Lost Article: Tori Pence

This is a "lost article": Something I wrote under the impression that it would be published, but something went wrong. The goal in journalism is to cover your bases with everyone involved but sometimes you can't anticipate everything. Except, of course, if it's the editor causing your article to go unpublished without compensation, ditch that editor ASAP. In this case, the subject of the article, Tori Pence, no longer is a Virginia resident, which makes her ineligible for Virginia Magazine. 

Buena Vista native Tori Pence is defined as much by her restlessness as she is by her accomplishments. In addition to her role as a cast member and writer on the Utah-based sketch show Studio C , Pence sings, does cover art, knows how to remodel a home, and is a skilled enough puppeteer that she was cast on Studio C’s sister show Nine Years to Neptune.

“I like the idea of being a renaissance person, the ability to build skills is half the journey. So once you learn one thing, it’s easier to learn another. A couple of my [siblings] are opera singers. We are an artsy family,” said Pence.

Since its debut in 2012 Studio C  has been a hit both for its parent network, BYU TV, and Youtube where the show has amassed 2.58 million subscribers. In addition, the show has garnered appearances for its cast members on Late Night with Conan O’Brien; a spin-off group earned a semi-final berth on the NBC humor competition “Bring the Funny”; and been able to bring on Saturday Night Live cast members Kenan Thompson and Will Forte as special guest stars.

Tori, 30, was cast in the show’s eighth season upon her graduation in 2016. She was recruited from the BYU’s sketch comedy troupe Divine Comedy which is where the original Studio C cast members met.

“I never wanted it to be my career, I thought it was going to be a thing that I do for fun. We would do four shows a month for a bunch of college kids who were tired and we needed a pick me up,” she said.

Instead, she had aspirations to be a librarian. She worked three jobs to pay her college tuition and she fell in love with one of them: She was a storyteller at the Provo City Library and used puppets in her performances.

Many of the cast members of Studio C’s current cast bought special talents—one of them has a background in stand-up, one is a ukulele player and song writer—and Tori Pence has been able to work puppets into some of her sketches. After temporarily departing the show after the 13^th season in 2021, Tori was asked to audition for the BYU TV show Nine Years to Neptune where she voiced the characters of Sascha and Pauline in a ten-episode run.

“We searched far and wide for talented puppeteers with improv capabilities. The first time we saw Tori’s audition we sensed we had a winner, and we were right. She was endlessly cheerful and had us all cracking up," said Nine Years co-creator Tyler McKellar.

Tori’s parents, Phil and Ellen, are life-long Virginians who jointly write novels under the pseudonym P.E. Pence. Tori is the sixth of eight children that her parents refer to as Pencelings. Tori's older sister, Rebecca, won the Miss Virginia pageant in 2015 as a way of sharing her religious beliefs. The family made part of their income restoring and flipping houses which meant that Tori moved around a lot as a child from Varina to Richmond to the small-town of Buena Vista.

“You don’t understand, I think Virginia is the greatest state. We moved a lot when I was a kid. I don’t have any connection to a house, I have a connection to the state,” said Pence.

Pence also credits her upbringing in the small town of Buena Vista for helping her develop her versatility. Not only did she act in all the school’s plays, she had to direct them by necessity since the school didn’t have a drama department. 

"Tori loves Virginia and if it weren't for her work, she would be living there still. She has said on more than one occasion how it's the most beautiful state in the country," said mother Elaine Pence.  "She has a group of friends still today that grew up together in B(uena) V(ista). They call themselves the Freakets and they get together as much as possible to celebrate milestones, birthdays and run marathons."

Pence’s state pride also includes being proud of being part of the Virginia LDS Church, which boats a population of 95,000 (the 2^nd highest population east of the Mississippi).

“It really just is a culture culture thing. LDS folks from outside of Utah grow up with people outside of the faith, so they’re more comfortable with non-LDS experience,” said Tori Pence.  

As for Tori’s future, she is re-joining the Studio C cast after a two-season hiatus and has plans to open a soda shop in Provo.

“I tend to do whatever pops up [in my head] next. I’m trying to be a little better at directing myself. My original intention was to become a librarian and Studio C tried to derail that,” she said.

Behind the Scenes of Six More of My Stories

 

The World-Class Bor Brothers: Podium Magazine (2021)

https://www.outsideonline.com/health/running/culture-running/people/the-brothers-bor-a-fast-family-finds-their-place/

One of my earliest beats as a writer was covering my cross-country team for my college so I developed a rare love of watching people run in circles and keeping up with the ins and outs of that sport. That extends to quite a bit of Olympics writing which is centered around track and field in the second week.

