‘The Lovesong of Alfred J. Hitchcock’ at 59E59 Theaters

By ROB WEINERT-KENDT NY TIMES

Sometimes the best refuge from real trauma is simulated terror. The English playwright David Rudkin remembers cowering under his bunk in an air-raid shelter as aAlfred Hitchcock thrillers like "Rebecca," "Suspicion" and "Foreign Correspondent," naturally.

child. It was the early 1940s, and German bombs were raining on his hometown, Birmingham. What dreams may come to a child who fears for his life? Menacing images from (Martin Miller)

"As I lay on the floor in fright," Mr. Rudkin, 77, said in a recent telephone interview from his home in Worcestershire, "I would go through those films in my head, those scenes. I was retreating from real existential danger into this separate, imaginary world of anxiety."

It was a world to which he had only been exposed piecemeal, he explained, since his mother was in the practice of sneaking off with him to movie houses far from their home, where his father, an evangelical pastor, had strictly forbidden exposure to the "Babylon" of motion pictures. Even as Hitchcock’s films gave his boyhood self the paradoxical thrill of being scared, the anxiety they provoked made him feel "as though I was being punished in the cinema for being there," Mr. Rudkin recalled. "I think Hitchcock would very much have appreciated that feeling."

This acute sense of guilty pleasure, imprinted in childhood and channeled into art, provides the inspiration for Mr. Rudkin’s "The Lovesong of Alfred J. Hitchcock," which runs May 4 to 25 as part of the Brits Off Broadway series at 59E59 Theaters. Less a straightforward biographical drama than a ruminative psychological study, "Lovesong" sifts through Hitchcock’s youth and early career for clues to the visual motifs and thematic obsessions — inaccessible blondes with names that start with the letter "M," for instance — that would recur in his work.

Though it inevitably plows some of the same fertile ground as recent movies about the filmmaker’s private and professional life — "Hitchcock," starring Anthony Hopkins, and HBO’s "The Girl," starring Toby Jones — "Lovesong" originated in 1993 as a radio play featuring Richard Griffiths (of "History Boys" and "Harry Potter" fame). Mr. Rudkin was persuaded to revisit the work when Jack McNamara, a young director who’d taken over the Nottingham-based touring company New Perspectives, went looking for a popular subject for a show.

"I had it in my mind to do something about Hitchcock, but I didn’t know if such a play existed," Mr. McNamara said by phone. A friend told him about Mr. Rudkin’s radio play, but a call to the playwright was not encouraging: "He told me it didn’t exist anymore, and he didn’t know where it was." A month later, a contrite Mr. Rudkin called to say he’d happened across the manuscript, "literally tied up with string."

Mr. McNamara had found his Hitchcock piece, though not in a stageable form. He asked Mr. Rudkin to rework the radio script into a fully embodied play. In adding visual elements to a piece "made for the ear," Mr. McNamara said he took inspiration from "what Hitchcock leaves out of his films: In the ‘Psycho’ shower sequence, for instance, a lot of people think you actually see Janet Leigh’s naked breast, and the knife actually slashing her, but you never do. The audience does a lot of the imagining, and that’s what disturbs them."

Similarly, the guiding idea behind both the radio play and the new "Lovesong," Mr. McNamara said, was to explore "the embryonic ideas that later took shape in the films we know, rather than showing images from the films themselves."

Likewise, the lead performance of Martin Miller — a stocky but hardly corpulent actor in his late 30s, who will reprise his London performance in New York — is less a spot-on impersonation of the filmmaker, who died in 1980, than an artful suggestion. Mr. McNamara quoted Mr. Rudkin as saying: "The Hitchcock in this play is less about the exterior and more about how he feels about his body. It’s more important that we get the inside of him right, and then the outside will follow."

Mr. Miller, also reached by phone, said he watched films of Hitchcock — the director became a kind of star by narrating droll introductions to his popular television series "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" — as well as the recent film turns by Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Jones. But those images of Hitchcock date from the late 1950s and ‘60s: "Lovesong" hops around in nonlinear fashion, giving Mr. Miller the challenge, and freedom, to show the filmmaker at various ages, even for a few moments as a baby.

"What’s interesting is that when you see the Hitchcock cameos from his early films, he’s not that heavy — he’s quite light on his feet, like an Oliver Hardy figure, quite graceful," Mr. Miller said.

Still, since the true setting of Mr. Rudkin’s play is Hitchcock’s inner life, movement is kept to a minimum; the focus, Mr. McNamara said, is on making "his imagination as vivid as possible onstage, because that’s the main action the character’s doing."

That Hitchcock could spend his career exploring the dark reaches of that imagination, yet simultaneously reach a huge popular audience, may be what impresses Mr. Rudkin most about his subject.

"He was able to develop an intensely private personal form of art, and yet do so in a way that spoke universally," marveled Mr. Rudkin, who makes no such claims for his own work. "I’ve never been able to manipulate an audience."

Emerging in 1962 with a shocking, homoerotic drama, "Afore Night Come," at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Mr. Rudkin is considered influential in Britain but his works are not produced or revived as often as those of contemporaries like Harold Pinter and Howard Barker. His last New York production was "Ashes" at the Public Theater in 1977. ("Probably the most important play of the season," Clive Barnes wrote in his New York Times review of Mr. Rudkin’s drama about an Irish couple trying in vain to have a child.)

About his return to the United States with "Lovesong," Mr. Rudkin could be describing his childhood self — gaping at the screen and eager for the "Directed by" title card — when he says, "I feel a mixture of excitement and apprehension."

AP Exclusive: Kentucky inmate starves to death

By BRETT BARROUQUERE, Associated Press

　

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — A prison doctor has been fired and two other staffers are in the midst of being dismissed after an inmate at the Kentucky State Penitentiary starved himself to death, a case that has exposed lapses in medical treatment and in how hunger strikes are handled at the facility. Prison officials have asked prosecutors to investigate after The Associated Press began asking questions about the inmate's death.

James Kenneth Embry, 57 and with just three years left on a nine-year sentence for drug offenses, began to spiral out of control in the spring of 2013 after he stopped taking anti-anxiety medication. Seven months later, in December, after weeks of erratic behavior — from telling prison staff he felt anxious and paranoid to banging his head on his cell door — Embry eventually refused most of his meals. By the time of his death in January of this year, he had shed more than 30 pounds on his 6-foot frame and died weighing just 138 pounds, according to documents reviewed by the AP.

An internal investigation determined that medical personnel failed to provide him anti-anxiety medication that may have kept his suicidal thoughts at bay and didn't take steps to check on him as his condition worsened. The internal review of Embry's death also exposed broader problems involving the treatment of inmates — including a failure to regularly check inmates on medical rounds and communication lapses among medical staff.

The AP, tipped off to Embry's death, obtained scores of documents under Kentucky's Open Records Act, including a report detailing the investigation into Embry's death, an autopsy report and personnel files. Along with interviews with corrections officials and correspondence with inmates, the documents describe Embry's increasingly paranoid behavior until his death and the numerous opportunities for various prison staff to have intervened.

"It's just very, very, very disturbing," said Greg Belzley, a Louisville, Ky.-based attorney who specializes in inmate rights litigation and reviewed some of the documents obtained by the AP. "How do you just watch a man starve to death?"

According to the report of the internal investigation, Embry stopped taking medications for anxiety in May 2013. Seven months later, he told the lead prison psychologist, Jean Hinkebein, on Dec. 3 that he felt anxious and paranoid and wanted to restart those medications. But the psychologist concluded Embry didn't have any significant mental health issues even though Embry repeatedly talked about wanting to hurt himself. Hinkebein and an associate considered his comments vague, and his request for medication was denied.

