LA 2017 “The Name of the Game” …item 1c.. Cult TV Review (Friday, October 04, 2013) — “Freedom is always relative to the needs of the community.” …item 2.. FSU News – Building our own legacy (Dec. 8, 2013) …
Image by marsmet533
What surprised me a great deal about this long-ago production was — to take a page from Glenn’s dialogue — "how it’s all remarkably consistent." The episode is filled with odd touches (like a rock-and-roll club for senior citizens), affecting touches (a painted skyline is all that’s left of surface life…), and moments of authentic pathos (the death of one of the four last fish in the world…). There’s not one moment of empty air in this TV show from forty-two years ago; not one wasted breath. Instead, Spielberg and writer Wylie fill in every inch of the movie with terrifying and memorable detail.
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… marsmet53 photo … Orlando, Florida – 2046 … Apocalypse Now: Unstoppable man-made climate change (10 October 2013) …item 2.. George Carlin – Arrogance of mankind …item 3.. Full Metal Jacket – Paint It Black …
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… message header for item 1. … Reviews & Ratings for "The Name of the Game" LA 2017 (1971)
Gene Barry, as series regular Glenn Howard, is driving to a conference on ecology and tape-recording an essay for his magazine "People" (not the one we all know), when he falls asleep at the wheel and crashes. When he wakes up, it is to a nightmarishly yellow-orange skyline; and he is found by men in gas masks. He is taken to an underground complex, where he is met by the new "mayor" of Los Angeles (Barry Sullivan). Sullivan’s explanation for the state of L.A.’s problems is that a toxic algae spread across the world and mixed with L.A.’s smog, creating a deadly mix that killed all life above ground. Barry learns that he has somehow travelled nearly half a century into an ecological nightmare of the future.
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…..item 1a)…. Reviews & Ratings for "The Name of the Game" LA 2017 (1971) …
… IMDb > "The Name of the Game" LA 2017 (1971) > Reviews & Ratings – IMDb
www.imdb.com/title/tt0273868/reviews
Contrary to what some may be led to believe, the masterful A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE isn’t exactly the first time Spielberg has gone into the far future. In fact, his actual first trip that way began while he was still a TV director. L.A. 2017, an episode he shot for the NBC-TV show "The Name Of The Game", was that trip.
Though "Name Of The Game" was usually standard TV melodrama, Spielberg’s episode took on a distinct science fiction theme. Gene Barry, as series regular Glenn Howard, is driving to a conference on ecology and tape-recording an essay for his magazine "People" (not the one we all know), when he falls asleep at the wheel and crashes. When he wakes up, it is to a nightmarishly yellow-orange skyline; and he is found by men in gas masks. He is taken to an underground complex, where he is met by the new "mayor" of Los Angeles (Barry Sullivan). Sullivan’s explanation for the state of L.A.’s problems is that a toxic algae spread across the world and mixed with L.A.’s smog, creating a deadly mix that killed all life above ground. Barry learns that he has somehow travelled nearly half a century into an ecological nightmare of the future.
Anticipating certain aspects of Ridley Scott’s 1982 epic BLADE RUNNER, L.A. 2017 posits a cynical assessment of Mankind’s abuse of the environment. Spielberg interestingly shot the scenes of the underground complex at the Hyperion treatment plant in El Segundo; and the scenes of a pollution-ridden world were shot, and enhanced with orange-yellow camera filters, in the fall of 1970 in areas of the western San Fernando Valley that had recently been devastated by a violent wind-driven firestorm. Spielberg also manages to get solid performances from his cast all around, which is astounding, given the fact that he had only twelve days and 5,000 to use.
Topped off by an eerie futuristic score by Robert Prince and Billy Goldenberg, L.A. 2017 is an excellent and very early glimpse into Spielberg’s professional movie-making talents. Universal, I believe, owns the rights to this superb TV flick, which aired on NBC on January 15, 1971; it should do the right thing and release this piece on video.
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— Eco-Sci Fi
Author: DTVTEMP from United States
10 March 2002
Although dated by any standards, this episode of the popular NBC show "The Name of the Game" still stands up relatively well. It is my hope that Universal will repurpose this content and release it to DVD.
LA 2017 differed from the other episodes of Name of the Game, in that it was a science fiction episode. The episode represents the first screenplay written by Sci Fi Author Phillip Wylie. Steven Spielberg directed the episode.