A friend of mine at ESPN suggested I pitch some articles and one got in about the controversial WCAP which offers foreign nationals (mostly Kenyans) expedited citizenship for military service and some say that the military service isn’t on par with the average soldier. At the 2016 Rio Trials, 4 of the 18 coveted distance running slots on the men’s Olympic team went to Kenyans.

When I published this article, one of those Olympians, Hillary Bor, found me on Facebook and expressed frustration that I had diminished his military service and didn’t tell the full story. Upon some reflection, I felt there was some xenophobia in my article: I wanted to see Americans do well including the ones that had been running under the American flag longer.

I offered to write a correction of some sort and Mr. Bor just said something along the lines of “whatever.” During the next Olympic cycle in 2021, I had published one Olympics-related piece for Podium Magazine and decided to pitch something about Hillary and his brother Emmanuel who had just given the 5K indoor American record a scare.

If someone messages you on Facebook, they’re still permanently there among your contacts, so I messaged Hillary about my desire to write my wrong, and he barely cared at that point and didn’t have much time to do an interview, but I was persistent with him about working with his schedule and his brother was pretty eagerly on board, so I eventually got it down.

The end result was something I’m quite proud of and I believe helped restore justice in telling the story of these two incredible siblings.

Filmmaker Anne Welles: Falls Church News Press (2018)

https://www.fcnp.com/2018/10/18/comedy-horror-film-mason-alum-debuts-just-time-halloween/

When I first imagined writing about film as a journalist out of college, I was not even aware of all the work that film makers were doing on an independent level. I’ve since learned the importance of shining a light on people working at all scales of film making rather than treating films as a hagiography of a select few blockbuster names. There’s also this image that movies can only be done in the abstract magical realm of California whereas people can get their starts anywhere.

One of these film makers, Anne Welles had a great trajectory to her dreams: She was a stay-at-home mom going through a separation at the age of 32 when she decided to try an acting class and soon booked an agent. Within a few years she was directing short films and by the time I interviewed her, she had a film “An Accidental Zombie Named Ted” on Amazon Prime.

I’m especially proud of the opening line:
“Filmmaker Anne Welles traces the moment she fell out of love with show business to a botched middle school audition. She thanks the film “Jerry Maguire” for restoring her faith in what is now her life’s work.”

Photo Essay on the Set of How Do You Know: Examiner.com (2009)

I generally cite October of 2010 as the start of my professional journalism career, so we’ll chalk this up to amateur stuff. One of my first gigs was as an Examiner for the Film Industry in DC. It was, more or less, a content farm so I could write whatever I wanted about film but getting enough people to read it so that I’d make any money was another story.

Still, it put me in the practice of writing regularly and occasionally, I did something that felt like real journalism. Even though this gig wasn’t very much of a real thing, I was still on the media list for the D.C. Film Office and I got an e-mail alert to the shooting of the James L. Brooks film “How Do You Know.” The film starred Paul Rudd, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, and Jack Nicholson in what would be his last role. Very little was needed in terms of clearance to get on the set since they were basically shooting on the street, so as long as I kept a healthy distance, no one really cared.

It was a highly eye-opening experience as to what life on set was for extras and I even remember sneaking a couple glances at Witherspoon and Rudd from across the street. I’m generally embarrassed of everything I wrote when I started writing but I think the photo captions still hold up. The quality of the photos were another story.

Occupy DC Offers Hands-On Learning: Teaching Tolerance (2012)

https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/occupy-dc-offers-handson-learning

Remember the Occupy Movement of a decade ago? It sounds bizarre that a bunch of 20-something underemployed and unemployed bums started camping out on public property in an effort to supposedly change the world or something or other. But stranger things have happened since then.

This is a good example of a story that happens if you go out a lot and keep your eyes open. I went to the Occupy Movement out of random curiosity and was surprised to learn that a teacher at an extremely unconventional high school was taking students along to Occupy as part of an extra-curricular. Whereas a non-reporter would say “well, good luck with that liability, weirdo teacher”, the reporter part of my brain reacted with “jumping jehoshaphat, have I got a scoop here!” But where would I write it up?  This was 2011 and I had little journalistic experience. Another person walking around with a note pad said he was writing for the Truth Pursuit and I asked him for his editor’s contact.

The Truth Pursuit liked my idea and greenlit a piece. This doesn’t happen very often but they gave me a kill fee (a payment for a good faith effort) and someone else picked up my story: The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Magazine Teaching for Tolerance. This was pretty funny because I later wrote for The Federalist and American Conservative and the audiences of each of those publications considers the others illegitimate spewers of hate speech.