Seven days later, on Dec. 10, Embry began banging his head on his cell door and was moved to an observation cell where he refused meals and told the prison psychologist, "I don't have any hope."

He soon began refusing most food, though he drank tea on occasion while continuing to make threats to hurt himself in the ensuing weeks.

A nurse checked on Embry on Jan. 4, finding him weak and shaky, and advised him to resume eating. Embry responded that it had been too long for him to start taking food again. Nine days later, on the very day he died, an advanced practice registered nurse named Bob Wilkinson refused a request from other medical staffers to move him to the infirmary at 11:51 a.m. and said the inmate should be taken off a hunger strike watch, according to the internal investigative report. Guards found Embry unresponsive in his cell hours later, his head slumped to the side. He was pronounced dead at 5:29 p.m.

Lyon County Coroner Ronnie Patton classified Embry's death as a suicide and listed dehydration as the primary cause of death, with starvation and several other medical ailments as secondary causes.

The documents obtained by the AP show a prison system with a dated protocol for handling hunger strikes, staff who weren't familiar with its provisions, and others who said they were told not to follow them. In Embry's case, those in charge of his well-being were simply counting on him to cave in and start eating again on his own, the records show.

On Jan. 16, three days after Embry's death, Steve Hiland, the lead physician at the maximum-security prison, signed off on a nurse's note about Embry consistently refusing food and being taken off of the hunger strike watch because he drank tea. During the internal investigation, Hiland said he believed a hunger strike consisted of missing "six or eight meals" and ended when the inmate ate or drank anything at all.

In a revealing exchange, investigators asked Hiland how he thought inmates are supposed to be removed from a hunger strike. Hiland told them that prison staff "usually don't have to worry about it because they (the inmates) eventually give up."

When Embry stopped eating regularly, the Corrections Department's existing guidelines recommended multiple checks of the inmate's vital signs three times a week , repeated visits with a physician and ongoing evaluations by a psychologist.

Medical staff would later tell internal investigators they were either unfamiliar with the protocols for handling a hunger strike or that Hiland and Wilkinson forbade those procedures from being used. There is no mention of whether anyone considered force-feeding the inmate.

Corrections investigators determined Embry continued to refuse most food, though he drank tea on occasion while continuing to make threats to hurt himself in the ensuing weeks. Investigators concluded that Embry refused 35 of 36 meals before his death.

The state has placed Hinkebein, who is also in private practice in Central City, Ky., on administrative leave, and said it is in the process of firing her and her associate. Hinkebein declined to comment, saying she's still a state employee.

The internal investigation found that Hiland and Wilkinson didn't check on inmates as they should have during routine visits. The report also documented multiple communication problems among medical staff and allegations that other nurses were intimidated by Wilkinson, a contract staffer who works for Nashville, Tenn.-based Correct Care Solutions.

Phone and email messages left with the company seeking comment from managers there and from Wilkinson were not returned.

Hiland said the Corrections Department used Embry's death as an excuse to fire him so that Correct Care Solutions could fill his $164,554-a-year job more cheaply. Since firing Hiland last month, the state has given the Corrections Department's medical chief, Douglas Crall, direct oversight of medical care at the penitentiary. The state has also hired the company on a one-year contract worth $14.8 million to provide nurses for all 12 of Kentucky's prisons.

"I never saw this guy, never met him," Hiland said of Embry. "I was convinced it was a way to get rid of me. I was told I should have known about it."

Hiland, who maintained a private practice in Eddyville, a town of 2,500, while he was in charge of health care at the nearby penitentiary, didn't address the state's claims directly, saying only that he was on vacation when Embry died and did nothing wrong.

It's not the first time his work has been called into question. The doctor has been sued in federal court 103 times since 1992 by inmates and their attorneys.

While many of the lawsuits filed were dismissed, Hiland reached an undisclosed settlement with the family of one inmate who died after Hiland repeatedly diagnosed him as faking illness. U.S. District Judge Thomas B. Russell Jr., in declining to dismiss the family's lawsuit against Hiland, wrote that the attention paid to the inmate's medical complaints was "so cursory as to amount to no treatment at all."

The Kentucky Attorney General's Office criminal review of Embry's death is ongoing, Daniel Kemp, a spokesman for Attorney General Jack Conway, told the AP.

Once the investigation is complete, corrections officials will decide whether to file complaints with the licensing boards overseeing the doctors and Wilkinson, department spokeswoman Lisa Lamb said.

"We are still reviewing all possibilities, which is one reason we asked an outside agency to look at our investigation in order to see if any other actions were warranted," Lamb said.

Embry, a heating and air conditioning repairman by trade, had no family or friends visit him at the prison, and no one claimed his remains. He is buried in a potter's field near the penitentiary.

___

Hurricane Carter,76 Ferocious Boxer and Cause Célèbre

Selwynn Raab NY TIMES

 

Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, a star prizefighter whose career was cut short by a murder conviction in New Jersey and who became an international cause célèbre while imprisoned for 19 years before the charges against him were dismissed, died on Sunday morning at his home in Toronto. He was 76.

The cause of death was prostate cancer, his friend and onetime co-defendant, John Artis, said. Mr. Carter was being treated in Toronto, where he had founded a nonprofit organization, Innocence International, to work to free prisoners it considered wrongly convicted.

Mr. Carter was convicted twice on the same charges of fatally shooting two men and a woman in a Paterson, N.J., tavern in 1966. But both jury verdicts were overturned on different grounds of prosecutorial misconduct.

The legal battles consumed scores of hearings involving recanted testimony, suppressed evidence, allegations of prosecutorial racial bias — Mr. Carter was black and the shooting victims were white — and a failed prosecution appeal to the United States Supreme Court to reinstate the convictions.

Mr. Carter first became famous as a ferocious, charismatic, crowd-pleasing boxer, known for his shaved head, goatee, glowering visage and devastating left hook. He narrowly lost a fight for the middleweight championship in 1964.

He attracted worldwide attention during the roller-coaster campaign to clear his name of murder charges. Amnesty International described him as a "prisoner of conscience" whose human rights had been violated. He portrayed himself as a victim of injustice who had been framed because he spoke out for civil rights and against police brutality.

A defense committee studded with entertainment, sports, civil rights and political personalities was organized. His cause entered pop music when Bob Dylan wrote and recorded the song "Hurricane," which championed his innocence and vilified the police and prosecution witnesses. It became a Top 40 hit in 1976.

Mr. Carter’s life was also the subject of a 1999 movie, "The Hurricane," in which he was played by Denzel Washington, who was nominated for an Academy Award for the performance. The movie itself, directed by Norman Jewison, was widely criticized as simplistic and rife with historical inaccuracies.

A more complex picture was provided in accounts by Mr. Carter’s relatives and supporters and by Mr. Carter himself in his autobiography, "The 16th Round," published in 1974 while he was in prison. Mr. Carter attracted supporters even when his legal plight seemed hopeless, but he also alienated many of them, including his first wife.

With a formal education that ended in the eighth grade in a reform school, Mr. Carter survived imprisonment and frequent solitary confinement by becoming a voracious reader of law books and volumes of philosophy, history, metaphysics and religion. During his bleakest moments he expressed confidence that he would one day be proved innocent.

"They can incarcerate my body but never my mind," he told The New York Times in 1977, shortly after his second conviction.

Troubled From the Start

Rubin Carter was born on May 6, 1937, in Clifton, N.J., and grew up nearby in Passaic and Paterson. His father, Lloyd, and his mother, Bertha, had moved there from Georgia. To support his wife and seven children, Lloyd Carter worked in a rubber factory and operated an ice delivery service in the mornings.

