Patrick Allitt
Subject: Don’t Damn the Dams
Bio: Professor of History at Emory University
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Don’t Damn the Dams. Our speaker is Patrick Allitt who is a Professor of History at Emory. Patrick also works with The Great Courses where he will be releasing a series of lectures on rivers.
I hope to learn from Patrick the history of dams and why they were critical for the growth and financial success of the Western United States.
Our second speaker will be Darren Schwartz who is the What Happens Next Culture Critic and we will discuss two classic films on rivers and dams: Chinatown and Deliverance. Patrick, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Patrick Allitt:
Most of the major rivers in America and around the world have been transformed by the building of dams. A case in point is the Colorado, where the building of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s on the Arizona Nevada border enhanced the security of everyone downstream before the dam was built. The Colorado was just a trickle most of the year, but then when the snow melted in the Rocky Mountain headquarters, it became a raging torrent. After the dam opened, communities downstream no longer faced alternating seasons of drought and destructive flooding. The dam doubled as a hydroelectric power station creating electricity on an industrial scale, which facilitated the growth of Las Vegas, Phoenix, and other southwestern cities. Water from the reservoir Lake Mead could supply domestic and urban needs and be channeled to irrigation farmers downstream.
The Aswan High Dam on the Nile in Egypt and the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China offer comparable benefits, but dams have drawbacks too. First, they transform the local ecosystem, often destroying the habitat of plants and animals that thrived in fast flowing shallow water.
Second, the reservoirs that back up behind dams fill valleys contain an area's most fertile ground. Dams therefore destroy valuable farmland and force the people who live on it to migrate elsewhere. The need to evict more than a million people and destroy their communities accounts for part of the bad publicitxy suffered by the Three Gorges project.
Third, dams swallow up objects and places of great interest. The Egyptian government's decision to build the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s set off a multinational project coordinated by UNESCO to relocate ancient pharaonic temples that would otherwise have been inundated.
A fourth drawback to dams is that there's no economical way of dredging silt from reservoirs with the result that it builds up behind the dam with every passing year, the reservoir's capacity decreases, and with the passage of time to become an immense mudflat. This was the problem with the Sanmenxia Dam on the Yellow River in China, completed in 1960.
Fifth, dams stand in the way of migratory fish. This was a big issue when the Bonneville and other great dams were built across the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest starting in the 1930s. Today, fish ladders are provided and it's possible to watch salmon leaping up a succession of concrete waterfalls to reach the height of the water behind the dam. The presence of a dam also makes navigation more difficult. As the Columbia River shows it's possible to build locks adjacent to dams so that barges and pleasure boats can get to the new elevation. Building them, however, is expensive and river traffic is inevitably slower. Let me say a bit more about the Three Gorges Dam. In the 1990s and early 2000s, China did everything it could to industrialize as rapidly as possible to alleviate mass poverty and to provide electricity nationwide. These were both highly desirable objectives. The dam was finished in 2006. Ever since the discovery of anthropogenic global warming, China has been heavily criticized for building coal-fired power stations. Here, by contrast, is an emissions free source of electricity. The dam is also proving its value in flood control. It reduces flow in the snow melt months, but then increases it during the dry months between November and March, which has the effect of improving shipping conditions downstream and providing more water for industrial and agricultural uses. On the other hand, the Three Gorges Dam required the destruction of 13 cities, a hundred towns and more than a thousand villages. As silt fills up the reservoir, even the Three Gorges Dam can't prevent a hundred year flood because big tributaries join the Yangtze downstream swelling the main stem, even when the dam is at full capacity.
Dams bring great problems in their train, problems that an energy hungry world has to confront in the knowledge that there are no easy solutions.
Larry Bernstein:
Patrick, why should we study dams?
Patrick Allitt:
Well, because they're one of the instruments with which we've realized how much we can dominate an otherwise neglected part of the natural landscape. If you think about Southern California and Phoenix and the whole development of the Southwest, it's only become phenomenally wealthy because of the manipulation of the few water sources there.
Larry Bernstein:
Tell us about why geography is important to understanding history.
Patrick Allitt:
One of the differences between my education in England and most American students is that we studied geography formally. Now in American history, it's true that when you are back East, you can certainly pass your entire lifetime never thinking very much about the water supply because it's so reliable. But once you get west of the hundredth meridian out into the area of Denver, water is top of the news items because water's in limited supply.
