Episode 406: Edgar Wright, Lauren Hough, Jason Schreier

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• Edgar Wright's Documentary Celebrates 50 Years Of 'The Sparks Brothers'

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  Writer and director Edgar Wright’s movie credits include the hit zombie comedy, “Shaun of the Dead” and the action movie, “Baby Driver”. He can now add the documentary, “The Sparks Brothers,” to his filmography.

  “The Sparks Brothers” explores the 50-year career of the Mael brothers, Ron and Russell, who are collectively known as Sparks. Over the past half century, Sparks have delved into several diverse music genres, including art-pop, new-wave synth pop, and electronic dance music. Their fans include comedian Patton Oswalt, actor Jason Schwartzman, and the musicians Beck and Flea.

  “Seeing Sparks on TV that young, they’re quite diverting prospects because I knew then that they weren’t really like the other bands,” Wright told WPR’s “BETA.”

  Wright liked the music, even if he didn’t’ understand the lyrics at 5 years old. Since then, Sparks have kept popping up in Wright’s life.

  “I was just kind of confounded by them and thought that their trajectory as a band was like no other,” he said.

  Then the thought occurred to him that somebody has got to do a documentary about Sparks.

  “I think I kept saying it aloud until one of my friends called me on it and said, ‘Why don’t you make the documentary on Sparks?’“

  Sparks’ first big hit was “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us.” It went to No. 2 on the United Kingdom singles chart in 1974. What is this song actually about?

  “The lyrics are sort of to be decoded a bit, kind of (like) Chaucer poems, where you have to kind of read them and figure out exactly what’s being said,” Wright explained.

  “And so to me, the song is about the anxiety of a young man who wants to get a date in a town where there are too many men and not enough women,” he continued. “Then I think his anxiety explodes into these kind of like cliffhangers from movies — like bombs dropping, and cannibals attacking, and war breaking out. And I guess the idea is that it’s eventually going to end in bloodshed that two men are going to fight over one girl.”

  The Mael brothers have reinvented themselves many times over the past 50 years. Wright said that this genre-hopping has definitely had an impact on Sparks’ career.

  “Because they’re naturally quite restless, and they’re always moving on to something new, it sometimes means that they haven’t enjoyed the spoils of what they’ve done, or by the time that that music is popular, they’ve already moved onto something else,” Wright said. “If you go ahead, breaking new ground, and you’re so ahead of the pack, you’re also kind of on your own. And that’s a great thing in terms of being the explorers. But it’s sort of the road less traveled.”

  Besides breaking new ground with their music, Sparks push the envelope with Ron’s lyrics. They often take the form of surreal short stories featuring twist endings.

  “Growing up with their songs, I sort of equated them to Monty Python albums,” Wright said. “It’s not like I fully understood the lyrics to all Sparks songs in the same way. And I didn’t fully understand all the references in a Monty Python sketch, but it made me want to be smarter. So I think in a strange way, one of the reasons that the band have endured is because there’s a lot to unpack.”

  One of the best examples of Ron’s witty lyrics is the song, “I Predict.” The ending could be the most brilliant song ending in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.

  “You’re relying on the deejay to play it to its very end, so people get the joke,” Wright said. “And the lyric is like, ‘And this song will fade out/And this song will fade out/And this song will fade out, I predict.’ And it cuts off. So it’s essentially saying that your narrator for the whole song is, like, not to be trusted.”

  How have Ron and Russell influenced Wright’s own career as a writer and director? That’s not entirely clear yet, Wright said.

  “I don’t know how they have so far, but in a weird way, I think that they’re kind of something to aspire to,” Wright said. “I think about it in the same breath as something like George Miller making ‘Mad Max: Fury Road‘ at age 71.”

  “The fact that Ron and Russell are doing what they do now, releasing great albums and writing a movie musical (“Annette”) for Leos Carax in their early 70s — anybody who’s a creative artist in any form would hope to be doing some of their best work in their 70s,” he continued. “It’s the dream, isn’t it? So I think if anything, it’s more making the documentary has kind of shown me the lesson in terms of sticking to your artistic beliefs is the only way forward through thick and thin.”

• Cable Guy, Cult Member, Bouncer: The Many Identities Of Lauren Hough

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  Near the end of 2018, Lauren Hough wrote a story for HuffPost. “I Was a Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst of America” was the headline. In it, Hough described the lows of her 10-year career fixing cable connections for irate customers.

  The story went viral and led to the publication of her debut essay collection, “Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing.” Hough’s book has received rave reviews, including this comment from writer Roxane Gay: “Hough’s writing will break your heart … This is one of those rare books that will instantly become part of the literary canon, and the world of letters will be better for it.”

  In her book, Hough explores the various identities she’s inhabited over the course of her life. In addition to her 10-year career as a cable guy, Hough also served in the U.S. Air Force and worked as a bouncer at a gay club.

  Hough was raised as a member of the Children of God cult, living in seven countries and West Texas. Actors Joaquin Phoenix, River Phoenix, and Rose McGowan also spent their youth as members of this cult.