A deacon in his Baptist church, the father was also a disciplinarian. He put Rubin to work cutting and delivering ice at age 8, and when he learned that Rubin, at 9, and some other boys had stolen clothing from a Paterson store, he turned his son in to the police. Rubin was placed on two years’ probation.

A poor student and troubled from the start, Rubin was placed in a school for unruly pupils when he was in the fourth grade. At 11, after stabbing a man, he was sent to the Jamesburg State Home for Boys (now called the New Jersey Training School for Boys). He said he had acted in self-defense after the man had made sexual advances and tried to throw him off a cliff. At Jamesburg, guards frequently beat and abused him, he wrote in his autobiography.

After six years in detention he escaped and made his way to an aunt’s home in Philadelphia, where he enlisted in the Army. Recruitment officers apparently accepted his word that he had grown up in Philadelphia and made no inquiries in New Jersey, where he was wanted as a fugitive.

Thriving in the Army, Mr. Carter became a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division in Germany and put on boxing gloves for the first time. He found he enjoyed associating with boxers. "They were strong, honest people, hardworking and equally hard-fighting," he recalled. "There were no complications there whatsoever, no tensions, no fears."

He won 51 bouts, 35 by knockouts, while losing only five. He became the Army’s European light-welterweight champion.

Mr. Carter also took speech therapy courses and overcame his stutter. He became interested in Islamic studies. Although he never formally converted, he sometimes used the Muslim name Saladin Abdullah Muhammad.Honorably discharged, he returned to Paterson in 1956 and took a job as a tractor-trailer driver. But the authorities tracked him down and arrested him for his escape from the reform school before he had joined the Army. He was sentenced to 10 months at the Annandale Reformatory for youthful offenders.

Shortly after his release, in 1957, he was charged with snatching a woman’s purse and assaulting a man on a Paterson street. He said he had been drinking. He served four years in Trenton State Prison, where "quiet rage became my constant companion," he wrote. He also rekindled his interest in boxing and attracted the attention of fight managers.

On Sept. 22, 1961, a day after his release from prison, he fought his first professional fight, winning a four-round decision for a $20 purse. "I was in my element now," he wrote. "Fighting was the pulse beat of my heart and I loved it."

Mr. Carter was an instant success and became a main-event headliner. With a powerful left hook, he was more of a puncher than a stylist, winning 13 of his first 21 fights by knockouts.

Showman in the Ring

Promoters capitalized on his criminal record as a box-office lure, suggesting that prison had transformed him into a terrifying fighter. One promoter nicknamed him Hurricane, describing him in advertisements as a raging, destructive force.

Mr. Carter was a showman in the ring. Solidly built at 5-foot-8 and about 155 pounds, he would enter in a hooded black velvet robe trimmed with metallic gold thread, the image of a crouching black panther on the back.

　

He also made sure he was noticed on the streets of Paterson, where he had returned to live. He dressed in custom-tailored suits and drove a black Cadillac Eldorado with "Rubin Hurricane Carter" engraved in silver letters on each side of the headlights. In 1963 he married Mae Thelma Basket.

Mr. Carter’s biggest victory came in Pittsburgh in December 1963, when he knocked out Emile Griffith, the welterweight champion, who was trying to move into the middleweight division for a crack at its world title. A year later, at the peak of his career, Mr. Carter battled the reigning middleweight champion, Joey Giardello, for the title in Philadelphia, Mr. Giardello’s hometown. He lost a close decision.

Mr. Carter received unfavorable attention when an article in The Saturday Evening Post in 1964 suggested that he was a black militant who believed that blacks should shoot at the police if they felt they were being victimized. He denied he had expressed that view. It was around this time that the police began harassing him, he said. One night, when his Cadillac broke down in Hackensack, he was jailed for several hours without being charged with a crime.

Before bouts, the police compelled him to be fingerprinted and photographed for their files on the ground that he was a convicted felon. He discovered that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had opened a file on him and was tracking his movements.

On the night of June 16 and the early morning of June 17, 1966, while his wife and their 2-year-old daughter, Theodora, were at home, Mr. Carter visited several bars in Paterson, winding up at one called the Night Spot.

A half-mile away, about 2:30 a.m., two black men entered the Lafayette Grill and killed two white men and a white woman in a barrage of shotgun and pistol blasts. The police immediately suspected that the shootings were in retaliation for the shotgun murder that night in Paterson of a black tavern owner by the former owner, who was white.

Mr. Carter had encountered John Artis, a casual acquaintance, that night and was giving him a lift home when they were stopped by the police. They said Mr. Carter’s leased white Dodge sedan resembled the murderers’ getaway car. Except for being black, neither Mr. Carter nor Mr. Artis matched the original descriptions of the killers. They were released after both passed lie detector tests and a patron who had been wounded in the Lafayette Grill failed to identify them. But they remained under suspicion.

On Aug. 6, 1966, in Rosario, Argentina, Mr. Carter lost a 10-round decision to Rocky Rivero. It was his last fight. His record would remain 27 wins (20 by knockout), 12 losses and one draw. Two months later, he and Mr. Artis were charged with the three murders.

Burglars Testified

At their trial in 1967, three alibi witnesses placed them elsewhere at the time of the killings. They were nonetheless convicted, primarily on the evidence of Alfred P. Bello and Arthur D. Bradley, two white prosecution witnesses with long criminal records. Mr. Bello testified that he saw both defendants leave the tavern with guns in their hands; Mr. Bradley identified only Mr. Carter.

Both witnesses admitted that they were in the vicinity of the Lafayette Grill at the time of the murders because they were trying to burglarize a factory nearby.

The prosecution offered no motive for the slayings.

Facing the possibility of death sentences, Mr. Carter received 30 years to life and Mr. Artis 15 years to life. Their appeals were denied unanimously by the New Jersey Supreme Court.

Back in prison, a defiant Mr. Carter refused to wear a uniform or work at institutional jobs. He ate in his cell, sustained by canned food and soup that he heated with an electric coil. He scoured the trial record and law books and typed out unsuccessful briefs for a new trial.

Mr. Carter also lost his vision in his right eye after an operation on a detached retina, a condition he attributed to inadequate treatment in a prison hospital. His celebrity boxing background and his outspoken contempt for prison rules made him a hero to many inmates. The prison authorities credited him with trying to calm down rioters at Rahway State Prison in 1971, and one prison guard reportedly said Mr. Carter had saved his life.

Witnesses Recant

By 1974, Mr. Carter’s prospects for a new trial seemed hopeless. But that summer the New Jersey Public Defender’s Office and The New York Times independently obtained recantations from Mr. Bello and Mr. Bradley. Both men asserted that detectives had pressured them into falsely identifying Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis.

Moreover, it was revealed that the prosecution had secretly promised leniency to the two witnesses regarding their own crimes in exchange for their cooperation in the Carter case.

Based on the recantations and the new information, the New Jersey Supreme Court overturned the guilty verdicts in 1976. Overnight, Mr. Carter was hailed as a civil rights champion, with a national defense committee working on his behalf and fund-raising concerts headlined by Mr. Dylan at Madison Square Garden and the Houston Astrodome; the Garden concert also included Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez and Roberta Flack. Muhammad Ali attended a pretrial hearing in Paterson in 1976 to show his support for Mr. Carter.

At a second trial, in December 1976, a new team of Passaic County prosecutors resuscitated an old theory, charging that the defendants had committed the Lafayette Grill murders to exact revenge for the earlier killing of the black tavern owner. Mr. Bello resurfaced as a prosecution witness and recanted his recantation. He was the only witness who placed Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis at the murder scene.

