You can see what's coming! This will end in scandal and ruin Mike de Blasio! (DAF)

 

 

Deal Is Said to Be Near to Expand Bike Sharing in New York

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER NY TIMES

Before New York City’s bike-sharing system was introduced last year, aides to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg mused about possible program nicknames befitting their boss.

"Mike’s Bikes" had a ring to it, they reasoned. "Bloomberg’s Bikes" might be even better.

Fourteen months later, Mr. Bloomberg’s successor, Bill de Blasio, has been confronted with a more consequential choice: how aggressively to embrace — and reimagine — a program that remains inextricably linked to the last administration.

After months of financial uncertainty surrounding the program, city officials are nearing a final agreement that would reshape the system’s management as it was established under Mr. Bloomberg, and bring the bikes to a wider swath of the city beginning next year, according to people involved with the discussions, who insisted on anonymity because the deal had not been completed.

The program — known by its sponsored name, Citi Bike, because the mayoral nicknames never stuck — could use the lift. Amid still-flailing software and an often overtaxed customer service operation, much of the excitement surrounding the system’s introduction last May has been dulled.

As the first anniversary arrived in May, a spate of annual members did not renew their passes. According to internal reports for Citi Bike, there were 96,318 annual members in June, down from 105,355 in May.

In the eyes of cyclists who cheered the city’s biking policies under Mr. Bloomberg, the de Blasio administration has been presented with an opportunity, one it appears poised to seize.

"He’s putting his own mark on something that the previous mayor innovated," said Charles Komanoff, a transportation economist and cycling advocate, adding, "If I weren’t pleased, I’d really be kind of a jerk."

If the deal is completed, the New York system’s new operators are expected to raise the annual membership fees to as high as $155, from $95, and use the revenue in part to improve the system’s software and to address other customer service issues, people involved with the plans said.

Expansion would follow, with a goal of roughly doubling the size of the program, to 12,000 bikes. This is expected to begin next year and be completed by the end of 2017.

The system would extend into Queens for the first time, and move deeper east into Brooklyn and farther north in Manhattan. The current system includes about 6,200 bikes and 330 stations. There are currently no stations north of 60th Street in Manhattan or east of Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn.

The arrangement would wrest control from Alta, the company, based in Portland, Ore., that has partnered with the city to date, and give it to REQX, a joint venture of the real estate firm Related and the fitness chain Equinox. REQX would also assume a majority stake in Alta’s other systems, in cities like Boston, Washington and Melbourne, Australia. The agreement could be announced as early as this week, though officials cautioned that a deal had not been completed.

Some system officials had hoped to complete a deal, with a corresponding rate increase, before a significant portion of annual memberships came up for renewal in May and June. Those who did renew, after signing up in the first two months of the program last year, are now locked into the old rate until the middle of next year.

In a statement, Mr. de Blasio’s office said that Citi Bike "has become part of our public transportation system, and there is a lot riding on its success."

The program has strained to recover from an introductory year marked by misguided rider estimates, shoddy software and a frigid winter. Daily and weekly passes, which were seen as potential moneymakers for the system, have failed to generate as much interest as hoped. And the system’s popularity with annual members, who tend to ride frequently, has brought unexpected wear and tear to bikes and stations.

On a Facebook page for the program, reviews have been unkind.

"Very disappointed," one rider wrote last week.

"I’m beginning to feel that this is futile, but FIX YOUR DOCKS," said another.

"The infrastructure for Citi Bike is becoming a bizarre vaudeville, alternating between comedy and tragedy," a third user wrote. "How will it all end?"

Though Mr. de Blasio was criticized before taking office for occasionally tepid comments about the bike lanes and pedestrian plazas that proliferated under Mr. Bloomberg, he said as a candidate that he hoped to expand the bike-sharing program. The position helped earn him the endorsement of a fledging political group, StreetsPAC, which is dedicated to cycling and pedestrian issues.

Polly Trottenberg, the city’s transportation commissioner, has expressed gratitude that her hard-charging predecessor, Janette Sadik-Khan, "broke a lot of eggs" during the years when debates over cycling were particularly spirited.

Mr. de Blasio’s impending embrace of bikes, and bike sharing in particular, arrives at a different kind of moment. His transportation policy is pinned to his "Vision Zero" plan to eliminate traffic deaths by 2024, and officials have cast cycling as an extension of that agenda.

No one has been killed on a Citi Bike to date. Transportation officials have also cited a "safety in numbers" effect, arguing that cycling on private bicycles has also become safer in areas with bike sharing.

While traffic deaths fell by about 30 percent under Mr. Bloomberg, his administration more often described the bike-share program as a hallmark of a world-class city, with safety and environmental benefits as well.

"It’s interesting to think about the rationale for policies which are in some ways really identical," said Paul Steely White, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group. "In politics and in policy, the frame is all-important."

Sought in Vegas, a Swindler Is Dealt a Losing Hand Far From Home

Dan Barry NY TIMES

　

BETHLEHEM, PA. — He could have browsed the volumes at the Moravian Book Shop, or dined al fresco at the historic Hotel Bethlehem. But the out-of-towner was looking to take a chance, so he headed instead to the Sands Casino, a glittery, jittery place rising from the old Bethlehem Steel stacks along the Lehigh River.

For some people, a casino is an ashtray netherworld devoid of sunlight or any sense of time, where the ambient roar of slot machines sounds like a thousand broken carousels. And there’s no place these people would rather be.

Among them, it seems, is this visitor, Jubreal Chahine, a large man of 40 who conveniently lives — or lived — in Las Vegas. Since 1999, he has been arrested at least 14 times on charges of trying to defraud nearly two dozen Nevada gambling establishments, a record that at the very least suggests a dedication to purpose.

