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7000 Words About The Dubious Refragmentation Of The Economy

One advantage of being old is that you can see change happen in your lifetime.

A lot of the change I’ve seen is fragmentation. For example, US politics and now Canadian politics are much more polarized than they used to be. Culturally we have ever less common ground and though inclusiveness is preached by the media and the Left, special interest groups and policies have a polarizing effect. The creative class flocks to a handful of happy cities, abandoning the rest. And increasing economic inequality means the spread between rich and poor is growing too. I’d like to propose a hypothesis: that all these trends are instances of the same phenomenon. And moreover, that the cause is not some force that’s pulling us apart, but rather the erosion of forces that had been pushing us together.

Worse still, for those who worry about these trends, the forces that were pushing us together were an anomaly, a one-time combination of circumstances that’s unlikely to be repeated—and indeed, that we would not want to repeat.

Describe How a Mass Culture Developed in America - JeankruwHumphrey

The two forces were war (above all World War II), and the rise of large corporations.

The effects of World War II were both economic and social. Economically, it decreased variation in income. Like all modern armed forces, America’s were socialist economically. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. More or less. Higher ranking members of the military got more (as higher ranking members of socialist societies always do), but what they got was fixed according to their rank. And the flattening effect wasn’t limited to those under arms, because the US economy was conscripted too. Between 1942 and 1945 all wages were set by the National War Labor Board. Like the military, they defaulted to flatness. And this national standardization of wages was so pervasive that its effects could still be seen years after the war ended. [1]

Business owners weren’t supposed to be making money either.

FDR said “not a single war millionaire” would be permitted. To ensure that, any increase in a company’s profits over prewar levels was taxed at 85%. And when what was left after corporate taxes reached individuals, it was taxed again at a marginal rate of 93%. [2]

Socially too the war tended to decrease variation. Over 16 million men and women from all sorts of different backgrounds were brought together in a way of life that was literally uniform. Service rates for men born in the early 1920s approached 80%. And working toward a common goal, often under stress, brought them still closer together.

Though strictly speaking World War II lasted less than 4 years for the USA, its effects lasted longer and cycled North towards Canada.

Wars make central governments more powerful, and World War II was an extreme case of this. In the US, as in all the other Allied countries, the federal government was slow to give up the new powers it had acquired. Indeed, in some respects the war didn’t end in 1945; the enemy just switched to the Soviet Union. In tax rates, federal power, defense spending, conscription, and nationalism the decades after the war looked more like wartime than prewar peacetime. [3] And the social effects lasted too. The kid pulled into the army from behind a mule team in West Virginia didn’t simply go back to the farm afterward. Something else was waiting for him, something that looked a lot like the army.

If total war was the big political story of the 20th century, the big economic story was the rise of new kind of company. And this too tended to produce both social and economic cohesion. [4]

The 20th century was the century of the big, national corporation. General Electric, General Foods, General Motors. Developments in finance, communications, transportation, and manufacturing enabled a new type of company whose goal was above all scale. Version 1 of this world was low-res: a Duplo world of a few giant companies dominating each big market. [5]

The late 19th and early 20th centuries had been a time of consolidation, led especially by J. P. Morgan. Thousands of companies run by their founders were merged into a couple hundred giant ones run by professional managers. Economies of scale ruled the day. It seemed to people at the time that this was the final state of things. John D. Rockefeller said in 1880

Image result for john d rockefeller

The day of combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return.

He turned out to be mistaken, but he seemed right for the next hundred years.

The consolidation that began in the late 19th century continued for most of the 20th. By the end of World War II, as Michael Lind writes, “the major sectors of the economy were either organized as government-backed cartels or dominated by a few oligopolistic corporations.”

For consumers this new world meant the same choices everywhere, but only a few of them. When I grew up there were only 2 or 3 of most things, and since they were all aiming at the middle of the market there wasn’t much to differentiate them.

One of the most important instances of this phenomenon was in TV.

Popular culture and daily life of Americans in the 1950s - WWJD

Here there were 3 choices: NBC, CBS, and ABC. Plus public TV for eggheads and communists (jk). The programs the 3 networks offered were indistinguishable. In fact, here there was a triple pressure toward the center. If one show did try something daring, local affiliates in conservative markets would make them stop. Plus since TVs were expensive whole families watched the same shows together, so they had to be suitable for everyone.

And not only did everyone get the same thing, they got it at the same time. It’s difficult to imagine now, but every night tens of millions of families would sit down together in front of their TV set watching the same show, at the same time, as their next door neighbors. What happens now with the Super Bowl used to happen every night. We were literally in sync. [6]

In a way mid-century TV culture was good. The view it gave of the world was like you’d find in a children’s book, and it probably had something of the effect that (parents hope) children’s books have in making people behave better. But, like children’s books, TV was also misleading. Dangerously misleading, for adults. In his autobiography, Robert MacNeil talks of seeing gruesome images that had just come in from Vietnam and thinking, we can’t show these to families while they’re having dinner.

I know how pervasive the common culture was, because I tried to opt out of it, and it was practically impossible to find alternatives.

When I was 13 I realized, more from internal evidence than any outside source, that the ideas we were being fed on TV were crap, and I stopped watching it. [7] But it wasn’t just TV. It seemed like everything around me was crap. The politicians all saying the same things, the consumer brands making almost identical products with different labels stuck on to indicate how prestigious they were meant to be, the balloon-frame houses with fake “colonial” skins, the cars with several feet of gratuitous metal on each end that started to fall apart after a couple years, the “red delicious” apples that were red but only nominally apples. And in retrospect, it was crap. [8]

But when I went looking for alternatives to fill this void, I found practically nothing. There was no Internet then. The only place to look was in the chain bookstore in our local shopping mall. [9] There I found a copy of The Atlantic. I wish I could say it became a gateway into a wider world, but in fact I found it boring and incomprehensible. Like a kid tasting whisky for the first time and pretending to like it, I preserved that magazine as carefully as if it had been a book. I’m sure I still have it somewhere. But though it was evidence that there was, somewhere, a world that wasn’t red delicious, I didn’t find it till college.

It wasn’t just as consumers that the big companies made us similar. They did as employers too. Within companies there were powerful forces pushing people toward a single model of how to look and act. IBM was particularly notorious for this, but they were only a little more extreme than other big companies. And the models of how to look and act varied little between companies. Meaning everyone within this world was expected to seem more or less the same. And not just those in the corporate world, but also everyone who aspired to it—which in the middle of the 20th century meant most people who weren’t already in it. For most of the 20th century, working-class people tried hard to look middle class. You can see it in old photos. Few adults aspired to look dangerous in 1950.

But the rise of national corporations didn’t just compress us culturally. It compressed us economically too, and on both ends.

Along with giant national corporations, we got giant national labor unions. And in the mid 20th century the corporations cut deals with the unions where they paid over market price for labor. Partly because the unions were monopolies. [10] Partly because, as components of oligopolies themselves, the corporations knew they could safely pass the cost on to their customers, because their competitors would have to as well. And partly because in mid-century most of the giant companies were still focused on finding new ways to milk economies of scale. Just as startups rightly pay AWS a premium over the cost of running their own servers so they can focus on growth, many of the big national corporations were willing to pay a premium for labor. [11]

As well as pushing incomes up from the bottom, by overpaying unions, the big companies of the 20th century also pushed incomes down at the top, by underpaying their top management. Economist J. K. Galbraith wrote in 1967 that “There are few corporations in which it would be suggested that executive salaries are at a maximum.” [12]

Speaking Out Meant Standing Alone

To some extent this was an illusion.

Much of the de facto pay of executives never showed up on their income tax returns, because it took the form of perks. The higher the rate of income tax, the more pressure there was to pay employees upstream of it. (In the UK, where taxes were even higher than in the US, companies would even pay their kids’ private school tuitions.) One of the most valuable things the big companies of the mid 20th century gave their employees was job security, and this too didn’t show up in tax returns or income statistics. So the nature of employment in these organizations tended to yield falsely low numbers about economic inequality. But even accounting for that, the big companies paid their best people less than market price. There was no market; the expectation was that you’d work for the same company for decades if not your whole career. [13]

Your work was so illiquid there was little chance of getting market price. But that same illiquidity also encouraged you not to seek it. If the company promised to employ you till you retired and give you a pension afterward, you didn’t want to extract as much from it this year as you could. You needed to take care of the company so it could take care of you. Especially when you’d been working with the same group of people for decades. If you tried to squeeze the company for more money, you were squeezing the organization that was going to take care of them. Plus if you didn’t put the company first you wouldn’t be promoted, and if you couldn’t switch ladders, promotion on this one was the only way up. [14]

To someone who’d spent several formative years in the armed forces, this situation didn’t seem as strange as it does to us now. From their point of view, as big company executives, they were high-ranking officers. They got paid a lot more than privates. They got to have expense account lunches at the best restaurants and fly around on the company’s Gulfstreams. It probably didn’t occur to most of them to ask if they were being paid market price.