Larry Bernstein:
Phoenix, Los Angeles the Colorado River and man's desire to move that water in the direction of these new metropolises; it's fundamental to growth of these major American cities.
Patrick Allitt:
Los Angeles has got a reputation for unscrupulous conduct when it comes to water supplies. A man named William Mulholland was the water engineer of Los Angeles at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. The first thing he did was to build a great aqueduct, which carried water from the Owens River, which is in the Sierra Nevada mountains, about 200 miles across the desert to Los Angeles. And it had a devastatingly adverse effect on the people of the Owens Valley because the water they'd relied on for their farms was no longer there.
It wasn't long before Mulholland also had his eyes on the Colorado River, and in the 1930s, a great aqueduct was built right across the California desert from the Colorado requiring a lot of pumping stations to keep the water moving. In the meantime, Mulholland himself was ruined because he'd built the St. Francis Dam with just a few miles inland from the coast in Los Angeles, broke in 1928 and a great wall of water battered its way down to the coast, killed about 400 people because it was badly designed and badly built. So, Mulholland's got a paradoxical role in Los Angeles history. On the one hand, he's the guy who had the vision that a great metropolis could be built there. On the other hand, his unscrupulous methods led to a disaster and the degradation of the Owens Valley.
Larry Bernstein:
We're going to have a podcast following our discussion, and one of the topics is the movie Chinatown, where Los Angeles water rights play an important role.
Patrick Allitt:
Well, it accurately describes the way in which engineers and politicians collaborated by underhanded means to bring the water supply into Los Angeles. It is based on a hard nugget of fact. I think another movie we should mention in this context is Terminator 2.
Larry Bernstein:
Of course, loved it.
Patrick Allitt:
That's the Los Angeles River, which is also part of all this story. There was a dreadful flood in the 1930s, and that's why Los Angeles decided to build this immense 50-mile long waterway to carry the Los Angeles River at its highest level through the entire city and safely to the sea. Los Angeles is a classic example of a place which suffers from feast or famine rather than having a moderate and continuous supply of water of the kind it would like. It's had either far too little or far too much. The combination of the Owens Aqueduct and the Colorado Aqueduct have done is to give it a sustained regular water supply.
It's a great place to film car chasers, and if you go back to the film noirs of the 1940s when it was still relatively new, very often you have chasers on foot there and people wandering about lost. It's such a striking object, and it's crossed by many of those art deco era bridges. On the other hand, it's an eyesore for most of the time because junk gets thrown into it.Larry Bernstein:
America used to be predominantly an agricultural country and when you do industrial agriculture, water supply becomes critically important, particularly in the West.
Patrick Allitt:
That's absolutely right. The Congress passed the Newlands Act in 1902 saying we need to build dams so we can then create canals which lead water to irrigated farms. Now, one of the stipulations of the Newlands Act was that the farms couldn't be bigger than 160 acres, which is the same size as a homestead farm. But what happened was that homestead farmers simply didn't have enough resources to build all the necessary canals and the infrastructure, which makes irrigation farming work. And so very rapidly, it was taken over by large scale farming corporations.
It's had a huge impact on American agriculture because the farms out in Arizona and California are so productive that they can sometimes grow two crops per year. And if you think about a crop which ideally will have heavy rainfall in the first six weeks after germination, but then a long dry period of ripening, you create exactly those conditions. So the yield also tends to be very high indeed. Interestingly, California is now a bigger cotton producer than any of the southern states that would've been unimaginable before 1930. So, the Newlands Act did create a farming bonanza, but it was a large scale farming bonanza rather than an individual farmer's one.
Larry Bernstein:
I'm trained in economics, we rely on price. One of the concerns that we have with water is, is it priced properly?
Patrick Allitt:
The short answer to your question is that it's not being priced right. In effect, the taxpayers back East subsidized the American farmers out West. It's ironic because the whole of the development of the West was dependent upon federal water projects. The cities of the American West could not be there had it not been for the federal government building dams and then selling the water far below its real price. So, every American farmer in the California Central Valley is the recipient of massive federal subsidies. But of course, that's got a long political history and there's almost nothing more difficult than getting rid of a farm subsidy once it's well established.
