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Revisiting the rhapsody, on the silver screen

11/29/2018

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Charles City Press, 11-29-18

“Wait until you hear this.”

It was my cousin talking, when we were just kids. He was a couple years older than me, and a couple years wiser in the ways of the world, I think. He certainly knew a little bit more about good rock music.

“You’ve never heard anything like this before,” he told me.

And he was right, I had not. And I haven’t heard anything like it since.

It was Queen. And of course, I’d heard several Queen songs before, on FM radio, but my cousin insisted that I’d never really heard Queen. I hadn’t heard their deeper album cuts, I hadn’t heard their songs that radio stations were afraid to play. My cousin was giving me a proper introduction.

It was different. It was strange. It was remarkable. And, most importantly, it was fun. I liked it.

This wasn’t just music. This wasn’t art, either. I wasn’t just listening to songs, I was joining a club. I now belonged to a group of misfits who had nothing in common, as individuals, other than the fact that we all were aware that these sounds existed.

Before they became Queen, they were a struggling blues-rock band called “Smile.” Singer Freddie Mercury, guitar player Brian May, bassist John Deacon and drummer Roger Taylor were all expert practitioners of creative sound, fluid pharmacists of a musical medicine that could temporarily cure all which ailed a teenaged hungered heart, an angered adolescent mind, the collective soul of the young and conflicted masses.

It was an eclectic, collusive collision of hard-charging guitar rock, pop piano ballads, mini-symphonies, instrumental jams, vocal exercises, lyric poetry, metal anthems, disco ditties — with a dash of self-deprecating silliness — all rolled into one. Sometimes all rolled into one song.

Many critics hated them, always, but the critics weren’t in the club. The fans understood — to the tune of about 300 million album sales.

When I walked into the movie theatre with my wife a couple weeks back, about 40 years after my initiation into the club, I was full of interest and anticipation. “Bohemian Rhapsody” was going to tell me the story of Queen — a story I already knew, but needed to see acted out.

Hollywood took a few liberties with the story, as Hollywood tends to do. I’m OK with that. We aren’t building nuclear plants here, we’re capturing the essence of a rock band.

It’s a lovely movie. If you’re in the club, you’ll think it’s great. The critics, of course, hate it — and are woefully unable to see the irony of their derision. History is repeating itself. Most critics hated Queen’s music then, but the fans were crazy about it. Most critics hate the Queen movie now, but judging by how packed the theaters have been, the fans are crazy about it.

It’s just a movie about four regular guys, each with rare musical talent. They’re portrayed as misfits, like many of their fans, who didn’t really fit in anywhere else. And it tries to show us how much they loved their fans, how much their fans loved them, and how much they loved each other. And it’s packed full of good music.

I thought it was great, despite the fact that I never heard my favorite Queen song in the movie. The song is a piano ballad called “Too Much Love Will Kill You.” It got my heart through many breakups and makeups with my high school girlfriend. When I listened to Freddie sing it way back then, I felt like he was the only one who understood what my girlfriend and I were going through. I had no idea at the time that there are perpetually about 100 million other teenagers going through the same thing.

Once in high school, my friend Scotty — a wanna-be singer — was singing it to himself when I walked into the chorus room.

“You can sing Queen?” I asked him.

“No one can sing Queen, except Queen,” he laughed.

Still, Scotty tried to sing the chorus for me, and actually hit all the notes, but he didn’t hit them with quite the gravitas you hear in a Queen song.

When I was in seventh grade, the varsity football team in my town went undefeated. It was a very exciting time. After every win, the players would crank up the Queen song “Another One Bites the Dust” on their ghetto-blasters. I looked up to those guys, and thought that was pretty cool. I had no idea that there were probably a thousand teams across the country doing the same thing after every win.

The point of all this is, the boys from Queen knew how to put together a song that everyone could relate to. Freddie Mercury and Queen came closer than anyone in music history to achieving the status of “rock gods.”

But gods are immortal, and Freddie Mercury was not a god. He died of complications from AIDS in 1991.

A few years later, my old friend Scotty, the wanna-be singer, died of leukemia.

“Too much love will kill you,” they sang. “Just as sure as none at all.”

That undefeated high school football team, which celebrated each victory to the sounds of Queen all those years ago? That team’s best player died of cancer when he was just 30 years old.

That high school girlfriend died a couple of years ago. I’m sure I’ll never understand why that happened.

My cousin, who introduced me to the music of Queen — and so much more — died at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland of injuries sustained on August 2, 2005 in Baghdad, Iraq, when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device struck his convoy.

“And another one’s gone, and another one’s gone — another one bites the dust.”

All of them were members of the club. A group of misfits who had nothing in common, other than the fact that all were aware that the music of Queen existed. Also, all of them bit the dust too young.

I miss all these people, but unlike old friends, good music is immortal. There’s a different Queen song out there to remind me of each of those people, and when I hear that song, my memories of them are happy and hopeful. No tears, I feel myself smiling — all over, I’m smiling.

