The Press: The Night the Lights Went On
Powers, Thomas
left with one disturbing detail. During the riots he walked with the student corteo, or procession, from the University to the downtown area. When they reached the business area and began passing...
...Soon thereafter they were supplied with Rotelle's promised substitute published by Catholic Books...
...He cannot have been much surprised at what happened after the lights went out in New York...
...With his goggle eyes that go off in different directions and his under-slung, faintly idiotic smile, Feldman looks so silly that he knows a little mugging will be as likely to get him a laugh as any performanee he might put on...
...From his vantage point at the rear he could see no thrown object, yet each large plate of glass seemed of its own accord to disintegrate...
...With reluctance, then, Costello engaged legal counsel to present his economic grievances to the bishops and possibly work out some way that he could sell his prayerbook...
...The immediate victim of this first case of ecclesiastical market-cornering is Harry Costello, the proprietor of a self-described "Morn and Pop" religious publishing house...
...The friend was puzzled...
...The marching students did not slow up, they stayed in the middle of the street, a certain distance from the windows...
...At first the grain ration was considered a temporary measure, but ,things never sorted themselves out, there was nothing for the dispossessed farmers to do, and for five hundred years they remained a volatile mob in the heart of Rome, demanding bread and Circuses and periodically erupting in violent riots which more than once ended with the burning of the city...
...In the present instance it was not a flash of lightning but the sudden darkness which revealed the landscape, a city divided by frontiers which could not have been more impassable if they'd been marked by barbed wire and checkpoints...
...Nobody I knew had been in surgery, or in an elevator, or on the IRT Express somewhere between City Hall and Union Square, but the stories had an air of excitement all the same, something of what children feel in a big storm when the streams begin to rise and trees go down in the wind...
...John's, of course, are only the initial victims of the bishops' anti-competitive agreements, boycott orders and ecclesiastical strong-arming...
...The RotelleCatholic Books version was quite similar to Costello's in form and content except that it used a different English translation of the original Latin text, a translation promulgated by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL...
...if we don't do something about them, they're going to do something about us...
...But by his interference in the open sale of Costello's prayerbook, Rotelle stepped from directing internal church worship to monopolizing a market for a commodity being sold to the general public...
...That market had to be created, in effect, by popular demand...
...As one of Costello's fellow publishers commented on the case, "The Church has never considered itself bound by the economic laws of this country...
...Was she all fight...
...It was some such vision as this which emerged when the lights went out in New York, and everybody began to see...
...It was "only" 29 percent in 1973...
...Perhaps they were not given money or time to work...
...Since Remake's cast includes Trevor Howard, James Earl Jones, Michael York, Ann-Margaret, Peter Ustinov, Spike Milligan, Roy Kinnear and Ed McMahon (in addition to Feldman himself and, of course, Gary Cooper), ~it is also an attempt to carry the film by mere presence...
...Everybody got the point right away...
...The Trouble with such statistics is that they reveal the extent without having much to say about the nature of the problem...
...Even from the distance of Rome it was clear that the great blackout of 1965 had been a special event, a bit like V-J Day, when New Yorkers all experienced the same thing at the same time and would not have missed it for the world...
...ICEL was created after the Second Vatican Council by the Catholic Episcopal Conferences of the Englishspeaking countries to translate liturgical texts...
...Counsel for Rotelle and the bishops has refused to discuss the Costello and St...
...The Heretic has followed officially from The Exorcist, like The Deep from laws, while Audrey Rose has, like Orca, tried to horn in on the action...
...These films just gd to show that the old formula still works...
...nothing like that was going on where she lived...
...But that's a quibble...
...The American bishops put up approximately 75 percent o f ICEL's initial investment and receive a corresponding share of its .profits from royalties...
...What the blackout revealed was the lowest of the low, the underclass of black and Hispanic poor dumped in the cities, an alienated, restless, anarchic mass as unmalleable as any the world has seen since the mob of ancient Rome...
...The bishops' attorney rejected all such submissions and insisted that the Church could do nothing to relieve Costello of "a bad business deal...
...It holds the copyrights to those translations and receives royalties from the companies who obtain licenses to publish and sell them...
...But the bishops continue to resist Costello in court with dilatory and complicating maneuvers including the intervention of the Anglo-Irish bishops with a trumped-up claim against Costello's Irish printer for breach of their licensing agreement...
