Filmmaking, Writing, Beer, Insularity, History, and Other Topics More-Or-Less Related to “Beer Wars,” Part 5

Part 1 --- Part 2 --- Part 3 --- Part 4 --- Part 5 --- Part 6 --- Part 7 Part 8 --- Part 9 --- Part 10 --- Part 11 --- Part 12 --- Part 13

NOTE: When I moved to a new site, this "Beer Wars" series was mangled/destroyed during the move. I've reconstructed it by copying/pasting another copy of the original posts. I also lost the comments in their original form. I've copied/pasted the comments, but had to do so under my own name. So although it looks as though I'm the only commenter, I'm not. In each case, I've identified the original commenter.

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Anat scheduled the panel discussion to run for 35 minutes, so with seven people on the panel (including Anat) and one person asking questions, well, the math is obvious: No one would have time to say much of anything.

Our advance instructions were clear (and I’m happy to say we all followed orders):The panel would open with each panelist responding to a film clip. We did not see the clips in advance, so we didn’t know what we would be responding to. Each person would respond in order, and none of us were to interrupt that person while he/she was speaking. 

Once we’d all spoken, Ben launched another series of questions of his choosing, directed at a panelist of his choosing. No surprise, Sam and Rhonda, as the film’s “stars,” received most of the questions, with Greg getting a chunk of them. (Again, we were not told in advance what questions would be asked.)

The half hour zoomed past at Autobahn speed. Indeed, the one thing we all agreed on as we left the stage after the event ended was that we would have loved another hour, because there was plenty to say.

Okay. So that’s what happened. (And yeah, I should have included this last bit of whys/wherefores in the previous post. What can I say?)

My response?

First the film. The film was terrific. It moved at a lively pace, nearly dizzying at moments, and it had a clear narrative structure: Anat leaves alcohol business, ponders nature of alcohol business, decides to follow two beermakers, two entrepreneurs whose stories have quite different endings. It was often hilarious and almost as often sobering. (How could anyone watch Rhonda hauling her case from bar to bar, from meeting to meeting, night after night, day after day, and not be moved by her spirit and energy?)

Was the film perfect? No. Had it been my film (and I’m definitely not cut out for film-making), I would have introduced Rhonda, Sam, and the three-tier system earlier in the proceedings. I also would have painted the conflict with more shades of grey: I don’t think the conflict is so much Big Guy v. Little Guy v. Middleman Monsters, so much as it is a conflict about broader and deeper American values. (That, by the way, is where I’m headed with all of this, so hang on a minute for that.)

More to the point, it wasn’t my film. It was Anat’s film and her perspective and she went through all this effort because she wanted to make a point of her choosing, not mine. And judged on that basis, in terms of both its technical qualities and its narrative, I thought the film was excellent: Lively, well-paced, well-directed, and thoughtful. The cinematography and editing were first-rate and as a director, Anat possesses an exquisite sense of timing. Her wit and humanity shone in equal measures. 

Someone said to me at the reception after that he didn’t even want to get up to use the john because he was afraid he’d miss something. That means the film succeeded. I was deliriously happy on Anat’s behalf. 

So I urge the beer geeks to separate the film’s topic from the film itself. Pretend it was a film about, I dunno, brain surgery or tree trimming or mountain biking.

In other words, take your off beer blinders and judge the film as a film.

Next: Oh, that panel discussion . . . 

COMMENTS:

[Please note: when I moved to a new website, this series did not survive the transfer of blog entries. I had to repost the entire thing. The only way to include the comments is to tack them on at the end of an entry.}

Useful Info From Paul Gatza, Director of the Brewers Association

Paul Gatza, the director of the Brewers Association added a comment to an earlier post about how the BA arrives at its head-count. I'm bumping that comment up to a separate post because it contains a huge amount of useful info.

I will add that my experience is that the staff at the BA is extraordinarily helpful and generous with their time. They could run seminars on how to do "public reach out."

And Paul is, like everyone else at the BA, an amazingly pleasant, lovely human being. I've only met him a couple of times, but this is a guy with quality! It's also worth noting that, as was the case 25 years ago, when the organization was just getting off the ground, the BA still relies on reports from the frontlines. Put another way, they've maintained their original mission of including the "public" in the organization.

So if you know of a new brewery, or one that's not around anymore, do let them know. They absolutely welcome the input.