But his cases involve no grand heists orchestrated by Rat Pack poseurs, no Julia Roberts in on the game. This isn’t "Ocean’s Eleven" — it’s not even a pond. Mr. Chahine is just another casino swindler, Nevada officials say, with several convictions and some time spent in bright prison dayrooms that are ruled by the clock.

"He is a frequent cheater," Karl Bennison, the chief of enforcement for the Nevada Gaming Control Board, said, employing a descriptive not often bandied about in the world beyond casinos.

The business travails of casinos might not win the sympathy of those who have nearly lost their houses to The House, but cheating remains a central concern. The never-ending cat-and-mouse game between casinos and cheaters now employs devices worthy of the National Security Agency. People still mark cards, only now with invisible ink that can be read with infrared contact lenses.

But Mr. Chahine appears to be a sort of traditionalist, Mr. Bennison says, favoring the old-school techniques known as "pressing," "pinching" and "past-posting."

To "press" a bet is to surreptitiously increase the number of chips you have wagered — or switch out a chip for one of a higher denomination — once you’ve seen your cards, say, in a game of blackjack. To "pinch" a bet is to remove chips — or switch out for one of a lower denomination — when you know that you’re holding a losing hand.

And to "past-post" is to slip your bet into play after the game of chance has concluded — putting a chip on a winning number, for example, after the roulette ball has landed.

George Joseph, the president of Worldwide Casino Consulting and a former magician in Las Vegas, said that these hoary techniques have waned with the advent of all-seeing cameras in casinos, but that they are still in play.

"It’s the simplest of all cheating methods," Mr. Joseph said. "It doesn’t take a whole lot of sleight-of-hand ability. But it does take guts."

Determining how successful the often-arrested Mr. Chahine has been is harder than counting cards. "The trouble is, you never know the percentage of times he gets away with it," Mr. Bennison said. "If the times he has been caught is a small percentage, he’s pretty successful."

For all his persistence, Mr. Chahine has never achieved the singular notoriety of making the "Excluded Person List," or "black book," kept by the Nevada Gaming Control Board. This is a roster of people deemed so undesirable that they have been banned for life from the state’s casinos. They are forever denied, then, the chance to see a slot’s spinning images of fruit at Circus Circus, or to whisper "Baby needs new shoes" before blowing on dice at Mandalay Bay.

The 32 men and one woman on the list include Francis Citro, a convicted racketeer, who famously wore a tuxedo to his hearing. This was the first time he had been invited to join anything, he explained at his hearing. "I just wanted to show the proper respect."

Mr. Chahine did, however, make the gaming control board’s "Most Wanted" list last summer, after disappearing amid a swirl of criminal charges and outstanding warrants for alleged acts that had become his calling card "up and down the Strip," Mr. Bennison said. For example: Switching a green $25 chip for a purple $500 chip in a game of midi baccarat at the New York-New York casino.

After hiding himself for months like a palmed jack of spades, Mr. Chahine resurfaced a week ago, 2,500 miles to the east, at the Sands Casino here in Bethlehem.

The Sands, which opened in 2009, is just one example of how this city of 75,000 has refused to be defined by the old steel plant hulking over the river, and took in about $357 million in gambling revenue in its last fiscal year. It has thousands of slot machines, dozens and dozens of gambling tables — and more than 3,000 cameras peering from above. Its surveillance teams can zoom in close enough to read the monogram on a fanny pack.

But guile was not in evidence when Mr. Chahine hit the red-carpeted gambling floor. According to Sgt. Robert Caprari, the commander of the Pennsylvania State Police’s gambling enforcement office at the casino, this "most wanted" fugitive from Nevada gave his actual name and date of birth in applying for a player’s card that earned him both "special discounts" and the notice of the casino’s surveillance team.

"The Sands subscribes to a variety of industry-related databases," Sergeant Caprari said. "They’re sharp up there."

The visitor from Las Vegas managed to gamble a little bit before he was arrested by two state police officers, who knew by then that he had also recently drawn attention at two other Pennsylvania casinos: the SugarHouse Casino in Philadelphia, and the Parx Casino in Bensalem, which the police say he had left in a hurry the day before, after a dealer accused him of cheating.

Mr. Chahine, who was being held on $150,000 bail, could not be reached for comment. He has no lawyer representing him yet for the criminal charges now pending in Pennsylvania, which has its own gaming control board, with its own exclusion list of those it describes as "career or professional offenders, cheats and other individuals whose presence in a licensed facility would be inimical to the interest of the commonwealth."

A spokesman for the commonwealth’s Gaming Control Board said that Mr. Chahine would be eligible for inclusion on the exclusion list, depending on how the chips fell.

Anthony Smith, Explorer With Zest for Land, Sea and Air, Is Dead at 88

By MARGALIT FOX  NY TIMES

 

Fancy rafting across the Atlantic?

Famous traveller requires 3 crew. Must be OAP.

Serious adventurers only.

So read a help-wanted ad in The Daily Telegraph, the British newspaper, on Jan. 28, 2005.

The ad was no joke. The man who placed it, Anthony Smith, then 78, was a storied English explorer and author who had crossed the Alps by balloon and traversed Africa by motorcycle, among other things.

For his newest adventure, he was seeking O.A.P.’s — old-age pensioners in British parlance, retirees in American — to cross the wild Atlantic with him on little more than a pile of logs.

Mr. Smith, who died on July 7 at 88, made that voyage, but not before a strenuous campaign to raise money; a prolonged effort to build his strange, seaworthy craft; and a crippling accident that nearly cost him the use of his legs.

By the time he and his comrades finished their journey in 2011 — a 66-day odyssey in which they braved storms, were blown far off course and endured significant damage to their raft — Mr. Smith was 85.