Publisher Glenn Howard is returning in his car from the Sierra Pines Conference on world ecological issues. It is a smoggy day in Los Angeles, and exhaust backs up in his car, knocking him out. His car drives off the side of the road into a dirt bank.
When he awakes, he discovers that a time warp has transported him from 1971 to the year 2017. An ecological disaster which occurred in the 1980s and 1990s has wiped out all life on the surface of the earth, interfering with the oxygen cycle and rendering the atmosphere deadly to even breathe.
Los Angeles is now an underground city of some 10,000 people. It has survived along with similar cities in perhaps a dozen locations around the world. The government has been replaced by a shareholder’s democracy established by the wealthy businessmen who funded building of the original underground cities.
The shareholder’s democracy is structured to favor the corporate elite. It is extremely heavy handed and is more or less a totalitarian state. Psychologists are now the police, and they are oriented towards thought control and mind control. Privacy does not exist.
This is an excellent episode. I last saw it aired on television in 1981.
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…..item 1b)…. L.A. 2017 (TV) (1971 USA) …
… modcinema.com … www.modcinema.com/ …
www.modcinema.com/categories/3-made-for-tv/205-l-a-2017-t…
… Directed by Steven Spielberg
… Starring: Gene Barry, Barry Sullivan, Edmond O’Brien, Severn Darden, Louise Latham, Joan Crawford
… Genres: Adventure, Episodic, Sci-Fi, Thriller
… 74 minutes | Full Screen | Color | English
"L.A. 2017" was a 1971 episode of the television series The Name of the Game. A science fiction piece shot for only 5,000, "L.A. 2017" revolves around a publisher (Gene Barry) who finds himself suddenly plunged 46 years into the future only to find that the people of Los Angeles are living underground to escape the pollution and under the thumb of a fascist government run by psychiatrists. The 24-year-old director Steven Spielberg used imaginative camera angles to drive the movie-length television episode across. Special features includes trailer and 1977 Stephen Spielberg interview
Watch the trailer
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…..item 1c)…. Cult TV Review: The Name of the Game: "L.A. 2017" (1971) …
… Reflections on Film and Television … reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com/ …
reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com/2013/10/cult-…
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John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV
One of the horror genre’s "most widely read critics" (Rue Morgue # 68), "an accomplished film journalist" (Comic Buyer’s Guide #1535), and the award-winning author of Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002), John Kenneth Muir, presents his blog on film, television and nostalgia, named one of the Top 100 Film Studies Blog on the Net.
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Friday, October 04, 2013
Cult TV Review: The Name of the Game: "L.A. 2017" (1971)
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img code photo … LA 2017
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Copyright MCMLXXI By
Universal City Studios, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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L.A. 2017" "is a uniquely dystopian episode of the wheel TV series The Name of the Game (1968-1971) and one directed by none other than movie legend Steven Spielberg.
Networks don’t present so-called wheel series these days, but The Name of the Game filled a ninety-minute slot each week of its 76-episode run on NBC, with three rotating lead actors (Gene Barry, Tony Franciosa and Robert Stack) vetting different story lines.
In this case, all the adventures portrayed on The Name of the Game centered around Howard Publishing. Franciosa played an investigative reporter, Stack a crime magazine editor, and Gene Barry was Glenn Howard, the publisher-and-chief.
Created near the end of The Name of the Game’s three year run, on the then-considerable budget of 5,000 dollars, "L.A. 2017" features Gene Barry’s character, and sends him off in an unexpected and frightening science fiction adventure.
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img code photo … LA 2017
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As "L.A. 2017" (written by Philip Wylie) commences, Glenn Howard is on his way back to Los Angeles from the Sierra Pines Conference on Ecology.
As he drives on a windy mountain road, Glenn dictates a private memo to the President of the United States about what he has seen and heard at the conference. He suggests that "the destruction of the environment" is imminent unless someone begins to demonstrate real leadership on the issue.
While steering and dictating the memo, Glenn suddenly falls unconscious and drives his car off the road. When he awakes, he is being tended to by two emergency workers in red jumpsuits and protective gas masks.
These men escort him through the "Los Angeles Portal" to the city. But it’s not the same city it once was, as Glenn quickly learns. The year is now 2017, and the surface of the planet Earth is uninhabitable. Mankind has moved underground to a series of overcrowded subterranean complexes.
