I wonder what the value is of a show like House of Cards vs, say, Jessica Jones, to a producer of content like Netflix. The former has major stars, a cult-like following that is large, and is great critical success. The latter also has some kick-ass stars but probably fewer, is a bit of a niche product (there are people who will glaze over at the idea of watching a “super hero” show, even though it really isn’t) and seems to have less hype, possibly watered down by the nearly simultaneous production of a handful of different parallel integrated complexly interrelated productions.

So, had you been a wise investor in Netflix productions, you would have been invested heavily in House of Cards, with all its high cost, high compensation, high production value, and less invested in Jessica Jones, because it also is probably fairly expensive to make, but it has a much less well known star (Krysten Ritter) as opposed to the great and famous Kevin Spacey.

But things do not always work out as planned.

It may well turn out that House of Cards will be of very little future value compered to Jessica Jones, assuming Krysten Ritter is not exposed as a sexual exploiter of some kind. Nobody will be re-watching the first few years of the House of Cards, or at least, no one other than the MRAs and people who just never heard. So one can look back and say that the wise investors were fooled, maybe even ripped off. Right?

Well, not really. Investors got what the were (not) asking for. The Patriarchy rarely examines itself, and had it done so, there might have been routine inspection of productions to check for … certain things … before piling in piles of production money. But it does not so there was not.

I heard many times a story from a friend that I always avoided repeating, but now that everyone (in the story) is dead, I have no compunction.

It was Michael Crichton, who as an alum was a long time friend of Harvard’s Department of Anthropology, visiting and staying at my adivsor and friend, Irv DeVore’s house. DeVore was one of the founders of modern primatology and hunter-gatherer studies. Michael was staying at DeVore’s place, as he sometimes did as a member of the department’s “Visiting Committee.” At the same time, he was working on a move.

By the way, one of his books was based in large part on the research project I was engaged in at the time, using the location and many of the stories brought back from the field to fuel the writing (though the plot of the book had very little to do with the course of the research!). It might have been the movie based on that book that was being developed at that time. But I digress.

As told to me by Irv, Michael Crichton spent considerable time on the phone, as a producer for the upcoming movie, with the casting director and others, trying to figure out which actors they could rely on, which actors were currently in rehab, or likely to cop out because of some drug or alcohol related binge, or who were in the middle of a messy divorce, or some other distracting activities.

This wasn’t just Crichton being a moralist or paranoid. It was standard procedure in producing a movie. It is a main job of casting directors and producers. You have to weigh the costs and benefits of hiring a given actor, where the costs often included the risks of an actor becoming unusable, or costing production a lot more than they should, because of bad behavior.

The point is, considering the behavior of actors has long been part of the process of producing film and I assume TV. Those conversations on the phone with Crichton were happening in the 1980s.

Yet, for some reason, this never seems to have included sexual misconduct, harassment, or similar. It never occurred to the producers and other movers and shakers that a) women (mostly) and men (sometimes) on the set or in some other context might be unduly burdened with felonious and obnoxious acts carried out against them, or that b) the value of a series or movie might drop precipitously if it tuned out a star was a sexual harasser, predator, or similar, and that became generally known.

Never. Occurred. To. Anyone.

Give that some thought.

The patriarchy is blind to its own misdeeds. The free market assumes the involvement of “ideal free actors.” “Free” in this case means free to make choices. “Ideal” in this case means all the actors have the same information, complete information, and are therefore “free” to act in the same way as each other if they chose. That is how you get rational choices being made, and that is how the decision makers, or the decisions themselves, are tested against each other, with the best ones winning and coming out ahead in the end. Plus or minus random effects.

Only then is a free market an actual free market, a maximizer of profit, and optimizer of process.

But in reality, the making of movies and TV shows, and many other endeavours in and out of Hollywood, involve “Ideal–free actors.” Notice the added dash. Notice the lack of ideals, of ethics and morals. Notice that for decades felonious acts on the set or elsewhere in the production process were expected, assumed to be normal. Boys will be boys, producers will be producers, stars will be stars. Decades after the deployment of anti sexual harassment HR policies across the rest of the professional world, film and TV investors remained (willfully?) blind, decades after the deployment of methods to avoid losing production money because some actors had turned into a crack head or some director stopped going to meetings, nobody cared about the issues of sexual harassment, assault, and similar.

So much for the free market.

By the way, I’m enjoying Jessica Jones. If you are a Dr. Who Fan, note that David Tennant plays a super villian for part of the show.

Some video treats:

He was a cultural anthropologist who realized during his first field season that a) he was not cut out to be a cultural anthropologist and b) most of the other cultural anthropologists were not either. Soon after he became Washburn’s student and independently invented the field study of complex social behavior in primates (though some others were heading in that direction at the same time), producing his famous work on the baboons of Kenya’s Nairobi National Park. For many years, what students learned about primate behavior, they learned from that work.

Later he and Richard Lee, along with John Yellen, Alison Brooks, Henry Harpending, and others started up the study of Ju/’hoansi Bushmen along the Namibian/Botswana border. One of the outcomes of that work was the famous Werner Gren conference and volume called “Man the Hunter.” That volume has two roles in the history of anthropology. First, it launched modern forager studies. Second, it became one of the more maligned books in the field of Anthropology. I have yet to meet a single person who has a strong criticism of that book that is not based on having not read it.

For many years, much of what students learned about human foragers, they learned from that work.

DeVore supported the rise of Sociobiology but his version of it was nuanced and investigatory, not dogmatic and oversimplified as the subfield eventually came to be. He fought with Lewontin though they essentially agreed on salient points. He launched a number of outstanding researchers mainly in primate studies, and well understood the problem of sexism in the field. So, many of his proteges were women, and many of those are now household names (if you live in a house of anthropologists). Barbara Smutts, Nadine Peacock, and Sarah Hrdy for example. Karen Strier holds the Irv Devore Chair at Madison. Eventually he hooked up with Bob Trivers, who was busy re-inventing the newly invented Behavioral Biology. Cosmides and Tooby were his students as well and he was their champion. He also supported the work of Daly and Wilson.