The ultimate way to get market price is to work for yourself, by starting your own company. That seems obvious to any ambitious person now. But in the mid 20th century it was an alien concept. Not because starting one’s own company seemed too ambitious, but because it didn’t seem ambitious enough. Even as late as the 1970s, when I grew up, the ambitious plan was to get lots of education at prestigious institutions, and then join some other prestigious institution and work one’s way up the hierarchy. Your prestige was the prestige of the institution you belonged to. People did start their own businesses of course, but educated people rarely did, because in those days there was practically zero concept of starting what we now call a startup: a business that starts small and grows big. That was much harder to do in the mid 20th century. Starting one’s own business meant starting a business that would start small and stay small. Which in those days of big companies often meant scurrying around trying to avoid being trampled by elephants. It was more prestigious to be one of the executive class riding the elephant.

By the 1970s, no one stopped to wonder where the big prestigious companies had come from in the first place.

Famous 1970s Logos: The Best 70s Logo Design Examples

It seemed like they’d always been there, like the chemical elements. And indeed, there was a double wall between ambitious kids in the 20th century and the origins of the big companies. Many of the big companies were roll-ups that didn’t have clear founders. And when they did, the founders didn’t seem like us. Nearly all of them had been uneducated, in the sense of not having been to college. They were what Shakespeare called rude mechanicals. College trained one to be a member of the professional classes. Its graduates didn’t expect to do the sort of grubby menial work that Andrew Carnegie or Henry Ford started out doing. [15]

And in the 20th century there were more and more college graduates. They increased from about 2% of the population in 1900 to about 25% in 2000. In the middle of the century our two big forces intersect, in the form of the GI Bill, which sent 2.2 million World War II veterans to college. Few thought of it in these terms, but the result of making college the canonical path for the ambitious was a world in which it was socially acceptable to work for Henry Ford, but not to be Henry Ford. [16]

I remember this world well. I came of age just as it was starting to break up. In my childhood it was still dominant. Not quite so dominant as it had been. We could see from old TV shows and yearbooks and the way adults acted that people in the 1950s and 60s had been even more conformist than us. The mid-century model was already starting to get old. But that was not how we saw it at the time. We would at most have said that one could be a bit more daring in 1975 than 1965. And indeed, things hadn’t changed much yet.

But change was coming soon.

And when the Duplo economy started to disintegrate, it disintegrated in several different ways at once. Vertically integrated companies literally dis-integrated because it was more efficient to. Incumbents faced new competitors as (a) markets went global and (b) technical innovation started to trump economies of scale, turning size from an asset into a liability. Smaller companies were increasingly able to survive as formerly narrow channels to consumers broadened. Markets themselves started to change faster, as whole new categories of products appeared. And last but not least, the federal government, which had previously smiled upon J. P. Morgan’s world as the natural state of things, began to realize it wasn’t the last word after all.

What J. P. Morgan was to the horizontal axis, Henry Ford was to the vertical. He wanted to do everything himself. The giant plant he built at River Rouge between 1917 and 1928 literally took in iron ore at one end and sent cars out the other. 100,000 people worked there. At the time it seemed the future. But that is not how car companies operate today. Now much of the design and manufacturing happens in a long supply chain, whose products the car companies ultimately assemble and sell. The reason car companies operate this way is that it works better. Each company in the supply chain focuses on what they know best. And they each have to do it well or they can be swapped out for another supplier.

Why didn’t Henry Ford realize that networks of cooperating companies work better than a single big company?

One reason is that supplier networks take a while to evolve. In 1917, doing everything himself seemed to Ford the only way to get the scale he needed. And the second reason is that if you want to solve a problem using a network of cooperating companies, you have to be able to coordinate their efforts, and you can do that much better with computers. Computers reduce the transaction costs that Coase argued are the raison d’etre of corporations. That is a fundamental change.

In the early 20th century, big companies were synonymous with efficiency. In the late 20th century they were synonymous with inefficiency. To some extent this was because the companies themselves had become sclerotic. But it was also because our standards were higher.

It wasn’t just within existing industries that change occurred. The industries themselves changed. It became possible to make lots of new things, and sometimes the existing companies weren’t the ones who did it best.

Microcomputers are a classic example.

Ms Dos 1.25 (1982)(Microsoft) Game

The market was pioneered by upstarts like Apple, Radio Shack and Atari. When it got big enough, IBM decided it was worth paying attention to. At the time IBM completely dominated the computer industry. They assumed that all they had to do, now that this market was ripe, was to reach out and pick it. Most people at the time would have agreed with them. But what happened next illustrated how much more complicated the world had become. IBM did launch a microcomputer. Though quite successful, it did not crush Apple. But even more importantly, IBM itself ended up being supplanted by a supplier coming in from the side—from software, which didn’t even seem to be the same business. IBM’s big mistake was to accept a non-exclusive license for DOS. It must have seemed a safe move at the time. No other computer manufacturer had ever been able to outsell them. What difference did it make if other manufacturers could offer DOS too? The result of that miscalculation was an explosion of inexpensive PC clones. Microsoft now owned the PC standard, and the customer. And the microcomputer business ended up being Apple vs Microsoft.

Basically, Apple bumped IBM and then Microsoft stole its wallet. That sort of thing did not happen to big companies in mid-century. But it was going to happen increasingly often in the future.

Change happened mostly by itself in the computer business. In other industries, legal obstacles had to be removed first. Many of the mid-century oligopolies had been anointed by the federal government with policies (and in wartime, large orders) that kept out competitors. This didn’t seem as dubious to government officials at the time as it sounds to us. They felt a two-party system ensured sufficient competition in politics. It ought to work for business too.

Gradually the government realized that anti-competitive policies were doing more harm than good, and during the Carter administration started to remove them.

The word used for this process was misleadingly narrow: deregulation. What was really happening was de-oligopolization. It happened to one industry after another. Two of the most visible to consumers were air travel and long-distance phone service, which both became dramatically cheaper after deregulation.

Deregulation also contributed to the wave of hostile takeovers in the 1980s. In the old days the only limit on the inefficiency of companies, short of actual bankruptcy, was the inefficiency of their competitors. Now companies had to face absolute rather than relative standards. Any public company that didn’t generate sufficient returns on its assets risked having its management replaced with one that would. Often the new managers did this by breaking companies up into components that were more valuable separately. [17]

Version 1 of the national economy consisted of a few big blocks whose relationships were negotiated in back rooms by a handful of executives, politicians, regulators, and labor leaders. Version 2 was higher resolution: there were more companies, of more different sizes, making more different things, and their relationships changed faster. In this world there were still plenty of back room negotiations, but more was left to market forces. Which further accelerated the fragmentation.

It’s a little misleading to talk of versions when describing a gradual process, but not as misleading as it might seem. There was a lot of change in a few decades, and what we ended up with was qualitatively different. The companies in the S&P 500 in 1958 had been there an average of 61 years. By 2012 that number was 18 years. [18]

The breakup of the Duplo economy happened simultaneously with the spread of computing power. To what extent were computers a precondition? It would take a book to answer that. Obviously the spread of computing power was a precondition for the rise of startups. I suspect it was for most of what happened in finance too. But was it a precondition for globalization or the LBO wave? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility. It may be that the refragmentation was driven by computers in the way the industrial revolution was driven by steam engines. Whether or not computers were a precondition, they have certainly accelerated it.

The new fluidity of companies changed people’s relationships with their employers. Why climb a corporate ladder that might be yanked out from under you? Ambitious people started to think of a career less as climbing a single ladder than as a series of jobs that might be at different companies. More movement (or even potential movement) between companies introduced more competition in salaries. Plus as companies became smaller it became easier to estimate how much an employee contributed to the company’s revenue. Both changes drove salaries toward market price. And since people vary dramatically in productivity, paying market price meant salaries started to diverge.