...The training center was just what you'd expect: an instant structure of plastic, glass and aluminum surrounded by cyclone fencing topped with barbed wire, and inhabited by a lot of young blacks and Puerto Ricans with alert eyes...
...Right away he met three or four guys he used to know years ago when they'd all been youth workers with one of the fighting gangs in Brooklyn...
...They weren't dramatic...
...The retailers reacted predictably to this not-to-subtle hierarchical pressure and told Costello with regret that they were compelled to boycott his prayerbook...
...He noted that when students are incensed, they usually break windows by dramatically throwing rocks...
...Rotelle's actions, however, had not only wiped out his investment in the Irish prayerbooks, but had also begun to sour his long-standing reputation with Catholic merchants as a distributor of orthodox literature...
...Trailing along after the annual Airport and Black Sunday, this summer RoIlercoaster is hoping to take us for the ride...
...Was the killing a mistake or part of a larger scheme...
...A couple of years ago I wrote an article about the various "modalities" of cure for heroin addiction...
...John's had...
...The Times talked about "justice" and "peace," but what really alarmed the writer was the awful sense that my God...
...the bishops have completely accepted ICEL's texts for the official worship of the church...
...The great blackout of 1977 inverted an old metaphor an ancient workhorse of literature like the notorious tip of the iceberg which darkly hints of the huge mass invisible beneath the surface of the water...
...The schoolteacher reassured her friend...
...When the looters spilled into the streets it was just another leak in the dike...
...When the Huns and Goths arrived they merely pushed over a tottering structure, rotten within...
...In similar fashion, as the writerdirector of this film, he obviously feels that the whole idea of remaking Beau Geste is so campy, it hardly, requires elaboration or invention beyond just having thought of it...
...The Bishops' Committee on the Liturgy, through its executive, Augustinian F.ather John E. Rotelle, has instructed independent Catholic religious goods merchants not to sell a private-devotional prayerbook bearing an Irish imprimatur...
...I visited the Arthur Kill center in a remote corner of Staten Island and spent a couple of hours talking to the director, a calm, intelligent, somewhat puzzled black man who had spent his life in one form or another of social work...
...Only after we get beyond the concept and the east might we expect to get down to some inherently original material...
...Costello imported the prayerbook and placed it for sale with various church-goods dealers and religiousbooks stores throughout the country...
...It may also have gratified Rotelle, who fancies himself a literary scholar, to know that all the simplified breviaries were using his approved translation...
...been ,publishing a shortform breviary suited to lay use since 1940...
...Unemployment among black youths is nearly 50 percent...
...This was all to be expected...
...There were no lonely voices, no solitary prophets pointing to the dispossessed rabble seething just across the frontiers of Harlem and Brooklyn...
...The dialogue doesn't make any sense or even have any funny lines in it, but the very fact that it is taking place is supposed to amuse US...
...Nothing much had ever been done for his kids, after all...
...All the royalty revenue from the sale of those liturgical books finds its way, of course, back to the bishops through ICEL...
...The air of excitement lends urgency to deadlines, returns journals squarely to the center of community life, and makes sense of the custom that they come out every day...
...Shortly thereafter, Rotelle telephoned Costello to tell him that his prayerbook did not have official approval and could not be sold...
...John's breviary or its literary quality was never questioned...
...Personally he abhors any thought of a conspiracy...
...There are 9 million poor in the nation's central cities...
...When the bishops and their publishing consorts "become the sole sellers of ,prayer material they can set their price which every consumer, Catholic or not, must pay...
...Like a big fish eating a small one, Orca The Killer Whale has tried to swallow whole the popularity of laws, and The Deep has attempted to contain the appeal of both...
...The old formula is: the more words there are in the title, the less there will be to the film itself...
...High land prices and the introduction of slaves were more than the citizen farmers could handle...
...In March, 1977, six months after the RotelleCatholic Books "official" version was published, St...
...I THE BISHOPS PLAY MONOPOLY DANIEL MORRISSEY The traditional independence of Catholic publishers is at stake The Catholic hierarchy is trying to monopolize the religious books market in this country and has been violating federal antitrust laws in the process...
...These two events do not raise questions about the bishops' ultimate authority to decide which English texts will be used for the Church's public worship...
...Costello proposed several forms of advertising disclaimers designed to meet any ecclesiastical objections that he was trying to pass his prayerbook off as an "approved" text for public worship...
...When the gangs died at the end of the Fifties they'd moved on, and now Commonweal: 531 here they were together again, fighting heroin...
...Of course...