For years he taught one or another version of “Sex”, the nickname for his course on human behavioral biology. Imagine a course taught for decades, a required course with 500 students a year, at a small but elite college like Harvard. How many students learned what they learned about human behavior from DeVore? Those of us who were involved in “Sex” saw this now and then: a Hollywood movie with one of Irv’s examples from the animal world worked into the script, or a novel with such a reference, etc. … yup, the writer or director was one of those students.

One of my first meetings with DeVore was at the home of David Maybury-Lewis, down the street from Irv’s house. DeVore pulled me aside and assigned me to be the head teaching fellow for that course. I was horrified. He forced me into the job. I did it poorly, since I was an archaeologist with virtually zero background in the field and most of the other TA’s (about eight of them) were advanced PhD students or post docs. Eventually I learned the ropes but I think I managed to avoid being head TA ever again (Jay Phelan, my Suaboya, was not so lucky, that became his job for many years). I later served as Irv’s understudy, when he was getting a series of brain surgeries. I waited in the wings to step onto the lecture hall floor in case he succumbed. That never happened, but I did take a couple of the lectures while he was in hospital. I gave his lectures as he would have given them, including jokes and personal stories (but with the personal stories in third person). When he returned he re-told all the jokes and personal stories in case I had messed them up. Like I said, he could be annoying. But I digress.

By the time I was on DeVore’s teaching staff, the Harvard Ituri Project, started by Bob Bailey and Peter Ellison, was well underway and I was sent off to do my PhD fieldwork there. That project was also championed by DeVore, he was in the field there for a while.

DeVore had a major impact on Harvard’s Anthropology department. He was mainly responsible for the division of that department into autonomous wings, which eventually led to the separation of the biological anthropology wing from the rest of the Department. This is important because the entire field in the US was under similar pressures. When Harvard “split” into wings, all the other departments were free to ask themselves if they should too. I remember the very famous head of a very major anthro department visiting to see what a split department looked like. Over subsequent years some split, some entrenched.

In homage to an inspiration of this post, I provide this link to the secret, generally unseen obituary of Professor Irven Boyd DeVore.

DeVore was instrumental in shaping the faculty of the whole department, but mainly the biological anthropology wing. It is fair to say that David Pilbeam, Peter Ellison, and Richard Wrangham are on that faculty in large part because of Irv.

As I say, my relationship with Irv was complicated, but it was good. I was his last PhD student, though he had a hand in the careers of other later students. I was his confidant (one among others) and he was mine. We often met up at the end of the day in his office to debrief, he’d have a drink. He kept his scotch in a fake book flask. Then we would leave together, and he’d drive me home, or I’d drive him home, or we’d go to his place to hang out.

Of all of these things that happened in his career, the research and the effects on the field of Anthropology, his wife Nancy DeVore was as much a part as he. Irv’s deployment of his advisory duties often involved Nancy. Nancy taught me a lot about writing and editing, for example. Over the last few years, his daughter, Claire, has taken on the difficult burden of caring for a difficult person having a difficult time. Claire is as unique and potent a person as her father. I love both of you, Nancy and Claire.

I’ll probably say more at another time. That’s all I’ve got now. Meanwhile, here is an obit at the NYT.

Photo from AnthroPhoto, a Nancy and Claire DeVore project.

Anyway, you all know what a corgi looks like (see the video linked above if you don’t) and the major feature of these dogs is their short legs.

Now, around the corner from Irv’s house was a restaurant called Nicks. Or Charlies. Depends on when you may have gone there (the name changed, but nothing else about the place did). If you’ve ever seen the movie The Paper Chase, then you’ve seen this restaurant. It’s the place the law students go and hang out. If you’ve read this post you’ve experienced this hamburger joint vicariously. But all you really need to know about Nicks for this story are two things:

1) In the evening, it is increasingly full of increasingly drunk Harvard Law students, Anthropology and Science graduate students, and older undergrads; and

2) The front door of Nicks is hard to open and when it does open there is an explosive exchange of air between the inside and outside so a lot of strange things can happen. This occurs because of the big fire inside the restaurant where they cook all the hamburgers (… and lamb chop platters).

So every evening Irv would walk Dillon around the neighborhood where he would defecate in designated spots behind bushes and in various nooks. (Dillon, not Irv. Defecating.) Very commonly, Irv would take a swing around to Mass Avenue, and part of his walk would bring him south from Linnaean Street, and thus, past Nicks.

So one evening, a bit late, Irv and Dillon were heading south on Linnaean Street, and just about to cross in front of Nicks. Suddenly, the door of the restaurant burst open. A vast amount of air was instantly sucked into the restaurant to replace the O2 that had been burned out of the atmosphere. The responding recoil shock wave caught the young man who was about to stagger out of the restaurant off guard, and as he stepped out onto the side walk, he lost his balance and fell to his knees, his baseball cap flying in one direction and his eyeglasses in the other direction.

Irv instantly stopped in is tracks and reigned in the corgi, who stood waiting and at the ready, as well trained dogs do.

The young man started to get his wits about him, and still on all fours looked around and found himself face to face with Dillon.

Dillon stared at the student. The student stared at Dillon.

And after a moment of contemplation, the stunned young man vociferated a startled lament:

“Lassie!” he yelled. “What have they done to your legs!?!?!?”

In homage to an inspiration of this post, I provide this link to the secret, generally unseen obituary of Professor Irven Boyd DeVore.