By no coincidence it was in the early 1980s that the term “yuppie” was coined. That word is not much used now, because the phenomenon it describes is so taken for granted, but at the time it was a label for something novel. Yuppies were young professionals who made lots of money. To someone in their twenties today, this wouldn’t seem worth naming. Why wouldn’t young professionals make lots of money? But until the 1980s being underpaid early in your career was part of what it meant to be a professional. Young professionals were paying their dues, working their way up the ladder. The rewards would come later. What was novel about yuppies was that they wanted market price for the work they were doing now.

The first yuppies did not work for startups.

AM2407 Spark blog: 1980s - The Yuppie

That was still in the future. Nor did they work for big companies. They were professionals working in fields like law, finance, and consulting. But their example rapidly inspired their peers. Once they saw that new BMW 325i, they wanted one too.

Underpaying people at the beginning of their career only works if everyone does it. Once some employer breaks ranks, everyone else has to, or they can’t get good people. And once started this process spreads through the whole economy, because at the beginnings of people’s careers they can easily switch not merely employers but industries.

But not all young professionals benefitted. You had to produce to get paid a lot. It was no coincidence that the first yuppies worked in fields where it was easy to measure that.

More generally, an idea was returning whose name sounds old-fashioned precisely because it was so rare for so long: that you could make your fortune. As in the past there were multiple ways to do it. Some made their fortunes by creating wealth, and others by playing zero-sum games. But once it became possible to make one’s fortune, the ambitious had to decide whether or not to. A physicist who chose physics over Wall Street in 1990 was making a sacrifice that a physicist in 1960 wasn’t.

The idea even flowed back into big companies. CEOs of big companies make more now than they used to, and I think much of the reason is prestige. In 1960, corporate CEOs had immense prestige. They were the winners of the only economic game in town. But if they made as little now as they did then, in real dollar terms, they’d seem like small fry compared to professional athletes and whiz kids making millions from startups and hedge funds. They don’t like that idea, so now they try to get as much as they can, which is more than they had been getting. [19]

Meanwhile a similar fragmentation was happening at the other end of the economic scale. As big companies’ oligopolies became less secure, they were less able to pass costs on to customers and thus less willing to overpay for labor. And as the Duplo world of a few big blocks fragmented into many companies of different sizes—some of them overseas—it became harder for unions to enforce their monopolies. As a result workers’ wages also tended toward market price. Which (inevitably, if unions had been doing their job) tended to be lower. Perhaps dramatically so, if automation had decreased the need for some kind of work.

And just as the mid-century model induced social as well as economic cohesion, its breakup brought social as well as economic fragmentation. People started to dress and act differently. Those who would later be called the “creative class” became more mobile. People who didn’t care much for religion felt less pressure to go to church for appearances’ sake, while those who liked it a lot opted for increasingly colorful forms. Some switched from meat loaf to tofu, and others to Hot Pockets. Some switched from driving Ford sedans to driving small imported cars, and others to driving SUVs. Kids who went to private schools or wished they did started to dress “preppy,” and kids who wanted to seem rebellious made a conscious effort to look disreputable. In a hundred ways people spread apart. [20]

Almost four decades later, fragmentation is still increasing.

Has it been net good or bad? I don’t know; the question may be unanswerable. Not entirely bad though. We take for granted the forms of fragmentation we like, and worry only about the ones we don’t. But as someone who caught the tail end of mid-century conformism, I can tell you it was no utopia. [21]

My goal here is not to say whether fragmentation has been good or bad, just to explain why it’s happening. With the centripetal forces of total war and 20th century oligopoly mostly gone, what will happen next? And more specifically, is it possible to reverse some of the fragmentation we’ve seen?

If it is, it will have to happen piecemeal. You can’t reproduce mid-century cohesion the way it was originally produced. It would be insane to go to war just to induce more national unity. And once you understand the degree to which the economic history of the 20th century was a low-res version 1, it’s clear you can’t reproduce that either.

20th century cohesion was something that happened at least in a sense naturally. The war was due mostly to external forces, and the Duplo economy was an evolutionary phase. If you want cohesion now, you’d have to induce it deliberately. And it’s not obvious how. I suspect the best we’ll be able to do is address the symptoms of fragmentation. But that may be enough.

The form of fragmentation people worry most about lately is economic inequality, and if you want to eliminate that you’re up against a truly formidable headwind—one that has been in operation since the stone age: technology. Technology is a lever. It magnifies work. And the lever not only grows increasingly long, but the rate at which it grows is itself increasing.

Which in turn means the variation in the amount of wealth people can create has not only been increasing, but accelerating.

The unusual conditions that prevailed in the mid 20th century masked this underlying trend. The ambitious had little choice but to join large organizations that made them march in step with lots of other people—literally in the case of the armed forces, figuratively in the case of big corporations. Even if the big corporations had wanted to pay people proportionate to their value, they couldn’t have figured out how. But that constraint has gone now. Ever since it started to erode in the 1970s, we’ve seen the underlying forces at work again. [22]

Not everyone who gets rich now does it by creating wealth, certainly. But a significant number do, and the Baumol Effect means all their peers get dragged along too. [23] And as long as it’s possible to get rich by creating wealth, the default tendency will be for economic inequality to increase. Even if you eliminate all the other ways to get rich. You can mitigate this with subsidies at the bottom and taxes at the top, but unless taxes are high enough to discourage people from creating wealth, you’re always going to be fighting a losing battle against increasing variation in productivity. [24]

That form of fragmentation, like the others, is here to stay. Or rather, back to stay. Nothing is forever, but the tendency toward fragmentation should be more forever than most things, precisely because it’s not due to any particular cause. It’s simply a reversion to the mean. When Rockefeller said individualism was gone, he was right for a hundred years. It’s back now, and that’s likely to be true for longer.

I worry that if we don’t acknowledge this, we’re headed for trouble.

If we think 20th century cohesion disappeared because of few policy tweaks, we’ll be deluded into thinking we can get it back (minus the bad parts, somehow) with a few countertweaks. And then we’ll waste our time trying to eliminate fragmentation, when we’d be better off thinking about how to mitigate its consequences.

Notes

[1] Lester Thurow, writing in 1975, said the wage differentials prevailing at the end of World War II had become so embedded that they “were regarded as ‘just’ even after the egalitarian pressures of World War II had disappeared. Basically, the same differentials exist to this day, thirty years later.” But Goldin and Margo think market forces in the postwar period also helped preserve the wartime compression of wages—specifically increased demand for unskilled workers, and oversupply of educated ones.

(Oddly enough, the American custom of having employers pay for health insurance derives from efforts by businesses to circumvent NWLB wage controls in order to attract workers.)

[2] As always, tax rates don’t tell the whole story. There were lots of exemptions, especially for individuals. And in World War II the tax codes were so new that the government had little acquired immunity to tax avoidance. If the rich paid high taxes during the war it was more because they wanted to than because they had to.

After the war, federal tax receipts as a percentage of GDP were about the same as they are now.

In fact, for the entire period since the war, tax receipts have stayed close to 18% of GDP, despite dramatic changes in tax rates. The lowest point occurred when marginal income tax rates were highest: 14.1% in 1950. Looking at the data, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that tax rates have had little effect on what people actually paid.

[3] Though in fact the decade preceding the war had been a time of unprecedented federal power, in response to the Depression. Which is not entirely a coincidence, because the Depression was one of the causes of the war. In many ways the New Deal was a sort of dress rehearsal for the measures the federal government took during wartime. The wartime versions were much more drastic and more pervasive though. As Anthony Badger wrote, “for many Americans the decisive change in their experiences came not with the New Deal but with World War II.”

[4] I don’t know enough about the origins of the world wars to say, but it’s not inconceivable they were connected to the rise of big corporations. If that were the case, 20th century cohesion would have a single cause.

[5] More precisely, there was a bimodal economy consisting, in Galbraith’s words, of “the world of the technically dynamic, massively capitalized and highly organized corporations on the one hand and the hundreds of thousands of small and traditional proprietors on the other.” Money, prestige, and power were concentrated in the former, and there was near zero crossover.

[6] I wonder how much of the decline in families eating together was due to the decline in families watching TV together afterward.

[7] I know when this happened because it was the season Dallas premiered. Everyone else was talking about what was happening on Dallas, and I had no idea what they meant.

[8] I didn’t realize it till I started doing research for this essay, but the meretriciousness of the products I grew up with is a well-known byproduct of oligopoly. When companies can’t compete on price, they compete on tailfins.

[9] Monroeville Mall was at the time of its completion in 1969 the largest in the country. In the late 1970s the movie Dawn of the Dead was shot there. Apparently the mall was not just the location of the movie, but its inspiration; the crowds of shoppers drifting through this huge mall reminded George Romero of zombies. My first job was scooping ice cream in the Baskin-Robbins.