Miss Arlington USA, Grace Ashti, Works to Overcome Speech Disability: ArlNow (2019)

https://www.arlnow.com/2019/02/28/miss-arlington-usa-2019-works-to-fight-bullying-overcome-her-speech-disability/

Like the previous story, this was a story I stumbled upon. In this case, this was through a shared Uber ride. My fellow passenger was talkative and I’m naturally talkative with strangers and she was saying she was a beauty pageant contestant, and I thought “hmmm, that could be a story idea.” Once again, I wasn’t “networking.” I don’t go out of my way to find stories but I’m naturally curious, talkative with strangers, and do have a need to mix up my daily schedule and activities. And I always make it a point to carry around business cards.

Grace Ashi was not an immediate hit with the editors I was in contact with at the time, but I banked the story for a later day. When ArlNow was hiring freelancers, I had already worked for them twice so I used this as one of my pitches and voila! Grace is a real estate agent and a fashion blogger so her incentive to be publicized is high and that always helps get an interview moving, but she was also a cooperative subject, and now she’s even a patreon. Check her out

Side note: Uber, can we please bring UberShare?

Death of Rabbi Laszlo Berkowitz, Founding Rabbi of Temple Rodef Shalom: Falls Church News Press (2021)

I went to preschool at Temple Rodef Shalom and vaguely remember that the Rabbi was a Holocaust survivor but I haven’t been inside the synagogue since I was 5 or 6. That’s what made it interesting to hear about the Jewish life I might have led if my parents had opted to continue my Jewish education at Temple Rodef Shalom rather than another synagogue.

One interesting facet of this story was the strange reaction I got from one of my sources: She had a back-and-forth with me where she had nothing to contribute and directed me to people who would have known him better. Memo to sources: If I’m contacting you for a story, be assured that you are clearly important to the story. If you don’t want to contribute that’s fine, but there’s no need to question your importance. I collect the information than sort out what’s important at the end of the day.


https://www.fcnp.com/2021/02/21/laszlo-berkowits-1st-rabbi-temple-rodef-shalom-left-indelible-legacy/

Deep Water Review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf Meets an SNL Sketch

 

This film presents an askew world that can be so jarring, it comes back to being unintentionally humorous before settling into a tense plot. If I didn’t know it came from two masterminds of the psychological thriller genre who knew what they were doing — the source material by novelist Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, Talented Mr Ripley) and Adrian Lyne as director (Fatal Attraction)---I would describe this as an extremely bizarre cross between the 2009 Saturday Night Live sketch “I Have Sex with Your Wife” and the 1966 classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in which an older couple (George and Martha, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton) unleash a 90-minute burst of raw, sociopathic marital dysfunction on an unassuming young couple they’ve invited to dinner.

The key players are Vic (Ben Affleck), a lower-middle-aged entrepreneur who’s now a member of the idle rich after retiring off a technological invention. His wife, Melinda, (Ana de Armas) is a gorgeous firecracker with a voracious sexual appetite who seems to get off on having affairs right under her husband’s nose.

It’s initially kind of vague whether seeing her wife gallivant with other men in such close proximity is something he welcomes as a kink or just tolerates it, but yikes! These two need therapy before things get all murdery and out of hand.

Or maybe, things have already gotten that far? Vic even admits it out loud to one of Melinda’s lovers.

On the surface, little about this film makes sense. Why do all three of Melinda’s on-screen lovers seem so blase about violating Vic and Melinda’s marriage after coming face-to-face with Vic? They all consistently seem to feel little guilt and have little concern for their own safety at this transgression. What is up with Vic and snails? If it’s an open secret that Vic killed someone in what appears to be a tight-knit neighborhood, why isn’t he a social pariah?

This is up there with Darren Aronofsky and David Lynch in terms of mind-f***ery, but here’s the thing:

There’s a great internal consistency to this world that demands admiration. These two might be less memorable than George and Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but that’s partially because George and Martha were the king and queen of mood whiplash.

Instead, Melinda is always a suburban temptress and Vic is always a mysterious cauldron of dark impulses.

If you feel like this film doesn’t feel right, it’s not supposed to. It’s a skewed universe where these people are too insane to exist but they do resemble certain aspects of an unhealthy marriage pushed to extremes. And to the degree that anything still doesn’t match up, it’s certainly discussion-provoking.

Every 2021 Film I Saw: Quick Takes

1.            Blue Bayou-Filmed, directed, and starring South Korean Justin Chon, the story of a Korean immigrant born and raised in Louisiana facing deportation is difficult with glimmering vestiges of human triumph. I was floored by the sentiment.

2.            House of Gucci-Very Shakespearean in all its delicious tragedy and back-stabbing. These people were larger than life and the story takes on that grandeur.  

3.            West Side Story-The degree of difficulty to adapt a classic and make it your own is high, so many great decisions went to make a fuller and richer story and put character developments in historic context 

4.            Last Night in Soho-I admire that a director who has always had comedy in each of his pictures was able to do something entirely without it. It was a great mystery, time capsule and comic of age story and I was overwhelmed with the kinetic frenzy. My one minor complaint is I didn’t love the horror elements.

