Dr. King And the Unnecessary Rewrite

Maya Angelou's been stirring up some controversy coming out against the wording on the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, saying it makes him look like "an arrogant twit."

Here is Dr. King's original quote, in response to people who accused him of only seeking glory for himself. It's from a sermon he gave designed to encourage people to not be afraid to take the lead.

"If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter."

Somewhere in the "development process", the quote was changed to:

"I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness."

The problem is the paraphrased quote, edited for brevity I guess, implies the exact opposite of the original's intention. It's like if you decided to defend yourself against the charge of showboating by...showboating. The impression is of a man who's puffing up himself rather than displaying Dr. King's quintessential humility. 

It'll be interesting to see whether the quote gets fixed or whether we're stuck with a truly sloppy edit for all eternity.

Good Writing/Bad Writing... Potayto/Potahto

I read this article the other day about the difficulty that people have discerning between good and bad writing. I've seen some of this in my home country where a couple journalists by dint of their enthusiastic vocabulary have pulled of this trick. In general, I didn't give this lack of discernment much thought until I came across someone complaining about the dishwasher scene in "Rachel Getting Married". I thought this scene was seriously one of the most brilliant, memorable movie moments I've experienced but this person argued that it was pointless. ("Take it out. Demme needs an editor to tell him what to cut.")

But to me the scene was layered, subtle and mesmerizing...in writing and execution. Too subtle for some I guess but a real gift for me. When you start learning craft folks warn you you'll never be able to appreciate a movie again. You're paying so much attention to the different ticking parts and how they all work together. You're distracted when they don't work, thinking of how they could work better. You slip out of the magic of the movie.

But then, every once in a while, you get lost in a sequence like the "Rachel Getting Married" dish washing sequence and when it's done you just go "wow" because there is no way you could ever come up with something that creative, that organic, that dramatic, that simple. And you're happy at the capacity of art... that in the middle of the tragic (and this last week was pretty grim), you get little things to marvel at.