  The cult was founded by David Berg in Huntington Beach, California in 1968. It was originally called Teens for Christ before being renamed the Children of God. The Children of God founded communes in various cities and countries across the world. Members would evangelize in the streets and give out pamphlets. After a restructuring, the group changed its name to The Family of Love. It later shortened its name to The Family and is now known as The Family International.

  As Hough writes:

  “Berg waited until he had his followers completely dependent. He had them sever all ties. Most everyone had kids, no jobs, and now lived in foreign countries. His crowning message was simple: Anything in love was good. Which sounds like an Instagram caption. But it had a dark twist. Go out to nightclubs and lure rich men into bed. It’s not prostitution if you tell them about Jesus.”

  “It really depended on where we were,” Hough told WPR’s “BETA” about her childhood and the cult. “My early years were pretty idyllic from my memory, living in campgrounds, and traveling around in Argentina and Chile was great.”

  She remembers there being a lot of other kids to play with and the fact that they were desperately poor.

  “But you don’t know that when everyone around you is poor,” Hough said. “It wasn’t fun at all. We spent most of our days either changing diapers and taking care of little kids and cleaning the house or out on the street selling posters.”

  In her book, Hough writes that it’s entirely possible that the way she speaks and, by extension, the way she writes “developed in rebellion to Familyspeak.”

  “Familyspeak” refers to one of the punishments adults used to discipline children.

  “If you spoke too loudly, if you were caught being foolish, telling a joke, and if you sighed when someone told you to do something — basically, if you were a teenager — you could get put on silence restriction, which meant you weren’t allowed to talk at all,” Hough explained.

  Silence restriction could last for a day or for months. Thirty days was the longest Hough had to go without talking.

  “It was really frustrating,” she said. “Most of the kids in the home knew some made-up version of American Sign Language, just the alphabet, that we would use to talk to one another, but you couldn’t get caught doing that. It’s sad. I don’t have words for not being able to say words. I think it’s definitely a reason I became so outspoken later on. Realizing I could speak, realizing that I could handle the consequences if I do speak has been life-changing for me, and thankfully it happened early on.”

  Hough left the Children of God when she was 15 years old. A few years later, she joined the Air Force.

  “It was, in my cult-raised mind, the logical next step,” she said. “And most of it is I just wanted a way out of Amarillo, (Texas) and I consumed the commercials that we all did: join the Air Force, and see the world, and get a college education, and get a leg up.”

  She joined during the 1990s when the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was in full force. The law barred people who identified as lesbian, gay and bisexual from serving in the U.S. military if they acknowledged their sexual orientation. The 1993 law was repealed by Congress in 2010, effective in 2011.

  As a gay woman in the military, Hough was surrounded by people who were homophobic.

  “One of the great things about the military is it’s such a wide diaspora of people who join. And most people my age were raised on MTV,” she said. “We didn’t have a problem with gay people. The problem came when all it really took was one person to have a problem with it.”

  “And I didn’t really know what ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ meant when I joined, I don’t think a lot of people did,” she continued. “We thought it was, ‘You don’t walk into your commander’s office and say you’re gay, you’re fine.’ But the problem with that one person is a lot of people were turned in by their exes as an easy way to hurt someone.”

  In her book, Hough says she doesn’t like the word “family.” But she did end up finding a family at the Washington, D.C. nightclub where she worked as a bouncer.

  “I started thinking of them as family,” she said. “We do that in the queer community, I think, especially because a lot of people do lose their families coming out. We developed sort of a pseudo-family.”

  Hough worked as a cable tech in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. for a decade. She said she made a service call to the house of former Vice President Dick Cheney. There was an assistant or security personnel who followed her around while she was checking signal levels and connections.

  “The cable was going to be out for a while,” Hough recalled. “The guy talking to me, it was sort of the, ‘Do you have any idea who that man (Cheney) is?’ And I was like, ‘He can waterboard me if he feels like it.’”

  Did Cheney react to her joke? “Well, if he did, I wasn’t looking. I just walked out. I didn’t want him to take me up on it.”

  Hough has had various identities over her lifetime, and each has come with some adjusting. But the most difficult, so far is embracing her new identity as a writer.

  “My brain certainly is not built to absorb a lot of this,” she said. “My brother has been saving all the clips, and he’s the first person to know where I am on the best-seller list or if I’m on it … And you don’t want to be uncool about it on Twitter, but you definitely want to tell someone. So I get to tell my little brother. He’s pretty impressed.”

  I don’t really have words for this yet. I’m headed to my brother’s to tell him. Before I do that:
  This is because of indie bookshops, because of all y’all who bought the book and read the book and told your friends to read it. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart. Thank you pic.twitter.com/3OxRB7qXeb

  — Lauren Hough (@laurenthehough) April 21, 2021

• Journalist Jason Schreier Looks At The 'Crunch' Of Making Video Games

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  There is a colloquial term tossed around in almost every major video game publishing setting: “crunch.” Tech journalist and author Jason Schreier tells WPR’s “BETA” the phrase’s near ubiquity in the billion dollar video game publishing industry should give everyone pause.