Larry Bernstein:
The dams were a private/public partnership, and the scale of something like the Hoover Dam was way beyond what the private sector could accomplish.
Patrick Allitt:
The Hoover Damis an enormous success. It's the one object which made possible the transformation of the American West and made possible it's unbelievable enrichment, which has had spillover benefits for just about everybody. But as usual with projects of that kind, the benefits were distributed unevenly. It was impossible for private industry to undertake a project like damming the Colorado. The Imperial Valley people tried it near the Mexican border. They built gates back in 1903, hoping that they'd be able to control the amount of water which flowed down into Imperial Valley, which is below sea level.
During a severe flood, the floodgates were smashed and the whole Colorado River changed its course. For about two years, the Southern Pacific Railroad desperately tried to get the Colorado River back into its proper course, which they finally succeeded in doing. But the geography of Imperial Valley was totally transformed, and after that that the federal government realized we need to be the ones to build a flood control dam in Black Canyon, the place where Hoover Dam is, because it's got so many obvious benefits for everyone who lives downstream.
Larry Bernstein:
Aqueducts are ancient. The Romans had aqueducts. New York City water is blessed with an aqueduct from upstate. Water management is as old as human civilization.
Patrick Allitt:
We've got evidence that every civilization was manipulating water sources. The earliest civilizations: the Fertile Crescent, which is now in Iraq and Syria, ancient Mesopotamia, and we can find lots of evidence of the manipulation of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, the two great rivers that flow through that area. Usually the building of small dams of earth and stone and the building of irrigation canals to get the water out onto the land. Or in the case of the Nile, the knowledge that it's going to flood every year and the building of little retention ponds to hold onto some of the water when the flood has gradually diminished. So Egyptian agriculture in the era of the Pharaohs and similarly Babylonian and Assyrian farming, they're all dependent on water manipulation. They did build dams of stone, and some of them were 15 or 20 feet high, but it wasn't until the 19th century that we developed reinforced concrete and could start building dams on a far greater scale.
Larry Bernstein:
I think of these dams as being a signal of where you are in development. The Hoover Dam was completed in the 1930s, and that reflected where America was at that time in its development. Then you see the Aswan Dam and those major dams built in China. They happened in the 1960s. They had goals to be like the United States. They hadn't yet reached that level of development and they wanted to show the world that they could do this then. So in some sense, because those were some of our poorest nations, have we passed the great age of the dam? Is that something that's now only in the past, it's no longer necessary to control these floods or find better uses of power? Does it reflect an age of development that has passed?
Patrick Allitt:
I don't think it does. Without the dams, we can't control the rivers, and if we can't do that, we can't do all the good things that flow from it. It's a very long time since a big dam was built in the United States, partly because we'd already got the dams we needed by 1970. And partly because the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1970 specified the submission of an environmental impact statement, which the opponents of the dam can use to delay the building of the dam. There is a lot of criticism right across the political spectrum about giant projects like Three Gorges. In America there's also a dam removal movement starting in the 1990s all over the American West.
The environmental impact was high. They were getting old, and it took a lot to maintain them. So now dams are being dismantled in America at the rate of 50 per year.
Larry Bernstein:
There's a new book entitled Breakneck by Dan Wang, and it compares new infrastructure projects in the United States versus China, and it emphasizes that the United States is caught by these environmental studies making it difficult or impossible to take on projects like the Hoover Dam or even small dams in the state of Washington. The Chinese lack that environmental oversight.
Patrick Allitt:
Well, we should be very grateful that we've got a democratic government because China can ride roughshod over all other considerations. I mean, that's why China has been able to build, for example, this astonishing 25,000 miles of high-speed rail while California can't even build 300 miles of high-speed rail in the same period. But what America does have is safeguards against citizens' rights being overridden. And luckily for the United States, by the time the safeguards came in, it was no longer necessary to have new dams being built. Two things which have really changed the picture since the 1970s is the development of desalination technology and also the development of micro-irrigation so that irrigation farmers no longer need to flood the fields.
They can now use far less water to get the same growing effect out of the plants. So I don't really think Americans can claim in good faith that they're suffering because of these restrictions.