[10] Labor unions were exempted from antitrust laws by the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914 on the grounds that a person’s work is not “a commodity or article of commerce.” I wonder if that means service companies are also exempt.

[11] The relationships between unions and unionized companies can even be symbiotic, because unions will exert political pressure to protect their hosts. According to Michael Lind, when politicians tried to attack the A&P supermarket chain because it was putting local grocery stores out of business, “A&P successfully defended itself by allowing the unionization of its workforce in 1938, thereby gaining organized labor as a constituency.” I’ve seen this phenomenon myself: hotel unions are responsible for more of the political pressure against Airbnb than hotel companies.

[12] Galbraith was clearly puzzled that corporate executives would work so hard to make money for other people (the shareholders) instead of themselves. He devoted much of The New Industrial State to trying to figure this out.

His theory was that professionalism had replaced money as a motive, and that modern corporate executives were, like (good) scientists, motivated less by financial rewards than by the desire to do good work and thereby earn the respect of their peers. There is something in this, though I think lack of movement between companies combined with self-interest explains much of observed behavior.

[13] Galbraith (p. 94) says a 1952 study of the 800 highest paid executives at 300 big corporations found that three quarters of them had been with their company for more than 20 years.

[14] It seems likely that in the first third of the 20th century executive salaries were low partly because companies then were more dependent on banks, who would have disapproved if executives got too much. This was certainly true in the beginning. The first big company CEOs were J. P. Morgan’s hired hands.

Companies didn’t start to finance themselves with retained earnings till the 1920s. Till then they had to pay out their earnings in dividends, and so depended on banks for capital for expansion. Bankers continued to sit on corporate boards till the Glass-Steagall act in 1933.

By mid-century big companies funded 3/4 of their growth from earnings. But the early years of bank dependence, reinforced by the financial controls of World War II, must have had a big effect on social conventions about executive salaries. So it may be that the lack of movement between companies was as much the effect of low salaries as the cause.

Incidentally, the switch in the 1920s to financing growth with retained earnings was one cause of the 1929 crash. The banks now had to find someone else to lend to, so they made more margin loans.

[15] Even now it’s hard to get them to. One of the things I find hardest to get into the heads of would-be startup founders is how important it is to do certain kinds of menial work early in the life of a company. Doing things that don’t scale is to how Henry Ford got started as a high-fiber diet is to the traditional peasant’s diet: they had no choice but to do the right thing, while we have to make a conscious effort.

[16] Founders weren’t celebrated in the press when I was a kid. “Our founder” meant a photograph of a severe-looking man with a walrus mustache and a wing collar who had died decades ago. The thing to be when I was a kid was an executive. If you weren’t around then it’s hard to grasp the cachet that term had. The fancy version of everything was called the “executive” model.

[17] The wave of hostile takeovers in the 1980s was enabled by a combination of circumstances: court decisions striking down state anti-takeover laws, starting with the Supreme Court’s 1982 decision in Edgar v. MITE Corp.; the Reagan administration’s comparatively sympathetic attitude toward takeovers; the Depository Institutions Act of 1982, which allowed banks and savings and loans to buy corporate bonds; a new SEC rule issued in 1982 (rule 415) that made it possible to bring corporate bonds to market faster; the creation of the junk bond business by Michael Milken; a vogue for conglomerates in the preceding period that caused many companies to be combined that never should have been; a decade of inflation that left many public companies trading below the value of their assets; and not least, the increasing complacency of managements.

[18] Foster, Richard. “Creative Destruction Whips through Corporate America.” Innosight, February 2012.

[19] CEOs of big companies may be overpaid. I don’t know enough about big companies to say. But it is certainly not impossible for a CEO to make 200x as much difference to a company’s revenues as the average employee. Look at what Steve Jobs did for Apple when he came back as CEO. It would have been a good deal for the board to give him 95% of the company. Apple’s market cap the day Steve came back in July 1997 was 1.73 billion. 5% of Apple now (January 2016) would be worth about 30 billion. And it would not be if Steve hadn’t come back; Apple probably wouldn’t even exist anymore.

Merely including Steve in the sample might be enough to answer the question of whether public company CEOs in the aggregate are overpaid. And that is not as facile a trick as it might seem, because the broader your holdings, the more the aggregate is what you care about.

[20] The late 1960s were famous for social upheaval. But that was more rebellion (which can happen in any era if people are provoked sufficiently) than fragmentation. You’re not seeing fragmentation unless you see people breaking off to both left and right.

[21] Globally the trend has been in the other direction. While the US is becoming more fragmented, the world as a whole is becoming less fragmented, and mostly in good ways.

[22] There were a handful of ways to make a fortune in the mid 20th century. The main one was drilling for oil, which was open to newcomers because it was not something big companies could dominate through economies of scale. How did individuals accumulate large fortunes in an era of such high taxes? Giant tax loopholes defended by two of the most powerful men in Congress, Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson.

But becoming a Texas oilman was not in 1950 something one could aspire to the way starting a startup or going to work on Wall Street were in 2000, because (a) there was a strong local component and (b) success depended so much on luck.

[23] The Baumol Effect induced by startups is very visible in Silicon Valley. Google will pay people millions of dollars a year to keep them from leaving to start or join startups.

[24] I’m not claiming variation in productivity is the only cause of economic inequality in the US. But it’s a significant cause, and it will become as big a cause as it needs to, in the sense that if you ban other ways to get rich, people who want to get rich will use this route instead.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Ron Conway, Chris Dixon, Benedict Evans, Richard Florida, Ben Horowitz, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Tim O’Reilly, Geoff Ralston, Max Roser, Alexia Tsotsis, and Qasar Younis for reading drafts of this. Max also told me about several valuable sources. Essay from http://paulgraham.com/re.html

Bibliography

Allen, Frederick Lewis. The Big Change. Harper, 1952.

Averitt, Robert. The Dual Economy. Norton, 1968.

Badger, Anthony. The New Deal. Hill and Wang, 1989.

Bainbridge, John. The Super-Americans. Doubleday, 1961.

Beatty, Jack. Collossus. Broadway, 2001.

Brinkley, Douglas. Wheels for the World. Viking, 2003.

Brownleee, W. Elliot. Federal Taxation in America. Cambridge, 1996.

Chandler, Alfred. The Visible Hand. Harvard, 1977.

Chernow, Ron. The House of Morgan. Simon & Schuster, 1990.

Chernow, Ron. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller. Random House, 1998.

Galbraith, John. The New Industrial State. Houghton Mifflin, 1967.

Goldin, Claudia and Robert A. Margo. “The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-Century.” NBER Working Paper 3817, 1991.

Gordon, John. An Empire of Wealth. HarperCollins, 2004.

Klein, Maury. The Genesis of Industrial America, 1870-1920. Cambridge, 2007.

Lind, Michael. Land of Promise. HarperCollins, 2012.

Mickelthwaite, John, and Adrian Wooldridge. The Company. Modern Library, 2003.

Nasaw, David. Andrew Carnegie. Penguin, 2006.

Sobel, Robert. The Age of Giant Corporations. Praeger, 1993.

Thurow, Lester. Generating Inequality: Mechanisms of Distribution. Basic Books, 1975.

Witte, John. The Politics and Development of the Federal Income Tax. Wisconsin, 1985.

 

Canadian Actor Relished Role In Fan Made Series Star Trek Continues

CAS ANVAR RELISHES HIS “VULCULAN” ROLE- Silver screen and small screen actor Cas Anvar couldn’t believe he was stepping onto a soundstage in a STAR TREK CONTINUES  episode when he first emerged in costume as Sentek in Episode 10 (“To Boldly Go: Part I”).

After playing opposite Ben Affleck in Argo, an Oscar winner for Best Picture, Anvar has stayed busy with Hollywood in film and TV roles in productions like the Princess Diana biopic Diana, the sci-fi adventure Source Code and suspense thriller The Factory. He has also appeared in Steve Spielberg’s The Terminal and then there’s a long list of TV roles on Anvar’s resume, including appearances on NCIS:LA, In Plain Sight, Boston Legal, Castle, and 24.

But to emerge in full Romulan garb on a planet set in rural Georgia? That was one of his personal career highlights – so far.

“On my very first scene, they brought me to the planet set. And it was amazing. I’d never really seen a real STAR TREK set before. You don’t realize how those sets were constructed back then. This thing was so authentic with its fake boulders and sparkly mineral dust and the elevator on the surface of the planet. Then I had my first exposure to holding a disruptor and doing the big fight scene. It was everything you’ve ever imagined when you watch STAR TREK!”