After being free for nine months on bail, Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis were sent back to prison and deserted by most of the show business and civil rights figures who had flocked to their cause. Mr. Carter’s second child, a son, Raheem Rubin, was born six days after the two men were found guilty.

Racial Revenge Theory

Over the next nine years, numerous appeals in New Jersey courts failed. But when the issues were heard for the first time in a federal court, in 1985, Judge H. Lee Sarokin of United States District Court in Newark overturned the convictions on constitutional grounds. He ruled that prosecutors had "fatally infected the trial" by resorting, without evidence, to the racial revenge theory, and that they had withheld evidence disproving Mr. Bello’s identifications. Mr. Carter was freed; Mr. Artis had been released on parole in 1981.

When the prosecution’s attempts to reinstate the convictions were rejected by a federal appeals court and by the Supreme Court, the charges against Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis were formally dismissed in 1988, 22 years after the original indictments.

During his second imprisonment in the case his wife had sued for divorce, after learning that he had had an affair with a supporter while he was free on bail awaiting trial.

On his final release from prison, Mr. Carter — with a full crop of curly hair, clean-shaven and wearing thick eyeglasses — moved to Toronto, where he lived with a secretive Canadian commune and married the head of it, Lisa Peters. He ended relations with her and the commune in the mid-1990s.

He founded Innocence International in 2004 and lectured about inequities in America’s criminal justice system. His former co-defendant, Mr. Artis, joined the organization. In 2011 he published an autobiography, "Eye of the Hurricane: My Path From Darkness to Freedom," written with Ken Klonsky and with a foreword by Nelson Mandela.

In his last weeks he campaigned for the exoneration of David McCallum, a Brooklyn man who has been in prison since 1985 on murder charges. In an opinion article published by The Daily News on Feb. 21, 2014, headlined "Hurricane Carter’s Dying Wish," he asked that Mr. McCallum "be granted a full hearing" by Brooklyn’s new district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson.

"Just as my own verdict ‘was predicated on racism rather than reason and on concealment rather than disclosure,’ as Sarokin wrote, so too was McCallum’s," Mr. Carter wrote.

He added: "If I find a heaven after this life, I’ll be quite surprised. In my own years on this planet, though, I lived in hell for the first 49 years, and have been in heaven for the past 28 years.

"To live in a world where truth matters and justice, however late, really happens, that world would be heaven enough for us all."

Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting

 

Woody Allen Joins John Turturro in ‘Fading Gigolo’

 

By ZACH BARON NY TIMES

Ask John Turturro about his newest project, "Fading Gigolo," and he will excitedly tell you about the streetwalker films, like "The Life of Oharu" or "Midnight Cowboy," that helped inspire the idea; the Isaac Bashevis Singer short stories that helped him settle on a tone for the script; and the filmmakers, like Michael Cimino, Spike Lee and the Coen brothers, who helped him develop his own directorial style.

He’ll tell you it’s a comedy, sort of. And if pressed, Mr. Turturro — who wrote, directed and stars in "Fading Gigolo," opening on Friday — will acknowledge that yes, there was perhaps something funny in his decision to cast himself as the sexual dynamo of the title. And that sure, casting Woody Allen as a pimp — a pimp who goes by the name Dan Bongo, no less — was, you might say, an unconventional choice. And then there is the unavoidable fact that the film’s plot turns on a threesome, one that is proposed in the very first scene.

Sitting in the parlor of his Park Slope brownstone one recent morning, Mr. Turturro, 57, ruefully described the kind of conversations he had while seeking financing for "Fading Gigolo.

"They said, ‘Well, it’s about a ménage à trois.’ I said: ‘Well, that’s sort of the idea. That’s where it starts,’ " Mr. Turturro recalled, laughing.

That is indeed where "Fading Gigolo" starts, but the film, his fifth directorial effort, is hardly pornographic. Instead, it’s an off-kilter romantic comedy, farcical, nostalgic and even a bit innocent. It’s about an odd couple — Mr. Turturro’s Fioravante, an underemployed florist turned paid companion, and Mr. Allen’s Murray (a.k.a. Bongo), a bookseller turned procurer — who join forces to provide (not inexpensive) comfort to lonely women.

Mr. Turturro deliberately cast actors in their 40s and 50s — Sharon Stone, Sofia Vergara, Liev Schreiber, Vanessa Paradis — and the film’s plot deals with the kind of adult concerns not often depicted on screen: loveless marriages, grieving widows, failing businesses. It’s a modest film, the result of a rare occurrence: the coming together of a bunch of very high-powered people to do a relatively low-powered, idiosyncratic thing.

For Mr. Allen, 78, "Fading Gigolo" presented the opportunity to act in a film not of his own making. "I’ve gotten very, very, very few offers over all of the years I’ve been in the movie business," he confessed.

Could that possibly be true, a reporter wondered — that other directors never call?

"They do not," Mr. Allen said. "They never have, at any point in my life. I’ve taken almost all the ones that I’ve been offered. But I don’t get offered things practically at all."

He went on: "I have a limited range. I mean, I wouldn’t be believable as Al Pacino’s brother in ‘The Godfather’ or something, but this character was a guy who had spent his life running a bookstore, which is completely believable for me, and had gotten involved in procuring for John. It seemed fine." (Mr. Allen spoke on the set before accusations — perhaps uncomfortably resonant now, given his role in the film — that he abused his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, resurfaced this year. He has emphatically denied the allegations.) For Ms. Stone, who plays Dr. Parker, a wealthy woman in an empty marriage whose request for Fioravante’s services sets the plot in motion, "Fading Gigolo" represented a rare opportunity to embody a woman who has lived as much as Ms. Stone has. When Mr. Turturro brought her the script, "he would talk a lot about how he was so much more interested in the performance, the artistic expression of an older woman, than a 22-year-old actress who hadn’t lived anything in life yet," she said. "Not that it’s their fault that they’re vacuous, but that they have so much less to bring to roles than women who have experienced and loved."

Ms. Stone said that there were difficult moments in her not-too-distant past "when I thought that’s it: My career is over, my life is over, my life’s upside down, everything is a disaster." Working on "Fading Gigolo" gave her a chance to reclaim those moments for herself and her character, she said in an interview on the film’s set. "Now when I’m at work I think: ‘Oh these are all wonderful things. That goes here, this goes there, this is like that, oh my God, this is amazing."

John Turturro in "Fading Gigolo," which he also wrote and directed. Although the financial cost of stepping away from his primary career to do a small film was considerable, he said, he views the movie as "a real gift." Credit Jojo Whilden/Millennium Entertainment

Mr. Turturro remains a much-in-demand actor in Hollywood, a recurring player both in blockbusters like Michael Bay’s "Transformers" franchise and independent films like those by his longtime friends the Coen brothers. The financial cost of stepping away from his primary career as a well-compensated actor to write and direct "Fading Gigolo," Mr. Turturro said, was tremendous.

"But on the other end, I think someone my age, right now, I feel still very — not naïve, but I feel very fertile at this. I haven’t given up my initial urges or impulses" to make creative work, he said. "I’ve done some big-budget things, but if you only do that, I think what happens is it becomes more about you. And it becomes more about, ‘Well I’ve got to get a big part.’ And it becomes less about what you are interested in. You don’t really develop. They’re paying you a lot of money, but they’re paying you a lot of money for a reason."

Still, Mr. Turturro had reason to be wary of attempting his own project. His last feature effort as a director, "Romance and Cigarettes" of 2007, a similarly lusty and surreal musical comedy starring James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, and Kate Winslet, languished in studio limbo for more than two years before receiving a belated and short-lived theatrical release. "I just had bad luck," Mr. Turturro said. The experience was dispiriting, he said: "I had to recover."