Larry Bernstein:
The second movie that Darren and I are going to review is Deliverance, and that takes place in North Georgia. And one of the characters insists that they go and travel down this river for the last time before it turns into a lake. Tell us about this transition from an unattractive river system into a lake. and lakes themselves also provide joy to people and animals.
Patrick Allitt:
I live in North Georgia and I don't think that Deliverance is an accurate picture of the population of North Georgia. The people like the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation who build the dams always include in their publicity and their justification, we're going to build a place in which recreation will be possible, which wasn't previously. Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam and Lake Powell behind the Glen Canyon Dam are now a paradise for water skiers and motor boats and vacationers of all kinds.
Larry Bernstein:
You have a new course at the teaching company on the Great Rivers. Tell us about that.
I hope that in July of next year, you'll suddenly say to yourselves, it's time for Allitt’s course on the Great Rivers.
Larry Bernstein:
Let's end on a note of optimism. Patrick, what are you optimistic about as it relates to rivers and dams?
Patrick Allitt:
I'm optimistic that we've made ourselves far richer and healthier and increased our longevity by controlling the world around us. And one of the ways we've done that is through the building of dams. They've got problems but they're manageable. And the history of humanity and technology encourages me to think that we'll continue to get better at managing the problems we've got. I'm very enthusiastic about the possibilities of the desalination of seawater. Once we can do that at an affordable way, the rivers will become a far less urgent problem and a far more manageable one. That doesn't mean we can dispense with dams, and I'm sure that for the least the next century, they're going to be a central part of the infrastructure of our industrial societies and one that we can look after and be pleased that we've got.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks Patrick, our second speaker is Darren Schwartz who is the What Happens Next Culture Critic, and we will be expanding the discussion of rivers and dams to cinema.
The first topic is the film Chinatown. This is a Roman Polanski film and the reason why we're going to discuss it is we just finished with Patrick Allitt and the topic was rivers and dams and how the Colorado River made Los Angeles. The plot line for Chinatown is money and power that comes from moving water. Let's talk about Chinatown. Did you love the movie?
Darren Schwartz:
It was marvelous. It moves very fast. It's a very efficient screenplay and that translates to the screen. Nicholson was incredible. It is a film noir that Roman Polanski the director shot with a lot of twists and turns. I really enjoyed it. How about you?
Larry Bernstein:
I thought it was an A+. Jack Nicholson's character resembles Humphrey Bogart’s character in the Big Sleep. He's trying to put together the facts. The audience is as confused as Nicholson trying to piece together the evidence.
Darren Schwartz:
To a certain extent it does follow what these typical 1940s crime thrillers’ structure. Nicholson's character stayed true to a film noir detective. You're seeing everything in his shoes, how he gets befuddled, misled or betrayed.
One thing that's different from those films is that the femme fatale Faye Dunaway seems deceitful. Ultimately, she's the hero, and that's where Polanski diverges from the traditional film noir.
Larry Bernstein:
The podcast is about water. What did you learn about rivers and dams?
Darren Schwartz:
I didn't realize to the extent that water could be diverted hundreds of miles. Water is life. Without water, nothing can happen. And that Los Angeles is in the desert, and you have got to have water. Whoever controls the water controls the world. That was one of the themes of the movie.
Larry Bernstein:
When I was at Salomon Brothers, David Shulman ran real estate research, and he mentioned that the biggest change in value of property occurs when it goes from desert to usable land. That's the greatest percentage increase. And fundamental to the story was that there was a speculator buying desert near Los Angeles and was planning to divert water from the Los Angeles water system to this desert valley and would make millions as a result. For me, that was the water story, how you combine water with real estate speculation and you're off to the races.
Darren Schwartz:
The screenplay by Robert Towne is ranked as one of the top three screenplays of all time: Casablanca, Godfather, Chinatown. People love it because the dialogue is tight. What's interesting is the Chinatown movie is not ranked in the top 10.
Larry Bernstein:
A lot of people dropped it out of the top 50.
Darren Schwartz:
That's interesting that it's still considered one of the top screenplays, not top movie.
Larry Bernstein:
It may be related to the fact that Roman Polanski is a wanted felon for statutory rape.
Darren Schwartz:
Rosemary's Baby is still ranked very highly, so maybe they're cutting that one out.
