Detroit Gloom & Doom for a Happy Halloween

On my first flight to Detroit years ago, I marveled at the skyline. Who knows what could have been had the city further pursued its Olympic aspirations.

A standout structure on the lakefront -- John Portman's GM Renaissance Center -- gleamed even from 5,000 feet, just as it appeared in the film "Presumed Innocent."

After driving through central Motown en route to the fabulous Art Institute -- and realizing more than 1,000 area buildings now stand abandoned -- later bird's eye views yielded "urban graveyard" notions, with each rotting high rise resembling a tombstone for Detroit's heyday. 

Not a great fate for Michigan's largest city (predicted by Michael Moore in his debut "Roger & Me"). 

As you might suspect from the hit film references above, Detroit is the backdrop for many memorable movies. And since last Halloween, two films emerged as future horror classics that double for preserving snapshots of Detroit's plight.

If you're in the mood for a creepy and intellectual vampire feature, check out the clever "Only Lovers Left Alive" with Tilda Swinton as a Tangier-based blood sucker whose centuries-long marriage is enduring change. 

Her husband (Tom Hiddleston) resides in one of Detroit's abandoned mansions (there are thousands of derelict properties from which to choose) writing music inspired by contemporary rockers and memories of hanging out with Schubert. 

At night they Skype about many cerebral subjects before hitting their respective towns in search of an untainted hemoglobin fix. By day, they wring their hands over the world's dwindling supply of plague-free "pure" blood aptly nicknamed "the good stuff."

With Hiddleston in a personal funk, Swinton travels to Michigan to provide moral support. Her younger, free-spirited sister (played by Mia Wasikowska) also arrives on the scene, but quickly reveals her careless ways with a twentysomething victim and the elder couple's expensive supply of rare, clean blood. 

Mortified, Swinton and Hiddleston must work quickly to right the vampire ship before their coven is outed by nosy neighbors and local law enforcement.

I enjoyed the sophisticated banter that foreshadows human fate (for Detroit residents and worldwide). It's a sad future infusing a few lines of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner").

Hiddleston's vintage Jaguar (powered by unknown inventions of the couple's old pal, Nikola Tesla) and John Hurt's cameo as a vampire author Christopher Marlowe also elevate the highbrow environs.

Their body disposal method in an abandoned warehouse is super creepy. Savor and enjoy!

Another outstanding film casting a spooky spotlight on Detroit: "It Follows." What a scary treat!

I first learned of "It Follows" during three March 2015 segments on NPR. This is one film you may not wish to watch alone. More than once I was yelling at the screen "look out!" and "run, dummy!" just like when Jamie Lee Curtis ran for the closet in "Halloween" of 1978 (still terrifying!).

Opening in modern Michigan suburbs, "It Follows" introduces a wide-eyed college virgin, Jay (Maika Monroe) living the dream and considering her first sexual encounters with new beau, Hugh (Jake Weary) a heartthrob who recently transferred from a school a few towns away. 

Upon consummating their relationship in the back seat of Hugh's 1970's Detroit-built sedan, Jay is shocked to find herself knocked out by chloroform only to awaken underwear-clad and tied to a wheelchair inside an abandoned warehouse (the same as in "Only Lovers Left Alive," I wonder). 

Hugh informs her that through their tryst Jay inherited a new best friend "It" which is going to slowly stalk her until she passes the fuck buddy torch to another person.

"It" will follow her and hang around like a bad suit, addiction or lingering STD until "It" kills catches her.

And if Jay is caught and killed by "It" then It" returns, in reverse order, to torment those who previously encountered "It" following them. Get the picture?

Hugh punctuates these instructions by introducing "It" in the form of an expressionless nude female advancing on their warehouse perch. "It" can take the form of a stranger or a close friend -- that's what makes "It" clever.

Hugh drops Jay on her front lawn, leaving her terrified and bewildered as her younger siblings and neighbors watch. The teens (sans Hugh) then embark on solving the many problems "It" brings to their lives. 

This scene provides a peek at "It" appearing for the first time since the warehouse.

I haven't seen too many films this year that made such an impression.

Through its simplicity sans gore, car chases, or many special effects, "It Follows" is terrifying, mostly for letting the viewer's imagination fill in the blanks on what "It" might be or represent (many a spoiler-filled fan theory are now posted online). 

The script weaves in several literary greatest hits, and there's some excellent camera and lighting work. As in "Only Lovers Left Alive," decaying Detroit provides the unsettling backdrop in top form. 

Like peer classics "Halloween," "The Shining" and "Psycho," the film "It Follows" includes an outstanding soundtrack that makes the movie with musical effects inspiring hair stand at attention on one's neck and arms. 