...More than half of black children in the North go to schools which are 90 percent black...
...I don't know what happened to them...
...The films are Marty Feldman's The Last Remake o/Beau Geste and nobody-in-particular's The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training...
...Cloud followed suit by withdrawing his imprimatur although the orthodoxy of the St...
...The interesting thing about blackout coverage was the speed and the unanimity with which people got the point...
...By the time we get to Remake there have been too many boxes within boxes, too many carbon copies of the ideas that once made some movies 19 August 1977:$$2...
...This prayerbook was recommended by the Dominican Order for worldwide devotional use by its lay members and had received an imprimatur from an Irish bishop...
...With that end in view, the industry, when it's smart, offers the summer trade the most original work it canmNew York, New York, or Star Wars, for instance--so people will feel a movie really is an alternative to the tired stuff on the tube...
...The last thing Costello, a faithful Catholic, desired was a confrontation with Rotelle or his hierarchical superiors...
...Like Marty Feldman, The Last Remake of Beau Geste depends excessively on what it is, as opposed to what it can do, to be funny...
...Oscar Lewis called it "the culture of poverty," by which he meant an air of feckless, disspirited, volatile confusion passed from one generation to the next like a family name...
...It was apparent he felt like someone trying to plug a leak in a dike...
...And so on...
...Welfare payments, job training, subsidized employment, remedial education, busing, rent subsidies, lowcost housing, counseling, "community action" programs and just about every other social service nostrum known to man have been tried in the past without much result...
...John's was only toldthat its book would not contribute to the "uniformity of prayer which the bishops desire...
...Rome, it will be remembered, also had a welfare problem...
...Everytime he got one leak stopped up, the water simply forced it way through somewhere else...
...the lights were off and the milk was turning sour in the icebox, but that was all...
...Brooks used exactly the same gag in one of the scenes in Young Frankenstein...
...Cloud, Minnesota, who is a member of the Bishops' Committee on the Liturgy...
...Whatever the condition of the urban poor is, it is intractable if not ineradicable, and it has the irrepressible force of all growing things, like seedlings which can crack concrete...
...Three days after Con Edison's lights went off, and the mentai lights went on, an editorial in the Times said: " . . . the darkness of Wednesday night made us see more about our city and our national policies than we have been able to see in a decade of sunshine...
...But this is unfortunately the point where Remake becomes most derivative...
...When they reached the business area and began passing in front of the various stores, the windows seemed to begin smashing themselves as if by magic...
...The facts of poverty and race in the United States are easy to come by...
...I asked him if he thought there were some link between the persons (police officers or not) who shot that student, and the other cool-headed .persons who walked with the angry students and inconspicuously headed their bags of stones...
...But the thing I remember best was a remark by the director...
...It's a riddle...
...the result was the same in any event: a sense of things let go for too long...
...They'd only been kids when be first met them, members of the Savage Skulls and the Death Angels, tearing up the streets of Bedford Stuyvesant on hot summer nights, and now here they were again, in their mid-twenties, strung out on junk...
...the blackout was a reminder of something more, that the cities of America harbor not simply a mass of people who fall below federally determined poverty levels (e.g., $5,500 for a non-farm family of four) but an underclass of violent, chaotic, unattached people who won't go away...
...Neady 26 million Americansml2 percent of the population~are poor by federal standards...
...THOMAS POWERS SUMMER RERUNS OOOOOOOOOOOOOO THE SCREEN Since there are nothing but reruns on television, summer is the time that Hollywood hopes the public will go out to a movie...
...However, he and his colleagues are intrigued by the murder of the student from Lotta Continua...
...I asked a store-owner who broke his windows and why...
...The blackout eerily revealed in 19 August 1977:530 darkness rather than light what Michael Harrington once called The Other America...
...Since Costello's prayerbook used a translation copyrighted by the Irish and British bishops, they, not the American bishops, were entitled to royalties from its sale...
...I missed it again...
...When Rome became an empire and the city was flooded with foreign money the first thing to be hit by inflation was land...
...For weeks thereafter every letter from home had a blackout story...
...But the odd thing, he said, the really interesting thing was that he knew so many of the inmates too...
...And on top of that, Brooks's own ideas are themselves such a scavenger hunt through movie history that they're seldom truly original either...
...Costello is an unpretentious and immediatelylikable middle-aged business man who has been making his living for a number of years dealing in religious books...
...What I'm referring to, of course, is Hollywood's penchant for sequels and, beyond that, for all sorts of deriva,tire schiock which tries to do the same thing as a re-run ---to exploit some earlier success and milk it dry...
...He mentioned in passing that arriving at the Arthur Kill training center was like old home week...
...In short, he put forward a version of the Whirlwind Theory...
...John's version had been given an imprimatur by one of its competitor's directors, the Bishop of St...
...Pretty clearly something had changed in New York between 1965 and 1977, and the press was not slow to point out what it was...
...But in recent years the film industry has developed its own equivalent of the re-run mentality, and this summer more than in previous ones, it seems to be getting the upper hand...
...A cop who did not assist at the riots, but who keeps his eyes open, had some different thoughts...
...The negotiations, however, proved to be a one-sided experience...
...Likewise, the Rotelle-ordered boycott of Costello's prayerbook and the sale of the Catholic Books-ICEL substitute which he promoted enriched the bishops' royalty revenue...
...Perhaps no one had quite forgotten the riots of 1967 and later years, but no one had been talking much about them, either, and certainly nothing was being done about the problem, if indeed there is anything which can be done...
...As a last resort Costello filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Rotelle and the bishops in Washington, D.C...
...For a day or two after the blackout the fat headlines of the New York Post seemed more than a nervous tic, and it's even possible that no one in the entire city picked up his morning's Times with the old complaint that it was too fat, too full, too much ado about nothing...
...Small world...
...certainly nothing happened to the heroin problem in New York City...
...In the case of the Costello prayerbook, American Dominicans additionally are cut off from a common Commonweal: 529 prayer text used'by their co-religionists elsewhere in the English-speaking world...
...Huge estates took their place and the dispossessed farmers gradually drifted to the capital where they went on the dole...
...Last and, one might wish, least in this sequence of sequels, serials, second-hand soap and rip-offs, two new comedies are now trying to do for that genre what the films just mentioned have done for the thriller, horror film, etc...
...The Communist city administration had left them alone for fear of ruining its image as champion of students, and defender of the left...
...This was a welfare problem with a vengeance and the Romans never solved it...
...John's Abbey Press of Collegeville, Minnesota, suffered a similar fate at the hands of Rotelle and his boss Archbishop Bernardin...
...The distinguished liturgical publisher, St...
...This time I was in Vermont, and the stories friends told were pretty much the same--dinners interrupted, a game of bakgammon finished by candlelight, streets earlier dark, trouble getting home, a reminder of what life had been like before the invention of the air conditioaer...
...A schoolteacher said she'd been called by a worried friend in Holland...
...it will probably take the bishops a while to learn they don't control independent merchants here as they did in metlieval Europe...
...Three days later on May 29, 1976 Rotelle sent a memo to all the independent merchants telling them to stop selling the "unauthorized" prayerbook and promis19 August 1977:528 ing them a marketable substitute approved by the American bishops which would soon be distributed by a rival publisher, Catholic Books Publishers, Inc...
...Half of all the unemployed in the United States are under 25...
...He said that this was done by students who had been warming up for over a year with similar shenanigans, although on a smaller scale...
...This puzzled and amused the director...
...she lived in the Village...
...Costello and St...
...We've been put oti noticeagain...
...He was speaking of the poor throughout the country---out-of-work miners in Appalachia, old folks eking by on Social Security, Indians and Chicanos and all those people who lose their jobs when the GNP drops by a tenth of a point...
...Its origins were not so different from those of our own...
...For him there was no mystery...
...They do, however, reveal dictatorial measures by the bishops and their agents to-control and profit from the distribution of material used for private worship~ At issue also are the traditional independence of Catholic DANIEL DIORRISSEY, former editor of the Georgetown Law Weekly, is a Washington lawyer...
...In fact, the movie industry used to be so loath to repeat itself that it couldn't see the legitimate worth of playing its own re-runs---the classics of the 30s and 40s---in summer festivals at repertory theaters...
...Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, the president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, has also told a noted Catholic publishing house not to distribute another prayerbook of unquestioned orthodoxy and literary quality because it might compete in the market of private-devotional material with d similar version producing translation royalties for the bishops...
...Only one story broke the pattern...
...One was mandatory, incarceration and treatment in a state training center under a program sponsored by Nelson Rockefeller...
...Costello contracted with an Irish publisher to purchase and distribute its simplified version of the breviary entitled Morning, Evening and Night Prayer...
...The last time I was in Rome, tearing copy from the UPI European wire when a flash came through that New York City had gone dark...