While Glenn tries to figure out how he traveled into his own future, the authorities of L.A.in 2017 interrogate him. Cameron (Severn Darden) is a psychiatrist and chief-of-police, and is suspicious of the stranger. Cameron fears Glenn might be part of a violent underground movement seeking to destroy the cities. "I can get anything I want out of you, electronically," he confides in his ward. Soon, Cameron diagnoses Glenn as either "schizoid" or telling the truth about his time travels.
In short order, Glenn is introduced to the amiable Vice-President of Los Angeles, Dane Bigelow (Barry Sullivan). Dane further explains the nature of this terrifying future. He describes how mankind has been underground since 1989, when the atmosphere grew "toxic" after the growth of poisonous algae in the Indian Ocean. Because "science and government stood by while everything died," the business community of the United States took over control of the country, drafting a "Corporate Constitution" that gave all surviving citizens shares in America, Inc. Supposedly, this is a more "efficient" system of government, than before. At least according to Bigelow and the Chairman of America Inc.
A beautiful young woman, Sandrette (Sharon Farrell) gives Glenn a tour of the underground city, home to 11,000 survivors. She introduces herself by informing Glenn is she is "thirty, sterile and a sex education major." Sandrette then takes Glenn to church where computers have taken the place of priests. You can type your spiritual question on a keyboard, and the computer will answer it. Example: Q: "How do I find the truth?" A: "It will find you."
The more Glenn learns of life in LA in 2017, the less he likes it. America is at war with England over a jurisdictional matter, and many of the poor citizens are assigned to public housing, five or six people to a single room. Worse, these homes often show seepage from the surface, and the air is becoming unbreathable. Other people are exploited as workers on the poisonous surface, an occupation with a 20 percent death rate.
Milk is the drink of the rich, because there’s only one cow, and it is "privately owned."
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img code photo … LA 2017
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The state also constantly monitors all citizens, making privacy a thing of the past.
"If there’s no privacy, there can’t be any invasion of privacy," Sandrette cheerily informs the visitor from the 20th century. When Glenn asks her if there is any freedom in the city at all, Sandrette’s response is similarly vacant: "Freedom is always relative to the needs of the community."
In the final moments of "L.A. 2017," Glenn escapes the city, where the Vice-President has plans to install him as the head of a state-sponsored press/propaganda outfit, and tries to make it back to his car, and hopefully, back to his time…
Although "L.A. 2017" features the dreaded "it was all a dream," dramatic cheat at the end, it nonetheless makes for a remarkably powerful program, forecasting ably the growing power and influence of corporations in America, as well as a technological surveillance state. The movie boasts many great, almost throwaway moments involving the city’s official announcements over loudspeakers, for instance. One such advertisement encourages citizens to "borrow against their shares at an interest rate of just 35 percent," a concept that is not at all foreign to our contemporary country, post Great Recession.
This episode of The Name of the Game is veritably filled with brilliant little asides like that, such as the surprise announcement in a control room that "there are unconfirmed reports of a Negro(!) in Cleveland," meaning, apparently that most African-Americans did not live to survive the new Corporate America. Another interesting touch: parenthood is "no longer for amateurs." On the contrary, the State has "professionals" do it now; professionals who have removed the words "mother" and "father" from society all together. So the episode also reflects the growth of the so-called "Nanny State."
I also enjoyed the way the episode blends psychiatrists with law-enforcers; these fearsome men are — quite literally — thought-police (and armed with weapon cylinders which fire injections of "counter-productive" drugs.)
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img code photo … LA 2017
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But the episode’s finest and most telling moment arises in the last act. Glenn visits Vice-President Bigelow and upbraids him for maintaining and nourishing a "totalitarian state."
At first, Bigelow responds that "survival justifies anything" in 2017, but then he changes his tact.
He turns Glenn’s self-righteousness around on the man from the 20th century. If Glenn hates this "future" so much, why didn’t he do something about the environment when he had money, fame and power, back in 1971? Who is he to judge the future if he didn’t take responsibility for building it in the first place?
This is a really clever narrative angle, because it asks the audience, rather bluntly, to take just such responsibility for our shared tomorrows. Why aren’t we complaining more loudly that some people — in the thrall of big business — want to gut rules and regulations that keep our water clean, our food safe, and our air breathable?
Director Steven Spielberg does a solid, highly-effective job creating and charting this dystopian future of the year 2017. He sometimes sets his camera high–up (pointed down) to catch an angled-perspective of the various rooms; presenting the appearance of being a surveillance camera view. On other occasions, he uses extreme low angles looking up to present us multiple levels of surveillance, a visual cue that the upper class is always looking down on the rest of the populace.