And when I watched the movie “Bohemian Rhapsody,” I was reminded that before they were called “Queen,” they were a struggling little college band named “Smile.”

That’s not a name, that’s advice. That’s a record collection full of life instructions, edited down to one word.

“Smile.”

That’s appropriate, I think. Hell, that’s more than appropriate.
​

That’s just about perfect.

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Charles City native Lidd talks about upcoming Kinnick movie, based on his book

11/27/2018

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Charles City Press, 11-23-18


By JAMES GROB

Eighty years after he won the Heisman Trophy, the story of Iowa Hawkeye football legend Nile Kinnick will be told on the silver screen, thanks in large part to a native of Charles City.

“It’s kind of a dream come true,” said author Tom Lidd.

Lidd, a former Charles City resident and lifelong Hawkeye fan, is a retired insurance agent who now lives in Cedar Rapids. In 2008, he published a historical novel about Kinnick, simply entitled “Nile.”

Ten years later, that book is the basis for the movie “The Ironmen,” which will chronicle the lives of the Hawkeyes who served in World War II. Lidd said the hope is to start filming the movie next spring, and for the film to hit theaters in 2020. A movie studio has committed to helping make and direct the film, as well as supplying a large portion of a targeted $15 million budget, with the rest coming through other fundraising efforts.

“The issue right now is raising money,” Lidd said. “There are a couple of well-known directors and actors who are interested, but it’s really coming down to financing.”

Lidd said there are some donors who are close to pulling the trigger. Once they do, the idea is to premiere the movie in Kinnick Stadium in Iowa City, the night before the first Hawkeye football game of the 2020 season.

Kinnick won the 1939 Heisman Trophy and was a consensus All-American. He died during a training flight while serving as  U.S. Navy aviator in World War II. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1951, and the University of Iowa renamed its football stadium in his honor in 1972. Kinnick Stadium is one of just two college football stadiums to be named after a player. The other, coincidentally, is Iowa State’s Jack Trice Stadium in Ames.

“The record for a movie premiere audience is 44,000 people,” Lidd said. “They think with the Iowa Hawkeye fan base, they can get 45,000 or more in Kinnick, easy.”

Lidd said that Iowa athletic director Gary Barta is behind the film, and the film has also received a lot of attention from former Iowa football players who went on to play in the NFL.

Lidd, 66, graduated from Charles City High School in 1970. He is the brother of Mike Lidd, who owns Lidd & Cordray Clothing in Charles City. Copies of the book “Nile” will be available for purchase at the store on Tuesday.

The two-year process of writing, editing and revising the book started for Lidd in 2006. Lidd said, as he was writing, he always had a movie in mind.

“In my mind, I was seeing the scenes play out on screen as I was writing them,” he said.

Filmmaker Joe Heath, an Iowa City native, is the executive producer of "The Ironmen." Heath has been pitching the idea of a Kinnick film since he’s been in the movie business, and a few years ago, he came across Lidd’s book and thought it would be perfect for the big screen.

"It is very 'Rudy' — an inspirational, family film," Heath said in the Daily Iowan newspaper last week. "I think it will be a movie that sticks with people, especially with people around here.”

Heath and Lidd worked together to whittle the the 452-page novel into a two-hour script. That script was then tweaked by established writer and director Nicholas Meyer, a University of Iowa alumnus who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.”

Meyer has written several other scripts for the small and big screen, including two other Star Trek movies, a James Bond movie, and movies such as “Fatal Attraction,” “Sommersby,” “The Informant,” and “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.” The latter also earned an Oscar nomination, and he’s been nominated for three Emmys and published eight books.

“I was asked to write the screenplay, and I based it on the novel and tried to include the main things,” Lidd said. “Nicholas Meyer then took it and he did a great job, he basically left everything the same, but put meat on the characters’ bones.”

Lidd said that the extent of his communication with Meyer has been a number of emails back and fourth. When Meyer sent him the first draft of the screenplay, Lidd couldn’t help himself — he made corrections.

“It felt kind of funny, correcting the grammar of an Oscar-nominated writer, but he thanked me,” Lidd said.

Although he doesn’t have a resume like Meyer’s, Lidd is not a novice when it comes to writing. Lidd said it was his wife, Jane Kelly, who first suggested that he write a book about Kinnick. Kelly is a U.S. Circuit Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Eighth Circuit. The two have been together since 2003, and married in 2014.

Lidd said that he used several sources as he did research for “Nile,” but there were two books in particular that stood out. One is  “A Hero Perished, The Diary of Selected Letters of Nile Kinnick,” by Paul Bander.

“Through that, I really got a sense of Kinnick’s personality,” Lidd said, and added that the other book was written by Al Coupee, a former Hawkeye quarterback and teammate of Kinnick’s who went on to a career in broadcasting.

“That book really gave the back story on everybody on the team, and there were a lot of humorous anecdotes,” Lidd said.

He’s written two screenplays since he retired from the commercial insurance business in 2014.

“Actually, I have more confidence in them being turned into movies than I had when I wrote ‘Nile,’” he said.