5.            Licorice Pizza-There was an extremely icky age difference but I enjoyed so much of the nostalgic drench and vignette-like nature of the story.

6.            Nightmare Alley-This visually beautiful tragic tale of a drifter is very rewarding on second viewing

7.            Concrete Cowboy-Idris Elba played the hard black dad like Denzel Washington in Fences but convincingly added the layer of empathy and caring for his child and that vulnerability in their relationship really got to me. I didn’t understand what this horse stable was doing in the middle of Philadelphia but I also got that it was important to them

8.            Last Duel-Slightly slower than ideal in terms of authenticity but the trade-off is authenticity.

9.            Power of the Dog-An incredibly strong attention to detail, great performances, and, in my opinion, a thematic thrust worthy of a Best Picture win.

10.          Free Guy-Yes, it's fun, but a lot of world building and the kind of detailed storyline that could transfer over to a robust sci-fi film

11.          Jungle Cruise-More just fun, but I found the central relationships moving enough, and I'm a sucker for Amazon stories

12.          Courier-It had a first half that was markedly different than the second (kind of like the Dev Patel film Lion) that was tonally a bit jarring, but it was a spy film that moved at the speed of life.

13.          Mayday-Very eerie and quiet film that sneaks up on you about a violated teenager who's taken away to a fantasy land where she can be in the protection of woman but she's also lulling men to their deaths

14.          Don’t Look Up-Yes, it was depressing, but it was sharp

15.          Queen Bees-Another entry into the "Old People Team Up to Make a Movie" genre with Jane Curtin, Ellen Burstyn, Loretta DeVine, Ann Margaret, Christopher Lloyd, and James Caan. Very sweet and tuned into the twilight years

16.          Moxie-A high school melodrama directed by Amy Poehler (maybe a companion piece to Mean Girls?) that's sharp and funny at times. Navigates the current climate well without casting feminism or men as villains.

17.          Woman in the Window-A Hitchcockonian mystery that oozed suspense and mystery

18.          Val-The only documentary I watched this year about Val Kilmer. A very self-conscious look at fame and coming to terms with his physical demise

19.          Ride the Eagle-An impressive small-scale production about a guy (Jake Johnson) coping with the death of a mother (Susan Sarandon) he barely knew

20.          Eyes of Tammy Faye-A nicely focused biopic which picked the right parts of Tammy's life to focus on and had a good villain in Vincent D'Onofrio's Jerry Fallwell. There was a tremendous amount to appreciate in Tammy Faye's arc as evidenced by Jessica's Oscar BUT I would've liked a litle more development to Andrew Garfield's character

21.          Coda-It was sweet and it did show us a world we hadn't seen before, but I felt the music part itself was full of plot holes and the piano teacher to the rescue at the audition is an old trope. Still I'm happy it won in an odd way: The Oscars are extremely predictable with the glut of precursors so a bizarre upset is welcome.

22.          Passing-Well-shot and acted and I’d even buy the score on CD. The conversations were really interesting as well but at times they felt a little theatrical as if they were playing for a small art-house audience.

23.        Ice Road-I love the guts of whoever pitched this film: “Speed but twice as slow and they’ll be going on ice.” Amber Midthunder could be a star down the road.

24.       Space Jam 2-I love the Looney Tunes though they feel a little off in the looniness department and, even in the first Space Jam, Bugs, Duffy and Lola had bigger roles which set them up to fuel more of the comedy (Michael Jordan/LeBron James is the straight man). Still, the film was fun, the plot felt updated in clever ways (taking a page from the e-sports world and lampooning entertainment’s overemphasis on IPs), and I enjoyed the greater focus on the son-father relationship that the original Space Jam should have also been about.

25.          Beckett-It's a contextless action film like the Bourne series where we're just shown a guy doing lots of amazing fighting but we don't know the why of anything. Tonally, the film held but barely.

26.          Worth-The film was executed well, but it was kind of dull. At the same time, it's not that easy to make a film about an accountant making risk assessment calculations.

27.          Cruella-Beautiful to look at and Emma Stone's iteration of the character was a fun underdog to root for. Paul Walter Hauser and Joel Frye also make excellent sidekicks. Still it went on way too long and there’s a such thing as too many twists.

27.          Pig-It's nice to see Nicholas Cage celebrated for his acting, but the film is a bit self-serious. It’s just food seasoning, guys: No need to start a fight club over it or build an organized crime empire around it.

28.       Legend  of Shang-Tsi and the Ten Rings-I could predict almost every plot development five minutes in advance, and what I couldn’t predict, I didn’t care about.  I was also bothered that the film expected me to know who Trevor whatever-his-name-is, F--- Off Marvel, I don’t care about crossovers. And shouldn’t side kicks have some use? (I’m looking at you Seth Rogen as Green Hornet, who punched out maybe 2 people in comparison to Kato single-handedly fighting dozens of goons at once).  But, that sky scraper fight scene was next level.