The raft made the voyage across the Atlantic in 2011. Credit Judy Fitzpatrick/Associated Press

They called their raft Antiki, partly in homage to Kon-Tiki, the raft on which the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl sailed the Pacific in 1947, partly in tribute to their own comparative antiquity. At journey’s end, the combined age of the Antiki’s crew was 259.

The crossing was not Mr. Smith’s last ocean adventure, nor even his most arduous. But it was undoubtedly his best known, minutely chronicled in the news media and through blog posts written midocean (theirs was an Internet-ready pile of logs) by Mr. Smith and his crew.

It was also a crowning achievement of a career so bold that in the 1960s Mr. Smith, feared lost on a balloon voyage over Africa, had the dubious privilege of reading his own obituary.

Mr. Smith undertook the Atlantic crossing, he often said, to honor the credo "Old men ought to be explorers," from T. S. Eliot’s "Four Quartets."

"Am I supposed to potter about, pruning roses and admiring pretty girls, or should I do something to justify my existence?" he asked in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph in 2011.

　

But he made the trip for another reason, equally compelling: to discharge a debt of honor that had tugged at him for more than half a century.

Anthony John Francis Smith was born on March 30, 1926, in Taplow, in Buckinghamshire, and reared there at Cliveden — Lord and Lady Astor’s estate — where his father was employed as the manager.

After serving as a pilot with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in the 1940s, the young Mr. Smith earned a degree in zoology from Oxford.

His adventures began in his student days, when he and several classmates traveled to Iran in the summer of 1950 in search of a fabled eyeless white fish, said to inhabit the qanats, ancient irrigation tunnels there.

They did not find it, but the trip gave Mr. Smith his first book, "Blind White Fish in Persia," published in 1953.

His later books include "High Street Africa" (1961), which chronicles his five-month journey, much of it by motorcycle, from Cape Town to England; "Throw Out Two Hands" (1966), about crossing East Africa in a hydrogen balloon in 1962 (the balloon was thought to have exploded during the trip, and at least one British paper published Mr. Smith’s obituary); and "A Persian Quarter Century" (1979), in which Mr. Smith returned to Iran and discovered his storied fish — the blind cave loach, later named Nemacheilus smithi in his honor.

But the Atlantic always loomed. He had hungered to cross it under sail since he was a youth, when he read "Two Survived," a 1941 history of men who had made the journey and barely lived to the tell the tale. The book, by Guy Pearce Jones, recounts the fate of the British merchant ship Anglo Saxon, sunk by an armed German ship in 1940.

Seven seamen survived, escaping into the Atlantic in an 18-foot wooden craft known as a jolly boat. During their 70 days at sea, five died. Finally, after almost 3,000 miles, the two survivors — Roy Widdicombe, 21, and Robert Tapscott, 19, both near death — made landfall at Eleuthera, in the Bahamas.

Mr. Smith had long wanted to reprise the voyage in tribute to his two courageous countrymen, but he was waylaid by his professional life: He was a science correspondent for The Telegraph and later presented science programs on British radio and television.

Then, at the dawn of the 21st century, just when conventional wisdom dictated he should settle down among the roses, Mr. Smith revived the idea.

He chose to go by raft for a practical reason: A raft, he said, was more stable than a boat.

"You can sit on the deck in your bedroom slippers having a drink," Mr. Smith told The Telegraph in 2005. "I thought it would be far more civilized."

Out of similar pragmatism, he chose an older crew. "Older people are more cautious about themselves," he said in a 2011 interview. "They’re not as stupid as young people."

　

Anthony Smith’s raft, the Antiki, set sail for Eleuthera, Bahamas from La Gomera in the Canary Islands.

United States

Atlantic Ocean

Apr. 29, 2012

Arrives at Eleuthera,

Bahamas.

Apr. 6, 2011

The raft arrived at St. Maarten, some 700 miles off course.

Africa

Apr. 6, 2012

Smith sets sail from St. Maarten with a different crew.

1,000 miles

And so Mr. Smith placed his advertisement. More than 100 replies poured in from round the world, some touting qualifications not strictly suited to life at sea.

"Someone said he used to play the trombone," Mr. Smith told The Telegraph in 2005. (That application was rejected.)

As the crew was being assembled, so was the raft. Measuring 20 feet by 40 feet, the Antiki was made of lashed-together plastic pipes, which lent it buoyancy and also held 2,000 liters of drinking water. Its superstructure was a small hut of corrugated steel, modeled on those used to house pigs.

In 2009, as he strove to finance his venture, Mr. Smith, in England, was hit by a van. The accident crushed his hip and left him with a metal plate in one leg; to the end of his life, he walked with two canes. But the compensation he received paid for the journey.

On Jan. 30, 2011, the Antiki set sail from the Canary Islands stocked with three dozen tins of baked beans, several bottles of single-malt whisky, pasta, bananas and "a colossal pumpkin," as Mr. Smith described it in one of his weekly dispatches to The Telegraph.

Its navigational gear, a satellite phone and a computer were powered by a wind generator, solar panels and a foot pump. The raft had no motor; its single sail flew from a telephone pole.

Mr. Smith’s crew, though not as antique as he, was bereft of callow youth. The skipper, David Hildred, from the British Virgin Islands, was 57; the raft’s doctor, Andrew Bainbridge, from Canada, was 56; the fourth crewman, John Russell, an English lawyer, was 61.

The Antiki was a matchbox on the sea.

"There is an awful lot that could come our way — storm, unhelpful changes in wind, raft failure of any kind, whales of less gentle disposition," Mr. Smith told The Telegraph in a midvoyage interview.

On the third day, two rudders broke, though the crew managed to jury-rig replacements. Three times, winds blew the Antiki hundreds of miles in the wrong direction; the raft’s average speed was 2.1 knots — about 2.4 miles per hour.