Back to the screenplay. Noah Cross, who we know from the movie as the father of Faye Dunaway and ultimately the big heavy who's behind this water diversion plan. In the screenplay you know what his name is?
Larry Bernstein:
I don’t.
Darren Schwartz:
It's not Noah, it's Julian. So, one of the theories is that Polanski wanted to make a biblical statement in the movie by changing his name to Noah, as you have this water deluge plot.
Larry Bernstein:
Why do you think that name change is worthy of the podcast?
Darren Schwartz:
I think it’s information that nobody knew. You had no idea. I think you’re actually a little intimidated about the fact I said it, which is why you’re challenging me. I think at least some people will find that interesting. At least biblical people.
Larry Bernstein:
Is this Jack Nicholson's finest performance?
Darren Schwartz:
No.
Larry Bernstein:
What's better?
Darren Schwartz:
I like The Shining. I like the Witches of Eastwick better because the scene at the end where he is the giant and he gets chopped apart that was fun. Chinatown may be a better movie than those, but in terms of performance, there's a few more that I like better.
Larry Bernstein:
You may recall that recently we reviewed A Few Good Men and Jack Nicholson played Colonel Jessup. Who did you like Colonel Jessup or Jake Gittes?
Darren Schwartz:
Jake Gittes. Nicholson was excellent in A Few Good Men.
Larry Bernstein:
It was cartoonish.
Darren Schwartz:
Yeah, it was cartoonish. It was a very one-dimensional character, although excellent.
Larry Bernstein:
Jake Gittes is a more complex character and requires greater range in his acting. In The Shining, he just goes off the deep end. It's the opposite here. He was a little bit loony as a detective, but he became more serious, thoughtful and empathetic as the picture went on.
Darren Schwartz:
He was consistent with his morals. The typical trope of a detective is you take payoffs. There was a line about bribery. Someone said, “Are you trying to bribe me? And he said, that's where I draw the line. I do not bribe people. Which is again odd because
Larry Bernstein:
He's in the business of helping wives figure out if their husbands are cheating on him. It's not serious work.
Darren Schwartz:
He'll ruin families and marriages with pictures and spying. But bribery, forget it.
Larry Bernstein:
Let's move to Faye Dunaway. What did you think of her performance?
Darren Schwartz:
It was good. I think there's other actresses that could have done it better. For some reason, Faye Dunaway has never really knocked my socks off.
Larry Bernstein:
Do you think Faye Dunaway lacks sex appeal?
Darren Schwartz:
Meryl Streep would've been amazing, and I'm not sure that Meryl Streep is known as a sex symbol, there just wasn't that emotional depth or conflict.
Larry Bernstein:
I think it is sex appeal.
Darren Schwartz:
You're probably right.
Larry Bernstein:
How do you compare her performance in Chinatown versus Bonnie and Clyde or Network?
Darren Schwartz:
Bonnie and Clyde was by far the best. There was a love affair in Bonnie and Clyde, so maybe that's what she needs.
Larry Bernstein:
I mean, they ended up in bed together. What is a love affair to you?
Darren Schwartz:
Yeah, but was that a love affair? She left, he tailed her, and then he told her she was going to be arrested. Then he saved her life. They moved fast.
Did you know that Roman Polanski had a part in the movie?
Larry Bernstein:
He plays a thug and slices Jack Nicholson's nose.
Darren Schwartz:
Yeah, that's one of the famous stills you see from the movie Chinatown. He's got that huge bandage.
Larry Bernstein:
When they took the bandage off, Faye Dunaway's character said, “oh my God, I had no idea it was that bad.” It doesn't even look like he had it properly sewed up. I don't know how he couldn't afford a plastic surgeon given the fees he was charging.
Chinatown was nominated for Best Picture. Godfather won, which was the better film?
Darren Schwartz:
Godfather. No question about it. Not even close.
The Godfather will never be dated because it is about gangsters, and there's no connection to the past or the future. When you're watching Chinatown, we have a water issue. Nothing there.
Larry Bernstein:
Let's move on to the second movie, Deliverance. Remember this is a podcast about rivers and dams.