29.         Flag Day-This was a film…..that I watched…..sorry, I barely remember watching this..

31.          Being the Ricardos-Aaron Sorkin had been on a really good streak—Molly’s Game, Trial of the Chicago 7—but this is like “Studio 60” backwards in terms of egotistical awfulness. Yes, the actors handle the smug material well, but the material is all about praising the ego of the creator at the expense of others (the producers, writers and co-stars are secondary to Lucy’s brilliance) and had little to do with Lucy who was funny.

32.          French Dispatch-The only Wes Anderson film I wouldn’t recommend. There is such a thing as too bloated of an ensemble and too much attention to detail.

33.          Electric Life of Louis P Wain-Too cutesy-wutesy and by the numbers.

34.          Lost Daughter-Slow and dreary. It might have all the right moves to offer but it didn’t hook me.

35.        Mitchells vs Machines-Don’t know if I remember this too much either. That’s not a good sign.

36.          Tomorrow War-Sooo much uncanny valley and ugly creatures on the screen and this is probably one of the few times when there’s no debate that a time travel film makes no sense. Normally that genre can hand-wave a lot of plot holes.

37.          Barb and Star Go to Mar El Vista-I know it had its fans, but I found this overly low-brow and couldn’t find a single scene that screams “Brilliant!.” Maybe Barb and Star being fired from their jobs comes close but that’s in the beginning of the movie and front loads with lots of expectations.  You realize that these two made Bridesmaids? It’s mostly standard mix-em-ups and a comedy of doors.

 This felt like when Mike Meyers or M. Night Shyamalan refuse to listen to studio notes about a bad idea.

38.          Thunder Force-Because it stars Melissa McCarthy, one might assume it’s a send-up to superhero tropes but the film plays the superhero story pretty straight despite the film still having the outlines of a comedy. It’s a pretty awkward clash. At least Jason Bateman seemed to know he was in a comic film.

39.          Breaking News in Yuma County-A dark comedy that feels as if someone read cliff notes on the Coen Brothers films (people fabricate dumb schemes, people get blackmailed, people are violently hurt, etc) and tried to make a film solely off that. It probably doesn’t help that the scheme is not just dumb but uninteresting. Allyson Janney pretends to know details about your husband’s death because she likes being on the news and the fame it brings her, but do people really like being a talking head on the news?

40.          Kate-Like Beckett, it’s a contextless action film (we’re not meant to know much about the hero) but, it’s also a contextless shoot-em-up and it’s too high in the ratio of violence to context for me to not see it as gratuitous.  

41.          Stowaway-Boring attempt at sci-fi and it’s lifeboat ethics weren’t anything I agreed with. 

The Art of the Interview in Journalism

 Interviewing:

When you interview a source, you have to be chummy and professional, but remember that they are not your customer or the person you are serving.

It generally is in your source’s best interest that they’re talking to you. The source could have something at stake in a number of ways: They could have something to promote (often more the case in soft journalism), they could have a message they want to get out, or they could use the publicity. On the other hand, they might just have time to kill and might find it polite to answer questions. 

If it’s someone with skin in the game, I find it best not to be overt about the transactional nature of this relationship. I can often smell from a mile away that they have an angle, but by not acknowledging it, I’m setting an expectation that I have my own job and it’s the same job I always do.

What if a source backs out?

The only exception is if someone’s the subject of my story where I might be completely screwed if they back out of my story.

To provide some more background, there are (for the purposes of this explanation) two types of sources: The subject of your story and secondary sources. The type of writing I do is largely human interest meaning that I l don’t have a story without the subjects’ cooperation. If, for example, the story is Joe Blow and Joe Blow doesn’t want to be interviewed for a story, then I’m SOL. The best thing to do is ascertain as early as possible if Joe Blow is down so I don’t waste my time. Now if Joe Blow is an exceptional cupboard maker and the story is about cupboard makers, I could potentially just go to someone who’s also a cupboard maker and make the story about them.

There can be complications to this. Once, I did a short pre-interview (letting someone know you’re interested in working with them and getting some initial questions in to ensure they fit the story I’m trying to write; they often come back with a request to clear it by some PR person before they talk back to me) with a mini-golf champion. I got her agreement and the story was approved. I never heard from her again. I once did about 75% of an interview with a rug owner and then when I got back from lunch, he said he was uninterested. I pulled out my hair trying to figure out a way to get back in his good graces.
 
For the most part, I don’t try to say “if you do this, I will promise you that” or latch onto their angles, but I make general overtures of how I would love to tell their story and talk about doing it in a way that will be as unintrusive on their time as possible.