  “You think of crunch, crunch time, it kind of sounds like, ‘All right, this is it, the end of the thing. It’s crunch time.’ But in the games industry, it’s actually not just at the end of a project when this will happen,” he said. “Oftentimes you go through this kind of period of excessive overtime just to hit a normal deadline over the course of your project. And a lot of games companies actually build in a period of crunch into their schedule, like expecting everybody to work those extra hours.”

  It’s the big question behind his second book on the video game industry, “Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry.” Schreier’s first book — “Blood, Sweat and Pixels” — shed a light on how popular video games are created. With “Press Reset” he is exploring the question of human cost in a notoriously churn and burn climate.

  “The big question that I set out to ask is: Why is the video game industry so volatile and what kind of effect does that have on people in it?” he said.

  The main volatility of this industry can be summed up by the lack of stability. With bottom lines impacting every independent and major studio, it’s not uncommon to lose your job even after the launch of a successful game. This leads to a constant fear of layoffs or reassignments which require constant relocations to chase down the next job. There’s also the severe burnout from a “crunch” culture that wipes away the prestige and glamour from a career creating and playing video games.

  “It’s a constant thing. It’s a very hit driven industry. But it’s not just that. It’s also an industry full of wealth disparity,” Schreier said. “There’s a lot of money being made, but not a lot of money going to the people who actually make the games.“

  Unlike other entertainment entities, successful video games are reliant on a fruitful marriage of art and technology. They have to have the artistic sensibilities of film but are beholden to the ever-changing backend tech and changes in gaming trends throughout the years-long cycle of their development.

  “The software has to be just constantly developed and fine-tuned and iterated upon. And that aspect of it requires a lot of engineers, a lot of designers, a lot of artists just throwing themselves at this game and working full time for a very long time,” said Schreier.

  Furthermore, while a video game is in this incubation period, it’s subjected to the shifting winds of audience appetite and capricious investors. So, it’s not unheard of for video game publishers to pull the plug on a game even if they’ve already sunk millions into it.

  “The amount of money that you’re spending on these things is not just all channeled into three months of shooting or whatever. It’s more like years and years of paying people salaries. So it’s easier to see why a game company might say, ‘OK, do we really want to commit another two years to this project or should we just cut our losses?’”

  “Press Reset” shares the personal stories of creators, engineers and game producers who have spent a lifetime involved in what appears to outsiders as a dream job. Some of these characters intersect at various points of their career as they all bounce from job to job and publisher to publisher.

  Some follow a vicious cycle where they break away from the big — AAA — game publishers like EA and 2K to launch their own smaller companies only to inevitably have to sell their game back to another AAA publisher to distribute it and make money.

  Even Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Curt Schilling learned the hard way that large amounts of capital isn’t all you need to launch a successful video game company. Schreier recounts and dissects Shilling’s attempt to parlay his personal fortune he earned from baseball into the ultimately doomed studio, 38 Games (named after his jersey number).

  “He always loved games. He always loved specifically MMORPGs, which are big worlds, open world games full of people, massively multiplayer online games. And when he finished his career, he said, ‘Hey, I’m going to take on World of Warcraft and make the next big MMO,’” said Schreier.

  Schilling failed to secure any outside investors for his desired MMO — or massively multiplayer online — game, Copernicus, and ended up making a deal with the state of Rhode Island’s Economic Development Corporation for a guaranteed $75 million loan. In 2011, shortly after Schilling relocated his company to the state, the loan came under scrutiny by newly elected Gov. Lincoln Chaffee and the state halted payments.

  “When you don’t know anything about game development, and you start a company, and you think you’re going to take on one of the biggest games in the world, things are probably not going to go well for you,” said Schreier.

  Once again, a large staff of game creators were left to ponder their future after they were abruptly laid off in May 2012 when 38 Studios filed for bankruptcy.

  Schreier’s book questions if the industry as a whole is sustainable. He ponders the solution of unionization similar to the crews working on feature films.

  “In North America, there are no unions in the games industry. And it’s kind of shocking to see that. It’s kind of strange that that hasn’t happened yet. Obviously film is the easiest comparison,” said Schreier. “They can ensure themselves certain protections, making sure they get paid for every hour and making sure they get proper credit for their work, that sort of thing, in a way that game developers, game makers have not been able to do. I’m surprised that unions have not started to pop up in the games industry yet, but I think they will at some point.”

  For his part, Schreier says even after reporting on how problematic the environment is for game creation, that he’s still a fan of playing. He says most creators don’t want people to stop enjoying their games.

  “I think that if you ask a game developer or even someone who feels like they really sacrificed a lot to make these games, I think most of them are proud of their work and want it to be enjoyed,” he said. “They don’t want all that crunch and hard work to go for not. So, I don’t think many people would want the player to feel guilty about any of these games.”