Cas Anvar Anvar is a Canadian born and trained actor whose big break came with his role 2003’s Shattered Glass with Hayden Christiansen, and his professional career began following graduation from Canada’s prestigious National Theatre School. Anvar is also a well-known voice actor, whose talents can be heard in some of the world’s most popular video games (including Call of Duty: BO2, Halo 4, and Assassins Creed: Revelations.)

As a voice actor, he was familiar with STAR TREK CONTINUES executive producer Vic Mignogna. Anvar learned about the opportunity to join the cast as a guest star following a fortuitous meeting with STC director James Kerwin and through a connection with STC make-up artist Lisa Hansell.

“I’d been exposed to STAR TREK CONTINUES before I found out about the opportunity to participate. Their reputation was very high, and the production really is amazingly impressive and very high quality. I like the way STC uses technology to make it possible to produce ‘new’ episodes of The Original Series without losing authenticity,” Anvar said.

Anvar is a fan of all flavors of STAR TREK, noting that “there’s not one that I’ve missed. I’m a Roddenberry fan – a fan of the universe that he created. But each of the STAR TREK series is like a movement in a symphony. Each one has a place and a purpose and its own unique flavor.”

The “Vulculan”

To prepare for the role of Sentek (“I call him a ‘Vulculan,” says Anvar), he thought about what would be required for a cool and collected Vulcan to appear as a hot-headed Romulan.

Cas Anvar in makeup chair for Star Trek Continues

“This is a character who grew up on Vulcan with emotional suppression. And he’s masquerading as a Romulan, who is much more emotional and volatile. So how does this character allow himself to pass as a Romulan? He has to behave in a way that is a little less Vulcan, trying to find the balance. You have a lot of imagery and a wealth of knowledge of Vulcans by watching Leonard Nimoy as Spock. Of course, Sentek was performing in a very non-Vulcan way. That made for an interesting challenge to try to figure out how he could rationalize such impulsive and dangerous behavior. It was fun to figure it out.”

In the Steps of Bill Shatner

“I studied psychology and sciences at McGill, and I think Bill Shatner did as well. He started in theater and did some Shakespeare, and of course everyone knew that he was an alumnus of the school. He went on to perform at Stratford in Toronto.”

That connection to Shakespeare proved very fortuitous.

Christopher Plummer as Star Trek villain Chang

“I actually got Bill Shatner to endorse a fundraising effort for a Shakespeare campaign, along with Christopher Plummer (an honorary McGill graduate.) Both of these famous actors came from my hometown. But after 9/11, our Shakespeare company had a financial problem. These great actors were sympathetic and helped us raise the money we needed. Later, of course, I also worked with Shatner on Boston Legal and saw him as the incredible Denny Crane.”

“Honestly, it was a surreal experience. Ever since I was a kid I wanted to be on STAR TREK and play some sort of an alien – ever since I was a kid. To getting to realize that dream was exciting,” Anvar says.

Supplemental-
Questions & Answers with STC Director James Kerwin

How did you get involved with STC and express your interest in directing an episode — something that led to directing several episodes?

I’d known Vic Mignogna for several years, and cast him in a short film I directed. While we were on set, he mentioned that he was producing a STAR TREK fan series, and asked me to check out “Pilgrim of Eternity.” To be honest, I was wary at first. Although I wasn’t very familiar with fan films, those which I’d happened to catch ranged from great to amateur, from a production perspective. That’s not a “knock” at all — God bless anyone with the gumption to make a fan film. So Vic opened his laptop and said “Just watch.” I did, and I was hooked! The production value was top-notch.

While we were in post-production on the short, Vic mentioned that he was thinking about doing a “Mirror Universe” story for STC episode 3, and asked me if I’d like to come aboard. I was drawn in by his overall goal and philosophy for the show: namely, to produce a Trek webseries made by fans who also happened to be film and TV industry professionals, both behind the camera and in front of it… professionals who agreed to set their busy schedules aside, without fame or financial incentives, to express their love of TOS and share it with the world. So we tossed around a couple plot ideas, but ultimately felt that his initial instinct — to do a fast-paced story that picks up moments after “Mirror, Mirror” and explores Spock’s immediate actions — was the strongest. The rest is history.

That episode still holds a special place in my heart because it was my first — and the Mirror Universe is just so much fun! Wired came to set for that one and shot “behind-the-scenes” footage of the project; I encourage everyone to check that out as well:

I assumed “Fairest of Them All” would be my sole trip on the TOS Enterprise… but a few months later, Vic asked if I’d be interested in coming back to direct episode 4. At that point, I needed to make a decision as to whether I’d be willing to set aside my career for a couple years to focus on STC, because writing and directing episodes isn’t a part-time job. It wasn’t a difficult decision, simply because this entire endeavor was so rewarding!

After “The White Iris,” I settled in as the series’ “story editor” — that’s the person who works creatively with the showrunner (executive producer) to decide on overall storylines and which scripts to produce. I eventually became a co-producer (and later producer) on the show. In addition to directing and/or co-writing most of the episodes, it was necessary for me to work in post as well, helping Vic decide on music and sound cues, etc. I performed what’s called the “online edit” — I took Vic’s cut of each episode and readied it for color grading by our cinematographer Matt Bucy — and then performed the “DI conform” after the graded footage was returned. That involved adding film grain, comping in ungraded opticals (i.e., viewscreen shots), and even adding “judder” to the end titles to simulate the 1969 optical film printing process. I also scheduled shoots, helped Lisa Hansell and Linda Zaruches with some of the social media and publicity, cut together “blooper” reels, and authored the DVDs and Blu-ray discs. But my focus remained primarily on directing. I’m quite proud of what we accomplished, needless to say!

How do you describe the role and activity of a director to someone not familiar with filmmaking. In other words, what does a director do?

The director makes the creative decisions about what’s seen on-screen. He or she works with the actors to craft performances, and composes the shots (i.e., collaborates with the director of photography to determine camera angles, lighting, etc.). The overall “feel” and “pace” of the piece is the responsibility of the director.

Now, there are significant differences between directing for film — which was my primary background before STC — and directing for series television. On a film, the director is usually “top dog,” so to speak. The buck stops with him or her. He or she establishes the overall vision and style of the movie, from the broad strokes to the finest details. That involves making decisions in every department — makeup, costumes, art / set design, sound, camera, lighting, acting, editing, music. A film director is basically the general in charge of a large army. It requires a lot of pre-planning; and that involves everything from casting roles to storyboarding (drawing) shots to making judgment calls on wardrobe. Time is money when you’re on-set or on-location, and — while it’s important to be malleable and be able to think on one’s feet — films ultimately run much more smoothly if the director has pre-visualized everything (either on paper, digitally/virtually using pre-vis software, or even simply in his/her mind). Films involve large crews and complex camera moves, lighting, and shot composition. One typically shoots about 2 or 3 script pages a day on a feature or short — and even that is pushing the limits at times. A theatrical film can have a shooting schedule anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.

Directing for TV is rather different. By the time a director comes onto a series, many of the creative decisions have already been made: primary cast, sets, costumes, and — perhaps most importantly — the overall “style” and “feel” of both the camerawork and the actors’ performances. With few exceptions, most series have multiple directors, and each one can’t bring his/her own personal vision to the table — you’d have a show that looks totally different from one episode to the next! That’s why, in TV, the executive producer is ultimately in charge. Individual directors must conform their styles to the overall vision of the showrunner. In the case of STC, I also had to honor the rich legacy of TOS, and shoot the episodes in a style reminiscent of 1969 network television. So a lot of my 21st-century directorial instincts had to “take a back seat” in order to serve the overall series. On top of that, unlike films, a television episode has a much quicker production schedule. On STC, we usually shot 5 or 6 pages a day — sometimes even 7 or more! That’s definitely a challenge to pull off.

How does the all-volunteer aspect of a fan production like STC make things more difficult — or easier — for a director?

Fortunately, on STC, our so-called “above the line” positions (main cast and guest stars, producers, writers, directors) and our primary department heads had a lot of experience working in film and/or television, and that helped tremendously. I didn’t have to “reinvent the wheel” or show people the ropes.

That cut both ways, though. Since we were dealing with working industry pros, getting everyone together on a volunteer basis was often quite difficult. For example, unlike a “normal” series, we didn’t have the luxury of putting our main cast under series-regular contracts. So if certain actors were working on another film or TV series at any given time, we either couldn’t film during those weeks, or I’d have to shoot “around” their absence. Same thing for our behind-the-scenes crew.