The plot here is a dam is being built to block a river in North Georgia to create a lake and destroy this riverbed. Burt Reynolds character says to his buddies, let's canoe down this river while it still exists.
Darren Schwartz:
Based on a book by James Dickey, who was a poet. Burt Reynolds is Lewis who's an outdoors man. He's in great shape. He's got the body of an Adonis. Jon Voight as Ed his good friend, who's a Lewis wannabe who learns how to bow hunt like him. Then you've got Ned Beatty as Bobby who's the chubby sales guy who is way out of his element. And you've got Drew played by Ronnie Cox who is the moral compass of the group.
They're going to take two canoes, paddle down the river, spend two days before this river gets covered up by the dam.
Larry Bernstein:
The novel Deliverance by James Dickey is very similar to the screenplay, also written by James Dickey.
What would you say about Dickey's screenplay adaptation to his own novel?
Darren Schwartz:
What was different is that there was so much buildup in the book. The book was 280 pages. There must have been a hundred pages before they got to the river.
Larry Bernstein:
You've got two hours of running time. Dickey must edit stuff out. What is core to the story? Let's reduce it to its essence. And when you do that, it's even better.
Darren Schwartz:
I've read a lot about Dickey. This guy loved his own writing, and he distilled it down. It might be a very different audience for the book versus the movie. You know I watch movies, you read books, somehow, we're friends. He was just crafting it to the audience.
Larry Bernstein:
He was a famous and award-winning poet. The novel, his word choice is specific.
Darren Schwartz:
Some of the scenes were so long in the book when Ed scaled that cliff, I don't know how many pages that was. Every single movement, the scrape of a hand on a boulder, a bird chirping. It was intense. And you can't do that on screen.
Larry Bernstein:
We had Cliffhanger. Stallone was going inch by inch.
Darren Schwartz:
Of the four characters, who would you be?
Larry Bernstein:
Drew. Drew is the one character who gets killed. I don't have the muscle mass of Lewis. I don't have the killer instinct of Ed, and I can't squeal like a pig. So that leaves Drew.
Darren Schwartz:
Tell me who you think I'd be?
Larry Bernstein:
You're Ed. You got a killer instinct. You can scale a cliff if you must. You could learn how to use a crossbow. You're an animal.
Darren Schwartz:
I agree.
Larry Bernstein:
You're a leader of men.
Darren Schwartz:
And a champion.
Larry Bernstein:
The movie is famous for two banjo players together that's one of the big scenes of the film.
Darren Schwartz:
Let's talk from the book’s perspective. We just talked about Ed’s scaling the cliff and how it took so long in the book, but on film you can't do that. The opposite was true with the song. The writing was like he played music; he went to a minor key. You couldn't translate that to words because that music was so amazing.
Larry Bernstein:
One of the things that Patrick Allitt didn't like about Deliverance was that it painted a picture of rural North Georgia to be undeveloped where incestuous relations had been causing mental retardation of their offspring. What do you make of the decision to portray rural North Georgia river life so poorly?
Darren Schwartz:
Well, James Dickey wrote the book. He's from there. This is not like a city person, a carpet bagger came to town for a week and said, here's my experience. That's the world this guy grew up in.
Larry Bernstein:
Did you ever do a canoe trip with some of your buddies?
Darren Schwartz:
I did several.
Larry Bernstein:
And did anyone die or break their leg?
Darren Schwartz:
It was like Deliverance. We had four guys in a canoe. It was my friend Kenny's bachelor party. We were on the river for eight hours and I spent six of them in the water. I had on a wetsuit. I felt like one with water. I was floating downstream and there was this low hanging branch. I was holding on and a little spider crawled up right in front of me
Larry Bernstein:
And you screamed like a little girl.
Darren Schwartz:
And I connected with it. I said, let's combine forces here. And I ate it.
Larry Bernstein:
Oh, my goodness. Didn't see that coming.
My fraternity did a Delaware River canoe trip, and we were going to sleep outside in lean-tos. And I had heard that the weather forecast was going to get down near freezing. So, I persuaded a fraternity brother of mine, Kenny Shiu, to abandon the camping site and we found a bed and breakfast.
Darren Schwartz:
This everybody or just the two of you?
Larry Bernstein:
Just us.