In one case, I interviewed the son of a Salvadorian pupeseria owner in 2018 and there was sensitive material his father didn’t want to share (he was involved with the Civil War). At a certain point, the son capitulated to his dad. I wasn’t going to put the dad’s story in so I knew that the story addressed the dad’s needs and I just worked around the family to get the final pieces of information because various forces (economics, not letting down the editor) made it advantageous to get the article in. After the article was published, the son read it and he was very pleased.

Human Interest verse Hard-Hitting News

Note that I also say human interest, because that is different from hard hitting news. If say Joe Blow was a cupboard maker who was very controversial or affected the public in some other way, I can write a story about Joe Blow without his consent. It’s a free press and I could always write stories about people without their consent but alienating random cupboard makers who are just doing their own thing, isn’t really a good business model for local journalism. Now it’s worth noting that on a couple occasions, I finished articles about people without their consent.

How to Conduct the Interview

The largest thing to keep in mind is time. Your subject is not on the clock to answer questions so it’s sometimes good to let your subject know you’re at the halfway mark or have five or ten minutes left. If you’re on a time crunch and your subject is long-winded, you might even have to do something that might be a little rude in regular conversation which is explain as politely as possible that you don’t mean to be rude but in the interest of the interview, you would like to move the conversation in a different direction. I just let them know up front (and am socially awkward anyway) that this conversation might be different than a regular interview.

You should have a few questions that are important, but it’s best when it’s an unscripted process. I’ve entered interviews with instructions to write about someone with only a vague idea of who they were and why they were important and the subject informs me along the way of what the story is.

I follow my curiosity because I see curiosity as my gift. The interview is data collecting. You’re not sure what you’re looking for, but just ask as much as you can and don’t think too much what the final article is going to look like.

The Kicker: They’ll want to see the piece.

At the very end, there will often be the uncomfortable moment when someone asks if they can see the piece before it goes to publication. The answer is always no. But here’s the thing: You have the upper hand. You already have the answers and you are free to publish it. At that point, you can stop interviewing them and write your story. Remember, you are being chummy, but it is a transaction and they’re asking you to do something that will compromise your job.

At the same time, in most situations with regard to local journalism, you absolutely need to be diplomatic at the very least. Outright hostility is not going to go over well and if you get a complaint, it could even cost you standing or your job. But, again you are in the right here.    

The best thing to do is show them this: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-you-cant-review-article-before-goes-print-craig-guillot/

What you can do is read quotes back to the source AT YOUR DISCRETION.

You also should mention that it’s not your final copy that goes into print because it goes through an editor anyway. I once interviewed a local stamp and coin store and the editor made the unusual decision not to have me to correspond with the stamp owner about areas of concern. I called the stamp store owner about it and he got very upset and I explained that my promises that I made to him were contingent upon an editor who had say over me. He got upset and I felt dragged in the middle. A few years later, I passed by his shop and I apologized about the whole thing and told him I didn’t like the situation any better than he did. It was a pleasant reunion. Often times, I play good-cop-bad-cop with my invisible editor as the bad cop if I have to explain rules.

Wrapping Up

You will have tons of information at your hands and then you’ll lay it out at some point in the future. Thank them profusely for their time. Tell them you might need follow-up questions. At this point, you wait until you write your entire story and see where the holes are.  Put blanks in the spaces where you don’t know the answer and put those follow-up questions on top of the text.

That way you only have to bother them once more and not persistently.

Any follow-up questions?

What I'm Watching March Edition: We Need to Tall About Cosby, Home Economics, Mr Mayor, The After Party, Welcome to Flatch

Welcome to Flatch (Fox): It’s a key ingredient in small-town comedies that you have to add a healthy dose of quirk but few shows have been able to find the comic sweet spot in those peculiarities as well as this show. The show uses a mockumentary style that might evoke comparisons to Parks and Recreation but the characters are much less universally relatable. The show’s protagonists are a pair of aimless cousins (likely around age 20) who are the product of a lack of parental supervision, a little bit of suppressed cabin fever, and hyper-active imaginations. Joining them is lovelorn small-town newspaper owner Cheryl Petersen (Aya Cash) who came to Flatch from the big city as the significant other to the town pastor (Seann William Scott) but got dumped at some indeterminate point. Cheryl, forever upbeat but often frightened at the change to small-town life, is an apt audience surrogate (and on a side note, my hero as a small-town journalism admirer). There’s also an uptight town historian, a perverted blind man, and a love interest for Shrub (one of the cousins) who is emotionally catatonic. Very few character beats are wasted on this show.

