Why Do I Like the Chicago Bears This Week?
I.
Always.
Like.
THE.
Chicago.
Bears.
Not Nitpicking Caleb.
Evaluating a rookie quarterback after his first game is much like evaluating a limerick after the first line: nonsensical. (“What do I care if this guy is from NANTUCKET?!?!?!”)
Caleb Williams is going to have bad games. More bad games, I should say. He’s also going to have good games. And by the end of the season, one would hope the player in Green Bay come January bears little resemblance to the player at Soldier Field last weekend.
We must see progress, incremental yet noticeable progress. But I’m not going to be using this space to dissect every quarter, every drive, every snap of his rookie season. At the bye, with a six-game sample size, we’ll chart his progress. Then around Thanksgiving, we’ll chart it again. At the end of the season, he’ll have a body of work to analyze and a list of distinct issues to address this offseason. That’s how it works with rookies, despite the now cottage industry of former backup quarterbacks trying to earn their living analyzing every throw on social media. Rookies, man. They’re up. They’re down. They make special plays. They make dumb plays.
What do we hope for? That there are more ups than downs. That the special outweighs the dumb. That by the end of this campaign the organization is confident this is the guy. It’s not an exciting approach but it’s only prudent way to approach rookies playing this position.
Lumet I: The Group Theater
Relevant Books:
- The Fervent Years by Harold Clurman
- Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940 by Wendy Smith
- Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets
- The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler
Summary:
- From the East Hampton Star, in a piece about the 2015 documentary By Sidney Lumet: “Lumet mentions that he was often criticized for not having a thematic line in his work and for doing many different kinds of movies. “It’s nonsense,” he said. “There is always a bedrock concern: Is it fair?”
- Lumet was the son of Baruch Lumet, a popular actor in the New York City Yiddish Theater, and Sidney was an incredibly successful young actor on Broadway. But it’s his connection with the Group Theater that provides the foundations of his ideological preoccupations as a filmmaker.
- The Group Theater was founded by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg as a response to what they saw as an exceedingly commercial and unserious theater scene in and around the crash of the stock market in 1929. Their intention was to do work that mattered, and they would reflect on their stages the struggles of those aimlessly wandering on the NYC streets outside. This intentionality, this political purpose, defines the career of Lumet as he consistently grapples with the social peril of the moment, constantly challenging institutional authority.
- The Group gave theatrical life to the work of Clifford Odets, and the early stage plays of William Saroyan. Their company members would forge a cinematic political legacy that included the works of Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront), Martin Ritt (Hud, Norma Rae), and John Garfield’s anti-McCarthy film productions under the Enterprise label (Force of Evil, The Breaking Point). The political legacy of American cinema is born on the stages of The Group.
- The Group’s most famous moment comes in the closing lines of Waiting for Lefty. When the play’s maligned cab drivers stepped to the front of the stage to yell “Strike!” they were greeted with an audience in solidarity. It has been widely reported that each performance of Lefty included an audience joining those pro-worker cheers, so much that those passing by the Longacre worried there was a riot taking place inside.
- Stanislavsky’s “method” acting approach was brought to New York by the founding members of this company after visits to meet the master in Russia; thus, their reach expands to the greatest American actors of the 20th Century: Pacino, DeNiro, Newman, Brando, etc. (We’ll discuss Lumet’s issues with the method in the auteur section later.)
- The Group failed for many reasons, but the essential one was financial. These were the days before the non-profit theater model. Companies either sold tickets or perished. The Group didn’t sell enough tickets, but their legacy remains. (Turns out people wanted, in the years of the Depression, to be distracted by the stage, not reminded of the tears at the fabric of American society.)