...The trouble is that Feldman's ideas about movie comedy are so heavily influenced by Mel Brooks, they're hardly Feldman's at all...
...John's prr to distribute its edition bttt was informed by Bernardin that the bishops would not allow the book to be sold at all The Bishop of St...
...A crisis justifies the hugeness of the enterprise, and journalists find nothing so bracing as knowing that what they write is going to be read with more than the usual sense of dull and grudging obligation...
...As Feldman then hobbled off, Wilder followed attempting to imitate Feldman's spastic, hunch-back shuffle, That was a pretty good gag too, but it was out of W. S. van Dyke's Another Thin Man, where a dottering butler fed the same line to William Powell and was followed with the same mockery...
...Newspapers love big dramatic events in which editors can rise to the occasion in the manner of generals directing a battle, dispatching reporters across the map, laying out their stories, assigning roundups and sidebars, bringing out the big type for banner headlines...
...Royalties To no one's surprise Rotelle the liturgist has shown a marked preference for the works of Rotelle the translator...
...No one seems to know for sure, because no one quite knows what the problems is when it's been stripped of statistics...
...In the case of the people who went looting the night of July 13, the solution is more elusive...
...Really...
...The condition of the elderly poor might be alleviated by money alone...
...Was the killer a police officer, an agent of some outside group, a student trying to look like a cop...
...Seen today, Beau Geste itself is such a sketch to Feldman that he can't resist including part of a scene from it in his own film, contriving a dialogue between himself and Gary Cooper in which they appear to sit at the same table in the same room...
...He'd heard there was looting, mass arrests, the city aflame...
...There's nothing to criticize here, unless it's a certain note of ungenerous panic...
...Maybe people in the village or in Brooklyn Heights or on the Upper East and West Sides were sharing candles and putting up stranded friends for the night, vignettes which might fit nicely into a novel by Jane Austen, but the scene elsewhere was from The Day of the Locust--kids ripping the gates from storefronts in Harlem and Brook!?~: ~hopkeepers with rifles, thousands of arrests, stripped show windows, women with supermarket carts filled with stolen food, men staggering home with color TVs...
...Various government bureaus unload bushels of them periodically...
...When Feldman has a blind man serving soup in the legionnaire's mess in Remake, it's funny enough, except that the edge is taken off our amusement by our sense of d~]tz vu...
...publishers, the proper application of the imprimatur power and the appointment of Rotelle to two powerful positions engendering a serious conflict of interest...
...Rotelle banned the prayerbook in America because its sale here breached the English-speaking bishops' cozy agreement not to compete with one another across the Atlantic...
...Which was just the point...
...charging two basic combinations in restraint of trade: the Rotelle-ordered boycott of his praycrbook and a larger scheme between the North American bishops and the Catholic hierarchy of Ireland and the British Isles to divide up the world market for religious books, particularly the market for abridged breviaries...
...Nothing to worry about...
...Even a few examples demonstrate the magnitude of the problem: ---Black family income is only 60 percent of that for whites...
...Everyone recognizes in a dutiful way that the poor are always with us...
...John's cases while the Costello matter is in litigation and has likewise refused to make his clients available to answer questions about either instance...
...When it was set to bring out its fifth edition of that work entitled Book o/ Prayer in November...
...1975, it was told by the bishops to hold up publication until Six months after the similar Rotelle-Catholic Books version hit the market...
...For that matter, the first time we ever saw Marty Feldman, it was in Young Frankenstein when he met Gene Wilder at the Transylvania Station and directed him to "Walk this way...
...When he got back to his store after the riots, all the windows had been smashed, and in the rubble he found four or five plastic bags filled with rocks...
...He is curious to know who the students were, if they were students, who broke the windows, what the techniqtie was they used, and why it was they were so well prepared and cool, while the others were furious at the death of one of their number at the hands, it seems, of the police...
...He shook his head: "E un rebus...
...The executive secretary of ICEL is the self-same John E. Rotelle who doubles as the executive director of the Bishops' Committee on the liturgy...
...John's had to reluctantly accede to this headstart by the bishops' volume because St...
...We were forced to confront . . . (the fact) that profound problems of race and poverty still lurk just beneath the surface of this fruitful society, that they pose a constant threat to a social fabric that is in fact surprisingly fragile...
...This ecclesiastical monopoly stifles not only economic and scholarly competition but also literary and artistic variety...
Vol. 104 • August 1977 • No. 17