We Need to Talk About Cosby (Showtime)-W. Kamau Bell does his homework here in this thorough and emotionally moving look at Bill Cosby’s rise to fame as well as the development of the Dr. Jekyll behind one of Black America’s most steadfast role models. Bell has always been a relatively neutral journalistic storyteller and he does his best to treat even-handedly the people who might be accused of enabling Cosby or supporting him past the point of no return. For the most part, the target is Bill Cosby himself and the documentary hammers home pretty well how awful this person’s actions were. Through his monstrous smears against media outlets and academics who covered him unfavorably, the documentary establishes a pattern that gaslighting and its subsequent forms of psychopathy that were a long part of Cosby’s persona. If you didn’t already know, Cosby’s rapes very much went hand-in-hand with gaslighting as he roofied his victims, violated them while unconscious, and then insisted to them that nothing had happened (even those who might have partially awoken or smelled something fishy). Many a brave victim bears their story in a very matter-of-fact way and there’s a lot of resonance in hearing the same story over and over.

The After Party (Apple TV)-Although we like to tell ourselves and our peers that we’re past high school, I suspect the abundance of TV shows about high school with adult audiences is good evidence that we never completely leave those formative years behind. It’s for that part of our identities that “The After Party” hits on the nose so well. Sure, we don’t spend every waking moment thinking about high school by the time we are 15 years out. However, put us in a room with our high school cohort and I have no doubt that there are always unresolved threads — an unexpressed attraction, a latent inferiority complex, a what-if ticket to stardom, a misbegotten grudge — that is rife for drama fifteen years later. That’s essentially where the show places us. And there’s a murder mystery on top of it because why not? That the show could function well enough without a murder to solve, bodes well for how solid the show’s comic infrastructure is. It also doesn’t hurt that the cast is a pretty solid blend of random comic talent (Ben Schwartz, Tyia Sinclair, Ilana Glazer, Tiffany Haddish, Ike Barinholtz among others).

Dropout (Hulu)-The limited series docudrama covers the true story of Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes who invented a way to diagnose multiple diseases through blood or something like that, and then cut corner after corner to the point where she went from wide-eyed dreamer to over-stressed manager to someone who could unequivocally be classified as the bad guy.

Played by the always-talented Amanda Seyfried, Holmes is portrayed early on as an overachiever with curious asocial tendencies. She comes off as a social pariah when she insists to her fellow students in a Mandarin immersion program that they speak Chinese like an unpaid dorm RA and she even practices a form of code switching by deepening her voice with her male benefactors. It’s hard not to admire her pluck and her underdog nature as a diminutive woman in a man’s world. It’s equally hard to put a finger on what or who Elizabeth Holmes is but she’s a fascinating enough figure (even for someone like myself who had no knowledge of her real-life counterpart) to try to pick apart.

Then, of course, there’s her inevitable downfall. While the show does a good job of forecasting how her inability to give up would lead Holmes to divorce herself from reality when things go wrong, the demise gets overly long and protracted until the show becomes smart enough in episode six to figure out she’s no longer the most interesting part of the story. That’s when two interns (Dylan Minnette and Camryn Mi-young Kim) start to go All the President’s Men on Elizabeth’s ass and things start heating up again.

Home Economics (ABC)-I’ve previously heralded this show as a worthy successor to “Modern Family” in that it’s sustainable comfort viewing with some nicely contrasting characters working through familiar family sitcom tropes.

I might even posit that there’s a little more meat on the bones of this premise as there’s a subtle classist examination on the lives of the three adult siblings at the center of this story: Oldest sibling Connor is decidedly more wealthy than his two siblings and that dynamic isn’t ignored as the story saunters along.

I also admire the show’s decision to go for a more horizontal than vertical approach with far less emphasis on the kids or grandparents. For all I care, they can switch up the child actors next year and I wouldn’t notice. Take away their bargaining power like Ray Romano’s kids, I say.

Lately, however, some of the plots are getting awfully basic. In the first season, there was a case of two of the adult siblings re-uniting with a girl they both hooked up with in summer camp. That episode had mistaken identities, cross talk, juicy secrets, and most importantly, real stakes.

A recent episode had two siblings bickering over writing a middle school play and a B-plot over whether two of the spouses are being cliquey by not letting one of the siblings in their friend group. In another plot, one of the spouses (who I assumed was Colbie Smothers, but is not which is another minus) wants her kids to be proud of her Mexican heritage and starts emphasizing words with Spanish pronunciations and cooks them guacamole. Sorry, these episodes have almost nothing to offer outside of the mildly pleasant characters. Here’s hoping things turn around.

Mr Mayor (NBC)-It’s good to have an old favorite back. Now that it’s the second season, can we do a little more world-building. I’m having trouble buying that in one of the 15 most populous cities in the world, the government can be run by only about five people (including one who’s semi-literate) and everyone else is just background. Maybe through in Tina Fey favorites like Tituss Burgess as a frazzled city department head, Dean Norris as the Los Angeles County sheriff, or Jon Hamm as a charismatic district attorney?