But there were abundant pleasures: schools of dolphins and whales of gentle disposition; bread freshly baked in the raft’s tiny oven, as was the cake for Mr. Smith’s 85th birthday, celebrated at sea; and the accord of the crewmen, strangers at the start.

"The word ‘mutiny’ was only spoken about two or three times a day," Mr. Smith told The Associated Press. (His crew did maintain that in the 26 card games they played, Mr. Smith cheated on 27 occasions.)

On April 6, 2011, the Antiki made land at St. Maarten, in the Leeward Islands. Mr. Smith had hoped to land at Eleuthera as the sailors he honored had done, but the winds dictated otherwise.

In 2012, Mr. Smith completed the St. Maarten-to-Eleuthera leg aboard the Antiki with a new crew, a 700-mile journey that entailed high winds and savage seas.

Mr. Smith, a resident of Thame, in Oxfordshire, died of respiratory failure in an Oxford hospital, according to Robin Batchelor, a longtime friend.

His two marriages, to Barbara Newman and Margaret Ann Holloway, ended in divorce. Survivors include two sons, Adam and Quintin; three daughters, Vanessa, Laura and Isabelle; and a grandson.

Mr. Widdicombe, who survived the sinking of the Anglo Saxon, died in 1941; his shipmate Mr. Tapscott died in 1963. In the 1990s, Mr. Smith helped arrange to have their jolly boat, which had long lain in storage at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, repatriated to the Imperial War Museum in London.

Mr. Smith’s memoir of the Antiki’s voyage is scheduled to be issued by the British publisher Little, Brown Book Group in February.

Its title: "The Old Man & the Sea."

                          

James Garner, Witty, Handsome Leading Man, Dies at 86

By BRUCE WEBER  NY TIMESS

James Garner, the wry and handsome leading man who slid seamlessly between television and the movies but was best known as the amiable gambler Bret Maverick in the 1950s western “Maverick” and the cranky sleuth Jim Rockford in the 1970s series “The Rockford Files,” was found dead of natural causes at his Los Angeles home on Saturday night, the police said. He was 86.

Mr. Garner, who smoked for most of his life, even after open-heart surgery in 1988, had suffered a stroke in 2008.

He was a genuine star but as an actor something of a paradox: a lantern-jawed, brawny athlete whose physical appeal was both enhanced and undercut by a disarming wit. He appeared in more than 50 films, many of them dramas — but as he established in one of his notable early performances, as a battle-shy naval officer in “The Americanization of Emily” (1964) and had shown before that in “Maverick” — he was most at home as an iconoclast, a flawed or unlikely hero.

An understated comic actor, he was especially adept at conveying life’s tiny bedevilments. One of his most memorable roles was as a perpetually flummoxed pitchman for Polaroid cameras in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in droll commercials in which he played a vexed husband and Mariette Hartley played his needling wife. They were so persuasive that Ms. Hartley had a shirt printed with the declaration “I am not Mrs. James Garner.”

His one Academy Award nomination was for the 1985 romantic comedy “Murphy’s Romance,” in which he played a small-town druggist who woos the new-in-town divorced mom (Sally Field) with a mixture of self-reliance, grouchy charm and lack of sympathy for fools.

Even Rockford, a semi-tough ex-con (he had served five years on a bum rap for armed robbery) who lived in a beat-up trailer in a Malibu beach parking lot, drove a Pontiac Firebird and could handle himself in a fight (though he probably took more punches than he gave), was exasperated most of the time by one thing or another: his money problems, the penchant of his father (Noah Beery Jr.) for getting into trouble or getting in the way, the hustles of his con-artist pal Angel (Stuart Margolin), his dicey relationship with the local police.

“Maverick” had been in part a sendup of the conventional western drama, and “The Rockford Files” similarly made fun of the standard television detective, the man’s man who upholds law and order and has everything under control. A sucker for a pretty girl and with a distinctly ’70s fashion sense — he favored loud houndstooth jackets — Rockford was perpetually wandering into threatening situations in which he ended up pursued by criminal goons or corrupt cops. He tried, mostly successfully, to steer clear of using guns; instead, a bit of a con artist himself, he relied on impersonations and other ruses — and high-speed driving skills.

Every episode of the show, which ran from 1974 to 1980 and more often than not involved at least one car chase and Rockford’s getting beaten up a time or two, began with a distinctive theme song featuring a synthesizer and a blues harmonica and a message coming in on a newfangled gadget — Rockford’s telephone answering machine — that underscored his unheroic existence: “Jim, this is Norma at the market. It bounced. Do you want us to tear it up, send it back or put it with the others?”

 

In his 2011 autobiography, “The Garner Files,” written with Jon Winokur, Mr. Garner confessed to having a live-and-let-live attitude with the caveat that when he was pushed, he shoved back. What distinguished his performance as Rockford was how well that more-put-upon-than-macho persona came across. Rockford’s reactions — startled, nonplused and annoyed being his specialties — appeared native to him.

His naturalness led John J. O’Connor, writing in The New York Times, to liken Mr. Garner to Gary Cooper and James Stewart. And like those two actors, Mr. Garner usually got the girl.

Mr. Garner came to acting late, and by accident. On his own after the age of 14 and a bit of a drifter, he had been working an endless series of jobs: telephone installer, oil field roughneck, chauffeur, dishwasher, janitor, lifeguard, grocery clerk, salesman and, fatefully, gas station attendant. While pumping gas in Los Angeles, he met a young man named Paul Gregory, who was working nearby as a soda jerk but wanted to be an agent.

Years later, after Mr. Garner had served in the Army during the Korean War — he was wounded in action twice, earning two Purple Hearts — he was working as a carpet layer in Los Angeles for a business run by his father. One afternoon he was driving on La Cienega Boulevard and saw a sign: Paul Gregory & Associates. Just then a car pulled out of a space in front of the building, and Mr. Garner, on a whim, pulled in. He was 25.