Anyway, from Paul:

"Here’s some background so everyone is on the same page with the Brewers Association “brewery count.” There are two numbers you may see published by the BA. For either count we are talking about brick-and-mortar facilities where beer is made and then sold. "One number is the annual count of operating breweries at specific point in time. This is a calendar year number for the BA’s annual craft brewing industry stats that includes each facility that brewed commercial beer in a calendar year. "This number includes brewers that brewed for some or all of the year. It does not include facilities where beer has not been brewed in a calendar year, even if that is a “store” of a restaurant group that also includes brewpubs. "The “annual” count for 2008 is 1501 craft brewers out of 1545 U.S. operating breweries. BA publishes the annual statistical report in the May/June issue of the new brewer. "One tricky piece is when do we inactivate a brewery. In general if we get word a place hasn’t brewed in a month and doesn’t seem likely to in the near future, we will inactivate them. "There are many very small breweries where a batch may normally last for, say, four months. and they may only brew three times a year. A brewery like this would be considered active by the BA as that fills the company’s demand and isn’t a true shutdown. "Another model we see in specific places is a brewery that is supplied by another facility in a group of brewers (usually a restaurant group) yet brews maybe as little as once per year in order to keep a permit active or for other reasons. "Yeah, it gets grey, and we need to use our judgment sometimes. Another place our counts are imperfect is that it often takes us time to get a status change through the natural course of information–for example, brewers telling the BA that they have closed isn’t usually high on their priority list–and we have to get that information on tips, media reports or online sites and then do the research and make the call. The same applies to brewery openings, but to a lesser degree. "We love tips to research if anyone notices a listing on our online Brewery Locator that they believe to be incorrect. BA’s Membership Coordinator & Brewery Detective Erin Glass (with her trenchcoat and magnifying glass) is our crack investigator. "We pull a report of this active brewery information from our database once per month based on the data in our database on the last day of the month. This “active breweries” count would be expected to be lower than the most recent “annual” count as it would not include brewers that closed in current year, past year, but would include current year openings. "The current count is used generally for media inquiries, our mid-year stat review and our member mailings and emailings in our Craft Brewers Fact Sheet. , we could publish the current count online each month. Now that the Craft Brewers Conference has wrapped, we are redesigning the professional division site and can do some more with the craft stats if there is interest and a benefit for BA members."

Good Commentary on the Future of the "Book"

Thoughtful commentary on the Steven Johnson essay re the future of the book that I mentioned the other day. Including this notion:

There’s one thing to be pointed out here: in the history of search engine optimization (oh, that dirty phrase), content has driven the evolution of search engines as much as the other way round.

The "Practice" of Reading --- and Why "Design" Matters

This is a lovely, cogent essay about what happens when we read, and why the image we're "reading" matters. It explains, as it happens, why my own website looks the way it does. (I didn't write the coding, but I "designed" its appearance. There was a method to my madness.)

Tip o' the mug to the always enlightening and entertaining Alan Jacobs at Text Patterns.

Filmmaking, Writing, Beer, Insularity, History, and Other Topics More-Or-Less Related to “Beer Wars,” Part 4

Part 1 --- Part 2 --- Part 3 --- Part 4 --- Part 5 --- Part 6 --- Part 7 Part 8 --- Part 9 --- Part 10 --- Part 11 --- Part 12 --- Part 13

NOTE: When I moved to a new site, this "Beer Wars" series was mangled/destroyed during the move. I've reconstructed it by copying/pasting another copy of the original posts. I also lost the comments in their original form. I've copied/pasted the comments, but had to do so under my own name. So although it looks as though I'm the only commenter, I'm not. In each case, I've identified the original commenter.

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Note: This section details the wheres/hows of the technical/backstage aspects of the Beer Wars event, so feel free to skip. The next segment gets back to the mental meat of the matter.

The point is that I knew that the critics would start in even before they’d seen the film. It’s all part of the deal. Fortunately, Anat also knew that would happen, and all she or anyone else could do was try to, well, educate people about how and why filmmakers and writers (and even brewers) make the choices they make. 

So on April 16, Anat and I and others gathered in Los Angeles for the event. I should explain that up to that point, no one had seen the film except Anat, her crew, and Ben Stein. (She hired Ben as moderator because she needed someone who was experienced at public speaking and who was not involved in any way in the beer industry. Ben fit the bill.)

Digression: Anat  hired Ben as moderator because he’s an experienced speaker and, more important, an outsider. He doesn’t make beer, sell beer, or promote beer. No surprise, the crowd of critics were annoyed. How, they demanded to know, could he serve as a moderator when he’s not a beer person? And what about his politics?, of which, apparently, many beer geeks disapprove.