Oscar's Class of 2021

So many thoughts on the Oscars, but here's a stat list I keep every year: Actors appearing in a BP nominee who've been in three or more BP nominees:

10 Leonardo DiCaprio-Titanic, Gangs of New York, Aviator, Departed, Inception, Django Unchained, Wolf of Wall Street, Revenant, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Don’t Look Up

9 Cate Blanchett-Elizabeth, LOTR 1-3, Aviator, Babel, Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Don’t Look Up Nightmare Alley,

8 Meryl Streep-Kramer vs Kramer, Julia, Deer Hunter, Out of Africa, The Hours, The Post, Little Women, Don’t Look Up

6 Bradley Cooper-Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, American Sniper, A Star is Born, Nightmare Alley, Licorice Pizza

6 Jesse Plemons-Bridge of Spies, The Post, Vice, Irishman, Judas and the Black Messiah, Power of the Dog

6 Benedict Cumberbatch-Atonement, War Horse, 12 Years a Slave, Imitation Game, 1917, Power of the Dog

6 Willem Dafoe-Platoon, Mississippi Burning, English Patient, The Aviator, Grand Budapest Hotel, Nightmare Alley

6 Stephen McKinley Henderson-Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Lincoln, Manchester by the Sea, Fences, Lady Bird, Dune

5 Judi Dench-Room with a View, Shakespeare in Love, Chocolat, Philomena, Belfast

5 Timothee Chalemet – Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird, Little Women, Dune, Don’t Look Up

5 David Strathairn-LA Confidential, Good Night and Good Luck, Lincoln, Nomadland, Nightmare Alley

5 Sean Penn-Thin Red Line, Milk, Mystic River, Tree of Life, Licorice Pizza

4 Rooney Mara-Social Network, Her, Lion, Nightmare Alley

4 Josh Brolin-No Country for Old Men, Milk, True Grit, Dune

4 Mark Rylance-Bridge of Spies, Dunkirk, Trial of the Chicago 7, Don’t Look Up

4 Jonah Hill-Moneyball, Django Unchained, Wolf of Wall Street, Don’t Look Up

4 Jennifer Lawrence-Winter’s Bone, Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, Don’t Look Up

4 Toni Collette-Sixth Sense, The Hours, Little Miss Sunshine, Nightmare Alley

4 Christine Ebersole-Tootsie, Amadeus, Wolf of Wall Street, Licorice Pizza

3 Jon Bernthal-Wolf of Wall Street, Ford v Ferrarri, King Richard

3 Rita Moreno-West Side Story, The King and I, West Side Story

3 Richard Jenkins-Hannah and Her Sisters, Shape of Water, Nightmare Alley

3 Aunjanue Ellis-Ray, The Help, King Richard

3 Frances Conroy-Aviator, Joker, Power of the Dog

The Dropout (Hulu) review

The limited series docudrama covers the true story of Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes who invented a way to diagnose multiple diseases through blood or something like that, and then cut corner after corner to the point where she went from wide-eyed dreamer to over-stressed manager to someone who could unequivocally be classified as the bad guy.

Played by the always-talented Amanda Seyfried, Holmes is portrayed early on as an overachiever with curious asocial tendencies. She comes off as a social pariah when she insists to her fellow students in a Mandarin immersion program that they speak Chinese like an unpaid dorm RA. The message is clear: Friends are secondary to her goals. She even practices a form of code switching by deepening her voice with male funders. It’s hard to put a finger on what or who Elizabeth Holmes is but she’s a fascinating enough figure (even for someone like myself who had no knowledge of her real-life counterpart) to try to pick apart. 

More so, as a plucky underdog with few social friends and a woman with diminutive stature in a man’s world she initially makes for a good underdog as she genuinely wins the respect of accomplished scientists decades her senior (at least at first).

Then, of course, there’s her inevitable downfall. While the show does a good job of forecasting how her inability to give up would lead Holmes to divorce herself from reality when things go wrong, the demise gets overly long and protracted through several episodes. For a number of episodes, the corner-cutting of Elizabeth Holmes seems like the natural course of action: She doesn't want to screw over her employees or investors by having the company fail. At some point, her cycle of short-term patching without seeing the big picture makes her the least interesting part of the story.

Fortunately, new blood in the form of two green recent college graduates (Dylan Minnette and Camryn Mi-young Kim) serving as interns shake things up pretty explosively in the sixth episode. Minnette's character is the product of nepotism whereas Kim comes from poverty and she has too much to lose by being a whistle-blower. The two start out as sleuths resembling a Hardy Boy and Nancy Drew (with more bio-technobabble, of course) before turning into Woodward and Bernstein. 

Heading into the final two episodes, there's hope that this series could close out on a high note.