Plus, understandably, we just didn’t have the budget to put our people up in hotels in Georgia — and feed them — for weeks on end. So our production schedule was often pretty tight. The more script pages one must shoot per day, the more stress one is under. There’s no way to avoid that. I suppose that having a background in indie film — where one often must work with lower budgets and tighter schedules — helped me cope!

Ultimately, though, having people who came together out of love for the material was a huge plus. Our team members were all motivated to do their best work, simply because that’s why they were there. And every night after photography, we’d all go out for dinner and drinks together. It really was a family… and one that I already miss.

What are some of the films and television series which influence you as a director?

I think Kubrick is probably my all-time hero. I love the specificity and patience of his films, and how his composition and pacing both inform and reflect his actors’ performances. 2001 is wonderful. I also love both Blade Runner movies, Solaris… but in addition, I have a soft spot for the late-60s aesthetic. The early Bond films, Flint, Barbarella… there’s a fun, sexy style there that we don’t see often any longer. As for television, I thought Ronald D. Moore’s version of Battlestar Galactica was wonderful. And there’s so much great content on right now. Black Mirror, for example. And Mr. Robot just blows me away.

What’s your background, and what are you doing professionally now that STC has finished its final episode?

Growing up, I used to make Doctor Who fan films and amateur movies with our family’s old video camera. If I was assigned to do a term paper, rather than writing a boring old report, I’d shoot it as a narrative film! So it was probably around high school when I first started thinking seriously about a career in directing. I also had — and still have — a passion for cosmology, so I was a bit indecisive. I went to T.C.U. in Dallas / Fort Worth, and started a double-major… but when I realized I’d be in college for many, many years, I ultimately decided to focus on filmmaking (although I did earn a minor degree in astrophysics). My student thesis film wound up winning a first-place Telly Award, so I stayed in Texas for a few years after that, directing shorts, music videos for local bands, etc.

When one of my films started to make a splash on the festival circuit, an assistant agent at talent agency APA offered to rep me, and I moved to Los Angeles. When I first got here, I wound up falling into a lot of stage directing, both classical and modern — which was unusual for me because I had relatively little background in live theatre at the time. But it’s an amazing process, and very different from filmmaking. My work at the Blank Theatre Company in Hollywood — a wonderful venue run by Daniel Henning and Noah Wyle — gave me a lot of “in the field” experience with actors, including many accomplished television and film veterans who’ve retained their passion for live theatre despite their on-screen success.

Ultimately, though, film is my first love, and I was fortunate to get the opportunity to direct a cerebral science fiction noir feature for Entertainment One studios called Yesterday Was a Lie (www.yesterdaywasalie.com), starring Kipleigh Brown as well as Chase Masterson from STAR TREK: Deep Space Nine. After YWAL, we started working on a film based on the science fiction Czech play R.U.R. from 1919. We originally shot a short (www.rurfilm.com) loosely based on the story — that’s where Vic and I first connected re: STC — and we’re developing it into a high-concept feature set in an alt-history, late-60s world. And Kipleigh and I have a couple other things in the works as well. But immediately next for both of us (as well as for Vic and Lisa) is a short psychological character drama called When the Train Stops — also starring Trek actors Michael Forest and John de Lancie. Lisa’s producing, and she did an excellent job successfully crowdfunding the film. We’ll be shooting in 2018, and I’m very much looking forward to it!

Website: www.jameskerwin.com
Twitter: @jameskerwin
Facebook: /jameskerwin

Supplemental-

A Profile with Producer and Make-Up Supervisor Lisa Hansell
How did you get involved with STC, and how did that relationship grow to be more than providing make-up services?

Once upon a time, August of 2012 actually, I was in the process of turning Tim Russ into Tuvok when this guy named Vic Mignogna walked in. We were introduced, exchanged pleasantries and went about our business. At the end of the day, he asked for my business card. The very next day, he called and asked to have lunch to discuss a project he was launching.

Over lunch, he began to explain his vision for STAR TREK CONTINUES. His excitement for STC was palpable, and we established that we both dearly loved STAR TREK and had been lifelong fans. Now, I have been a professional in the entertainment industry for years and had been pitched “passion projects” many times (read: no pay). I had to turn them down because my bills don’t get paid with “great opportunities for exposure,” but this felt different somehow…special. Vic’s passion was contagious!

In The Beginning, there weren’t very many people on board, but all the usual pre-production details needed to be handled. Vic was trying to do it all himself, so I volunteered to take over social media for starters and helped source costumes for our first shoot, which was the final scene for “Pilgrim of Eternity.” There were a million details to take care of, and I offered to help share the load. Over time, this deepened my friendship with Vic and my involvement with STC. I have given input on script and story development (the ending for “Lolani” was my idea, for example), wardrobe choices, sound design, etc. I did whatever needed to be done without regard to whether or not it was “my department” all for love of the project.

What are some of the challenges you faced as Makeup Supervisor on STC?

Of course, the whole series was a period piece with the goal of recreating the look and feel of late 1960’s STAR TREK. They used heavier, more theatrical makeup back in the day, but we were shooting in HD which is much less forgiving than film. Finding a balance of makeup looks that would fit the period and yet not be distractingly obvious was not an easy task!

Several episodes brought their own unique challenges, which I LOVE! In Episode 1 we had to vary the age appearance of Apollo several times throughout the story. Episode 2 was a LOT of green for our Orions, and that green had to be something that wouldn’t transfer onto costumes, props and sets. We custom mixed something called PAX, which is a combination of medical grade adhesive and acrylic color. Consequently, it was very time consuming to apply and remove. Episode 3 was all about recreating every character’s look from “Mirror, Mirror.” In Episode 4, we recreated three known loves from Kirk’s past.

Then there was Episode 8. The ‘Old Kirk’ prosthetic makeup was equal parts long, hard work and a lot of fun! Special effects makeup is my absolute favorite thing because I get to watch the actor use my work to enhance and inform their performance. Episode 9 was a color theory workout! I tested many color combinations for our guests stars before settling on schemes that would read ‘normal’ in black and white and not look completely ridiculous in color. Me to Vic: “I can’t have our guest stars looking like a bowl of hard candies.” For our finale episodes, I got to create an Andorian and…Romulans! So many pointed eartips…glorious! I’m incredibly proud of the work my team and I did throughout the series.

What’s involved in being the Social Media Manager and keeping people informed about STC activities – on Facebook and otherwise?

I could really write a novel here, but I’ll try to summarize. Our main Facebook fan page has grown to nearly 200K “Likes,” and our Facebook Group now has 14.5K members. We have a Twitter following of nearly 22K and 4.5K on Instagram. That’s a lot of eyeballs on our activities! For our main Facebook page, I have an angel volunteer named Linda (I LOVE you, Linda!) who combs through our behind-the-scenes photos and schedules out a ton of posts. I go in daily and check through them, tag people, monitor comments, etc. I check in on the group, and the other platforms several times a day, and have done so every day for the last 5 years.

Social media really is our main liaison with our fans, which is incredibly important. Early on, I wanted to establish a ‘voice’ for STC that included professionalism, class, courtesy, enthusiasm and the principles of IDIC. How STC is perceived is extremely important to me because I believe it reflects on everyone involved – on our family – so I’m very protective of it. I have been so gratified when hearing from fans that we have achieved an excellent public perception.

Vic consults with James Kerwin and myself pretty much daily on STC activities and decisions that he has to make regarding the direction of the production. You could say James and I are the “Bones” and “Spock” to his “Kirk” off-screen. Ha! (We’ve had a group Facebook chat going since episode 4!) Whenever we have an event coming up, we three hash out the plan of execution and release, Take our Christmas gift of downloads for the fans, for example. That has been in the works for months! Then it’s all about choosing the right wording, imagery, etc., and coordinating the exact date and time of release so that it happens as seamlessly as possible.

I’m sure you’ve been touched by the stories that people have told about how STC has affected them. What are a couple of examples that really stand out?

I’m always thrilled to hear stories about STC bringing people together. Parents and children reconnecting to watch new Star Trek episodes like they did years ago, or fans who may no longer have that parent around but can feel their presence each time they watch STC are some of my favorites.

I have to say, though, that the messages and emails I received after “Come Not Between the Dragons” were the most profoundly moving. We had adults who were abused as children write in to say that they were able to heal and let go of the anger they had harbored for years against an abuser who had long since passed. We even had abusers write to us and tell us they finally saw themselves through their children’s frightened eyes and vowed to change – to break the cycle. We never could have imagined having the affect we have had on some of our fans, and I find it profoundly humbling to be a part of something that could invoke that in others.

