thought it was a thriller. The third time, I mostly thought the Jimmy Stewart character was kind of creepy. I was right each time.
2. Seven Samurai
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni
"Since it's impossible to kill them all, I usually run away."
3. Johnny Guitar
Directed by Nicholas Ray
Written by Ben Maddow, from a novel by Roy Chanslor
I think the films of the '50s tend to be step down from the films of the '40s, but I do like how the westerns got weirder.
4. Wuthering Heights
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Written by Buñuel, Julio Alejandro, Dino Maiuri, and Pierre Unik, from a novel by Emily Brontë
I would not be unhappy if every adaptation of a highbrow literary classic was made by a surrealist slumming in the Mexican melodrama market.
5. The Age of Swordfish
Directed by Vittorio De Seta
Here is where the boundary between documentary and neorealism breaks down entirely.
6. Sansho the Bailiff
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Written by Fuji Yahiro and Yoshikata Yoda, from a story by Mori Ōgai
"Humans have little sympathy for things that don't directly concern them. They're ruthless."
7. On the Waterfront
Directed by Elia Kazan
Written by Budd Schulberg
My friend Shawn once asked if I'd ever heard "Noam Chomsky's analysis of A Streetcar Named Desire." I did a double take and said, "What? No, I haven't. What does Noam Chomsky have to say about A Streetcar Named Desire?" Shawn then realized that he'd had a brain fart and that he'd meant to say "Noam Chomsky's analysis of On the Waterfront," which further discussion revealed to be exactly what you'd expect Chomsky's take on On the Waterfront to be. But I still sometimes wonder what ol' Noam thinks of A Streetcar Named Desire.
8. Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
Written and directed by Kenneth Anger
Aleister Crowley's home movies.
9. Journey to Italy
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
Written by Rossellini and Vitaliano Brancati, from a novel by Colette
More or less the opposite of a love story.
10. Track of the Cat
Directed by William Wellman
Written by A.I. Bezzerides, from a novel by William Van Tilburg Clark
Beulah Bondi steals every scene she's in.
Honorable mentions:
11. Illusion Travels by Streetcar (Luis Buñuel)
12. Corral (Colin Low)
13. The Far Country (Anthony Mann)
14. Closed Vision (Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin)
15. Islands of Fire (Vittorio De Seta)
16. Late Chrysanthemums (Mikio Naruse)
17. Father Brown (Robert Hamer)
18. Jazz Dance (Roger Tilton)
19. La Strada (Federico Fellini)
20. Senso (Luchino Visconti)
Finally, a shout-out to A Lesson in Love. It may be just a mid-tier movie in the grand scheme of Ingmar Bergman's filmography, but how many of his pictures climax with two girls having a catfight in a seedy jazz club?
Of the films of 1954 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Musashi Miyamoto.
When the Motion Picture Academy looked at 1964, it gave its Best Picture award to My Fair Lady, a movie that takes on new dimensions if you assume that Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering are having sex. The film's reputation has suffered somewhat since '64, but I like it. It isn't in the top 10, though:
1. Dr. Strangelove
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Written by Kubrick, Peter George, and Terry Southern, from a novel by George
"Mein führer! I can walk!"
2. Woman in the Dunes
Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara
Written by Kobo Abe, from his novel
Spooky and beautiful. The book is good, but the movie is perfect.
3. Diary of a Chambermaid
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Written by Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carriere, from a novel by Octave Mirbeau
I love Renoir as much as the next cineaste, but this is so much better than the Renoir version.
4. The Killers
Directed by Don Siegel
Written by Gene L. Coon, from a story by Ernest Hemingway
In which Ronald Reagan delivers the immortal line: "I approve of larceny. Homicide is against my principles."
5. Kwaidan
Directed by Masaki Kobayashi
Written by Yoko Mizuki, from a book by Lafcadio Hearn
Four Japanese ghost stories. The first is mediocre, but the rest are riveting—especially "Hoichi the Earless," which feels like an epic medieval poem but bears no resemblance to Hollywood's "epics" at all.
6. The World of Henry Orient
Directed by George Roy Hill
Written by Nora and Nunnally Johnson, from Nora's novel
Two children make a magical dérive through New York, then are initiated into adulthood. Between this and The Manchurian Candidate, Angela Lansbury was clearly going through the "bad mom" phase of her career.
7. Onibaba
Written and directed by Kaneto Shindo
This, Kwaidan, Woman in the Dunes—what an amazing year for Japanese horror pictures.
8. A Shot in the Dark
Directed by Blake Edwards
Written by Edwards and William Peter Blatty, from plays by Marcel Achard and Harry Kurnitz
Not every Pink Panther movie holds up, but I watched this again with one of my kids a few months ago and I think it's a goddamn piece of art.
9. The Americanization of Emily
Directed by Arthur Hiller
Written by Paddy Chayefsky, from a novel by William Bradford Huie
Reminds me a bit of Stalag 17, except it has the courage of its convictions.
10. A Fistful of Dollars
Directed by Sergio Leone
Written by Leone, Víctor Andrés Catena, and Jaime Comas, from a novel by Dashiell Hammett
In the days since Hammett started to write Red Harvest, his story has taken the form of a great hardboiled detective novel, a great samurai movie, and a great spaghetti western. It would make a great Bugs Bunny short too, but y'all ain't ready for that conversation.
Honorable mentions:
11. Kiss Me, Stupid (Billy Wilder)
12. Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich)
13. I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov)
14. Séance on a Wet Afternoon (Bryan Forbes)
15. Nothing But a Man (Michael Roemer)
16. Mermaid (Osamu Tezuka)
17. The Train (John Frankenheimer)
18. Culloden (Peter Watkins)
19. Becket (Peter Glenville)
20. Evil of Frankenstein (Freddie Francis)
Of the films of 1964 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Topkapi.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1974, it gave its Best Picture award to The Godfather Part 2. In another year that might have topped my list as well, but in 1974 it wasn't even the best Coppola movie:
1. Chinatown
Directed by Roman Polanski
Written by Robert Towne
The bridge between the film noir of the '40s and the conspiracy thrillers of the '70s.
2. The Conversation
Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola
The ultimate 1970s movie: It's got paranoia, guilt, a lone wolf locked into an uneasy relationship with the system, and Gene Hackman.
3. Lenny
Directed by Bob Fosse
Written by Julian Barry
Sometimes Dustin Hoffman did Lenny Bruce's routines better than Lenny Bruce did Lenny Bruce's routines.
4. California Split
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Joseph Walsh
The next time someone tries to tell you Hollywood always fucks things up, remind them that this one almost got directed by Spielberg instead.
5. The Godfather Part 2
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Written by Coppola and Mario Puzo, from a novel by Puzo
A short history of America.
6. Primate
Directed by Frederick Wiseman
The darkest comedy, most gruesome horror film, and least erotic sex flick of the year.
7. Swept Away...by an unusual destiny in the blue sea of August
Written and directed by Lina Wertmüller
A comedy about the complexities of love, lust, and power, and the difficulties in discerning who wields the third when the first two are in play.
8. Phantom of the Paradise
Written and directed by Brian De Palma
The Phantom of the Opera meets The Picture of Dorian Gray meets Faust meets The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
9. Young Frankenstein
Directed by Mel Brooks
Written by Brooks and Gene Wilder
Try to find a better version of "Puttin' on the Ritz." Just try.
10. Thieves Likes Us
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Altman, Joan Tewkesbury, and Calder Willingham
Extra credit for ending a bank-robbing movie with a Charles Coughlin broadcast.
Honorable mentions:
11. A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes)
12. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Sam Peckinpah)
13. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Joseph Sargent)
14. Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks)
15. TV Buddha (Nam June Paik)
16. The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula)
17. Céline and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette)
18. Every Man for Himself and God Against All (Werner Herzog)
19. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
20. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper)
Of the films of 1974 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Harry and Tonto.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1984, it gave its Best Picture award to Amadeus. That one made it into my top 10, but it isn't at number one—not in the year that gave us what might be my favorite film of my lifetime:
1. Repo Man
Written and directed by Alex Cox
"It happens sometimes. People just explode. Natural causes."
2. Love Streams
Directed by John Cassavetes
Written by Cassavetes and Ted Allan, from a play by Allan
"All through the making of this picture," Cassavetes later said, "I kept reliving my father's words. 'For every problem there's an answer.' But since Love Streams is about a question of love, there didn't seem to be an answer I could find....Even now, I still don't know what the brother and sister really feel about each other."
3. This Is Spinal Tap
Directed by Rob Reiner
Written by Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer
The best rock movie, the first and funniest of the Christopher Guest troupe's semi-improvised comedies, and the strongest evidence that the now-insufferable Reiner was once capable of doing good work.
4. Once Upon a Time in America
Directed by Sergio Leone
Written by Leone, Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini, and Stuart Kaminsky, from a novel by Harry Grey
One of the great gangster pictures, arguably even better than The Godfather.
5. Nothing Lasts Forever
Written and directed by Tom Schiller
This movie harkens back to so many different film styles that it seems to take place in the entire 20th century at once. But it's a different 20th century—one where the Port Authority has seized dictatorial powers in Manhattan, a benevolent conspiracy of tramps guides people's destinies from a hidden base beneath New York, and the U.S. government first went to the moon in 1953, where it set up a secret shopping district for elderly American tourists.
6. Antonio Gaudí
Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara
The next best thing to seeing Gaudí's buildings in person.
7. Amadeus
Directed by Milos Forman
Written by Peter Shaffer, from his play
"Mediocrities everywhere, I absolve you."
8. Ghostbusters
Directed by Ivan Reitman
Written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis
A pleasant little comedy about a small business and its run-ins with the administrative state.
9. Secret Honor
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone, from their play
Like a post-Watergate conspiracy picture, but instead of a thriller it's a one-man show.
10. Blood Simple
Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
My favorite living American filmmakers make their debut.
Honorable mentions:
11. King Lear (Michael Elliott)
12. Before Stonewall (John Scagliotti, Greta Schiller, Robert Rosenberg)
13. Favorites of the Moon (Otar Iosseliani)
14. There Will Come Soft Rains (Nazim Tulyakhodzayev)
15. After the Rehearsal (Ingmar Bergman)
16. Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders)
17. Comfort and Joy (Bill Forsyth)
18. Return to Waterloo (Ray Davies)
19. A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven)
20. Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch)
Of the films of 1984 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Urusei Yatsura 2.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1994, it gave its Best Picture award to Forrest Gump, a movie with a simple message: It's better to be retarded than a hippie. It didn't make it onto my list:
1. Pulp Fiction
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Written by Tarantino and Roger Avery
Tarantino is one of those artists, like Hunter Thompson or Marcel Duchamp, who it's better to admire than to imitate. But you can't blame him for that.
2. Crumb
Directed by Terry Zwigoff
This has a sequence where a comic book slowly devolves into something else, the illustrations swept aside by page upon page of tiny, illegible words. I don't think I've ever seen a movie portray a man's descent into madness so effectively.
3. Hoop Dreams
Directed by Steve James
Better than any scripted basketball movie.
4. Before the Rain
Written and directed by Milcho Manchevski
A Balkan time-loop.
5. The Secret of Roan Inish
Directed by John Sayles
Written by Sayles, from a novel by Rosalie K. Fry
Aside from Limbo, which doesn't entirely fit the mold anyway, I'm not a fan of Sayles' big-canvas pictures—those labored films where he tries to create a politically engaged portrait of an entire community but ends up producing a clockwork-powered speechmaking machine instead. But his small movies, like this eerie and endearing fantasy, can be wonderful.
6. Red
Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski
Written by Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz
Surveillance, love, and coincidence.
7. Chungking Express
Written and directed by Wong Kar-Wai
More surveillance, more love, more coincidence. There's a plotline in this movie about a woman who keeps sneaking into a man's apartment and rearranging his things. I'm a sucker for stories like that.
8. Ed Wood
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski
Alexander and Karaszewski's next two movies about misfits, The People vs. Larry Flynt and Man on the Moon, were directed by Milos Forman, who turned them into somewhat sanctimonious biopics. Burton did much better, because he had the inspired idea to treat Wood's life as a fairy tale.
9. Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter
Directed by Deborah Hoffman
It's a touching documentary about Alzheimer’s...and it's funny. No, really.
10. Pipsqueak Pfollies
Written and directed by Danny Plotnick
In the words of the filmmaker, this "painstakingly details all the crap little kids can get away with."
Honorable mentions:
11. Burnt by the Sun (Nikita Mikhalkov)
12. The Last Seduction (John Dahl)
13. The Kingdom (Lars von Trier)
14. Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson)
15. The Madness of George III (Nicholas Hytner)
16. White (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
17. Faust (Jan Svankmajer)
18. Barcelona (Whit Stillman)
19. Fresh (Boaz Yakin)
20. True Lies (James Cameron)
Of the films of 1994 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in That's Entertainment! III. (And I still haven't sat through Satantango yet. One day, one day…)
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked at 2004, it gave its Best Picture award to Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, a reasonably good movie that lasts longer than it needs to. Here are some better efforts:
1. Bad Education
Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar
No one wrings meaning from melodrama the way Almodóvar does.
2. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino
The second installment of the Kill Bill sequence deepens our sense of the story's characters, treats this objectively silly material seriously, and somehow makes me take it seriously too. Not by loudly proclaiming its seriousness, as so much trash aspiring to arthood does, but by earning my respect; by letting me get attached to these pulp characters with their truth serums, their kung fu superpowers, and their very human attachments and resentments and revealing little lies.
3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Directed by Michel Gondry
Written by Charlie Kaufman
Three years before the term "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" was coined, this subverted every Manic Pixie Dream Girl movie that would ever be made.
4. The Wire 3
Written by David Simon, Ed Burns, Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Rafael Alvarez, and Joy Lusco
Directed by Ed Bianchi, Steve Shill, Rob Bailey, Ernest Dickerson, Dan Attias, Leslie Libman, Tim Van Patten, Agnieszka Holland, Alex Zakrzewski, Christine Moore, and Joe Chappelle
In which reform turns out to be difficult for an individual and just about impossible for an institution.
5. Deadwood
Written by David Milch, Malcolm MacRury, Jody Worth, Elizabeth Sarnoff, John Belluso, George Putnam, Bryan McDonald, Ricky Jay, and Ted Mann
Directed by Walter Hill, David Guggenheim, Alan Taylor, Ed Bianchi, Michael Engler, Dan Minahan, and Steve Shill
Studies in state-building.
6. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Directed by Wes Anderson
Written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach
"What would be the scientific purpose of killing it?" "Revenge."
7. Sideways
Directed by Alexander Payne
Written by Payne and Jim Taylor, from a novel by Rex Pickett
The movie that made the critical establishment take note of Virginia Madsen. (Me, I've been a fan since Candyman.)
8. Palindromes
Written and directed by Todd Solondz
If you want to see a bleak, sardonic comedy about abortion, this one is even darker than Citizen Ruth.
9. Team America: World Police
Directed by Trey Parker
Written by Parker, Matt Stone, and Pam Brady
I wouldn't say this explains the Bush era, but at least it'll give you a sense of what it was like to be there.
10. Nobody Knows
Written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
One of the great—make that four of the great—child performances.
Honorable mentions:
11. Howl's Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki)
12. Undertow (David Gordon Green)
13. In the Realms of the Unreal (Jessica Yu)
14. The Assassination of Richard Nixon (Niels Mueller)
15. Panorama Ephemera (Rick Prelinger)
16. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater)
17. Garden State (Zach Braff)
18. Light Is Calling (Bill Morrison)
19. Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow)
20. Primer (Shane Carruth)
Finally, a note on The Incredibles: "Everyone's special" does not, in fact, mean that no one is special, because people can have different specialties. (But it is still a decent movie, especially by kidflick standards. I miss the days when this was the typical level of Pixar quality.)
Of the films of 2004 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Place Promised in Our Early Days.
A lot of people missed this movie's underlying antiwar worldview, partly because they assumed a film based on Chris Kyle's memoir would reflect Chris Kyle's militarist outlook, but also because it isn't the sort of antiwar worldview that you usually see in even a pro-peace Hollywood picture.
Honorable mentions:
11. The Tribe (Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy)
12. John Wick (Chad Stahelski, David Leitch)
13. Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy)
14. Kumiko the Treasure Hunter (David Zellner)
15. Unedited Footage of a Bear (Alan Resnick, Ben O'Brien)
16. The Americans 2 (Joel Fields, Joe Weisberg)
17. BoJack Horseman (Raphael Bob-Waksberg)
18. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)
19. Peaky Blinders 2 (Steven Knight)
20. The LEGO Movie (Phil Lord, Christopher Miller)
The Americans, BoJack Horseman, and Peaky Blinders are TV shows, so the names listed after those titles are showrunners, not directors. Though in the case of Peaky Blinders, every episode this season had the same director—Colm McCarthy—so perhaps I should have inserted his name instead? Please don't report me to the DGA.
It is interesting, I note idly, that #8 and #14 would appear the same year. But I didn't call this the Year of the Fargo Extended Universe. I called it the Year of Time Loops, even though there is just one time loop movie in that list (The Infinite Man), because...well, not only have I seen several other time loop films from 2014 (Edge of Tomorrow, One-Minute Time Machine, and arguably Interstellar, all worth watching), but I'm told there are a ton of more, from a sex comedy (Premature) to an adaptation of the Heinlein story that I mentioned in my Infinite Man blurb (Predestination). Maybe I'll have watched them all by the time these lists loop back to 2014 again.
That said: Of the films of 2014 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Frank.
...well, now we stop. Sorry: I just haven't seen enough exceptional movies from 1923 to fill a top 10 list. For the record, my favorite film of 1923 is Safety Last! and my favorite from 1913 is the opening chapters of Fantômas. (That isn't a putdown of the later chapters—it's just that they didn't come out until 1914.) Hang tight til December; we'll start on the 4 years then.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1933, it gave its Best Picture award to Cavalcade, which isn't nearly as good as a film based on a Noel Coward play ought to be. Aside from a couple of montages and the song "20th Century Blues," the thing is a study in tedium. These are all better:
1. Duck Soup
Directed by Leo McCarey
Written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby with Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin
A cinéma vérité documentary filmed at the White House during the invasion of Iraq.
2. Zero for Conduct
Written and directed by Jean Vigo
Anarchy in the schoolhouse.
3. Snow-White
Directed by Dave Fleischer
Comparing this to the Disney movie is like comparing an R. Crumb comic to Richie Rich.
4. Land Without Bread
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Written by Buñuel, Rafael Sánchez Ventura, and Pierre Unik
The first great mockumentary.
5. Hallelujah, I'm a Bum
Directed by Lewis Milestone
Written by S.N. Behrman, from a story by Ben Hecht
When Harry Langdon and Al Jolson have their rhyming debate in the park, it's the closest an old-school Hollywood musical ever comes to being Marat/Sade.
6. I'm No Angel
Directed by Wesley Ruggles
Written by Mae West
"I see a man in your life." "What? Only one?"
7. Design for Living
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Written by Ben Hecht, from a play by Noel Coward
"A man can meet two, three, or four women and fall in love with all of them, and then, by a process of interesting elimination, he is able to decide which he prefers. But a woman must decide purely on instinct, guesswork, if she wants to be considered nice."
8. Outskirts
Directed by Boris Barnet
Written by Barnet and Konstantin Finn
Like Dovzhenko's best work, this is part naturalistic, part surrealistic, and part slapstick, sometimes tragic and sometimes comic, while never venturing anywhere near the dogmas of Socialist Realism. Despite the inevitable Bolshevik bits in the final 10 minutes, the politics feel more anarcho-pacifist than Stalinist. It's amazing that someone in the Soviet Union managed to make this as late as 1933.
9. Alice in Wonderland
Directed by Norman Z. McLeod
Written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and William Cameron Menzies, from two novels by Lewis Carroll
There was at least one genius involved with creating this film, and that was whoever got the idea to cast W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty.
10. International House
Directed by A. Edward Sutherland
Written by Neil Brant
Fields is in this one too—and so are Cab Calloway, and Bela Lugosi, and Burns and Allen, and Rudy Vallee, and Col. Stoopnagle, and...
Honorable mentions:
11. 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, Busby Berkeley)
12. Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy)
13. Baby Face (Alfred E. Green)
14. Lot in Sodom (James Sibley Watson, Melville Webber)
15. Is My Palm Read (Dave Fleischer)
16. The Wizard of Oz (Ted Eshbaugh)
17. The Mad Doctor (David Hand)
18. Three Little Pigs (Burt Gillett)
19. The Sin of Nora Moran (Phil Goldstone)
20. The Fatal Glass of Beer (Clyde Bruckman)
Of the films of 1933 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Power and the Glory.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1943, it gave its Best Picture award to Casablanca—a great movie but a peculiar choice, since it actually debuted in 1942. Yes, I put it in my top 10 list for that year. No, I won't repeat it in this one.
1. Shadow of a Doubt
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville, from a story by Gordon McDonell
Few film experiences are as enjoyably odd as watching Thornton Wilder's sensibility collide with Hitchcock's. Wilder's screenplay is an ode to conformity, and Hitch's picture drily undercuts the script at every turn.
2. Meshes of the Afternoon
Directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid
Written by Deren
The most contemporary-feeling entry on this list: It's easy to imagine a giffable fragment of the film flickering in a tweet, a Facebook status, or an Instagram story, lending its uncanniness to an internet that itself feels awfully uncanny already.
3. Le Corbeau
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
Written by Clouzot and Louis Chavance, from a story by Chavance
The Resistance denounced this Vichy-era story of small-town paranoia as an attack on the French people, but in retrospect it looks more like a critique of the culture of collaboration.
4. Red Hot Riding Hood
Written and directed by Tex Avery
The Male Gaze: A Comedy.
5. Ossessione
Directed by Luchino Visconti
Written by Visconti, Mario Alicata, Giuseppe De Santis, and Gianni Puccinim, from a novel by James M. Cain
The first and best of the pictures based on The Postman Always Rings Twice.
6. The Ox-Bow Incident
Directed by William A. Wellman
Written by Lamar Trotti, from a novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
Ideologically I have mixed feelings about this noir western: I like its defense of due process, but I don't care for the implication—common in pictures from this period—that lynching was just a matter of mobs' passions getting out of control, rather than something a power structure did to keep people in line. Cinematically, on the other hand, this is practically perfect.
7. I Walked with a Zombie
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Written by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray, from a novel by Charlotte Brontë
Long before Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, this movie gave us Jane Eyre and Zombies.
8. Five Graves to Cairo
Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Wilder and Charles Brackett, from a play by Lajos Bíró
Like I said, Casablanca isn't on this list. But this sure feels a lot like Casablanca.
9. Day of Wrath
Directed by Carl Dreyer
Written by Dreyer, Poul Knudsen, and Mogens Skot-Hansen, from a play by Hans Wiers-Jenssen
This tale of a witch hunt would make an interesting triple bill with Ox-Bow and Le Corbeau.
10. The Eternal Return
Directed by Jean Delannoy
Written by Jean Cocteau
A fairy-tale romance. Remember, real fairy tales are cruel and weird.
Honorable mentions:
11. Tortoise Wins by a Hare (Bob Clampett)
12. Journey Into Fear (Norman Foster, Orson Welles)
13. Lumière D'Été (Jean Grémillon)
14. Dumb-Hounded (Tex Avery)
15. Stormy Weather (Andrew L. Stone)
16. The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson)
17. The Fallen Sparrow (Richard Wallace)
18. Tin Pan Alley Cats (Bob Clampett)
19. Falling Hare (Bob Clampett)
20. Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (Bob Clampett)
I'll spare you the trouble of counting: 6 of those 20 films are cartoon shorts, all from either Tex Avery or Bob Clampett. I've said before that if I allowed individual TV episodes onto these lists, there are years in the '90s that would be overwhelmed by installments of The Simpsons. I suppose this is the equivalent for World War II.
Of the films of 1943 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in The Phantom Baron.