We snuck out. I slept with a down comforter. I took a shower and shaved, I had a full breakfast: eggs, bacon, coffee. We headed back to the camping site, and it had gone below freezing and the men we had left hours earlier were broken.
We come out looking like a million bucks. Ready to go. And I see Gus, I say, Gus, Gus, what happened to you? And he said, it was so cold that I decided to sleep in a porta-potty. And I woke up and some unknown guy was pissing over me.
Darren Schwartz:
That's not true.
Larry Bernstein:
It's true.
Darren Schwartz:
The guy opened the door and Gus was there
Larry Bernstein:
Asleep curled up. And I knew at that moment that I had made the best decision of my life.
Darren Schwartz:
That’s horrible.
I also went on a trip to the Upper Youghiogheny River in West Virginia, which has Class 5 rapids, which the guys that planned the trip did not know. That was as close to Deliverance from a safety perspective that we got. It's one of those where you're going down and the guy's like, “Hey, a guy died there last week.” Get me off this river. But there's something about being on the water and connecting with nature. We've had to conquer water to live.
There's incest in both Deliverance and Chinatown.
Larry Bernstein:
I think it's more about sexual deviancy.
Darren Schwartz:
Fair enough.
Larry Bernstein:
The most memorable part of Deliverance is a male rape. The novel is more shocking than the film. And can you think of another male rape scene in modern cinema?
Darren Schwartz:
There's that prison scene, and I forgot the name of the movie.
Larry Bernstein:
Naked Gun 33 1/3rd?
Darren Schwartz:
This was unsettling because of how it unfolded. You've got two guys walking down the hill in the forest, the locals, and you've got the two city guys. They could have just gotten the canoe and rode away. But they walked up. Let's just connect. Maybe we can work this out. And it slowly turns into, no, we're going to put you against the tree and tie you up with your neck.
Watching Jon Voight's face as the assault was unfolding, there was this horrible look of resignation where he couldn't look away. It was more terrifying on screen for me.
Larry Bernstein:
Here is a city slicker, Jon Voight, who has never been in a violent situation. He was even incapable of killing a deer at short range,
Darren Schwartz:
Couldn't pull the trigger.
Larry Bernstein:
And he's put in a position where to save his own life and the lives of his buddies, he needs to kill another man. Most of us wonder if they will have the capacity to do that. In that Tom Hanks movie, that war movie we saw together.
Darren Schwartz:
Big?
Larry Bernstein:
No, the war movie
Darren Schwartz:
Saving Private Ryan
Larry Bernstein:
Saving Private Ryan, we see a character who can't go up those stairs and lets his buddy be stabbed by that German soldier.
Darren Schwartz:
That's the worst.
Larry Bernstein:
He just froze. Will Jon Voight's character freeze or will he have the gumption and the capacity to take him out? And it's a close call.
Darren Schwartz:
It is a close call as to whether he could pull the trigger. He had the courage to put himself in this situation. It wasn't like he was sitting there afraid. He aimed and he came through.
Larry Bernstein:
It's one thing to point a crossbow at the man. It's another to release.
Darren Schwartz:
Of those four actors who had the best performance?
Larry Bernstein:
Jon Voight by far.
Darren Schwartz:
Didn't you love Burt Reynolds?
Larry Bernstein:
He was excellent.
Darren Schwartz:
He was a stud. How about the muscles?
Larry Bernstein:
I mean he had muscles on top of muscles.
In this movie, tell us about the cameo.
Darren Schwartz:
Well, the cameo is of James Dickey, the author, the screenwriter, and a big hulking guy. He's six-foot three and a Professor at the University of South Carolina, but he was a poet, which is such an odd thing, this massive hulking guy. He was an alcoholic; he played the sheriff well and at the end he got into Jon Voight's face and said, don’t ever come back here. He was magnetic.
Larry Bernstein:
What do you make of the fact that there's all these cameos? Recently Happy Gilmore 2 had a lot of PGA golfers. We got James Dickey and Roman Polanski. Where are we going with these cameos?
Darren Schwartz:
It seems like you're trying to make a line from Deliverance and Chinatown to Happy Gilmore 2.
We had a very interesting experience watching and reading Deliverance. It was a three-pronged approach.
Larry Bernstein:
Here's what you did. You read the book, listened to the book and watched the film.
Darren Schwartz:
I watch movies in chunks sometimes, and I go back and watch several scenes. I read the book and alternated when I was in the car on long road trips, I was listening. It was a three-pronged approach to taking this story in.
Will Patton was at narrating the book. He's got a natural southern drawl, and it blew me away reading those beautifully crafted lines of James Dickey, hearing Will Patton say it, was a whole other level.
Larry Bernstein:
I did the same thing. I read the book. When I was driving, I listened to the book on Audible and then afterwards I watched the film with my daughter. I thought all three methods were superb artistic endeavors. And flipping back and forth between reading and listening is effective because you can hear the voice of the narrator as you read. It gave it a different level of engagement.
Larry Bernstein:
Should the audience see Deliverance?
Darren Schwartz:
I think the audience should. I would recommend that you read the book. It is 280 pages. But if you don't want to do that, then I would recommend listening to it. But the movie's quicker and you should absolutely do that.
Larry Bernstein:
I thought the book was great. I recommend it. I thought the movie was excellent. The banjo scene is great.
I love bluegrass. It is a period piece of what life looked like in 1970 rural Georgia. When my kids were younger, particularly Jonathan, he would say, “I don’t want to see an old movie. I don't want to do it.” But this movie had pace, tension, character development, beautiful scenery and historical context. It is well worth seeing 55 years later.
Darren Schwartz:
If it was present day, what do you think the banjo kid would be doing?
Larry Bernstein:
He would be playing video games 24/7 and his whole world would be engrossed in that TV.
Darren Schwartz:
Minecraft, Candy Crush. I agree.
Larry Bernstein:
Darren, if an audience member has not seen either Chinatown or Deliverance, which one should they watch first?
Darren Schwartz:
I think Deliverance. It's faster paced and when attention spans are so short, it's going to be much more engrossing. If you're someone who's a little more intellectual, then Chinatown, but I think overall most people would prefer Deliverance.
Larry Bernstein:
I vote for Chinatown.
If you're going to have a best actor award, would you give it to Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Voight, or Burt Reynolds?
Darren Schwartz:
Between those four I would give it to Nicholson.
Larry Bernstein:
I would too. It's a fantastic performance and second would go to Jon Voight.
Darren Schwartz:
Jon Voight absolutely is the star, but there's something so engrossing about Burt Reynolds, that fall from Grace, the leader, the guy who says we're going to charge in battle, and he gets wounded right away and the second command has to take over.
Larry Bernstein:
Chinatown and Deliverance are about sexual deviance, introspection, and the meaning of life. What were your thoughts on these two films?
Darren Schwartz:
The essence of Deliverance to me was man versus nature and man versus man, and you have to survive both. And sometimes man versus man is the more dangerous of the two. Chinatown part of it was about loyalty. Jake remained loyal to Faye Dunaway and Faye Dunaway remaining loyal to her sister slash Upp and her father Noah was not loyal to the family.
Larry Bernstein:
Chinatown ultimately was about greed and Noah's disregard for others.
And the funny part was it didn't come until the end that you've realized that this whole movie is about the John Huston character Noah and not Jake and Faye.
Darren Schwartz:
And by the end of it, there was no one who gave a shit about the water. It was this sleight of hand. It's all about the water, this investigation and putting stopwatches under someone's tire. This huge buildup. At the end, it had nothing to do with the water.
Larry Bernstein:
It was a family drama.
Darren Schwartz:
Yep.
Larry Bernstein:
That's it.
Thanks to Patrick and Darren for joining us.
If you missed the last podcast, the topic was the Future of Vaccines.
We had two speakers. Ofer Levy who is a Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the Director of Precision Vaccines at Boston Children’s Hospital. We also had Paul Mango who ran Operation Warp Speed for Trump in his first administration that successfully got a working vaccine for COVID in record time.
We discussed the current controversy over vaccines that has escalated since COVID.
I would now like to make a plug for next week’s podcast. The topic will be No Debate on College Campuses.
Our speaker will be Jon Shields who is a Professor of Political Science at Claremont McKenna. Jon just finished a study of nearly 30,000 college syllabi and he found that there is political bias in the choice of reading assigned and that there is little offerings of the other side.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, The Future of Vaccines, here.