The composer, Disasterpeace, built on notes from several horror genre favorites listed above, and I also picked up on possible inspiration he found from Tangerine Dream's work for "Risky Business" as well as Brad Fiedel's compositions for "The Terminator" or "Fright Night." There's even tonal reference to "Danse Macabre" and Trent Rezor/Atticus Ross' Oscar-winning score for "The Social Network."

Happy Halloween!

Images via IMDB

Beantown Blows 2024 Olympic Bid

In case others didn't already spill the beans, the Athens of America -- Boston -- today ended its 2024 Olympic bid by "mutual agreement" with the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Titletown now has a new nickname about which to brag: Olympic bid flunky.

Unlike Detroit with its ill-fated bids (seven of them) spanning the 1940s through early 1970s, Beantown is not likely to emerge as a future U.S. bid city in the lifetime of any living resident.

I predict Boston's Olympic aspirations will only echo Katy Perry's lyrics to "The One That Got Away" for many decades.

It's not entirely the Boston bid team's fault, though this armchair quarterback does believe some significant missteps were committed by, and rest at the feet of, Boston 2024 leadership. I'll come back to these questionable local choices in a few lines. 

For this blogger it feels like Boston was unintentionally teed up to fail from day one. 

Maybe when the U.S.O.C. met in early 2015 to choose the nation's candidate city, they should have given the winning metropolis a few days to get ready for a winning selection announcement with a more robust public Q&A option to instill confidence from the start. I hope this is a key takeaway the powers that be at Team USA will keep in mind for their next bid selectee for 2024 (assuming a bid will still occur) and future bids. 

Up until January , the U.S.O.C. was doing well with a new approach to Olympic bidding. They invited several cities to submit their interest and pose questions, and earlier stages of the new process seemed to go smoothly. If on a roll with new processes, I wondered then and now, "Why go back to the pre-2014 playbook after choosing Boston from a solid pool including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.?" 

A bigger lesson learned the hard way in Boston: No modern Olympic bid will succeed without the power of transparency. From the first day of their selection, Boston 2024's occasionally milquetoast and often dismissive Q&A responses (I suspect misguided by some old-school, non-P.R.-savvy execs at the U.S.O.C.) proved to be major Achilles' heels. 

The opening press conference was convincing (sort of), but the honeymoon period -- if there was one for Boston's bid team -- was short-lived. Public opinion spiraled in the wrong direction. Even at last week's televised debates (the selected event's title/theme itself seemed a communications flub) there was too much remaining room for skepticism. 

The biggest lesson, perhaps, is that the message "no public funds will be used" is a statement that worked only in a social media-free world of long ago. Like Joan Crawford at a Pepsi board meeting in "Mommy Dearest," too many citizen journalists, longtime Olympic reporters and plain folks have 'been to the rodeo' on Olympic bids and know that federal, state and local investments are part of the mix. 

It seems to me that if a future U.S. Olympic bid city would just put into plain English a summary of likely public funds to be spent, this transparency would diffuse some dissenting voices like those heard in Boston. Another way to get around this? Present Olympic bid "must haves" on one list with a matching list of "nice to haves" about which the public may pick and choose. To wit, clearly explain to the public and media what is negotiable (or isn't) with the IOC, leaving only the "negotiables" for debate.

A fellow Olympic historian believes the U.S.O.C. should frame a 2024 candidate as "America's Bid" (a national bid) rather than the work of a single metropolis. Monday's New York Times report on Boston's aborted mission lends credence to this "national approach" as an Associated Press survey found a vast majority of U.S. citizens -- nine in 10 or 89 percent -- support a USA bid, but their support wanes the more localized the bid city and financial responsibility gets. 

Speaking to the Boston Olympic naysayers with a Colonel Slade/Al Pacino Scent of a Woman voice, "F*ck you, too!" 

Members of No Boston Olympics or No Boston 2024 may feel like 'heroes' for 'defeating' the bid, but history will not likely be kind to you for your efforts. You not only killed the team dream for 2024, but also for several future generations of Boston bids. Like so many other anti-Games organizations who both loathe the power of the Olympics but also thrive only because of the Olympic news hook, your voices in Boston will soon be only a murmur. Best of luck on your next quest to improve Boston without the Olympic news machine to keep your messages on Page One and local broadcast news.

Yesterday, when the trade publication "Inside The Games" broke the news of the U.S.O.C. conference call to decide Boston's fate, their reporter mentioned Los Angeles as a likely 2024 alternative. 

This is an option I support, but today's NBC report deflated my expectations in LA2024 as the city's mayor "hasn't had recent conversations with the U.S.O.C."

You mean to tell me the U.S.O.C. decided to pull the plug on Boston without touching base with LA2024? This seems like another avoidable misstep to me. Only time will tell. 