Is working on STC like working on other fan productions?

There are similarities in that almost any fan production is driven by a passion and love for the source material. I have very much enjoyed working on other things and have made lifelong friendships as a result.

That said, STC is unlike any other production I’ve worked on, fan or otherwise. I’ve been fortunate enough to work on quite a few films that were filled with wonderful professionals who’ve become friends and had a fantastic time doing it, but STC is very different. Everyone is doing it for love and not for money. When you’re pouring your heart into something vs waiting for a paycheck, it shows!

Also, from very early on I have had a much deeper involvement with STC than on most other productions. As a producer, I have input on the final product that I wouldn’t normally have as a makeup artist, and I find that I am much more invested as a result. This has moved me to pursue more of an active role in producing other things as well, because I enjoy being a part of the creative team for the whole project and not just for one department.

When you look back on your experiences with STC, what has been most personally rewarding?

I would have to say that the relationships I’ve built with the cast and crew of STC are #1 for me. We throw the word “family” around a lot, but there just isn’t a better word for it. I deeply and sincerely LOVE each and every one of the crazy nerds on our team, and I know that is for life – there’s no question in my mind. This is my ‘chosen’ family.

A close second would have to be the chance to spend so much time living INSIDE my lifelong love of Star Trek. I’ve walked the corridor of the Enterprise. I’ve sat in the Captain’s chair, stared into Spock’s scanner, dusted the table in Kirk’s quarters, climbed the ladder in engineering and even got to ‘drive the ship’ in a couple of episodes. I’ve napped in sickbay, on the transporter pad, in a turbolift, and in the warp core (yes, really)! I’ve stood at the monitor watching new STAR TREK being created before my very eyes. It doesn’t get any better than that!

What’s your background in the entertainment world, and what’s next on your professional horizon?

I began doing special effects and beauty makeup 11 years ago. I’ve worked on everything from micro budget independent films to multi-million dollar theatrically released features. I’ve worked with names like Ed Begely, Jr., Sean Young, Eric Roberts, Martin Kove…and I absolutely love what I do. The artistry of it combined with storytelling is what I find most compelling.

I’m currently in pre-production on a short film with some STC alumni. The film is called When the Train Stops, and it stars John de Lancie, Michael Forest, Vic Mignogna, Kipleigh Brown, and my dear friend Darren Jacobs. Darren is a Shakespearean Theater-trained actor whose talent always blows me away. I can’t wait for you to see him in action! Of course, our readers already know what brilliance the rest of the cast is capable of. I’m excited to also bring back Emie Morissette, who you will recognize as the relief navigator from STC’s finale episodes.

The film will be directed by our very own James Kerwin, and I’m producing it. It’s a drama with a twist – think Twilight Zone. We will no doubt bring on more STC folks as we get closer to production and start filling out the crew. When you find your “A” team for filmmaking, why look any further! You can check out our website for more info: www.whenthetrainstops.com

In closing, I’d like to thank Vic for bringing me aboard this wonderful journey. His vision gave birth to STC, and my time working on it has truly been one of the most memorable and remarkable experiences of my life. Thank you, Vic, for being a wonderfully insane geek to the extent that you created this beloved masterpiece, and for letting me play on your starship! It was a great ride…

Frequently Asked STC Questions
Weren’t you going to make 13 episodes? Did CBS make you stop?

CBS is not responsible for the decision to end the series. We are doing 11 episodes instead of 13 because another fan group took advantage of the good graces of the copyright holders forcing them to protect their property and the interests of their license holders. In deference and gratitude to CBS, we wrapped up earlier than planned and are very proud of what we’ve accomplished.

What will happen to the studio/sets? Will set visits/tours be available?

We don’t have a definitive answer on this right now, but we’re considering all our options.

So, you can’t make more full-length episodes due to the guidelines, but can you make more vignettes?

Yes, short films are allowed by CBS’s guidelines, but the run time is not the only limitation that would preclude us from continuing. We finished our mission and are grateful to have been able to do so.

How about making some other fan film (Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Lost in Space, etc?)

STC was born from Vic Mignogna’s love of STAR TREK and not any other franchise. It’s the kind of love required to do this kind of work for 5 years for free. While the other shows are favorites, they aren’t “devote-5-years-of-your-life” favorites!

Bravo TV Star Asa Soltan Rahmati Launches Sacred Rituals For Women Book

Asa Soltan Rahmati has had many lives. From fleeing Iran as a child and living as a refugee in Germany and then the U.S. to becoming a celebrated reality television star on Bravo TV’s Shahs of Sunset; from launching a successful designer line of women’s kaftans to becoming a brand new parent with beau Jermaine Jackson Jr. – she is a master of reinvention and personal-betterment. In her newest life – as a published author – she sets out to empower other women to truly love themselves and take control of their own destinies.

Her book GOLDEN: Empowering Rituals to Conjure Your Inner Priestess is hitting bookstore shelves now. In it she shares seven sacred rituals that she developed throughout her life as she went from refugee (twice) to “artsy” to the Persian Pop Priestess that fans of Shahs of Sunset have grown to admire. I’d love to send you a copy of the new book for consideration of coverage in an upcoming story.

Asa’s life has been a filled with great challenges and deep loss, but through it – and through her outsider status – she learned to face life fearlessly and with her own style. From her self-love ritual to her chapter on confidence (“Radiate Beauty from the Inside Out”), Asa provides readers with the ultimate “green juice, master cleanse and z pack” for life. It all starts with her Priestess Detox, the total mind, body, soul cleanse to get the reader in touch with her own Inner Priestess. Asa’s ability to translate her rituals have helped hundreds of thousands of her fans become more empowered. GOLDEN is her gift to them and to anybody who is ready to take control, learn to love themselves, and face the future with confidence and strength.

When I was in college at UCLA, I worked part-time at an African art store in Santa Monica. One day Maya Angelou came into the store. I have always been a huge fan of hers and I was completely starstruck. She walked straight toward me, took my hand in hers, looked me directly in the eyes, and said, “stay golden, my child.”

– Asa Soltan, from GOLDEN

GOLDEN by Asa Soltan

Empowering Rituals to Conjure
Your Inner Priestess

Available Now

Asa Soltan Rahmati – Persian Pop Priestess, Spiritual Gangsta, and beloved star of Bravo TV’s hit reality show, Shahs of Sunset – shares seven sacred rituals that she has developed throughout her life in GOLDEN: Empowering Rituals to Conjure Your Inner Priestess (North Star Way; May 9, 2017; $25.99 USD).

Asa was eight years old when her family fled their war-torn country of Iran to seek refuge in Germany. To say she experienced culture shock after arriving is an understatement. She had never seen anyone that looked and acted so different from her, and she didn’t speak a word of German or English. She felt completely cast off from her land, her culture, and her people.

Feeling a need to connect to her culture and herself, she created rituals that she practiced every day. At first they were a simple way to create a sacred space for herself so she could go within and remember who she really was. But when she became a refugee for the second time moving from Germany to Los Angeles, those rituals — on beauty, love, career, family, and friendships–kept her deeply connected to her Inner Priestess, the authentic version of herself that existed without ego, baggage, or attachments to material things.

Asa’s own personal journey to find peace and self-acceptance helped her marry her artistic side with her business acumen and led her to launch a highly successful kaftan business, create a line of jewelry for Home Shopping Network and, of course, the television show. GOLDEN will help readers find their own power with inspirational quotes, stories and photos from her childhood to illustrate the impact her rituals can have. Whether you choose to focus on one ritual separately or all of them at once, GOLDEN can guide you to a state of glamorous, gorgeous mindfulness and a chance to live the life of your dreams.

Since the first season of Shahs aired, Asa has gained a loyal legion of fans who refer to her as the Spiritual Gangsta. Many of them write her to seek answers to their most personal questions. They often ask how to feel confident and feel good about their bodies in a world that’s hyper critical of women’s looks, how to gain the courage to follow their dreams, and how to stay true to their culture and traditions yet remain a modern woman. Asa’s ability to translate her rituals have helped hundreds of thousands of her fans become more empowered. GOLDEN is her gift to them.