Otherwise, Spielberg gets the absolute most out of the tunnels and corridors of the city, fostering memorable visions of a claustrophobic world. In the episode’s final road chase — an ambulance versus a police car with a hood-mounted machine gun — he deploys many of the same expressive angles he used in Duel (1971).
Finally, Spielberg’s last shot — a shift in focus from a "rescued" Glenn in 1971 to a dead bird on a bare tree branch in the foreground — proves a nice way of undercutting the facile "it was all a dream" ending. Instead, Spielberg puts the valedictory focus of this piece on the environment, leaving us no choice but to consider its importance.
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img code photo … LA 2017
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What surprised me a great deal about this long-ago production was — to take a page from Glenn’s dialogue — "how it’s all remarkably consistent." The episode is filled with odd touches (like a rock-and-roll club for senior citizens), affecting touches (a painted skyline is all that’s left of surface life…), and moments of authentic pathos (the death of one of the four last fish in the world…). There’s not one moment of empty air in this TV show from forty-two years ago; not one wasted breath. Instead, Spielberg and writer Wylie fill in every inch of the movie with terrifying and memorable detail.
The episode’s predictions are clearly hit or miss. The environment in 2013 may be in difficulties, but it isn’t destroyed. Rather, the predictions about modern surveillance techniques and the rise of the corporation seem more apt. Whether right or wrong, "L.A. 2017" represents a good early look at Steven Spielberg’s approach to filmmaking, and an intriguing time capsule of 1970s "futurist" concerns.
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Posted by John Kenneth Muir at 6:00 AM
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…..item 2)…. Building our own legacy …
… FSU News … www.fsunews.com/ …
Dec. 8, 2013 6:44 PM |
Written by
Adrian Chamberlin
Senior Staff Writer
FILED UNDER
FSU News
FSU News Adrian Chamberlin
www.fsunews.com/article/20131209/FSVIEW0303/131208016/Bui…
It seems strange to consider, but people think about you when you’re not around. I often forget that, which is why the passing of Nelson Mandela struck such a chord with me: It reminded me of the importance of individual legacies.
While I call it “individual” legacies, they are only individual to the point that it is the legacy of a specific person, who ideally impacted the lives of many. Many important figures have done so throughout the ages, and we remember them for it.
The history of our species shows that we still revere greats like Marie Curie and Napoleon, or Galileo and Gandhi. Within Florida State’s history, there are greats as well, such as Warrick Dunn and Norman Thagard, or Burt Reynolds and Hunter S. Thompson. Each of them has gone on to craft their own legacies, and in turn have impacted FSU as well.
Unfortunately, we can’t all be famous. Some of Florida State’s current students will go on to achieve greatness and become legendary for it, and others will go on to become more “ordinary” people. But the world needs managers, starving artists and seemingly boring parents as much if not more than it needs athletic greats and legendary actors.
That’s why, instead of trying to chase the legacies of others, we need to create our own. I have no idea what I will be remembered for among my friends and family after I die. If I did, I think I might be a little too self-aware. But, I’m pretty sure I’ll never be remembered for my future as a prolific Olympic skier, or as Mr. Universe 2050.
What I’m trying to say is that I have some idea of the legacy I’d like to leave behind, without having all the specifics nailed down. And that’s about where I need to be, as far as I’m concerned. I’m only 20 years old, and still finishing my undergraduate education, so it’s safe to say that I, along with the rest of my peers, have a lot more life ahead of us than behind us.
So when that periodic and crippling existential crisis next comes up, probably while you’re in the shower or falling asleep, I say, “chill.” Time is on our side, for now, and legacy is one of the things in life that doesn’t generally get created over night.
And with that positive note mentioned, I think it’s worth pointing out that legacy creation asks more of us than just walking around texting and spending nights glued to Netflix or the closest bottle of booze. I’m obviously no expert with his own legacy, but I feel pretty confident saying the greatest legacies aren’t forged on the easy path.
We can’t all be Nelson Mandela’s, and we shouldn’t want to be. Instead, we should want to leave behind something, anything that makes the world a better place for our friends, family and fellow humans. Life is too wonderful a gift to waste on stressing for finals and binging on Scrubs semester after semester, especially when the world is waiting to recognize the unique footprints we are all capable of leaving behind.
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