Mr. Gregory, by then an agent and a theatrical producer, hired him for a nonspeaking part in his production of Herman Wouk’s “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” which starred Henry Fonda, John Hodiak and Lloyd Nolan. It opened in Santa Barbara and toured the country before going to Broadway, where it opened in January 1954 and ran for 415 performances. Mr. Garner said he learned to act from running lines with the stars and watching them perform, especially Fonda, another good-looking actor with a sly streak.

“I swiped practically all my acting style from him,” he once said.

Mr. Garner claimed to have stage fright and no desire to act in the theater. He later played Lieutenant Maryk (the Hodiak role) in a touring company of the play that starred Charles Laughton, but afterward would almost never appear onstage again. Still, it was the serendipitous stop on La Cienega that changed his life.

“The only reason I’m an actor is that a lady pulled out of a parking space in front of a producer’s office,” he wrote in “The Garner Files.”

James Scott Bumgarner was born in Norman, Okla., on April 7, 1928. His paternal grandfather had participated in the Oklahoma land rush of 1889 and was later shot to death by the son of a widow with whom he’d been having an affair. His maternal grandfather was a full-blooded Cherokee. (Mr. Garner would later name his production company Cherokee Productions.)

His first home was the back of a small store that his father, Weldon, known as Bill, ran in the nearby hamlet of Denver. His mother, Mildred, died when he was 4. When he was 7, the store burned down and his father left James and his two older brothers to be raised by relatives; when his father remarried, the family reunited, but James’s stepmother was abusive, he said in his memoir, and after a violent episode at home, he left.

 

 

He worked in Oklahoma, Texas and Los Angeles, where his father finally resettled. He went briefly to Hollywood High School but returned to Norman, where he played football and basketball, to finish. In 1950, when the Korean War broke out, he was drafted.

Mr. Garner’s first Hollywood break came when he met Richard L. Bare, a director of the television western “Cheyenne,” who cast him in a small part. That and other bit roles led to a contract with Warner Bros., which featured him in several movies — including “Sayonara” (1957), starring Marlon Brando and based on James Michener’s novel set in Japan about interracial romance — and sliced the first syllable from his last name.

His first lead role was in “Darby’s Rangers” (1958) as the World War II hero William Darby, a part he was given after Charlton Heston walked off the set in a dispute with the studio over money. At about the same time he was cast as the womanizing gambler Bret Maverick, the role that made him a star.

Alone among westerns of the 1950s, “Maverick,” which made its debut in 1957, was about an antihero. He didn’t much care for horses or guns, and he was motivated by something much less grand than law and order: money. But you rooted for him because he was on the right side of moral issues, he had a natural affinity for the little guy being pushed by the bully, and he was more fun than anyone else.

“If you look at Maverick and Rockford, they’re pretty much the same guy,” Mr. Garner wrote. “One is a gambler and the other a detective, but their attitudes are identical.”

In a Maverick-like (or Rockford-like) move, Mr. Garner left the series in 1960 after winning a breach-of-contract suit against Warner Bros. over its refusal to pay him during a writers’ strike. He did not return to series television for a decade.

He found steady work in movies, however. In “The Children’s Hour” (1961), an adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play, he played a doctor engaged to a schoolteacher (Audrey Hepburn) accused of being a lesbian. He appeared uncomfortable in that earnest role, but he was winning and warm in “The Great Escape” (1963), the World War II adventure about captured Allied fliers plotting to break out of a German prison camp, as Bob Hendley, the resourceful prisoner known as the Scrounger.

In 1964 he starred with Julie Andrews in “The Americanization of Emily,” which he called his favorite of all his films. He played the personal attendant of a Navy admiral, a fish out of water and the voice of the movie’s pacifist point of view.

Written by Paddy Chayefsky, it included perhaps the longest and most impassioned speech of his career: “I don’t trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham,” he said, in part. “It’s always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. And it’s always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades.”

In 1966, he starred as an avenging frontier scout in the violent western “Duel at Diablo” and as a high-speed driver in “Grand Prix,” a film that sparked his interest in auto racing. He drove in the Baja 1000 off-road race several times, and he drove the pace car at the Indianapolis 500 in 1975, 1978 and 1985.

 

He also appeared in romantic comedies, including three in 1963: “The Thrill of It All” and “Move Over, Darling,” both with Doris Day, and “The Wheeler Dealers,” opposite Lee Remick. There was also a comic western, “Support Your Local Sheriff” (1969), and a follow-up, “Support Your Local Gunfighter” (1971). Other notable films included “Victor/Victoria” (1982), in which he was reunited with Ms. Andrews and played a man who falls in love with a woman even though she has been masquerading as a man.

Mr. Garner was often injured on the job; during the Rockford years, he had several knee operations and back trouble. More seriously, in 1988, he had a quintuple bypass operation, which cost him his job as spokesman for the beef industry.

After surgery, he made a vigorous return to work. He appeared in the television films “My Name Is Bill W” (1989), starring James Woods as a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and “Barbarians at the Gate” (1993), based on the best-selling book about the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco; in “My Fellow Americans” (1996), a comic adventure in which he and Jack Lemmon played feuding former presidents who find themselves framed by the sitting president and end up together on the lam; and in the romantic film “The Notebook” (2004).

He also reprised his Rockford character in several television movies and appeared in the movie version of “Maverick” (1994) as Marshal Zane Cooper, a foil to the title character, played by Mel Gibson.