Both of the scripts are works of historical screenplays that deal with racism. One, called “Scott vs. Sandford,” pertains to the Dred Scott Decision in 1857, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a slave who resided in a free territory was not entitled to freedom. Lidd called it the “worst U.S. Supreme Court decision ever.”

The other screenplay is sports-related. It’s about a basketball team at a segregated high school in Indiana in 1955 — the team’s star player was future NBA great Oscar Robertson.
​

That interest in sports likely stems from Lidd’s youth in Charles City. He called Charles City “a great place to grow up.” At one time, Lidd held two school basketball records, most points in a game (41) and most field goals in a game (19). Both of those records stood for 23 years.

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Please refrain from mocking mock elections

11/8/2018

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Charles City Press, 11-8-18

I didn’t take the photo, it was an acquaintance of mine on Facebook who shared it.

It was a picture of a sign hung by the powers-that-be outside of a voting area somewhere.

“NO CAMPAIGN MATERIALS OR CLOTHING ALLOWED IN POLLING PLACE,” the sign said.

I was reminded of the importance of punctuation and sentence structure, because if you read that message literally, it’s essentially telling you you’re not supposed to wear any clothes when you’re voting. The sign insists on nude voting.

My response was, “Now I’m sorry I voted early and missed all the naked people.”

I know, it was kind of a childish thing to say, but at the moment I thought it was clever. A lot of people agreed, the photo got a lot of “likes” and “shares.” I believe that was less because of my cleverness and more because people appreciated a rare moment of comic relief on election day.

Election day mercifully ended the campaign season on Tuesday night, and I hope your side won.

Honestly, I do. I hope that, however you voted, the final results gave you something to feel good about.

It was a strange election, not just locally, but nationally, and it seems to me that both sides had some things to please them and some things to disappoint them.

Almost every candidate who was running and every pundit who was analyzing said something hyperbolic, along the lines of “this is the most important election of our lifetime.” That statement is true only in the context that every election is the most important election of our lifetime, until the next election. Every election we’ve ever had in this nation has been slightly more important than the previous one, and that will continue to be the case until the last one.

There are times when I fear that the last election will be very soon, but after Tuesday, I believe the last election is still a long time from happening. By all accounts, voter turnout was very high. Many races were very close. Voters split tickets everywhere. The big winner of the election was participation, the big loser was apathy. People still care.

As a writer at community newspapers for most of my adult life, I’ve always gotten the opportunity to see elections from a different perspective. Of course, I have my own strongly-held political views, opinions and ideals. At the same time, I usually get the opportunity to meet and talk with nearly every candidate, face to face. It doesn’t take long to learn there are things I have in common with the candidate, regardless of how opposed I may or may not be to that candidate’s policies. This tempers and moderates whatever views I have.

What I’m saying is, with a handful of unique exceptions, it’s really hard to hate someone, once you get to know them. That even applies to most politicians.

About a week before the election, about 40,000 students across Iowa participated in an unscientific straw poll, which was sponsored by the office of Iowa Republican Secretary of State, Paul Pate. Here in Charles City, 198 students in Robert Pittman's social studies classes voted. This is a good thing. Students don’t just vote, they learn how to vote intelligently. They delve into what the candidates say and what their actions have been. I wrote up a little article about the results.

I was astounded by the negative reaction from a handful of local people.

"Ask em why ... see if they know … the schools are brainwashing them,” one person wrote on our Facebook page. Another called the school district an “indoctrination center.” Another said  “it’s pretty much throwing liberal views down their throat.”

For some reason, there was a weird debate over what television news programs the students watch, even though there was nothing about television or news in the article.

I realize that these social media warriors aren’t exactly Iowa’s best and brightest, but none of these brilliant commenters had done even a fraction of the research the local students had done. They might have realized this, had they taken one minute to actually read the article. In fact, one of the more vociferous and opinionated commenters proudly proclaimed that he hadn’t read it.

In the article, Mr. Pittman said that the students in his classes don’t just look at what the candidates say in their campaigns, but they track the candidates’ voting history online to see what they’ve actually done. 

There were some comments from people who had actually read the story, who expressed that it was a positive thing that the students were being taught to research the candidates.

“Perhaps the most important thing that students get out of the mock election experience is that they get a test run on how to vote thoroughly,” Pittman said in the article. “They look at all the candidates, they look at the issues they care about and investigate them thoroughly. We hope as adults, they do the same.”
​

I hope so too, Mr. Pittman. But I wouldn’t count on it.

Why bother to investigate things thoroughly when it’s so much easier to share your ignorance on social media?

I have no idea if any of these geniuses who mocked the mock election actually voted in the real one.

If any of them did — if they were actually able to find their way into a voting booth and mark a ballot — they certainly weren’t as informationally equipped as those 198 students of Mr. Pittman were.

It’s sad, I think, to have such large and loud opinions and ideas based on such a tiny whisper of knowledge and understanding.
​

Some of them, I’ll bet, were voting naked.
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