Golden by Asa Soltan

About Asa Soltan Rahmati
Asa Soltan Rahmati, also known as the Persian Pop Priestess and Spiritual Gangsta, is the star of Bravo’s hit realty show, Shahs of Sunset. Asa lived on three continents and spoke four languages by the time she moved to the United States at fifteen. The Islamic revolution and decade-long war were the backdrop of her early childhood, and paved the way for her own personal revolution to build confidence, spirituality, and remain at peace among life’s daily trials and tribulations. Known for her glamour and down-to-earth spirituality, Asa is also an internationally recognized multimedia artist, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. In 2014 Asa launched her highly anticipated luxury kaftan line, Asa Kaftans, which celebrities and her international fan-base adore. Asa is committed to using her unique blend of high-art, pop-culture, glamour, and spirituality to make the world a more beautiful and positive place. For the Silo, Jason Southerland.

About North Star Way
North Star Way is an imprint dedicated to publishing “information to make your life better.”  With a non-fiction editorial focus in the areas of motivation, inspiration and books that advise and inform, North Star Way aims to connect readers with thought leaders through a variety of new media formats including books and e-books, on-line courses and subscriptions, speaking engagements, mobile applications, original video and audio books, sponsorships and business partnerships, podcasts. North Star Way authors include John O’Leary, Maya Penn, Amanda Steinberg, JJ Virgin, and Keke Palmer.


Fans Of 1960s TV Star Trek Should Be Aware of Star Trek Continues

When the next episode of STAR TREK CONTINUES is revealed, science fiction fans will see a familiar face in a guest star role.  The new episode, titled Still Treads the Shadow, features guest star Rekha Sharma, perhaps best known to science fiction fans for her role in more than 30 episodes of Battlestar Galactica.   While details of Sharma’s character in STAR TREK CONTINUES are being kept under wraps until April, she says the offer for a role came after meeting Vic “Kirk” Mignogna at FedCon Germany last year during the 50th Anniversary of STAR TREK event.



“Vic and I kept in touch after FedCon, and then he asked if I’d be interested in coming aboard STAR TREK CONTINUES.  He told me about a script that was in development and the character he had in mind.  I’m so delighted that it worked with my schedule,” Sharma says.   Sharma’s first introduction to the original STAR TREK series came from her big brother.   “All my friends were watching Full House or something.  I’m not sure! And there I was, coming home after school and watching the original STAR TREK and old Perry Mason reruns!  I remember my brother told me that there were people opening and closing the doors, which I thought it was so cool and cheesy. And it very much appealed to my dreams of utopia — especially as a young colored girl growing up in very white neighborhoods,” says Sharma.   Rekha’s character of Tory Foster in the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, which began in 2004, developed after several auditions.   “From the very first audition, I was immediately struck by the intelligence, artistry and kind-heartedness of the directors and producers. I thought, I’d really like to work with these people! First I went in for the role of a Viper pilot, then a captain, and then the role of Tory came along.  Oh yeah, I thought, this is a perfect part for me.” Galactica’s producers apparently agreed.   “Working on Battlestar Galactica was a dream come true.  From my previous experience, I honestly didn’t think I could be creatively satisfied working in TV. But Battlestar Galactica changed that. Not only was it creatively satisfying, but we also had such a great team of people.  We are all like family to this day,” Sharma explains

 star trek continues bridge

What does it mean to be a STAR TREK CONTINUES guest star?   “It means I have fulfilled a dream, in a way, and that I’ve come full circle. I loved those stories. They had a wonderful morality and vision for humanity that made my heart sing. And then I got to step onto those sets and step into my childhood and be a part of telling that kind of story.   Not only that, but that world was so fun! I loved those neat-o futuristic gadgets when I was a kid. And now, as an adult, I got to play with them. I got to sit on the bridge.  There weren’t any trailers, so when I needed to rest between scenes, I took naps in sickbay on board the Enterprise.   And I got beamed in the transporter!  I can’t wait to see that,” she says enthusiastically.   The experience of working on the STAR TREK CONTINUES set “was so refreshing,” Sharma says.  “Everyone is there for love, not money. It felt like Battlestar Galactica that way. Although it’s a fan run project, the STAR TREK CONTINUES sets were surprisingly professional and very impressive. It was a mix of TV veterans and total newbies, and that made for an awesome atmosphere to work in. It was the best of both worlds, really.”   Sharma likes to compare the character she’s playing in Episode 8 to be much like aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart.  “She is smart as a whip, very technically inclined, and brave. I thought of her as a bright light of goodness and intelligence with a big heart.”   She admits to being very surprised at what the cast and crew have created with STAR TREK CONTINUES.   “You know, Vic told me that I’d become part of the family, but I had no idea what he meant. They have chosen a team who are all friendly, diligent, thoughtful and good-hearted people. I felt so welcomed and incredibly lucky. It makes sense that they’re shooting in the south – they’re so hospitable!  And those sets! Again, Vic told me what they built, but until you’re there you just can’t conceive of it. It’s really impressive. I know I’m not the only one who was moved to tears,” Sharma says.   Fans will be able to see Rekha Sharma at future conventions and events.   “It’s funny. At first it felt so strange to do conventions, but as time has gone on I’ve really come to appreciate them.  It’s special to have the opportunity to meet the fans and discuss the themes of these shows. You get to connect with people that you’d never get to meet otherwise. And sci-fi fans are awesome because, generally speaking, they still have dreams. They’re not jaded. They believe in possibility. And without that, nothing would ever change for the better. We’ve got to hold on to our dreams and keep being warriors in this world – to truly go where no man has gone before.”   “Still Treads the Shadow” will premiere at Fan Expo Dallas on April 1 at the Dallas Convention Center.

Frequently Asked Questions and Answers about remaining episodes of STAR TREK CONTINUES 

 

How are you getting around the guidelines for fan films?   As CBS/Paramount has made clear, the guidelines are not laws; they are general parameters applied on a case-by-case basis. Since the implementation of the guidelines, we have stopped all crowdfunding activities and have focused strictly on completing the four episodes which had already been funded as of that time by fans’ donations to our 501(c)(3) non-profit. STAR TREK CONTINUES has always followed any and all instructions given to us by CBS regarding our production, and will continue to do so.   Does STAR TREK CONTINUES have any type of special and/or official arrangement with CBS/Paramount?   No.

 

How long are the episodes?   They will be exactly the same format as our previous episodes   Why are you ending the series?   Recent developments necessitated our finishing up sooner than we intended, but it was always our goal to bring The Original Series to a conclusion. With our final four episodes, we will have done that. It’s been an amazing five years creating this series, and we will miss making it.  But all good things… Weren’t you going to make 13 episodes? Did CBS make you stop?   CBS is not responsible for the decision to end the series. We are doing 11 episodes instead of 13 because another fan group took advantage of the good graces of the copyright holders forcing them to protect their property and the interests of their license holders. In deference and gratitude to CBS, we are wrapping up earlier than planned. We always have stood, and continue to stand, with CBS.   Can we get DVDs/Blu-ray discs of the final episodes?   As we do not own STAR TREK, we cannot sell DVDs or Blu-ray discs. In the past, we’ve made a limited number of discs available as crowdfunding perks. However, since we are no longer crowdfunding, providing episodes to the public on DVD and/or Blu-ray discs is not currently feasible for us.   What will happen to the studio/sets? Will set visits/tours be available?   We don’t have a definitive answer on this right now, but we’re considering all our options.

Day Marks Another Anniversary Of JFK Assassination

The Grassy Knoll at Dealey Plaza.
The Grassy Knoll at Dealey Plaza.

2015’s historic JFK 50th assassination Special was a riveting and powerful demonstration of media technology. We co-hosted the CBS feature which “rebroadcast” their original assassination television coverage in real-time, fully and completely. Every detail was reproduced exactly as it was shown on that fateful day- even the interruption of a certain soap opera with the first “bulletin” announcement. Live internet coverage began at 1:38 EDT exactly 50 years to the minute of the initial CBS news broadcasts.

If you have any #JFK thoughts (perhaps you even remember that fateful day)- or if you watch the archived live stream please share your feelings by commenting below at the end of this post. We will respect all requests for anonymity.

In the meantime, you may want to view Newsmax TV documentary: “I killed JFK” claiming to showcase a newly revealed “confessed killer”. In 1978 a US Congressional Investigation into Kennedy’s death determined that there were likely more than one shooter/killer.

RIP JFK CBS coverage

JFK visits Ottawa 1961:

Silo Tweet JFK Ottawa 1961

 

 

@CBSNews live tweeting during this historical rebroadcast event- image:CBS Twitter
@CBSNews live tweeting during this historical rebroadcast event- image:CBS Twitter

 

Supplemental- The United States National Archives Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives
References: I. Findings in the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy