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With Money at Risk, Hospitals Push Staff to Wash Hands
http://nyti.ms/ZcRm1K
At North Shore University Hospital on Long Island, motion sensors, like those used for burglar alarms, go off every time someone enters an intensive care room. The sensor triggers a video camera, which transmits its images halfway around the world to India, where workers are checking to see if doctors and nurses are performing a critical procedure: washing their hands.
This Big Brother-ish approach is one of a panoply of efforts to promote a basic tenet of infection prevention, hand-washing, or as it is more clinically known in the hospital industry, hand-hygiene. With drug-resistant superbugs on the rise, according to a recent report by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and with hospital-acquired infections costing $30 billion and leading to nearly 100,000 patient deaths a year, hospitals are willing to try almost anything to reduce the risk of transmission.
Studies have shown that without encouragement, hospital workers wash their hands as little as 30 percent of the time that they interact with patients. So in addition to the video snooping, hospitals across the country are training hand-washing coaches, handing out rewards like free pizza and coffee coupons, and admonishing with “red cards.” They are using radio-frequency ID chips that note when a doctor has passed by a sink, and undercover monitors, who blend in with the other white coats, to watch whether their colleagues are washing their hands for the requisite 15 seconds, as long as it takes to sing the “Happy Birthday” song.
All this effort is to coax workers into using more soap and water, or alcohol-based sanitizers like Purell.
“This is not a quick fix; this is a war,” said Dr. Bruce Farber, chief of infectious disease at North Shore.
But the incentive to do something is strong: under new federal rules, hospitals will lose Medicare money when patients get preventable infections.
One puzzle is why health care workers are so bad at it. Among the explanations studies have offered are complaints about dry skin, the pressures of an emergency environment, the tedium of hand washing and resistance to authority (doctors, who have the most authority, tend to be the most resistant, studies have found).
“There are still staff out there who say, ‘How dare they!’ ” said Elaine Larson, a professor in Columbia University’s school of nursing who has made a career out of studying hand-washing.
Philip Liang, who founded a company, General Sensing, that outfits hospital workers with electronic badges that track hand-washing, attributes low compliance to “high cognitive load.”
“Nurses have to remember hundreds — thousands — of procedures,” Mr. Liang said. “Take out the catheter; change four medications. It’s really easy to forget the basic tasks. You’re really concentrating on what’s difficult, not on what’s simple.”
His company uses a technology similar to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The badge communicates with a sensor on every sanitizer and soap dispenser, and with a beacon behind the patient’s bed. If the wearer’s hands are not cleaned, the badge vibrates, like a cellphone, so that the health care worker is reminded but not humiliated in front of the patient.
Just waving one’s hands under the dispenser is not enough. “We know if you took a swig of soap,” Mr. Liang said.
The program uses a frequent-flier model to reward workers with incentives, sometimes cash bonuses, the more they wash their hands.
Gojo Industries, which manufactures the ubiquitous Purell, has also developed technology that can be snapped into any of its soap or sanitizer dispensers to track hand-hygiene.
At North Shore, the video monitoring program, run by a company called Arrowsight, has been adapted from the meat industry, where cameras track whether workers who skin animals — the hide can contaminate the meat — wash their hands, knives and electric cutters.
Adam Aronson, the chief executive of Arrowsight, said he was inspired to go from slaughterhouses to hospitals by his father, Dr. Mark Aronson, vice chairman for quality at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and a professor at Harvard Medical School.
“Nobody would do a free test — they talked about Big Brother, patient privacy — nobody wanted to touch it,” Mr. Aronson said.
He finally got a trial at a small surgery center in Macon, Ga., and in 2008, North Shore also agreed to a trial in its intensive care unit. The medical center at the University of California, San Francisco, is also using Arrowsight’s video system, and Mr. Aronson said eight more hospitals in the United States, Britain, the Netherlands and Pakistan had agreed to test the cameras.
North Shore’s study, published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, found that during a 16-week preliminary period when workers were being filmed but were not informed of the results, hand-hygiene rates were less than 10 percent. When they started getting reports on their filmed behavior, through electronic scoreboards and e-mails, the rates rose to 88 percent. The hospital kept the system, but because of the expense, it has limited it to the intensive care unit, where the payoff is greatest because the patients are sickest.
To get a passing score, workers have to wash their hands within 10 seconds of entering a patient’s room. Only workers who stay in the room for at least a minute are counted, and the quality of their washing is not rated. Scores for each shift are broadcast on hallway scoreboards, which read “Great Shift” for those that top 90 percent compliance.
Technology is not the only means of coercion. The Greater New York Hospital Association, a trade group, and the health care workers union, 1199 S.E.I.U., train employees to be “infection coaches” for other employees.
In a technique borrowed from soccer, hospital workers hand red cards to colleagues who do not wash, said Dr. Brian Koll, chief of infection prevention for Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, who trains coaches. (Unlike soccer players, however, workers do not have to leave.) “It’s a way to communicate in a nonconfrontational way that also builds teamwork,” Dr. Koll said.
“You do not want to say, ‘You did not wash your hands.’ ”
Doctors, nurses and others at Beth Israel who consistently refuse to wash their hands may be forced to take a four-hour remedial infection prevention course, Dr. Koll said. But to turn that into something positive, they are then asked to teach infection prevention to others.
Dr. Koll said that he was not aware of malpractice suits based on hand-washing, but that hand-washing compliance rates often become part of the information used when suing hospitals for infections.
A hospital in the Bronx gave out tickets — sort of like traffic tickets — to workers who did not wash their hands, he said. “That did not work in our institution,” he said. “People made it a negative connotation.” Beth Israel finds that positive reinforcement works better, Dr. Koll said.
Like other hospitals, Beth Israel also uses what it calls secret shoppers — staff members, often medical students, in white coats whose job is to observe whether people are washing their hands. Beth Israel gives high-scoring workers gold stars to wear on their lapels, “hokey as this sounds,” he said; after five gold stars they get a platinum star, or perhaps a coupon for free coffee. “Health care workers like caffeine,” Dr. Koll said.
There are buttons saying, “Ask me if I’ve washed my hands,” and Dr. Koll said that patients’ families did ask because they understood the risks. Especially in pediatrics, he said, “parents do not have a problem at all asking.”
To avoid slogan fatigue, Beth Israel has at least five buttons, including “Got Gel?” and “Hand Hygiene First.”
Dr. Larson, the hand-washing expert, supports the electronic systems being developed, but says none are perfect yet. “People learn to game the system,” she said. “There was one system where the monitoring was waist high, and they learned to crawl under that. Or there are people who will swipe their badges and turn on the water, but not wash their hands. It’s just amazing.”
Task Forces Offer Hoarders a Way to Dig Out
http://nyti.ms/18t4uSZ
YORBA LINDA, Calif. — Wet rag in hand, the older woman was trying to clean her filthy, packed garage to comply with a warning that she was violating city codes. As two officials approached to check on her progress, she proudly pointed to an open box in which she had placed two dead rats.
For maximum display, she had perched the box atop one of the garage’s many dense, waist-high piles: bins overflowing with clothes and cans, a bicycle frame, a mildewed mop.
Darren Johnson, an inspector with the Orange County Fire Authority, and Mary Lewis, a city code enforcement officer, smiled encouragingly. They maneuvered into the woman’s townhouse, its passageways blocked by the detritus of a troubled life. Both are members of the Orange County Task Force on Hoarding, trained not to gag at the stench, even as their shoes squished on newspapers slippery with rat urine.
Mr. Johnson, who with Ms. Lewis accompanied a reporter into the woman’s home on the condition that she not be identified, shined a flashlight over tangled electrical cords and ancient magazines. If a fire broke out, he told the woman, “my guys would have a tough time getting inside.”
“So we’d have to get you out through the window,” he told her. “But it would be hard for you to climb through this stuff to get there.”
The fire inspector added softly, “Can you let us help you clean this up, to save yourself and not put everyone else at risk?”
An estimated 3 percent to 5 percent of Americans suffer from hoarding, which was officially recognized as a disorder this month in a psychiatric diagnostic manual. But the impact of hoarding extends beyond the afflicted individual and relatives in the home: the behavior can also put immediate neighbors at risk, by creating perfect conditions for explosive house fires and infestations of vermin and disease.