As stated in my early 2015 post, my vote and Olympic bid hopes remained pinned on Washington, D.C. The city already has solid mass transit that actually connects points of interest, they are skilled at hosting mass-security gatherings, and the area's wealth of destinations provides an unlimited array of non-Games options to keep folks busy on the days when they have no Olympic tickets.

Given the aforementioned AP poll, Washington seems all the more appropriate as "America's candidate," a city getting ready for the world's Olympic spotlight for 200+ years. I can just picture Olympic wrestling and fencing at The Kennedy Center, archery on the National Mall or at Mount Vernon, and rowing on the Potomoc. The IOC could bring back the mostly dormant Cultural Olympiad at the Smithsonian and National Gallery of Art or Hirshhorn Museum.

The worst thing the U.S.O.C. could do for a fiasco encore would be to select San Francisco as its go-to candidate. If you think opposition was rough in Boston, wait until you see Olympic protesters in Shaky Town!

Do I support a 2024 Olympic bid from either D.C. or LA? Yes, absolutely. Would the 2024 Games rock in either city? Certainly. My preference simply is for a new city (Washington) to enjoy the opportunity to compete against Budapest, Hamburg, Paris and Rome.

And I'd prefer that the U.S.O.C. set a sturdier course for its next candidate city from day one.

Images via Boston 2024, this Flickr account and Conde Nast Traveler. Cartoon by Dan Wasserman via Boston Globe.

With All This Talk About Motown ...

In the wake of Michael Jackson's death, the [usual for a celebrity of his calibre] cavalcade of tribute programming is flashing on the TV.

I've heard more about Motown and Detroit in the last 48 hours than perhaps the last year, save the near-daily news updates about the challenges faced by the U.S. auto industry.

With all this talk about Motown, and also thanks to a recent refresher course in online search techniques, this week I stumbled upon a handful of blogs mentioning a lengthy promotional video created in Detroit for the city's failed Olympic bid for the 1968 Summer Olympic Games.

I first heard about Detroit's Olympic aspirations while connecting on flights to and from Beijing last summer. Must admit, asked myself "for the summer Games, or winter?"

As pointed out by http://www.autoblog.com/ in their June 15 post, this summer Olympic bid film fails on several fronts. In addition to leaving out any mention of the Motown music industry, there are some surprising (albeit indicative of the era in which it was filmed) elements that were intended to showcase the city's diversity (unfortunately, shifted into an incorrect gear a time or two).

Another manner in which this film backfired: It is just plain boring!

C'mon! Even President Kennedy (around the 15 minute mark in the film) looks bored out of his mind reading a prepared statement to the voting members at the IOC Session. His gruff closing "thank you" is perhaps telling of where the bid fit in his list of priorities.

I expect members of the International Olympic Committee selection team for 1968 kept copies of this film on the ready in case of acute insomnia. The narration does not at all convey whatever "excitement" the city had for hosting the Games. Even newsreels of earlier times, whether true or fictional, had more pep. I'm anxious to find a copy of Mexico City's Olympic bid film for a comparison.

Fortunately, in spite of losing to Mexico's capital for the 1968 Olympic duties, some of Detroit's hometown auto brands did go on to sponsor the Olympic Movement in gigantic ways. I still remember spotting the auto industry Olympic ads during the 1980s.

During the summer of 1989, while volunteering for the U.S. Olympic Festival coming to Oklahoma City, I was part of a team of 100 or so drivers who created an Olympic photo opp involving 100 new cars from the General Motors plant in OKC (one of many P.R. moves learned in my pre-public relations career days). We parked 100 cars -- each clad with "OLYMPIC" Oklahoma license plates -- in the car plant's parking lot to arrange an "OK89" logo visible from local news helicopters.

GM also sponsored the Olympics (as do other import car brands) throughout the last several years, until they nixed global sponsorship (again, back to http://www.autoblog.com/).

Except by living vicariously through Michael Moore's great documentary films (new release on Oct. 2, the same day of the IOC vote for 2016), KISS songs (which reminds me, check out the REAL "Rock City," a former Edelman client of mine, here), Eminem's big screen debut (yo!), a popular Harrison Ford murder mystery film, and aforementioned Michael Jackson videos, I've only experienced Detroit via the city's modern airport -- there's no better spot for a pre-flight margarita than Detroit's vast international terminal (though the south of the border restaurant in LAX's Tom Bradley International Terminal gives DTW a run for it's money). I do hope to explore Detroit's architecture and cultural hubs -- some mentioned in the Olympic bid film -- and visit Detroit in the future.

Would like to think Detroit's non-selection as the first Great Lakes candidate will only contribute to Chicago's 2016 Olympic bid success. Fortunately, the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid videos feature a bit more excitement and drive (as does President Obama's pitch video for the bid)!

(photo cropped from image similar to one at http://olympianartifacts.com/ and via pages of "The Perlow Guide to Olympic Bid Pins")