Up and Down

This chapter’s main subject is Milestone’s extensive preparatory work on a film about life in the USSR: Red Square. In 1933, he traveled to Russia and conferred in Europe with Soviet author Ilya Ehrenburg about adapting his novel The Life and Downfall of Nikolai Kurbov for the screen. But Columbia Studios cancelled the contract, partly because of changing U.S.-Soviet relations and anxiety about Communism. The chapter’s final section focuses on the comedies The Captain Hates the Sea (a comedy set on an ocean liner starring matinee idol John Gilbert), Paris in the Spring (starring Ida Lupino), and his film of the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes (starring Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman).

Hungarian in the Promised Land

Curtiz arrived in New York City via the ocean liner Leviathan on June 10, 1926; the story that his ship docked on July 4 and he thought the holiday fireworks were a celebration of his American arrival was a PR fiction that would be repeated for decades by Warner, Hal Wallis, and Curtiz. Curtiz arrived in Hollywood with his treatment of Noah’s Ark, but instead Jack Warner assigned him a crime drama, The Third Degree (1926), based on a 1908 stage play. He scrambled to learn about American criminal procedures by spending time in the L.A. County Jail and having the script translated into Hungarian. He added a great deal of unscripted material to the picture, a harbinger of future strife between him and the studio.As he completed more pictures for Warner Bros., including A Million Bid and The Desired Woman, he began his long association with Darryl F. Zanuck.He also met the screenwriter Bess Meredyth,who would become his second wife. His immigration status proved to be a problem, as it had to be extended each year by Warner Bros. until he could become a legal resident.

How to turn an ocean liner: a proposal for voluntary degrowth by redesigning money for sustainability, justice, and resilience

This article argues that many destructive aspects of the contemporary global economy are consequences of the use of general-purpose money to organize social and human-environmental relations, and that the political ideals of sustainability, justice, and resilience will only be feasible if money itself is redesigned. The argument is based on the conviction that human artifacts such as money play a crucial role in organizing society, and that closer attention should be paid to the design and logic of key artifacts, rather than devoting disproportionate intellectual energy to theorizing their complex systemic repercussions. What is generally referred to as "capitalism" is the aggregate logic of human decisions about the management of money. Visions of a post-capitalist society using money the way it is used now is thus a contradiction in terms. The article sketches a possible redesign of money based on the idea that each country establishes a complementary currency for local use only, which is distributed to all its residents as a basic income. The distinction between two separate spheres of exchange would insulate local sustainability and resilience from the deleterious effects of globalization and financial speculation. To indicate that the suggestion is not as unrealistic as it may seem at first sight, the article briefly and provisionally responds to some of the many questions raised by the proposal. Keywords: Resilience, money, degrowth, capitalism