Across the country, local officials like Mr. Johnson and Ms. Lewis have begun grappling with hoarding as a serious public health hazard. More than 85 communities — from San Jose, Calif., to Wichita, Kan., to Portland, Me. — have established task forces, hoping to stave off catastrophes and help hoarders turn their lives around.
The task forces on hoarding are finding their mandates daunting. With each case, officials must weigh when their authority to intervene trumps an individual’s right to privacy.
“The nature of the disorder demands multiple resources,” said Christiana Bratiotis, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. “No one discipline has all the expertise needed.”
The task forces typically include people from support as well as enforcement perspectives, added Dr. Bratiotis, a co-author of “The Hoarding Handbook,” an intervention guide. “There is value in the carrot-and-stick approach.”
Hoarding disorder is poorly understood, complex and often recurring: over decades, cases wax, wane and become chronic. It is distinct from cluttering or insatiable collecting. The self-soothing need to acquire, coupled with a paralyzing inability to discard, significantly impairs one’s ability to function.
Over the years, a hoarder’s health and hygiene become dangerously compromised. Because stoves, sinks and tubs are used for storage, cooking and bathing become impossible. Sleep becomes a relative term. When the queen-size bed of a rocket engineer Mr. Johnson tried to help became buried under mounds, the man simply hoisted a twin mattress on top. In 2010, a Chicago couple was found buried alive under years of possessions.
The possibility of a hot, hungry fire increases over time. First, utility bills become buried under snowdrifts of paper, so people forget to pay them. Electricity is turned off. Then residents use candles for light and gas burners for heat, inches from swaying towers of cherished trash.
In October 2011, a couple died in a fire in Dana Point, Calif. — a home that officials had tried for years to get cleaned up. Last October, a fire in Old Greenwich, Conn., destroyed a home that officials called inaccessible, leaving a woman critically burned.
In November, a Chicago man was burned, five of his dogs died and a neighbor’s home was scorched. Pat Brennan, a chief with the Chicago Fire Department, told reporters at the scene: “He was a hoarder. It impeded our progress.”
And the problem is not confined to the United States: a 2009 study found that the homes of hoarders accounted for 24 percent of preventable residential fires in Melbourne, Australia.
Task forces are also confronting another public health threat: infestations. After water is shut off, residents may urinate in bottles and defecate in the yard. Bacteria invade. Maggots feast. Vermin burrow.
In September, a woman who was trying to clean up a hoarder’s house featured on a reality TV show tested positive for the rodent-borne hantavirus and was hospitalized, although follow-up tests for hantavirus were negative; the house was briefly placed under quarantine. And particularly when a home shares walls with neighbors in an apartment building or a condo complex, contagion spreads.
Traditional methods for confronting hoarders are increasingly considered draconian and ineffective, creating new problems. Municipal cleanup crews or family members would throw the hoarded contents into a Dumpster, as the homeowner watched, traumatized. Officials would seek civil or criminal penalties.
In extreme cases, a hoarder’s home — floorboards weakened, waste pipes neglected, mold growing deep inside walls — would be condemned. Evicted homeowners and tenants, mentally ill and often estranged from relatives, became homeless.
A pilot study last year led by Carolyn Rodriguez, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, found that of 115 clients who sought help from a New York City nonprofit organization to avoid eviction, 22 percent had clinically diagnosed hoarding disorder. In Boston, representatives from MassHousing, a nonprofit group, try to prevent evictions by showing housing court judges that tenants who hoard have a disorder and are receiving help.
Each task force is a loose amalgam of agencies and, depending on what resources they can muster, their goals may range from educating one another and the public to collaborating on cases. But some uniform procedures, and problems, are emerging.
Many task forces around the country use a standard checklist to rank homes. Those rated at levels 1 through 3 may need intervention but may not have descended into squalor.
“I’ve never seen a level 5” — the highest — “be cleaned up for less than $20,000,” said Mr. Johnson, the inspector, who travels among 23 cities in Orange County and says he sees between 60 and 80 severe cases a year. In some cases, public funds may be available to help cover the cost.
After evaluating a home for fire hazards, he may call in pest control, social workers who specialize in older adults — whose hoarding may have gone undetected for decades — and cleanup crews affiliated with the county’s task force. He will enter notes in a database for first responders, so that if there is a fire or other first-aid emergency at the home, they will be warned which entrances are blocked and to wear additional protective gear.
But even for a comprehensive task force, hoarding cases present harrowing, poignant obstacles, chief among them the homeowners’ fervent resistance to intervention.
Over the years, they increasingly withdraw, terrified of losing their possessions. Mr. Johnson has fended off vicious dogs and faced down armed hoarders. He spent two years trying to clean up one household. He leaves his card, returns every few weeks, brings sandwiches and intercepts residents outside the home.
Another challenge is the stigma of hoarding, dissuading many from seeking help. Some task forces have considered renaming themselves. The Wichita and Sedgwick County Hoarding Coalition offers a “What a Mess Workshop” and a “Clutter Cleaners Club.”
One impediment is whether officials have the right to gain access to a hoarder’s space, particularly to private dwellings. Although landlords and condominium property managers have the right to enter residences, those who do not share walls enjoy greater rights to privacy.
While each municipality has sanitation and building codes, enforcement is discretionary and selective. Even when neighbors complain of unsightly yards or noxious fumes, once those issues are addressed, compelling a homeowner to tackle the interior is problematic.
In egregious cases, said Capt. William Cummins, a fire official in Shrewsbury, Mass., task force members have gone to civil court for an administrative warrant.
But even after a home is rendered habitable, relapse is likely, especially if the underlying causes are not resolved.
Years ago, the woman in the Yorba Linda townhouse had gotten the courage to fill a Dumpster with hoarded materials, although there was plenty left.
“A therapist told me I should at least throw out my papers, but I couldn’t,” she told Ms. Lewis, the code enforcement officer, during the site visit. “There were checks in there somewhere,” she said.
Ms. Lewis learned of the woman’s situation from the complex’s property manager, after a crew came to fix an interior leak that was making one of her walls collapse. To get more information and gain her trust as they inched their way through her home, Ms. Lewis and Mr. Johnson gently chatted her up.
Did she need food? Medication? Since Ms. Lewis had already extended the stick of code enforcement, they now both offered carrots for the cleanup.
Mr. Johnson had a friend at a vermin-control agency who could help. Ms. Lewis had a list of cleaning crews, mentioning that the woman might be eligible for a grant to defray costs.
Mr. Johnson wondered if he might stop by to install smoke detectors. The woman looked relieved. She promised to attend a therapist-led group in nearby Buena Park.
“I didn’t come into this world a hoarder,” she said. “I’m 76 now. I’m not leaving as one.”
Summer’s Steeds, Back Home
http://nyti.ms/10Z5vNk
It has pictures of the carousel horses!
http://nyti.ms/13MnGdi
One at a time, they loaded the horses into the truck. The dapple grays and the chestnut mares were maneuvered onto a tractor-trailer where they nestled snugly together, wrapped in moving blankets.
“The herd’s coming home,” said Todd W. Goings, a carousel restorer in Marion, Ohio. For five years, the 50 horses of Coney Island’s historic B&B Carousell had been his charges. Now, the antique wooden animals were on their way back to Brooklyn with new coats of paint, new tails and refurbished joints.
“Can you push that guy to the wall so we can wedge this one in?” Mr. Goings called to a worker, as the truck was filled with the 36 jumpers (horses that go up and down) and 14 standers (stationary mounts).
This weekend, the horses of the old B&B will once again be spinning in the salubrious breezes on the Coney Island Boardwalk. Sandals will slip into newly fabricated stirrups. Sticky fingers will grasp freshly painted manes. And a piece of Coney Island history will be back.
“In many ways, it’s a real work of art,” said Seth W. Pinsky, president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which bought the carousel from a private owner and paid for its restoration. “There are very few surviving carousels of this vintage. It’s historic and it’s brand new, and that’s what Coney Island is.”
For decades, Coney Island was something of a carousel headquarters. In the late 1800s, carousel makers set up shops there and by the turn of the century two dozen merry-go-rounds were operating on the island. There even evolved a Coney Island school of carousel design, distinct from the more staid Philadelphia and County Fair styles. The Coney Island style was characterized by a flamboyant, aggressive-looking horse — neck straining, nostrils flaring and tongue lolling.
The B&B was built in Coney Island, with a frame dating to 1906, and at some point it operated in New Jersey, although it it unclear for how long. In the early 1920s it received a new set of horses that were carved by Charles Carmel, one of Coney Island’s celebrated carousel makers. It had returned to Brooklyn by 1935.
By 2005, the B&B Carousell (the whimsical spelling dates to its creation) was the last surviving carousel at Coney Island. Its owners planned to dismantle it and auction it off, horse by horse — the merry-go-round version of the glue factory. That’s when the city stepped in, with the E.D.C. paying $1.8 million to buy the intact merry-go-round.
The carousel was shipped to Mr. Goings’s 26,000-square foot workshop, Carousels and Carvings, in 2008. The paint was so thick on the horses that it filled the shallower carvings on saddles, bridles and breast straps, rendering them invisible. His team stripped more than 20 layers from each horse, taking them down to the bare wood.
There were repairs, too. “We didn’t have any missing hooves, but some of the joints had rotted,” said Scott Pickens, a staff member.
In restoring the horses, Mr. Goings, who is known for his purist approach, used only dowels and glue, never screws or other metal hardware. “That’s the way it was originally built and that’s the way he wanted to put them back,” Mr. Pickens explained. (Mr. Goings, a plain-spoken man who favors plaid shirts, is more practical, saying that screws rust and eventually give out.)
For the color scheme, city officials were presented with a choice. The original colors from the early 1920s were lush, but fairly simple, with dominant pinks and greens. “It’s the same on Victorian houses from that period,” Mr. Goings said.
The second layer of paint dated from the carousel’s arrival at Coney Island. The palette was similar, but more intricate. “I liked the Coney Island paint better,” Mr. Goings admitted. “It was fancier, with more pin-striping and detail.”
New York City officials had the final say. Representatives from the parks department, Public Design Commission and E.D.C. chose the original color scheme.
Theresa Rollison, a painter with Carousels and Carvings, custom-mixed more than 80 colors to replicate the original hues. She then applied salmon pink, lemon yellow, metallic silver and maroon, using natural brushes made from badger, squirrel and hog bristle. “I wouldn’t have chosen to put some of the colors together, but overall it works,” she said.
Perhaps the most exciting moment came when Mr. Goings uncovered the signature of the master carver Marcus Charles Illions on the flank of one of the horses. It is the only horse on the B&B Carousell by Mr. Illions, a Coney Island carver revered for his artistry. The horse was one of four created in 1909 to celebrate the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.
Apparently, an earlier owner had removed one of the horses to give to his daughter before selling the carousel. That left the most recent private owner, the McCullough family, with a hole to fill, and it did so with the Illions show horse.
The Illions horse certainly stands out from the herd. With body armor covered in colorful rhinestones, decorative scales and a relief of Lincoln’s profile, it is one that youngsters are bound to fight over.
Mr. Goings suggested that the horse be cordoned off on the ride in the interest of preservation, noting that the other Lincoln tribute horses are in private collections. But the city’s E.D.C., which paid $1.7 million for the restoration, has decided to allow the public to ride it.
Even the mover, Marty Astarita of Advance Relocation Systems, seemed to appreciate the precious cargo, as he described the climate-controlled trucks with “air-ride” suspension. “Instead of riding on an axle, it has air bags built into the trailer,” he said. “That trailer floats going down the road.”
Back in Coney Island, the E.D.C. enlisted the Rockwell Group to design a new pavilion for the B&B. The pavilion is the centerpiece of a newly remodeled Steeplechase Plaza, a 2.2-acre public space next to the Boardwalk that will feature seating, landscaping and a fountain.
Construction was still under way on the pavilion as Mr. Goings and his team arrived to assemble the carousel in mid-April. “Everybody is working in everybody’s space,” he shouted over the screech of a metal saw. In addition to the horses, he had restored the B&B’s hand-painted rounding boards (the panels at the top of the carousel) and the original German-made Gebruder Bruder organ. One of his last tasks was to give the steeds their new horsehair tails.
The new glass pavilion has radiant floor heating and air-conditioning, allowing for year-round use. On pleasant days, the pavilion’s bifold doors can open wide for a plein-air experience.
City officials say that the carousel’s operator may not take “creative liberties” with any future renovation work, but instead must follow the painting pattern that has already been proscribed.
Still, Mr. Goings worries. He sees a triple threat at Coney Island with the combination of salt air, ultraviolet light and sandy skin, all of them potentially harmful to the horses. “I’m not sure they’ll let people ride with sand on their butts,” he said. “Just one time will scratch the finish.”
Then he gave a shrug of resignation. As if to convince himself more than anyone, he added: “But it’s meant to be enjoyed.”
When Hollywood Wants Good, Clean Fun, It Goes to Mormon Country
http://nyti.ms/12vrWLn
May 23, 2013
When Hollywood Wants Good, Clean Fun, It Goes to Mormon Country
By JON MOOALLEM
Allen Ostergar stood at the front of the lecture hall with a stiff and bashful smile, or maybe it was just stage fright, and started his pitch. Open on a deadly pirate ship, he said— “the deadliest of all the pirate ships to, like, sail the seas.”
It was a Tuesday evening at Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah, and the school’s computer-animation program had assembled its 70-odd students to choose their next project — the one film they would be producing over the next three semesters. Ostergar, a junior from Southern California, was up first.
A panning shot across the ship’s deck, he explained, would introduce the thuggish crew: two pirates take turns slugging each other in the gut. Another stands around eating habanero peppers and blowing fire. “One idea I had,” Ostergar said, “was one guy could be bench-pressing a cannon. And then it zooms out a little bit, and then there’s a bigger guy that’s bench-pressing that guy!”
Eventually the camera would zero in on the main character, Off-White Dakin. Ostergar had done an animated sequence showing the lantern-jawed pirate sitting behind a barrel — hiding. He was knitting a sweater, using his hook-hand and a rusty nail for needles. The sweater was pink and had a rainbow on it. This was Off-White’s secret shame: “He only knits really cute things,” Ostergar said. “It’s his way to decompress.”
The film’s premise sounded fun and wry and a little hokey. It was aiming for that Pixar-ish sweet spot, which is typical of the animated shorts that B.Y.U. students have made every year since the program started in 2000. (See, for example, ‘‘Las Piñatas,” about two anthropomorphic piñatas who, having been hoisted up at a child’s birthday party, panic and reconsider their careers.) Those films have consistently racked up student Emmys and student Academy Awards. They’ve played at Cannes and Sundance. Most important, they’ve impressed recruiters. Out of nowhere, B.Y.U. — a Mormon university owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — has become a farm team for the country’s top animation studios and effects companies. Unlikely as it sounds, young Mormons are being sucked out of the middle of Utah and into the very centers of American pop-culture manufacturing.
Praising the program in a speech on campus in 2008, the president of Pixar, Edwin Catmull, noted: “It’s the perception not just of Pixar, but also at the other studios, that something pretty remarkable is happening here.” (During the production of “Brave,” for example, a 14-person team tasked with rigging the complicated musculature in horses and wrangling Princess Merida’s curls included six B.Y.U. alumni.) Once Catmull’s speech circulated online, prospective students from around the world started e-mailing the director of B.Y.U.’s program, R. Brent Adams, wanting to apply. Adams did what he always does. He sent each a link to the university’s honor code. Students must regularly attend church services. No sex outside of marriage. (“Live a chaste and virtuous life.”) No alcohol or coffee. (There aren’t even caffeinated sodas in the vending machines.) No swearing. No deviations from the university’s meticulous grooming standards. (“If a yearly beard exception is granted, a new Student ID will be issued after the beard has been fully grown and must be renewed every year by repeating the process.”) Adams told me: “I never heard from any of those people again.”
The typical B.Y.U. student doesn’t seem like a natural fit for Hollywood. Mormon culture tends to see the entertainment industry as both a reflection of and contributor to our “morally bereft society,” as one alumnus put it. Many of the students I met rarely, if ever, watch R-rated films and could name the handful of exceptions they had made. One 27-year-old junior remembered seeing the Civil War drama “Glory” in high school. Another was working part time at a company in Salt Lake City that cleaned up Hollywood films and released family-friendly versions on DVD. Recently, the student told me, he digitally replaced a cigarette in a character’s hand with a pretzel.