Of Mr. Garner’s other forays into series television, “Nichols” was said to have been his own favorite. A dark comic western set in Arizona in the early 20th century that was produced by Cherokee in 1971, it starred Mr. Garner as a retired soldier who becomes sheriff of his hometown. When NBC canceled it after one season, Mr. Garner was so incensed that he had his character killed in the final episode.

He later had recurring roles on a number of shows, including “Chicago Hope,” “First Monday” and “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter”; in the short-lived animated series “God, the Devil and Bob,” he was the voice of God.

Mr. Garner disdained the pretentiousness of the acting profession. “I’m a Methodist but not as an actor,” he wrote in “The Garner Files.” “I’m from the Spencer Tracy school: Be on time, know your words, hit your marks, and tell the truth. I don’t have any theories abut acting, and I don’t think about how to do it, except that an actor shouldn’t take himself too seriously, and shouldn’t try to make acting something it isn’t. Acting is just common sense. It isn’t hard if you put yourself aside and just do what the writer wrote.”

Nor did he sit still for the dog-eat-dog business side of Hollywood. In the early 1980s he again sued his employer, this time Universal, which he accused of cheating him out of his share of profits on “The Rockford Files.” Universal settled the case in 1989, reportedly paying him more than $14 million.

Mr. Garner, a lifelong Democrat who was active in behalf of civil rights and environmental causes, always said he met his wife, the former Lois Clarke, in 1956 at a presidential campaign rally for Adlai Stevenson, though in “The Garner Files” Mrs. Garner said they had actually met at a party earlier. She survives him, as do their daughter, Greta, known as Gigi; and Mrs. Garner’s daughter from a previous marriage, Kimberly.

Persuasively ambivalent as a hero of westerns, war movies and detective stories, Mr. Garner’s performances may have reflected his feelings about his profession.

“I was never enamored of the business, never even wanted to be an actor, really,” he told The New York Times in 1984. “It’s always been a means to an end, which is to make a living.”

The GOP self-destruction is complete: Millennials officially hate conservatives

The backlash machine has finally backfired with a generation that cringes at old people yelling at gay clouds

Ana Marie Cox The London Guardian

Conservatives are stuck in a perpetual outrage loop. The reappearance of Todd Akin, the horror-movie villain immortality of Sarah Palin, the unseemly celebration of the Hobby Lobby decision – these all speak to a chorus of "la-la-la-can't-hear-you" loud enough to drown out the voice of an entire generation. Late last week, the Reason Foundation released the results of a poll about that generation, the millennials; its signature finding was the confirmation of a mass abandonment of social conservatism and the GOP. This comes at a time when the conservative movement is increasingly synonymous with mean-spirited, prank-like and combative activism and self-important grand gestures. The millennial generation has repeatedly defined itself as the most socially tolerant of the modern era, but one thing it really can't stand is drama.

Republicans were already destined for piecemeal decimation due to the declining numbers of their core constituency. But they don't just have a demographic problem anymore; they have stylistic one. The conservative strategy of outrage upon outrage upon outrage bumps up against the policy preferences and the attitudes of millennials in perfect discord.

We all can recognize the right's tendency to respond to backlash with more "lash" (Akin didn't disappear, he doubled down on "legitimate rape"), but it seems to have gained speed with the age of social media and candidate tracking. The Tea Party's resistance to the leavening effect of establishment mores and political professionals has been a particularly effective accelerant. Palin's ability to put anything on the internet without any intermediary has rendered her as reckless as any tween with a SnapChat account. Akin's whiny denouncement of Washington insiders is likely to make him more credible with a certain kind of base voter. The midterms are, as we speak, producing another round of Fox News celebrities, whether or not they win their races: the Eric Cantor-vanquishing David Brat, Mississippi's Chris McDaniel and the hog-castrating mini-Palin, Jodi Ernst of Iowa.

The fire-with-fire attitude of hardline conservatives has its roots in the petulant cultural defensiveness adopted by the GOP – especially the Christian right – during the culture wars of the 90s. Their siege mentality bred an attitude toward liberals that saw every instance of social liberalization as proof of their own apocalyptic predictions and conspiracy theories. Gay marriage will lead to acceptance of beastiality and pedophilia. "Socialized medicine" will lead to the euthanizing Grandma. Access to birth control will lead to orgies in the streets.

Then came Obama's election, the Zapruder tape for the right's tin-foil hat haberdashers – a moment in history that both explained and exacerbated America's supposed decline. Dinesh D'Souza, the Oliver Stone of the Tea Party, has now made two movies about the meaning of Obama's presidency. The first, 2016: Obama's America, garnered an astounding $33m at the box office, and his lawyers blamed disappointing returns from this summer's America on a Google conspiracy to confuse moviegoers about its showtimes. (Of course.)

The GOP has long staked a claim on The Disappearing Angry White Man, but they have apparently ever-narrowing odds of getting a bite at millennials, who appear to be more like The Somewhat Concerned Multicultural Moderate. This generation is racially diverse, pro-pot, pro-marriage equality and pro-online gambling. They are troubled by the deficit but believe in the social safety net: 74% of millennials, according to Reason, want the government to guarantee food and housing to all Americans. A Pew survey found that 59% of Americans under 30 say the government should do more to solve problems, while majorities in all other age groups thought it should do less.

The Rupe-Reason poll teases out some of the thinking behind the surge of young people abandoning the GOP, and finds a generation that is less apt to take to the streets, Occupy-style, than to throw a great block party: lots of drugs, poker and gays! Millennials don't want to change things, apparently – they want everyone to get along. The report observes "[m]any specifically identified LGBTQ rights as their primary reason for being liberal"; and "[o]ften, they decided they were liberals because they really didn’t like conservatives."