Then he made a musical documentary, "Passione," a 2010 tribute to singers and musicians in Naples, Italy, that restored his willingness to experiment. That "kind of brought me back to life," he said. "Because I didn’t know if I wanted to go through that again. So this is a real gift, to do this movie."

"Fading Gigolo," which Mr. Turturro made outside the studio system (he then sold the film’s distribution rights to Millennium Entertainment), began basically as a joke. Mr. Turturro and Mr. Allen share a barber, and one day Mr. Turturro idly suggested while getting his hair cut that he should write a movie in which he played a prostitute and Mr. Allen played his pimp. A few days later, Mr. Turturro received a phone call; his barber had relayed the idea. Mr. Allen liked it and wanted in. And so, between other projects and with Mr. Allen’s encouragement, Mr. Turturro started writing "Fading Gigolo."

The script that emerged was odd, and quickly got odder: What began as a broad comedy gradually grew more detailed and emotional. At Mr. Allen’s suggestion, Mr. Turturro focused on a previously minor character, Avigal, a widowed Hasidic woman from Crown Heights played by Ms. Paradis. "I kept thinking, ‘Well, if it’s a film about sex, it should have religion,’ " Mr. Turturro said. So there are comic sequences set in a Brooklyn Hasidic community — Mr. Schreiber plays a bumbling neighborhood police officer who both loves Avigal and suspects her of breaking local religious laws — and, eventually, a tender interfaith, interborough romance between Avigal and Fioravante. "I think, really, the film is about friendship, or the need for human connection," Mr. Turturro said.

The result is a deeply personal off-kilter look at the city, shot in colors so warm and saturated that New York takes on a fairy tale aspect. That impression only deepened on the set, where one day both Louis C.K. and Bobby Cannavale — who appeared in Mr. Allen’s latest film, "Blue Jasmine" — just happened to walk by as Mr. Turturro was filming on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. There are smoky jazz clubs with women singing in French, lusty close-ups of flower arrangements and shots of Mr. Allen casually pitching baseballs in the park.

And that threesome? It’s not really a spoiler to say it kind of happens eventually. (Ms. Vergara gamely provides the third partner.) Ms. Stone remembers watching Mr. Turturro try to play the scene and direct it at the same time.

"I don’t know what was funnier," she recalled, "doing the scene, or him jumping out in his black bikini underwear, jumping on the camera and looking through the lens, going, ‘I’m directing!’

Another Faith Fraud Takes a Fall

The rise and fall of Fort Lauderdale’s superstar preacher By Carli Teproff and Julie K. Brown MIAMI HERALD From the pulpit of Calvary Chapel in Fort Lauderdale, past or Bob Coy would sometimes recount stories from his un-pious past as a means of leading his legions of parishioners on the path to salvation. In his sermons, the cocaine-addict-turned-preacher would mimic the voices of the topless dancers he once managed or the gangster who would page him to make cocaine runs — jobs he quit in 1981 when, he said, he left a life of drugs and womanizing to save his soul. Coy, 58, stepped down late last week. The church, announcing his exit, cited a "moral failing" on the preacher’s part, but did not elaborate. The scandal has rocked the megachurch, which in three decades has grown from a dozen members who met in an Oakland Park funeral home into one the biggest Evangelical ministries in the nation with 20,000 or more parishioners. The Miami Herald was unsuccessful in reaching Coy on Monday. Church leaders said they hoped to guide him through a process of "full repentance, cleansing and restoration.’’ Parishioners were asked to pray for Coy and his family. He and his wife, Diane, have been married for 30 years and have two teenage children. The sprawling Calvary Chapel carried on as normal Monday, with parents taking their kids to school and people going in and out of the complex in the 2400 block of Cypress Creek Road. "He had such a huge following. This is going to be a big change for the church,’’ parishioner Darby Loomis said. Church members reached Monday said they were disappointed but bent on forgiveness. "He did a lot of good for a lot of people," said Mitch Guertler. "Like he always said up on stage — don't follow him, follow Christ. He's a sinner like the rest of us. It’s too bad." No one answered the door at Coy's two-story Coral Springs house Monday afternoon. The well-manicured home in the gated Windsor Bay community had two cars parked outside, the shades drawn and an American flag waving in front. Church leaders announced Coy’s departure at Sunday’s service, which drew an estimated 7,500 congregants. Coy was not present. Leaders said assistant pastors would take over his various ministries. Coy began his career in his late 20s when his brother took him to a Calvary Chapel in Las Vegas in hopes of getting him to clean up his life. Calvary Church was founded in the 1960s when Pentecostal pastor Chuck Smith began preaching to hippies who had been rejected by mainstream churches. Coy felt welcomed by the ministers and began studying the Bible. He worked his way up the church ranks, despite no formal seminary training. In 1985, he piled his meager belongings into a U-Haul and moved to Broward County with plans to open his own church. He earned money working as a shoe salesman while preaching on weekends. Within 10 years, Coy’s laid-back sermons, combined with his boyish good looks, T-shirts and khaki slacks, captivated thousands of followers who sought a spiritual connection that resonated with their everyday lives. Describing his approach as somewhere between Billy Graham and Billy Crystal, Coy attracted baby boomers, lapsed Catholics and others who found more traditional houses of worship hidebound and irrelevant. Over the years, the church moved to a 75-acre tract, built a 3,800-seat mall-sized sanctuary, added children’s and youth ministries and a skateboard ramp, and opened nine other regional campuses across South Florida. Calvary became one of the fastest growing non-denominational churches in America, moving into the digital age and luring younger members from diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds. Coy’s Active Word ministry on radio, TV and digital media spread the word to thousands, transforming him into a religious rock star. News of Coy’s resignation first broke on a blog Friday and quickly spread. The blogger, Alex Joye-Grenier of Calvarychapelabuse.com, said he believes that some of the church’s leaders have abused their power. "This illustrates that these guys are men. They are sinners like everyone else," Joye-Grenier said. It is not the first time Calvary Church has been hit by scandal. In 1994, a former youth pastor admitted he had molested an 8-year-old boy he lured to his home from a nearby mall. At the time of his arrest, James Gould worked as property manager at the church’s Pompano Beach campus but had previously worked for six years as a youth pastor and director of youth development. David Kling, professor and chair of University of Miami’s department of religious studies, said resignations due to "moral failings" are not unheard-of. He cited the examples of Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. In some cases the ministries they founded survived. In others, they did not. "It's difficult to know what will happen at this time, but the one thing that you can say for sure is that it won't be the same church it once was," he said. Membership and donations may fall off depending on how the church and Coy respond to the scandal, Kling added. "If there is sincere contrition, there is often-times forgiveness. It doesn't mean there's not a price to pay, but there is an effort to move on.," he said. Congregants reached Monday said that Coy’s undisclosed indiscretion should not diminish the good work he has done in the church. Jorge Goodman of Miami Beach pointed out that during Coy’s tenure, the church has helped with issues related to foster care, homelessness, drug abuse and children with special needs. "God has done so much through his life,’’ he said. "It's a great loss for our community." Miami Herald staffer Stefania Ferro contributed to this report.

Why won't you DIE? IBM's S/360 and its legacy at 50

Big Blue's big $5m bet adjusted, modified, reduced, back for more

By Gavin Clarke Australian Register 

                

IBM's System 360 mainframe, celebrating its 50th anniversary on Monday, was more than a just another computer.

The S/360 changed IBM just as it changed computing and the technology industry.

The digital computers that were to become known as mainframes were already being sold by companies during the 1950s and 1960s - so the S/360 wasn't a first.

Where the S/360 was different was that it introduced a brand-new way of thinking about how computers could and should be built and used.