They seemed not to understand his role in this event: He was there to MODERATE. Got that? MODERATE. He wasn’t there to share his brewing expertise (there were four other people on stage to do that). He wasn’t there because he was knowledgeable about the industry. He wasn’t there because he holds a specific political point of view (which, I might point out, was and is irrelevant to the proceedings.) He was there to ask questions and keep the half hour panel on track. End of story.

End of digression. The panelists — myself, Rhonda Kallman, Sam Caligione, Todd Alstrom, Greg Koch, and Charlie Papazian — spent that afternoon in the “green room” waiting our turn for makeup and talking. Those who had cell phones tweeted and blogged the green room activity. Etc.

It’s worth noting that I’d never met Rhonda or Sam or Todd. I’d had one brief conversation with Greg a few months earlier at the Great American Beer Festival, and have known Charlie for about four years (I interviewed him for the book). It was an interesting experience to be, in effect, stranded in the Green Room with what amounted to total strangers, all of whom have what can only be described as oversized personalities. Toss Anat and Ben into the mix and it made for an amazing and memorable afternoon.

(If I were Jane Smiley, I would have been taking notes for a novel titled Five Hours in the Green Room, a riff on her Ten Days in the Hills, which I loved.) (But I’m definitely not a novelist, so that’s one book that’s not gonna get written, at least not by me.)

Another (brief) digression: Makeup. I hate wearing makeup. I own almost no makeup (I keep a bit on hand for the TV gig I do, just in case the studio’s makeup person isn’t there.) But high-def cameras can make a 20-year-old with fabulous skin look like an aged crone. So: makeup. I asked the person doing my makeup (which, no surprise, took a looooooong time; I’m old) if men got as much makeup as women. “Oh, no,” she said. “Men usually only need a light touch. But people expect women to wear makeup, so we always put more on them.”

Oh?

About an hour before the film was to begin, we all trouped onstage for a run-through of the live event. The crew wired us, checked sound levels, checked camera angles, and so forth. Ben ran us through a series of questions (none of which he re-asked during the live event.) We all argued; a minor shouting match ensued (because many of us disagreed about a number of topics). (Not to worry; it was a friendly shouting match.)

(The crew, by the way, consisted of dozens of people. You want to know why tickets cost $15? Staging an event like this requires a HUGE amount of equipment and a lot of highly skilled theater tech people. The satellite trucks were marvels of mobile high-technity, and there were miles of cables, wires, and so forth all over, all of which required a human being to set up and operate.)

Then we went backstage again to wait for the screening to begin. When it was time, we — the panelists, Anat, and Ben — took our seats in the auditorium so we could watch the film. (Again, note that only Anat and Ben had seen the film. The rest of us were “Beer Wars” virgins.)

The lights dimmed. The screen lit up. The film rolled. We watched. Five minutes before the film ended, we crept from our theater seats, returned to the stage (which was concealed by the movie screen), took our assigned seats for the panel discussion, got re-wired, received still more makeup (ugh). The film ended, the screen rose, and the panel discussion began.

Next: You want depth? You're not gonna get it in a half hour.

Yes, I Am Writing Another Book, and No, I Don't Mind The Time-sink Beer Has Become

I started writing a reply to an email from Loyal Reader Dave who asked a good question and I decided I'd post my reply here because I think it might be relevant to other readers. (Or not.)

He wondered if it bothers me to spend so much time on beer, given that I'm writing a new book that has nothing to do with beer ( Carnivore Nation: Meat and the Making of Modern America is the working title.)

And the answer is no: It took me awhile, but I finally accepted that beer is now part of my life (although, ahem, I'm sure some beer geeks wish I would just go the hell away.) Yes, keeping tabs on the beer world takes time, but that's okay. Once I made the decision to blog regularly, I knew that might happen.

So -- be careful what I wish for.

But I'm also careful to organize my time. It may seem, for example, that I spend huge amounts of my day blogging. In fact, I spend 85 to 90 percent of my working time on the meat book, and the rest of it on beer.

Speaking of which, at some point in the next month or so, I plan to add a website page about the meat book and to start talking about it more here at the blog. I haven't said much up to now about the new book because I was still finding my footing, but that project is now far enough along that I'd like to start sharing some of what I've learned. And THANKS for reading the blog. I really do appreciate it.