But liberals can't be complacent about their demographic advantage. Their challenge is to resist the impulse to copycat the hysteria that has worked so well for the right historically. "No drama Obama" was the millennials' spirit animal – his popularity has sunk with the economy, but also with the administration's escalating rhetoric. Today, under-30 voters show a distinct preference for Hillary Clinton (39% according to Reason, 53% according to the Wall Street Journal), and no wonder: she's as bloodless as Bill was lusty, as analytical as Bill was emotional. The professorial Elizabeth Warren is the logical (very logical) backup.

Right now, Democrats benefit from both the form and content of conservative message: this next generation is not just inclusive, but conflict-adverse. Millennials cringe at the old-man-yelling-at-gay-clouds spectacle of the Tea Party. Perhaps this comes from living in such close proximity of their parents for so long. If this generation does have a political philosophy, it's this: "First, do no harm." If it has a guiding moral principle, it's simpler: "Don't be embarrassing."

'Apes' Director Matt Reeves on Why He Insisted on Creating a 'Caeser-centric' Film

by Carolyn Giardina

Hollywood Reporter

The movie "needed to be based around Andy Serkis," the director tells THR.

　

David James

One day on the set of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, director Matt Reeves was blocking a scene with a few of the actors, including Andy Serkis, who plays the movie's simian hero Caesar. "It was an emotional scene, and all we were doing was talking about it," says the director. "I turned to Andy, and he has tears streaming down his face. It took my breath away, because I realized he was already in the scene emotionally."

Reeves admits the powerful, emotive performance that Serkis gave as the lead ape in 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes is what attracted him to the sequel and why he felt Dawn, which opens today and appears to be on track to gross $65 million or more during its debut weekend, "needed to be built around Andy."

The Cloverfield director's journey with Apes started in early fall of 2012 when he was contacted by producers Dylan Clark and Peter Chernin. "They had been working with various writers and Rupert Wyatt (who directed the 2011 Apes reboot of 1968's Planet of the Apes), and they reached some kind of impasse where Rupert had decided it wasn't going in the direction that he wanted," Reeves says. "So they contacted me and asked, 'Would you like to come in?' I was such a fan of what they had done on the first film — I thought, 'I don't know.'

"They were in an interim space where they had moved away from what Rupert was doing," he continues. "But the thing that I had fallen in love with in the first movie was Caesar's story and the emotional identification with his character. [Also], at the end of the first film, you saw how the beginning of intelligence entered into the apes' world and the very beginning of the virtual apocalypse. And that would take us to the original film — it becomes the planet of the apes. With the outline they presented to me, I felt they had taken too far a leap and the story was not entirely Caesar-centric. So I said, 'I love the franchise and I think this will be a great movie. It's just not the movie I would do.' "

But the meeting didn't end there. Instead, Reeves was asked what he would do. His answer was an "Ape-world creation" film. "What if the beginning of this film was an Earth that seemed to have no humans on it, and what if it was the beginning of the apes' tribal development? What if you could be in the apes' world for a good 15 minutes, see what Caesar had created, and then realize all the humans are not gone — raising the question of can there be co-existence?

"This is the time where it could have become something other than the planet of the apes. It could have been the planet of the humans and the apes," Reeves explains. "Caesar had a human father and is caught in the middle. He has the empathy for both sides to try to find a way to have a better world than the one in the 1968 film. So why didn't it end up that way? What went wrong?"

To Reeves' "shock," he says, the producers agreed to let him do the film his way. "The catch was they still wanted to meet the release date," he adds, noting that that was originally Memorial Day weekend. But once production began, he got some extra time when the studio decided to switch its opening day with that of X-Men Days of Futures Past.

Mark Bomback had already been hired to write the next draft, based on the original outline, and Reeves and Bomback got right to work. "We had a draft by Christmas. We entered prepro and were shooting by March."

To make Dawn, the producers again turned to Peter Jackson's VFX house, Weta Digital, in Wellington, NZ. Just as on The Lord of the Rings and Wyatt's Apes film, the Weta artists and Serkis made a powerful team. "The core to the character comes from the facial expressions, the emotional commitment of the actor," Reeves said. "What you have there is a genius of an actor. With Weta, their genius is in their artistry. It's not a simple thing to take a performance and turn it into an ape."

"There was a fair amount of new software development," explains Joe Letteri, senior VFX supervisor at Weta. "Fur was a big one. We had a pretty good way to groom the fur last time, but it didn't have much interaction with rain, contact in fighting. We wrote new software to handle the fur dynamics. Because we had large crowds of apes, we also wrote a new renderer to deal with the global illumination [the way that light gets into a CG shot without coming directly from a light source] in a more robust way." Weta had developed an earlier version of the software for Avatar.

This development and skillful artistry is evident in the scene where the apes go to the humans for the first time. Says Letteri: "We had about 1,200 apes in an outdoor environment. You really see the global illumination. The detail in the fur effects might be more visible in the close-ups, such as in the early part of the film where viewers see the apes' community as they bond and talk about their issues."

Reeves also wanted to push the filmmaking techniques. "I wanted to take the level of photo reality to a higher level of excellence. A lot of the first film was shot on a stage. But we shot about 85 percent of Dawn on location [around Vancouver and New Orleans]," he relates. "I wanted it to be in the jungle; I wanted real weather with real natural light." (Serkis describes the shoot in an interview with THR here).

"We did a little bit on location [in Rise], but it was in a park, so it wasn't that different from being on set," Letteri adds. "But on this one, especially for the opening with the rain and mud, we had to re-engineer all the equipment with new microprocessors for the sensors, wireless systems for the cameras and ways to transport the systems and use them in the rain.

"To me, it's the kind of thing that happened when cameras and film stock became light enough and fast enough for studios to start shooting a lot of location work — where you're able to just go wherever the director wants to go to tell the story."