The S/360 made computing affordable and practical - relatively speaking. We're not talking the personal computer revolution of the 1980s, but it was a step.

The secret was a modern system: a new architecture and design that allowed the manufacturer - IBM - to churn out S/360s at relatively low cost.

This had the more important effect of turning mainframes into a scalable and profitable business for IBM, thereby creating a mass market.

The S/360 democratised computing, taking it out of the hands of government and universities and putting its power in the hands of many ordinary businesses.

The birth of IBM's mainframe was made all the more remarkable given making the machine required not just a new way of thinking but a new way of manufacturing. The S/360 produced a corporate and a mental restructuring of IBM, turning it into the computing giant we have today.

The S/360 also introduced new technologies, such as IBM's Solid Logic Technology (SLT) in 1964 that meant a faster and a much smaller machine than what was coming from the competition of the time.

Thomas J Watson Jr - in the hot seat when the S/360 was born

Big Blue introduced new concepts and de facto standards with us now: virtualisation - the toast of cloud computing on the PC and distributed x86 server that succeeded the mainframe - and the 8-bit byte over the 6-bit byte.

The S/360 helped IBM see off a rising tide of competitors such that by the 1970s, rivals were dismissively known as "the BUNCH" or the dwarves. Success was a mixed blessing for IBM, which got in trouble with US regulators for being "too" successful and spent a decade fighting a government anti-trust law suit over the mainframe business.

The legacy of the S/360 is with us today, outside of IBM and the technology sector.

Bankers' delight... unless you're RBS

Banks, insurance companies, retailers and power companies - the great and the familiar from the City mile to the high street run many operations on an IBM mainframe: RBS, Nationwide, EDF, Scottish Power, Sainsbury's, Tesco and John Lewis. There's the Met Office and Land Registry, too.

Ninety-six of the world's top 100 banks run the S/360 descendants with mainframes processing roughly 30 billion transactions per day.

These transactions include most major credit card and stock market actions and money transfers, manufacturing processes and ERP systems.

If you want a testament to the sustained power of the mainframe then look at RBS. Two years ago, a simple human error on the part of those running RBS's mainframe crippled the company's core business. Sixteen million customers were locked out of their accounts for days, unable to withdraw money or pay in.

These accounts were housed, as they are in many banks, on the mainframe at the banking group's corporate and technology HQ in Edinburgh.

Lessons learned

Fifty years after the first S/360 was announced and 30 years after the rise of distributed systems that were supposed to replace them, the mainframe is smaller in market share, but its principles are being embraced once again.

Google and Facebook run tens of thousands of distributed x86 servers but these servers are clustered, use fast networking and virtualisation and are managed centrally to ensure near-continuous uptime of mission-critical tasks.

Searches on Google and status updates on Facebook are the new mission-critical: back in the day a "mission critical" was ERP and payroll.

Further, there has been an uptick in the mainframe business for IBM - more servers and more processing are being bought. Meanwhile, IBM has released new mainframe servers – and not just for the old guard: it's targeting cloud startups.

With so many core business apps sitting on mainframes, mobile computing is making it even more important to what companies are doing.

CIOs now predict they will depend on the mainframe for least another decade, while 89 per cent reckon their mainframes are running new and different workloads to those they ran five years ago, in 2009. Mobile computing is the driver, as companies' customers want to access accounts and information held on those legacy systems.

2009, if you remember, was the year after the first iPhone and Android phones from Apple and Google's partners were released... and just one year before the first iPad was released.

Along with the mainframe's renewed success there have been problems: dependency, as well as a shortage in staffers qualified to run or maintain them.

Compuware tells us of a large number of support calls it receives are from those who simply don't know how to install new software on a mainframe.

The consequences can, and have, been disastrous – as RBS proved.

The same Compuware survey that found CIOs' reckon the mainframe will be critical to their business over the next decade also found that the tech chiefs were fearful.

Guess who's back?

That resurgence was somewhat surprising for something that was intended as nothing more than a 10-year product roadmap for a company that had seemed to be running out of steam. There was nothing inevitable about the business that grew from the S/360. In fact, Fortune in 1966 called it (PDF) IBM's $5bn gamble - the amount the S/360 finally cost IBM to deliver.

And no wonder: the S/360 had gone more than $4bn over budget - it had been initially estimated by IBM's beancounters in 1962 to cost $675m.

ENIAC: 18,000 square feet and 30 tones of computer

IBM – first incorporated back in 1911 as the Computing Tabulating Recording Company – entered the 20th century making and selling tabulators and punch cards along with a range of lesser business equipment that included meat and cheese slicers.

The 1930s and 1940s saw government, academics and businesses start to build their digital computers to crunch large volumes of data more quickly than could be done using the prevailing model of the time: a human being armed with a calculator.

Big names from the era included ENIAC - the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer - used by the US army to calculate missile firing ranges in 1946. ENIAC used 17,468 vacuum tubes for switching and computation, and was capable of 5,000 additions, 357 multiplications and 38 divisions in one second. It was also big - 18,000ft² and weighing 30 tonnes, it took an all-female team of mathematicians weeks to program ENIAC's system for jobs – and it cost a whopping $500,000 to build.

In the UK we had the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), which ran its first programs in 1949. It was a stored-program system with 3,000 valves and magnetic tape backup and storage. EDSAC paved the way to LEO - the Lyons Electronic Office - the world's first business computer. And there were others.

The business that broke the bank

IBM had been moving into data-processing, too, and it had a variety of systems that used vacuum tubes and transistors. Business was brisk.

But IBM wasn't alone and others were moving into computers: Honeywell, Burroughs and Control Data Corp. Notable among rivals was Remington Rand: its machine, the UNIVAC 1, had successfully calculated the winner of the US presidential election on TV on the evening of 4 November, 1952.

The real killer was the fact that the UNIVAC 1 came from two of brains behind ENIAC itself: J Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who'd gone into business as the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. They'd started the UNIVAC 1 as a project for the US Census Bureau on an initial deposit of $400,000 in 1951. But the project broke them, and they sold to Remington Rand, famous for typewriters and razors, who completed the UNIVAC 1 at a cost of $1m.

A UNIVAC with its co-creator J. Presper Eckert

(center) and US TV reporter and anchor Walter Cronkite (right)

UNIVAC 1 was smaller than ENIAC, just 5,200 vacuum tubes, and faster with an addition time of 120 milliseconds, multiplication time of 1,800 milliseconds, and division time of 3,600 milliseconds. It was relatively easy to program, too.

Revenue in 1962 was $2bn, up from $4m in 1914. But growing competition was making IBM look like just another computer company and people were starting to think company's best days were behind it and its growth had plateaued.

IBM wasn't helping itself either. The company was saddled with supporting and developing a diverse set of non-compatible products for both high- and low-end needs that were all very much single-purpose machines.

Making things worse, IBM engineers had been busy on custom mainframes. These included the Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC) and SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) AN/FSQ-7 family of networked systems used in US air defence.

And by the early 1960s, IBM was planning on adding yet another system to the already complex mix - the 8000, which it was calling "a massively powerful super computer".

Middle-aged SPREAD

Under a relatively new CEO - Thomas J Watson Jnr - IBM management convened a special committee in autumn 1961 to evaluate the company's operations. Named SPREAD, the committee's name stood for Systems Programming, Research Engineering and Development. There were no sacred cows: everything IBM was doing with computers and peripherals was to be examined to determine product and development direction for the next 10 years.

The 80-page report was delivered by Christmas. In short, it recommended a range of five scalable systems varying only in processing power, with the largest being 200 times more powerful than the first, and each device designed to be compatible with the others. The idea was for a program that ran on one could run on all systems and that all computers would use standard interfaces - nothing custom.