The B.Y.U. program is designed to be a similar kind of ethical counterweight: it’s trying to unleash values-oriented filmmakers into the industry who can inflect its sensibility. “Without being preachy about it,” Adams told me, “if we can add something to the culture that makes people think about being better human beings — more productive, more kind, more forgiving — that’s what we want to do.”
At first, I struggled to understand the specifics of that mission. Everyone talked about wanting to make “clean movies” or “movies I wouldn’t be afraid to take my mother to,” but these phrases were shibboleths, loaded and tough to pin down. It wasn’t simply a matter of avoiding sex and violence. (A few times, I heard even “Shrek” described disapprovingly: too many fart jokes, too much cynicism.) There was, instead, a fixation on whether you walked away from the movie feeling uplifted. That question superseded everything, even the usual genre and age-demographic lines. A senior, Megan Lloyd, told me: “I just saw ‘The Dark Knight.’ It was wonderful, but it’s just so dark. I didn’t feel better about myself after I saw it. Instead, I felt like, I’m a horrible human being — like all human beings are. Now,” she went on, nearly in the same breath, “contrast that with a film like ‘Wreck-It Ralph.’ That teaches you: Hey, you can be a better person. Here’s how!”
Maybe it was inevitable then, but Ostergar’s story about the knitting pirate soon took another, even more tender left turn. Midway through his pitch, he revealed that Off-White Dakin is really a family man at heart. He’s knitting those sweaters for his daughter, whom he left at home and misses very much. As he knits, he clutches a framed picture of the baby girl.
Eventually Off-White’s shipmates find him out. He’s mocked, ostracized and nearly executed. But when the ship’s sail catches fire, it’s only Off-White’s knitting skills that can save the crew. In one of the final sequences, Ostergar explained, we see the pirates collaboratively knitting a patchwork replacement for their sail, embellishing it with all kinds of adorable puppies and kittens.
The film’s message was about community and about the temptation to look down on people who are different from you and lose sight of their humanity and talents. It was a solid message; I tried, in Provo, to keep it in mind.
“All these pirates are like, Oh, this is weird,” Ostergar went on. “But they all end up loving it!”
The mind-bending tedium of computer-animation work can’t be overstated. In an animated film, after all, everything we see, in every frame, has been methodically conjured out of a computer by a human being. Consider the school’s current film, “Chasm,” an allegory about a stubborn inventor who must abandon her technological contraption and take a literal leap of faith over a canyon. When I visited, a senior named Meredith Moulton was in her ninth month of rigging the heroine’s hair, struggling to make her bun wobble and a few strands of her bangs waft free — in just the right way — when she jumped into the wind and flew. Another student was tasked with making atmospheric dust particles swirl convincingly around the inventor’s body as she walked through a shaft of light coming from a window. Someone else was creating the shaft of light. And so on. Consequently, while the students did consider the moral messages of the films pitched at the meeting that evening, most were focused on the technical ambitions of each idea: the millions of digital puzzles that they’d spend the next year trying to solve, just to produce five or six minutes of animation.
Seated a few rows behind me was Garrett Hoyos, a 24-year-old sophomore from Kansas, who specializes in giving digital materials their texture. Hoyos sized up Ostergar’s pitch the way a climber takes in a rock wall, mapping out his route. He felt immediately exhilarated by it: he wanted a chance to render the weathered wood of the pirate ship, the chop of the ocean, the fleecy yarn. The raising of the new, patchwork sail, if he could pull it off, would be a killer shot to have on his demo reel when he applied for jobs. “I just love materials!” Hoyos told me.
Like many of his classmates, Hoyos claims to have been called to animation early and with strange specificity. At age 13, he was in line to see “Shrek” when he found himself gazing at the deep, rough folds of Shrek’s burlap vest on the movie poster — gazing into them, really — and suddenly he knew he wanted to build digital fabric for a living. “Since then, I’ve been so observant of the world around me,” he said. “All I want to do is texture all the awesome things we have in real life.” In 2008, after high school, he went to San Francisco to serve a two-year mission for the church. When he wasn’t preaching the word of Christ, he was connecting with B.Y.U. alumni at Bay Area animation studios and effects companies like Pixar and DreamWorks.
The school’s animation program was just eight years old at the time. Brent Adams had been mentoring his computer-science students on animation side projects for years when, in 2000, he persuaded the Arizona homebuilder Ira Fulton to donate a supercomputer so that he could create a proper animation major. (Fulton, a Mormon, told me he has invested more than $10 million in the school’s program, which he is proud to see spawning values-driven animators and “clean” entertainment. “You can’t find many family-oriented films anymore,” he said. “If something says PG on it, lots of luck!” B.Y.U. named the supercomputer Mary Lou, after Fulton’s wife.) That year, a tight-knit group of students produced the program’s first short, “Lemmings.’’ It’s about a lone, enlightened lemming who tries to stop his comrades from running off a cliff.
Animating a throng of 2,000 muttering lemmings was, technically, an audacious feat, and “Lemmings” won both a student Emmy and a student Academy Award. The graduates fanned out into the industry. One, Tom Mikota, was part of a team that won an Oscar for the visual effects in “Avatar.” Another, Paul Schoeni, is a 3-D modeler at DreamWorks and a founder of a company called Caffeine-Free that builds family-friendly iPad apps. (Schoeni told me that he and his three Mormon co-founders have 15 children between them — a robust, in-house focus group for their products.) From there, the B.Y.U. diaspora intensified. By 2007, the university had made enough of a name for itself that the program’s film that year — “Pajama Gladiator,” about a small child who is beamed to another planet and must fight blobby aliens with his blankey — almost wasn’t finished because so many of the seniors were hired away before graduation.
The industry has found a new breed of employee in Utah. One recruiter from Sony Animation Pictures described the typical B.Y.U. grad as perhaps not as talented artistically as students from the other premier schools, like CalArts, but equipped with “a different mind-set.” In most animation programs, each student leads production on his or her own film. But at B.Y.U., everyone works as a team on a single film because, unlike at art schools, students are too busy with religion courses and other requirements to be full-time filmmakers. Out of necessity, production on each year’s film winds up mirroring the way the industry actually works. B.Y.U. students emerge committed to a specialty and to collaboration — prepared for an entry-level job rather than expecting to be treated as visionary auteurs.
“Honestly,” says Marilyn Friedman, the former head of outreach at DreamWorks, who visited B.Y.U. frequently, “the first few times I went to Provo, I was like: What am I doing here? I’m a little Jewish girl from back East. But I was just amazed by how absolutely lovely those kids are. They couldn’t be nicer, humbler, more respectful. It’s a pleasure. And when they come here, they stay that way.” Many students are already married with children by the time they graduate; they want to excel at their jobs to give their families stability. Many have served missions abroad, often deposited in third-world countries amid great suffering, and are years older than the typical college student by the time they graduate. “It means there’s a maturity level there,” says Barry Weiss, a longtime animation executive and former senior vice president at Sony. “If I’m a senior executive and I want to get people on my team, they’ve got to be hard-working and serious people. They’ve got to understand that this is a business — it’s not just art for art’s sake. The kids coming out of B.Y.U., they’ve got that box checked.”
Many of the students I met in Provo grew up in insular, Mormon communities. They came from what’s dismissed as flyover country. They don’t smoke or drink, and I noticed that one faculty member, for example, kept saying, “Holy schnikeys!” whenever he wanted to curse. And yet creative types in Hollywood kept raving to me about how much “more worldly” these Mormons were than the moody, Gen Y art-school grads coming out of New York and Los Angeles and how grateful they were to have them onboard. This cut against so many different stereotypes — of Mormons, of Hollywood, of tortured artsy kids — and at the oddest angles. By coincidence, it seemed, Mormon culture was grooming its young people to be ideal employees of the same industry it predisposed them to be wary of.
“The man is superexcited. Yes, this stick is finally here! And the dog looks at the stick like: Really? That’s it? That’s what you’re so excited about? This stick?”
Jeff Raines, a lanky junior with glasses, had been pitching his film for several minutes. It was not going well. The film, called “Fetch,” was about a man teaching his dog to play fetch with a mail-order stick. But Raines’s telling was flat, uncertain and granular. Just the buildup to the first throwing of the stick felt interminable. Someone in the back forced an encouraging laugh.
“One of the horrible things about Mormons is that we’re so polite,” Kelly Loosli, a faculty member, later told me. “It’s one of the serious issues facing our community: our polite culture is problematic for excellence.” Loosli has taken it upon himself to be the program’s bad cop, showing students how to tell one another when their work looks terrible, to get them industry-ready. “I’ve made a lot of people cry,” he told me, proudly. At the end of the evening, “Fetch” received only one vote — and that was only after the faculty coaxed Raines into raising his hand: he felt sheepish about voting for his own idea.
As Raines finished, I noticed Morgan Strong slip out of the room. Strong is 24, a contemplative and steady-seeming senior. He was the producer on “Chasm,” the current project. Having borne the managerial stress of the production all semester, he insisted on carving out some time that night with his wife, who was six months pregnant with their first child. Even though Strong was about to graduate, “Chasm” was the first film he worked on at B.Y.U. He wasn’t technically an animation major — he was on the university’s more strait-laced computer-science track. He’d felt an artistic itch all his life but, like a lot of his classmates, felt pressure to pursue a more pragmatic career. (A junior named Daniel Clark described spending his childhood making elaborate stop-motion animation films with his father’s video camera. Still, he convinced himself that he should major in construction management at B.Y.U. It was during an estimating class — a lecture covering how to estimate bids for construction jobs, down to approximating the number of screws you’d need — that Clark finally jumped ship.) Strong told me, “Saying you’re going to be an artist for a career is kind of like buying a cardboard box as a house.”
Earlier, Brent Adams told me that his students’ idealism about reforming the entertainment industry often comes from their recognition, as they’ve matured, of the negative influence that films and games had on their own lives. I wasn’t sure I believed him — he sounded like a father figure projecting his values onto his children. But Strong was a perfect example. We had a long talk one afternoon in the computer lab, and he told me that growing up in northern Idaho, he was an undisciplined teenager — hanging around with girls who drank and hiding those friendships from his parents. His dishonesty unsettled him, but he repressed the feeling. Then, during his freshman year at B.Y.U., his outlook changed. He saw students who were all striving to be kind and moral people but also having fun and enjoying solid friendships with one another. The uneasy compromises between his principles and his popularity didn’t seem necessary anymore. It was the reverse of the typical coming-of-age-at-college story: he felt liberated enough to experiment, so he experimented with returning to the values he was raised with. “I realized I can be whoever it is that I want to be,” he said. “That thought just hit me like a ton of bricks. And I discovered I want to be a really good person.”
Now, Strong said, he avoids even some PG-13 movies. “You never know what’s going to come up on that screen, and once you see something, you can’t get it out of your head. Ever.” He thought a moment, then asked: “What’s the name of that film?” I don’t know what I expected him to say, but I was surprised when he said, “ ‘Wedding Crashers.’ ”
In high school, a friend persuaded him to sneak into the movie, and the nudity, as well as Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson’s general attitude toward women, shook him. After that, when he saw a girl, his first thoughts would be about whether she was attractive; he felt himself moving through the world essentially casting or rejecting its inhabitants as possible extras in “Wedding Crashers.” You could argue that this was only the harmless awakening of a teenage male mind. But Strong didn’t see it this way. In fact, he feels so uneasy about this stretch of his life that later, when he began dating his future wife, he made a point of discussing it with her. (“I had changed,” he explained, “but I wanted anything like that to be open between us.”) “In the L.D.S. church,” he told me, “a really strong message is that everyone’s a child of God — that they’re a sacred individual. They’re born into this world clean and pure and beautiful.” “Wedding Crashers” altered his vision. He spent some time looking at the world through “Wedding Crashers”-colored glasses, and it was not only disrespectful of other people, he felt, but it also deprived him of experiencing them in a more genuine way. Why couldn’t films subconsciously encourage us to use the eyes that God gave us instead? “To view people through that window puts a positive, beautiful spin on your life,” he said.
It was easy to worry about how students like Strong would fare out in the wilds of the film industry after graduation. But talking with alumni, I uncovered only a handful of mildly uncomfortable conflicts. There was the case of Mike Warner, finishing postproduction on the latest “Die Hard,” who signed on to the film reassured by the studio’s strictly business-minded goal of keeping it tame enough to land a PG-13 rating. Ultimately the film was rated R. “It’s a bummer,” Warner said, “but what can you do?” There was a story Adams told me about an alumnus who panicked when asked to animate ants for a Budweiser commercial. (Adams talked him down. “I said: ‘O.K., Vern, are you breaking any commandments by working on a beer commercial? Not technically.’ ”) But mostly, I sensed a nuanced and pragmatic understanding of what it meant to be a Mormon in Hollywood: a commitment to avoid contributing to negativity whenever possible, but also a parallel obligation — and maybe a more important one — to create the maximum amount of good. A modeler and rigger at Pixar, Jacob Speirs, told me that working at Pixar probably meant he would never be asked to create images of violence or promiscuity. But he had recently asked the company to stock nonalcoholic drinks, and not just Champagne and beer, for its many in-house celebrations. Even non-Mormon co-workers frequently thank him for it, Speirs said; they didn’t always want a drink in the middle of the workday and were relieved to have another option. “And Pixar keeps it fun too,” he added. “It’s not like they just throw in a can of 7-Up. They bring in novelty sodas.”
I kept being reminded that B.Y.U.’s program was only 13 years old: most of the moral emissaries that it has been pouring into the industry are still climbing to the positions from which they’ll be able to truly influence a film’s tone and content. One day, there will be alumni directing and producing, students insisted — it’s an inevitability. “Right now we’re the workhorses,” an alumnus at DreamWorks told me. “But I think our future is bright in terms of being able to shape the industry.”
The last pitch of the night was for a film called “Bothered.” The student who got up to give it was a small woman with jagged bangs and cat-eye glasses named Christina Skyles. She wore black tights with skeleton legs stitched along the length of her actual legs.
Skyles is from Portland; she loves animé and Tim Burton, especially “Ed Wood,” in which Johnny Depp plays the cross-dressing B-movie director. She voted for Obama, not Romney. In all the most superficial ways, she screamed “film student,” which is to say, she couldn’t have seemed more out of place, slowly making her way to the front of this room full of film students. “I’m coming,” she called. Her voice was creaky, impatient — unburdened by any trace of pep. This felt like a formality to her; she expected her story would be too dark, too personal, to attract any interest. In fact, a friend had already encouraged her not to pitch the film, worried that her singular vision could only get diluted and scrambled if she subjected it to the program’s collaborative process.
Skyles elicited a mix of respect and protectiveness from the other students in the program. She later explained that she has a lot of social anxiety and doesn’t handle stress well. When she feels overwhelmed or intimidated, she starts crying. “It’s just this weird biochemical thing happening in my head,” she said. But it tends to startle and upset those around her, which upsets her more. The whole thing confused her. She wanted to make a film about it.
“So my story’s called ‘Bothered,’ ” she began. “It’s kind of hard to explain in words.” She cued up a rough, three-minute animatic of the film — a complete sequence of hand-drawn storyboards strung together with dialogue. A young woman, Maggie, is drawing in her sketchbook on the subway, head down, hair pouring over her eyes from under a hoodie, when she’s interrupted by a taller, louder girl named Lucy. Lucy knows Maggie; Maggie can’t place her. But Lucy, clueless, starts nattering at her anyway — about school and switching majors. Her blabbing is guileless but oppressive. Maggie sketches more violently; her panicked interior monologue — “Why so friendly?” — starts appearing scrawled on the wall behind her, the words multiplying like graffiti tags. They cover everything. Then, suddenly, all of that ink recoils into Maggie, and her body erupts, morphing into a levitating, growling monster. Thick columns of ink project from her eyes like oil or vomit. Her black tentacles smash windows and reach for Lucy, who is soon backed against the door, cowering on the floor, quivering and asking: “What is it? What’s wrong?” and apologizing for whatever she did to bring this on. Then, quietly, Maggie reforms into herself. Music plays — spare and sad. “I’m sorry I made you cry,” she tells Lucy. Then she gets off at the next stop.
That was it. There were no more film pitches to get through. A professor asked for questions. All the questions were about “Bothered.”
It was autobiographical, right? Was it meant to be funny? There had been a lot of uncomfortable laughter in the room. “The vibe that I got,” one guy ventured, “is that this is something really different for us, and we don’t know how to react.”
“Um,” another began, “how concerned should we be about children who are watching these?” And would the General Authorities see it — the government of the L.D.S. church?
Eventually Adams stood up. He noted that the version of the film Skyles just showed was composed of two-dimensional drawings. He worried that, animated in 3-D with computers, the protagonist could wind up coming off as either a gruesome animal, and you’d feel viscerally horrified by her instead of sympathetic, or like a campy B-movie demon, and you would laugh. “I’m just truly afraid we’ll ruin your film,” Adams told Skyles.
The conversation became scattered and confusing. There was technical resistance to the project but also, it seemed, emotional resistance that masqueraded as technical resistance. Parris Egbert, the head of the university’s computer-science department, told me: “From a C.S. perspective, I hated ‘Bothered.’ I don’t like it. I dislike it.” But when I asked him why, he said, “It’s just too weird for me,” a critique that was not computer-science-based at all. At one point, Skyles tried to speak and started crying instead.
In the end, the students voted to do “Bothered” as a 2-D short and selected, as their primary project, a film called “Pwned” — a cutesy comedy of errors about the redemption of an obese video-game addict, pitched by a student named Wesley Tippetts. (Adams eventually made Tippetts change the title to “Owned,” fearing no one would be familiar with the slang.)
It wasn’t that the students were rejecting Skyles’s film; they actually greenlighted it — just in 2-D, as a kind of side project — and Skyles, for her part, was surprised and grateful for their support. But from where I sat, at least, it was clear that something very unusual had happened. It was as if some grimy, human emotion at the core of “Bothered” had momentarily disrupted all the persistent sunniness in the room. Just for a moment. Then the sunniness regathered its strength and the grime vanished again in the glare.
“Did you get the message?” Tippetts asked Adams about “Pwned.” With the votes counted, and the course for next year set, everyone was milling around. There was a feeling of camaraderie and collective purpose, like runners stretching before a charity 10K.
“Oh, yeah,” Adams told him.
Tippetts explained the message anyway. “He’s supposed to be full-on addicted to games, and then he’s like, ‘What happened to the rest of my life?’ ” Tippets told Adams. “I know it needs to have a message. I wanted it to have a message. But I didn’t want it to be annoyingly obvious.”
Adams said that the message wasn’t annoyingly obvious. He said that the message was subtle. He said that the message was just right.
http://nyti.ms/ZcRm1K
At North Shore University Hospital on Long Island, motion sensors, like those used for burglar alarms, go off every time someone enters an intensive care room. The sensor triggers a video camera, which transmits its images halfway around the world to India, where workers are checking to see if doctors and nurses are performing a critical procedure: washing their hands.
This Big Brother-ish approach is one of a panoply of efforts to promote a basic tenet of infection prevention, hand-washing, or as it is more clinically known in the hospital industry, hand-hygiene. With drug-resistant superbugs on the rise, according to a recent report by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and with hospital-acquired infections costing $30 billion and leading to nearly 100,000 patient deaths a year, hospitals are willing to try almost anything to reduce the risk of transmission.
Studies have shown that without encouragement, hospital workers wash their hands as little as 30 percent of the time that they interact with patients. So in addition to the video snooping, hospitals across the country are training hand-washing coaches, handing out rewards like free pizza and coffee coupons, and admonishing with “red cards.” They are using radio-frequency ID chips that note when a doctor has passed by a sink, and undercover monitors, who blend in with the other white coats, to watch whether their colleagues are washing their hands for the requisite 15 seconds, as long as it takes to sing the “Happy Birthday” song.
All this effort is to coax workers into using more soap and water, or alcohol-based sanitizers like Purell.
“This is not a quick fix; this is a war,” said Dr. Bruce Farber, chief of infectious disease at North Shore.
But the incentive to do something is strong: under new federal rules, hospitals will lose Medicare money when patients get preventable infections.
One puzzle is why health care workers are so bad at it. Among the explanations studies have offered are complaints about dry skin, the pressures of an emergency environment, the tedium of hand washing and resistance to authority (doctors, who have the most authority, tend to be the most resistant, studies have found).
“There are still staff out there who say, ‘How dare they!’ ” said Elaine Larson, a professor in Columbia University’s school of nursing who has made a career out of studying hand-washing.
Philip Liang, who founded a company, General Sensing, that outfits hospital workers with electronic badges that track hand-washing, attributes low compliance to “high cognitive load.”
“Nurses have to remember hundreds — thousands — of procedures,” Mr. Liang said. “Take out the catheter; change four medications. It’s really easy to forget the basic tasks. You’re really concentrating on what’s difficult, not on what’s simple.”
His company uses a technology similar to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The badge communicates with a sensor on every sanitizer and soap dispenser, and with a beacon behind the patient’s bed. If the wearer’s hands are not cleaned, the badge vibrates, like a cellphone, so that the health care worker is reminded but not humiliated in front of the patient.
Just waving one’s hands under the dispenser is not enough. “We know if you took a swig of soap,” Mr. Liang said.
The program uses a frequent-flier model to reward workers with incentives, sometimes cash bonuses, the more they wash their hands.
Gojo Industries, which manufactures the ubiquitous Purell, has also developed technology that can be snapped into any of its soap or sanitizer dispensers to track hand-hygiene.
At North Shore, the video monitoring program, run by a company called Arrowsight, has been adapted from the meat industry, where cameras track whether workers who skin animals — the hide can contaminate the meat — wash their hands, knives and electric cutters.
Adam Aronson, the chief executive of Arrowsight, said he was inspired to go from slaughterhouses to hospitals by his father, Dr. Mark Aronson, vice chairman for quality at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and a professor at Harvard Medical School.
“Nobody would do a free test — they talked about Big Brother, patient privacy — nobody wanted to touch it,” Mr. Aronson said.
He finally got a trial at a small surgery center in Macon, Ga., and in 2008, North Shore also agreed to a trial in its intensive care unit. The medical center at the University of California, San Francisco, is also using Arrowsight’s video system, and Mr. Aronson said eight more hospitals in the United States, Britain, the Netherlands and Pakistan had agreed to test the cameras.
North Shore’s study, published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, found that during a 16-week preliminary period when workers were being filmed but were not informed of the results, hand-hygiene rates were less than 10 percent. When they started getting reports on their filmed behavior, through electronic scoreboards and e-mails, the rates rose to 88 percent. The hospital kept the system, but because of the expense, it has limited it to the intensive care unit, where the payoff is greatest because the patients are sickest.
To get a passing score, workers have to wash their hands within 10 seconds of entering a patient’s room. Only workers who stay in the room for at least a minute are counted, and the quality of their washing is not rated. Scores for each shift are broadcast on hallway scoreboards, which read “Great Shift” for those that top 90 percent compliance.
Technology is not the only means of coercion. The Greater New York Hospital Association, a trade group, and the health care workers union, 1199 S.E.I.U., train employees to be “infection coaches” for other employees.
In a technique borrowed from soccer, hospital workers hand red cards to colleagues who do not wash, said Dr. Brian Koll, chief of infection prevention for Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, who trains coaches. (Unlike soccer players, however, workers do not have to leave.) “It’s a way to communicate in a nonconfrontational way that also builds teamwork,” Dr. Koll said.
“You do not want to say, ‘You did not wash your hands.’ ”
Doctors, nurses and others at Beth Israel who consistently refuse to wash their hands may be forced to take a four-hour remedial infection prevention course, Dr. Koll said. But to turn that into something positive, they are then asked to teach infection prevention to others.
Dr. Koll said that he was not aware of malpractice suits based on hand-washing, but that hand-washing compliance rates often become part of the information used when suing hospitals for infections.
A hospital in the Bronx gave out tickets — sort of like traffic tickets — to workers who did not wash their hands, he said. “That did not work in our institution,” he said. “People made it a negative connotation.” Beth Israel finds that positive reinforcement works better, Dr. Koll said.
Like other hospitals, Beth Israel also uses what it calls secret shoppers — staff members, often medical students, in white coats whose job is to observe whether people are washing their hands. Beth Israel gives high-scoring workers gold stars to wear on their lapels, “hokey as this sounds,” he said; after five gold stars they get a platinum star, or perhaps a coupon for free coffee. “Health care workers like caffeine,” Dr. Koll said.
There are buttons saying, “Ask me if I’ve washed my hands,” and Dr. Koll said that patients’ families did ask because they understood the risks. Especially in pediatrics, he said, “parents do not have a problem at all asking.”
To avoid slogan fatigue, Beth Israel has at least five buttons, including “Got Gel?” and “Hand Hygiene First.”
Dr. Larson, the hand-washing expert, supports the electronic systems being developed, but says none are perfect yet. “People learn to game the system,” she said. “There was one system where the monitoring was waist high, and they learned to crawl under that. Or there are people who will swipe their badges and turn on the water, but not wash their hands. It’s just amazing.”
Task Forces Offer Hoarders a Way to Dig Out
http://nyti.ms/18t4uSZ
YORBA LINDA, Calif. — Wet rag in hand, the older woman was trying to clean her filthy, packed garage to comply with a warning that she was violating city codes. As two officials approached to check on her progress, she proudly pointed to an open box in which she had placed two dead rats.
For maximum display, she had perched the box atop one of the garage’s many dense, waist-high piles: bins overflowing with clothes and cans, a bicycle frame, a mildewed mop.
Darren Johnson, an inspector with the Orange County Fire Authority, and Mary Lewis, a city code enforcement officer, smiled encouragingly. They maneuvered into the woman’s townhouse, its passageways blocked by the detritus of a troubled life. Both are members of the Orange County Task Force on Hoarding, trained not to gag at the stench, even as their shoes squished on newspapers slippery with rat urine.
Mr. Johnson, who with Ms. Lewis accompanied a reporter into the woman’s home on the condition that she not be identified, shined a flashlight over tangled electrical cords and ancient magazines. If a fire broke out, he told the woman, “my guys would have a tough time getting inside.”
“So we’d have to get you out through the window,” he told her. “But it would be hard for you to climb through this stuff to get there.”
The fire inspector added softly, “Can you let us help you clean this up, to save yourself and not put everyone else at risk?”
An estimated 3 percent to 5 percent of Americans suffer from hoarding, which was officially recognized as a disorder this month in a psychiatric diagnostic manual. But the impact of hoarding extends beyond the afflicted individual and relatives in the home: the behavior can also put immediate neighbors at risk, by creating perfect conditions for explosive house fires and infestations of vermin and disease.
Across the country, local officials like Mr. Johnson and Ms. Lewis have begun grappling with hoarding as a serious public health hazard. More than 85 communities — from San Jose, Calif., to Wichita, Kan., to Portland, Me. — have established task forces, hoping to stave off catastrophes and help hoarders turn their lives around.
The task forces on hoarding are finding their mandates daunting. With each case, officials must weigh when their authority to intervene trumps an individual’s right to privacy.
“The nature of the disorder demands multiple resources,” said Christiana Bratiotis, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. “No one discipline has all the expertise needed.”
The task forces typically include people from support as well as enforcement perspectives, added Dr. Bratiotis, a co-author of “The Hoarding Handbook,” an intervention guide. “There is value in the carrot-and-stick approach.”
Hoarding disorder is poorly understood, complex and often recurring: over decades, cases wax, wane and become chronic. It is distinct from cluttering or insatiable collecting. The self-soothing need to acquire, coupled with a paralyzing inability to discard, significantly impairs one’s ability to function.
Over the years, a hoarder’s health and hygiene become dangerously compromised. Because stoves, sinks and tubs are used for storage, cooking and bathing become impossible. Sleep becomes a relative term. When the queen-size bed of a rocket engineer Mr. Johnson tried to help became buried under mounds, the man simply hoisted a twin mattress on top. In 2010, a Chicago couple was found buried alive under years of possessions.
The possibility of a hot, hungry fire increases over time. First, utility bills become buried under snowdrifts of paper, so people forget to pay them. Electricity is turned off. Then residents use candles for light and gas burners for heat, inches from swaying towers of cherished trash.
In October 2011, a couple died in a fire in Dana Point, Calif. — a home that officials had tried for years to get cleaned up. Last October, a fire in Old Greenwich, Conn., destroyed a home that officials called inaccessible, leaving a woman critically burned.
In November, a Chicago man was burned, five of his dogs died and a neighbor’s home was scorched. Pat Brennan, a chief with the Chicago Fire Department, told reporters at the scene: “He was a hoarder. It impeded our progress.”
And the problem is not confined to the United States: a 2009 study found that the homes of hoarders accounted for 24 percent of preventable residential fires in Melbourne, Australia.
Task forces are also confronting another public health threat: infestations. After water is shut off, residents may urinate in bottles and defecate in the yard. Bacteria invade. Maggots feast. Vermin burrow.
In September, a woman who was trying to clean up a hoarder’s house featured on a reality TV show tested positive for the rodent-borne hantavirus and was hospitalized, although follow-up tests for hantavirus were negative; the house was briefly placed under quarantine. And particularly when a home shares walls with neighbors in an apartment building or a condo complex, contagion spreads.
Traditional methods for confronting hoarders are increasingly considered draconian and ineffective, creating new problems. Municipal cleanup crews or family members would throw the hoarded contents into a Dumpster, as the homeowner watched, traumatized. Officials would seek civil or criminal penalties.
In extreme cases, a hoarder’s home — floorboards weakened, waste pipes neglected, mold growing deep inside walls — would be condemned. Evicted homeowners and tenants, mentally ill and often estranged from relatives, became homeless.
A pilot study last year led by Carolyn Rodriguez, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, found that of 115 clients who sought help from a New York City nonprofit organization to avoid eviction, 22 percent had clinically diagnosed hoarding disorder. In Boston, representatives from MassHousing, a nonprofit group, try to prevent evictions by showing housing court judges that tenants who hoard have a disorder and are receiving help.
Each task force is a loose amalgam of agencies and, depending on what resources they can muster, their goals may range from educating one another and the public to collaborating on cases. But some uniform procedures, and problems, are emerging.
Many task forces around the country use a standard checklist to rank homes. Those rated at levels 1 through 3 may need intervention but may not have descended into squalor.
“I’ve never seen a level 5” — the highest — “be cleaned up for less than $20,000,” said Mr. Johnson, the inspector, who travels among 23 cities in Orange County and says he sees between 60 and 80 severe cases a year. In some cases, public funds may be available to help cover the cost.
After evaluating a home for fire hazards, he may call in pest control, social workers who specialize in older adults — whose hoarding may have gone undetected for decades — and cleanup crews affiliated with the county’s task force. He will enter notes in a database for first responders, so that if there is a fire or other first-aid emergency at the home, they will be warned which entrances are blocked and to wear additional protective gear.
But even for a comprehensive task force, hoarding cases present harrowing, poignant obstacles, chief among them the homeowners’ fervent resistance to intervention.
Over the years, they increasingly withdraw, terrified of losing their possessions. Mr. Johnson has fended off vicious dogs and faced down armed hoarders. He spent two years trying to clean up one household. He leaves his card, returns every few weeks, brings sandwiches and intercepts residents outside the home.
Another challenge is the stigma of hoarding, dissuading many from seeking help. Some task forces have considered renaming themselves. The Wichita and Sedgwick County Hoarding Coalition offers a “What a Mess Workshop” and a “Clutter Cleaners Club.”
One impediment is whether officials have the right to gain access to a hoarder’s space, particularly to private dwellings. Although landlords and condominium property managers have the right to enter residences, those who do not share walls enjoy greater rights to privacy.
While each municipality has sanitation and building codes, enforcement is discretionary and selective. Even when neighbors complain of unsightly yards or noxious fumes, once those issues are addressed, compelling a homeowner to tackle the interior is problematic.
In egregious cases, said Capt. William Cummins, a fire official in Shrewsbury, Mass., task force members have gone to civil court for an administrative warrant.
But even after a home is rendered habitable, relapse is likely, especially if the underlying causes are not resolved.
Years ago, the woman in the Yorba Linda townhouse had gotten the courage to fill a Dumpster with hoarded materials, although there was plenty left.
“A therapist told me I should at least throw out my papers, but I couldn’t,” she told Ms. Lewis, the code enforcement officer, during the site visit. “There were checks in there somewhere,” she said.