Adding to the complexity, Reeves says that since the studio wanted a 3D version, they decided to shoot in stereo rather than do a conversion. "Weta suggested that if we wanted to shoot in the woods, the detail in the trees wouldn't be as effective or realistic [using conversion] as native 3D. I sentenced us to the worst possible shoot — mocap cameras and 3D rigs [Arri Alexas with 3Ality Technica rigs]. This equipment was so heavy; we used crane arms unless we were on a dolly — and that was hard to do on a hillside in the rain and mud. But I felt it would take the level of reality and increase it."

While Reeves agreed to do a 3D version of Dawn, he admitted he didn't want the "traditional CG tentpole aesthetic," but his view on 3D changed after watching Life of Pi. "I had wondered if you can do soft, shallow focus in 3D. [After viewing Pi], I thought, 'Not only is it not going to be a problem, it's going to be beautiful.' "

For some shots, though, it was still unrealistic to attempt to shoot them as live action. For instance, Letteri reveals that the portion of the film's climatic battle that takes place in a skyscraper is a sequence that is fully CG.

Asked about the third film in the franchise, Reeves admits: "I have ideas. … People have asked me 'does it spoil the story because [the viewer] knows the ending?' But there are other stories where you already know what happened, and the question is how did it get there? Those stories are always more psychological — about story and character."

David Brat’s Hand-of-God Economics

By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM  NY TIMES

Even before David Brat’s out-of-nowhere victory against Eric Cantor last month, there was plenty of skepticism about whether he merited the label of academic economist. Brat, a professor at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, is certainly not in danger of winning a Nobel Prize: He writes discursive papers devoid of math; he has cited Wikipedia as a source; and he has never been published in a significant journal. But his big idea — that Protestantism is good for the economy — has a surprisingly distinguished history.

The financial crisis of 2008 shook an abiding faith in the free markets that had dominated policy making for a generation. Liberals responded by calling for increased regulation. Conservatives, distrustful of both Wall Street and government, have struggled to articulate their own alternative. But Brat, who describes himself as a "100 percent free-market-Milton-Friedman-Chicago-School-Hayek economist," saw confirmation of his longstanding idea that markets are perfect places inhabited by imperfect beings. On the campaign trail, Brat declared that bankers should have gone to jail and that "crony capitalists," like Cantor, had undermined the system. "I’m not against business," he said. "I’m against big business in bed with big government."

1. David Brat isn’t going to win a Nobel Prize in economics.

2. But he is hardly the first to argue that religion is good for growth.

3. Unfortunately, faith is not enough.

Instead of arguing for any specific regulation, however, Brat said that the system simply needed more virtue. "We should love our neighbor so much that we actually believe in right and wrong and do something about it," he wrote in a 2011 essay for Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology. "If we all did the right thing and had the guts to spread the word, we would not need the government to backstop every action we take."

The idea that religion plays a role in economic growth was most famously advocated by the German sociologist Max Weber. In his 1905 book, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," he argued that Protestant countries developed more quickly because they embraced hard work as a virtue. Over the decades, others have continued to see merit in the theory, including J. Bradford DeLong, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who presented statistical evidence for it in a 1988 paper. Even Friedrich Hayek, a professed agnostic, grudgingly acknowledged the role of religion. "Like it or not," he once wrote, "we owe the persistence of certain practices, and the civilization that resulted from them, in part to support from beliefs which are not true."

Weber’s view has since fallen out of favor, but Brat, who studied at a Presbyterian seminary before pursuing a degree in economics, has tried to carry on an extreme variant of this tradition anyway. In his doctoral thesis at American University, "Human Capital, Religion and Economic Growth," he argued that Protestant countries grew more quickly because they were particularly supportive of scientific exploration. The role of religion was "not large compared to other factors," but ignoring it would "be a significant omission." Over the years, he has grown only more convinced of his views. "The one source of economic growth is virtue," he told The Richmond Times-Dispatch last year. "It is not property rights, not law or resources, but virtue."

Brat’s political success suggests a fundamental evolution in the Republican Party. During the late 1990s, Senator Phil Gramm and Representative Dick Armey, former economics professors, played key roles in the government’s deregulation of the financial industry. Gramm helped write the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which cleared the way for the emergence of financial supermarkets, like Citigroup, that offered banking and brokerage and insurance services. Armey, as the House majority leader, was a noted deficit hawk.

But neither of them identified closely with the Christian right. Free-market economists, after all, are explicit that companies are held accountable by customers, competitors and shareholders: They don’t need the government’s help, and they don’t need God’s either. Religious voters effectively ended Gramm’s bid for the presidency in early 1996, when he was upset by Pat Buchanan in the Louisiana caucus. And Armey, who left Congress in 2003, has continued to argue that some of the Christian right’s views are at odds with a libertarian commitment to individual freedom. "When the social conservatives and the economic conservatives work well together is when they work with a common resistance to the growth of the power of the state," Armey said in 2010. "My point is very simple: You live a righteous life, you’re an encouragement to other people; use the state to impose it, and you’re a tyrant."

But whereas the Republican Party was once a coalition of capitalists and Christians, it’s increasingly populated by people who profess belief in both. David E. Campbell, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, has found a significant overlap between the Tea Party and the religious right. In 2006, Campbell and his collaborator, Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard University, interviewed about 3,000 Americans. When most were interviewed again, in 2011, the professors found that the people most likely to identify with the Tea Party were those who previously wanted religion to play a large role in government. Campbell said that it made sense that people who came of age when the Republican Party was a coalition of those two things are now forming a generation that "is just going to believe in both things."

Brat may be a politician for his time, but it is hard to have faith that religion holds the answer to our economic problems. Bankers continue to behave badly, but the markets break down even when participants are virtuous. Government regulation isn’t meant to substitute for failed virtue. It’s there to make markets work.

Binyamin Appelbaum is an economics reporter for The Times.