The processors must have new capabilities not present in existing IBM computers the new family would not be compatible with IBM's existing systems.

Watson wasn't sure about what he was about to undertake.

S/360 arrives

The System 360 "was the biggest, riskiest decision I ever made, and I agonized about it for weeks, but deep down I believed there was nothing IBM couldn't do," he wrote in his memoirs, Father, Son and Co: My Life at IBM and Beyond.

What emerged from SPREAD was a family of six compatible machines - the S/360 30, 40, 50, 60, 62 and 70, which Watson Jnr announced on 6 April, 1964.

The S/360 was remarkable for a number of conceptual and technological reasons. First, it separated design from build, so systems could be replicated. This allowed components to be specced and manufactured using a standard process, ensuring the S/360 wasn't a one-off or relatively custom build that was hard to turn into a successful business - like UNIVAC.

Part and parcel of this was the "compatible" moniker of the S/360. IBM built what today might be called a plug-and-play stack: that is, all components from circuits to memory, storage, printers and screens were designed and manufactured by IBM.

The parts' compatibility made the S/360 modular: Watson Jnr announced six systems but they came in 19 combinations of power, speed and memory size. The smallest was capable of 33,000 additions per second and the biggest 750,000. A total of 54 peripherals were also available from IBM: from magnetic storage devices and visual display units to printers, card punches and more.

The benefit for IBM was a system that was relatively low-cost to make and easy to customise to meet a relatively broad number of customer scenarios.

Also, the hardware was separate from the software program and the program could - in theory at least - run on difference versions of the S/360. The plug-and-play nature of the hardware side thus extended to the software.

This was, in truth, one of the hardest parts of the dream to deliver: IBM struggled to make the operating systems and the apps run on different sized S/360s and to make the underlying operating systems capable of being multi-function.

Flash-Gordon tech - vacuum tubes, once the state of the art

As a mainframe, the S/360 wasn't a new beast. What IBM did succeed in doing was bringing the manufacturing, technical specification and use of such systems into what we might call the modern age. The S/360 changed the face of what had been at best a cottage and at worst Heath-Robinson industry: it turned making mainframes in to a Henry-Ford-style, large-scale manufacturing process.

Machines finally evolved from the era of Flash-Gordon-esque vacuum tube processors – from looking like light bulbs that were state of the art in the 1930s and 1940 to looking more in sync with the integrated electronics era of the post-war world.

The S/360 introduced new IBM technology, it found a use for existing IBM technologies, and it embraced new thinking in the industry.

Good things come in small(er) boxes

IBM built its own circuits for S/360, Solid Logic Technology (SLT) - a set of transistors and diodes mounted on a circuit twenty-eight-thousandths of a square inch and protected by a film of glass just sixty-millionths of an inch thick. The SLT was 10 times more dense the technology of its day.

IBM built its own plant to manufacture the SLTs at a site in East Fishkill in the Hudson Valley, and by 1965 was making 28 million to keep up with demand. It built so many that 25 per cent failed quality control. Years later, East Fishkill became a major IBM chip manufacturing plant.

Memory in the S/360 was standardised on something new called magnetic core. A variety of technologies had been in use by different computer companies, including IBM. These included large and bulky drums filled with mercury through which electronic pulses were sent and amplified, cathode ray and thin-film memory. None were 100 per cent reliable and all had their problems.

Magnetic core was new, and it was digital: a set of tiny doughnut-shaped metal circles in a wire honeycomb that would be magnetised and stored zeros and ones.

The S/360 Model 91 at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, with 2,097,152 bytes of main memory, was announced in 1968

IBM bought into magnetic core in a very real way, acquiring one patent in 1955 from An Wang and paying MIT for another patent from Jay Forrester in 1964.

Storage was via a disk drive, the IBM 2311 that looked like an old-style, top-loaded washing machine or spin dryer. The 2311 stored up to 7.25MB on a single, removable disk and came with an IBM-standard interface.

Not everything was invented for the S/360 or came from IBM. Disk storage dated from IBM's 305 REMAC - Random Access Method of Accounting and Control machine - in 1956. COBOL - a staple of mainframe applications - dated from 1959 and was based on the work of ENIAC and UNIVAC programmer Grace Hopper.

The software

Nothing is simple in IT and dreams never arrive as predicted, and so it was with the S/360.

Building the software was one of IBM's biggest headaches. Developing and delivering the S/360 cost $5bn, not the $675m IBM estimated it would in 1962. Of this, $4.5bn went on new facilities like East Fishkill and on buying and renting equipment.

Of the remainder, software was the single biggest hit. The cost had been estimated to come in at $30m and $40m. The final number was $500m.

The problems were numerous and saw the Operating System 360 go months late. Among the challenges were making new innovations work together and making the system upwards-compatible and able to run two or more programs simultaneously and also take inputs from more than one different users.

A thousand engineers toiled to eventually produce one million lines of code.

Even upon completion, not not everything worked exactly as envisaged. Model 20 was not binary-compatible with rest of the range. Neither was there a single operating system: there was Basic Operating System/360, Tape Operating System/360 and Disk Operating System/360 for the three low-end machines and the Operating System/360, Primary Control Program and Multiprogramming with a Fixed number of Tasks (MFT) for the higher end systems.

Also, time-sharing didn't arrive until the S/360-67, announced in 1965 and not delivered until 1967 – IBM had preferred batch processing.

For the customer, though, the S/360 was a success. It meant large-scale computing power was something businesses could do more than just run their business on, they could run new business, too. The S/360 was a multi-purpose rather than a one-user product suited to just a single function. Up to 248 data transmission terminals could communicate with the computer, even when it was busy on a batch job. It was not only capable of working on small binary, decimal or floating-point calculations, it could also process scientific and/or commercial jobs.

Early adopters included the Ford Motor Company, which was able to introduce a warranty system and a retail loan system using its S/360.

If you couldn't buy, you could rent: monthly prices started at $2,700 for a "basic" configuration and up to $115,000 for a "typical" large multi-system.

Before the S/360, memory and storage were in short supply and expensive to add. The S/360 gave large and relatively unlimited volumes that were easy to slot in, with a central memory capacity of 8,000 to 524,000 characters.

The $5bn gamble paid off. By the end of 1966, around 8,000 S/360s had been built and installed. Compare that to 46 UNIVAC 1s and 36 UNIVAC 1107s.

IBM revenue had nearly doubled to around $4bn and by 1970 it nearly doubled again to $7bn. It was also hiring to keep up with demand – taking on 25,000 staff by the end of 1966. By 1970 staffing levels had gone from 120,000 in the pre S/360 age to 269,000.

NASA's Apollo 11 Capcom team who got the first men back from the moon using an S/360.

As it entered the 1970s, IBM claimed 70 per cent of the world's mainframe market – with customers including Ford, Volkswagen McDonnell Aircraft Corporation and NASA. On the latter, a total of five S/360s had helped run the Apollo space programme, with one of IBM's mainframes being used to calculate the data for the return flight of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins - the team that put boots on the Moon for the first time.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the original S/360s were being replaced by newer mainframes, but the momentum had carried IBM through the decade.

IBM was so far ahead of the competition, observers began to brand it the Seven Dwarfs or the BUNCH. This moniker referred Burroughs and Univac - which merged to create Unisys in the 1980s; Control Data Corp (CDC); General Electric, which sold its business to Honeywell; and NCR and RCA.

IBM's lead was too much for some in the US government, though. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) began antitrust proceedings in 1969, alleging IBM was operating an illegal monopoly in the mainframe market.

Lights out by 1997. Not quite.

The DoJ said IBM had eliminated competitors using the price of its machines, software and services and by through the use of bundling. It wasn't until 1982 that the DoJ dropped its suit, when IBM's market share had fallen to 62 per cent and a new computing power was in the ascendancy - the personal computer.

The original six S/360s were succeeded by newer models and eventually the S/360 line by the S/390 and zSeries. The rise of the x86 PC and server bred a belief about the "inevitability" of the death of the mainframe. Typifying these was venture capitalist and former editor-in-chief of InfoWorld Stewart Alsop, who in 1991 said: "I predict that the last mainframe will be unplugged on March 15, 1996."

Yes, mainframes have been turned off. NASA, one of the first on S/360, turned off its last Z machine in February 2012. Long-time mainframe shop Amadeus, the travel booking hub used by airlines and hotels, turns off its last mainframe this year.

Ford spun up brand-new business lines thanks to IBM

Mainframe sales, like market share, have fallen, and IBM is ruler of a reduced kingdom. The worldwide market for Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC) - the architecture used in mainframes - was worth $5bn in 2013 versus $48bn for other CPUs, according to IDC. IBM holds 81 per cent of that market.

But while S/360 is gone, its descendants are holding on. With mainframes running critical functions and holding so much data that's vital to businesses and customers, turning off that last mainframe has proved an impossible task.

In fact, the mainframe has been enjoying something of a renaissance thanks to mobile computing the web and cloud.

The ability to book travel online or access your bank account through a smartphone have seen consumption of MIPs - millions of instructions per second used to measure mainframe computing - grow by an average of 41 per cent, according to data from Compuware. Eighty-one per cent of CIOs believe the mainframe will remain a "key" business asset for another 10 years,

IBM's Customer Information Control System (CICS) is the application server/operating system used to manage transactions on mainframes; 70 per cent of mainframe shops plan to expose their CICS systems to the web, according to a 2013 Arcati study last year. IBM's DB2 database and IMS on the mainframe are going the same way.

IBM senses a fresh opportunity.

Sales of the mainframe might be a shadow of what they were, but they are stable - around $5bn year each year since 2009 says IDC, down from $6bn in 2008. The difference was the 2008 economic crash, when banks cut their IT budgets.

IBM has been marrying that to two trends and use cases: cloud servers and analytics engines and bread-and-butter business servers in the enterprise.

The cloud is a significant departure to the past, given this has been the preserve of distributed x86, with companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter packing tens of thousands of branded and custom x86 boxes into vast data centres.

IBM has delivered the BC12 zEnterprise capable of running 520 virtual Linux servers at a claimed cost of $1 a day. IBM also bought SL International for virtualisation management on the zEnterprise for $20m - IBM's first act of mainframe M&A since Platform Solutions in 2008 to run zOS on non-IBM hardware.

We asked to speak to a mainframe customer, and rather than a traditional bank or airline, IBM gave us a nine-month-old cloud startup - L3C, which is running the BC12. L3C is IBM's newest mainframe customer, buying its BC12 in December 2013.

L3C's business is part infrastructure, part software-as-a-service: it offers mainframe-as-a-service for others, hosting Oracle database software, e-commerce and CRM hosting, and virtual machines for dev, test and deployment. Target customers are telcos, banks and financial services and IT companies.

Managing director and founding partner Lubomir Cheytanov said he went mainframe rather than x86 for reasons of cost and management.

While the BC12 is more expensive up front than the average x86 server, starting at $75,000, Cheytanov reckons he can save by the fact he can pack in more virtual machines on the server than on the average Intel blade. This will save on physical space, power and cooling while the job of administering by a human will be simpler because the mainframe is more reliable - again helping save on costs.

"I will be a lucky man if I have to put a second [BC12] in," said Cheytanov – referring to the huge amount of scale provided in his new mainframe.

Given one year and just 20 paying customers, Cheytanov reckons he could soon be cash-flow positive and have recouped his initial outlay.

Arguably, IBM's best move for the mainframe was putting Linux on the System Z mainframe descendants of the S/390. Jose Castano, IBM director for System Z, claimed more than 70 new clients, with most - 60 per cent - using Linux. The Linux-on-mainframe business is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 30 per cent, he said but wouldn't break out actual numbers.

On the other end of the spectrum are the mainframe old guard: banks, financial institutions and public sector, expanding consumption or buying brand new.

You can bank on it

RBS is an example of one customer buying more - spending £450m on brand new mainframe and estate at the HQ in Edinburgh to make up for the 2012 outage. Others, like Nationwide, are consolidating data centre ops, Castano said. Still others have been starting up new operations on mainframes, rather than going x86. Banks in emerging markets like China, where mainframes sales have grown, have gone Z-series during the last 10 years and upgraded as IBM has released new products.

Castano, meanwhile, also reckoned on another category of enterprise use: those running analytics and serving up Java applications on their zOS.

IBM was catering to this market when it released the zEnterprise EC12 in 2012. The child of a $1bn R&D effort, the machine offers 25 per cent better performance and 50 per cent more capacity than its predecessor, Big Blue claims, with 100 configurable cores. It has also created mainframe configurations that work with x87 and Power blades.

Why would customers, even those starting from scratch, go mainframe – apart from the performance or ROI factor? IDC server and cloud research manager Giorgio Nebuloni points to the roadmap. Now, just as in 1964, IBM offers something you can bet on over the long term.

Nebuloni said: "IBM have been very clever in that they didn't just monetise the mainframe - they created a platform for the customer and said: 'You have critical applications on this. We promise you, we will support you. We have roadmaps spanning five to 10 years. If you are around in 10 years we will be there to support you'."

Indeed, IBM does seem rather committed to the mainframe. Fifty years after the S/360, it was IBM's x86 servers business that had been sold, not the legacy mainframe unit – despite the fact that it was x86, the distributed server, which was supposed to be the future. The sale followed the selling of the x86 PC business in 2005. Both have gone to Lenovo.

Why would IBM keep one and not the other? One reason could be profit margin. Margins on x86 servers run between 15 and 30 per cent but on mainframes and Unix it's more than 50 per cent. The revenue mostly comes from the sale of software licences. IBM dumped the PC business because it couldn't make a decent profit on that either.

Ford rival Volkswagen shared common ground on love of the S/360

What's next? The BC12 provides a peek into the future of where IBM is looking, Castano says. He promised more work on speed via threads and with more bandwidth on the processor; he also said Big Blue would work on acceleration to speed apps without relying on just the processor. There will be more work on solid-state drives, analysis of machine data, and support of open standards – especially in virtualisation.

Castano claims cloud is the re-incarnation of the mainframe service bureau and concepts such as virtualisation, metering and automation are concepts the world of distributed systems has only now realised it needs to catch up with. Plenty would agree.

And yet the picture is more complicated.

Watson's gamble certainly paid off for IBM and for the industry. What was perceived as a simple 10-year survival plan became a blueprint for IBM and for building computers as a whole - not just other mainframes but later PCs, too.

But let's not get too hagiographic. The S/360 wasn't a new idea, rather a successful intersection of new and emerging technologies.

What came with it was the industrialisation of computer manufacture on a grand scale to satiate demand and create the first mass market for computers. IBM did what American companies do best: manufacture and sell at scale.

Further, the legacy of the S/360 is still with us. Unlike some systems already forgotten or behind glass in a museum, the mainframe become so important to critical segments of society that they cannot be switched off.

And thanks to our appetite for Linux in the cloud and for web-scale computing, IBM's found a fresh outlet for a system that runs counter to everything we are told computing is today: cheap, open and a commodity. The mainframe is expensive and, at its core, it is also proprietary.

On the 50th anniversary, should we expect just one more decade for the mainframe as some CIOs are now saying? Will it be lights out in 2024?