Ms. Lewis learned of the woman’s situation from the complex’s property manager, after a crew came to fix an interior leak that was making one of her walls collapse. To get more information and gain her trust as they inched their way through her home, Ms. Lewis and Mr. Johnson gently chatted her up.
Did she need food? Medication? Since Ms. Lewis had already extended the stick of code enforcement, they now both offered carrots for the cleanup.
Mr. Johnson had a friend at a vermin-control agency who could help. Ms. Lewis had a list of cleaning crews, mentioning that the woman might be eligible for a grant to defray costs.
Mr. Johnson wondered if he might stop by to install smoke detectors. The woman looked relieved. She promised to attend a therapist-led group in nearby Buena Park.
“I didn’t come into this world a hoarder,” she said. “I’m 76 now. I’m not leaving as one.”
Summer’s Steeds, Back Home
http://nyti.ms/10Z5vNk
It has pictures of the carousel horses!
http://nyti.ms/13MnGdi
One at a time, they loaded the horses into the truck. The dapple grays and the chestnut mares were maneuvered onto a tractor-trailer where they nestled snugly together, wrapped in moving blankets.
“The herd’s coming home,” said Todd W. Goings, a carousel restorer in Marion, Ohio. For five years, the 50 horses of Coney Island’s historic B&B Carousell had been his charges. Now, the antique wooden animals were on their way back to Brooklyn with new coats of paint, new tails and refurbished joints.
“Can you push that guy to the wall so we can wedge this one in?” Mr. Goings called to a worker, as the truck was filled with the 36 jumpers (horses that go up and down) and 14 standers (stationary mounts).
This weekend, the horses of the old B&B will once again be spinning in the salubrious breezes on the Coney Island Boardwalk. Sandals will slip into newly fabricated stirrups. Sticky fingers will grasp freshly painted manes. And a piece of Coney Island history will be back.
“In many ways, it’s a real work of art,” said Seth W. Pinsky, president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which bought the carousel from a private owner and paid for its restoration. “There are very few surviving carousels of this vintage. It’s historic and it’s brand new, and that’s what Coney Island is.”
For decades, Coney Island was something of a carousel headquarters. In the late 1800s, carousel makers set up shops there and by the turn of the century two dozen merry-go-rounds were operating on the island. There even evolved a Coney Island school of carousel design, distinct from the more staid Philadelphia and County Fair styles. The Coney Island style was characterized by a flamboyant, aggressive-looking horse — neck straining, nostrils flaring and tongue lolling.
The B&B was built in Coney Island, with a frame dating to 1906, and at some point it operated in New Jersey, although it it unclear for how long. In the early 1920s it received a new set of horses that were carved by Charles Carmel, one of Coney Island’s celebrated carousel makers. It had returned to Brooklyn by 1935.
By 2005, the B&B Carousell (the whimsical spelling dates to its creation) was the last surviving carousel at Coney Island. Its owners planned to dismantle it and auction it off, horse by horse — the merry-go-round version of the glue factory. That’s when the city stepped in, with the E.D.C. paying $1.8 million to buy the intact merry-go-round.
The carousel was shipped to Mr. Goings’s 26,000-square foot workshop, Carousels and Carvings, in 2008. The paint was so thick on the horses that it filled the shallower carvings on saddles, bridles and breast straps, rendering them invisible. His team stripped more than 20 layers from each horse, taking them down to the bare wood.
There were repairs, too. “We didn’t have any missing hooves, but some of the joints had rotted,” said Scott Pickens, a staff member.
In restoring the horses, Mr. Goings, who is known for his purist approach, used only dowels and glue, never screws or other metal hardware. “That’s the way it was originally built and that’s the way he wanted to put them back,” Mr. Pickens explained. (Mr. Goings, a plain-spoken man who favors plaid shirts, is more practical, saying that screws rust and eventually give out.)
For the color scheme, city officials were presented with a choice. The original colors from the early 1920s were lush, but fairly simple, with dominant pinks and greens. “It’s the same on Victorian houses from that period,” Mr. Goings said.
The second layer of paint dated from the carousel’s arrival at Coney Island. The palette was similar, but more intricate. “I liked the Coney Island paint better,” Mr. Goings admitted. “It was fancier, with more pin-striping and detail.”
New York City officials had the final say. Representatives from the parks department, Public Design Commission and E.D.C. chose the original color scheme.
Theresa Rollison, a painter with Carousels and Carvings, custom-mixed more than 80 colors to replicate the original hues. She then applied salmon pink, lemon yellow, metallic silver and maroon, using natural brushes made from badger, squirrel and hog bristle. “I wouldn’t have chosen to put some of the colors together, but overall it works,” she said.
Perhaps the most exciting moment came when Mr. Goings uncovered the signature of the master carver Marcus Charles Illions on the flank of one of the horses. It is the only horse on the B&B Carousell by Mr. Illions, a Coney Island carver revered for his artistry. The horse was one of four created in 1909 to celebrate the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.
Apparently, an earlier owner had removed one of the horses to give to his daughter before selling the carousel. That left the most recent private owner, the McCullough family, with a hole to fill, and it did so with the Illions show horse.
The Illions horse certainly stands out from the herd. With body armor covered in colorful rhinestones, decorative scales and a relief of Lincoln’s profile, it is one that youngsters are bound to fight over.
Mr. Goings suggested that the horse be cordoned off on the ride in the interest of preservation, noting that the other Lincoln tribute horses are in private collections. But the city’s E.D.C., which paid $1.7 million for the restoration, has decided to allow the public to ride it.
Even the mover, Marty Astarita of Advance Relocation Systems, seemed to appreciate the precious cargo, as he described the climate-controlled trucks with “air-ride” suspension. “Instead of riding on an axle, it has air bags built into the trailer,” he said. “That trailer floats going down the road.”
Back in Coney Island, the E.D.C. enlisted the Rockwell Group to design a new pavilion for the B&B. The pavilion is the centerpiece of a newly remodeled Steeplechase Plaza, a 2.2-acre public space next to the Boardwalk that will feature seating, landscaping and a fountain.
Construction was still under way on the pavilion as Mr. Goings and his team arrived to assemble the carousel in mid-April. “Everybody is working in everybody’s space,” he shouted over the screech of a metal saw. In addition to the horses, he had restored the B&B’s hand-painted rounding boards (the panels at the top of the carousel) and the original German-made Gebruder Bruder organ. One of his last tasks was to give the steeds their new horsehair tails.
The new glass pavilion has radiant floor heating and air-conditioning, allowing for year-round use. On pleasant days, the pavilion’s bifold doors can open wide for a plein-air experience.
City officials say that the carousel’s operator may not take “creative liberties” with any future renovation work, but instead must follow the painting pattern that has already been proscribed.
Still, Mr. Goings worries. He sees a triple threat at Coney Island with the combination of salt air, ultraviolet light and sandy skin, all of them potentially harmful to the horses. “I’m not sure they’ll let people ride with sand on their butts,” he said. “Just one time will scratch the finish.”
Then he gave a shrug of resignation. As if to convince himself more than anyone, he added: “But it’s meant to be enjoyed.”
When Hollywood Wants Good, Clean Fun, It Goes to Mormon Country
http://nyti.ms/12vrWLn
May 23, 2013
When Hollywood Wants Good, Clean Fun, It Goes to Mormon Country
By JON MOOALLEM
Allen Ostergar stood at the front of the lecture hall with a stiff and bashful smile, or maybe it was just stage fright, and started his pitch. Open on a deadly pirate ship, he said— “the deadliest of all the pirate ships to, like, sail the seas.”
It was a Tuesday evening at Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah, and the school’s computer-animation program had assembled its 70-odd students to choose their next project — the one film they would be producing over the next three semesters. Ostergar, a junior from Southern California, was up first.
A panning shot across the ship’s deck, he explained, would introduce the thuggish crew: two pirates take turns slugging each other in the gut. Another stands around eating habanero peppers and blowing fire. “One idea I had,” Ostergar said, “was one guy could be bench-pressing a cannon. And then it zooms out a little bit, and then there’s a bigger guy that’s bench-pressing that guy!”
Eventually the camera would zero in on the main character, Off-White Dakin. Ostergar had done an animated sequence showing the lantern-jawed pirate sitting behind a barrel — hiding. He was knitting a sweater, using his hook-hand and a rusty nail for needles. The sweater was pink and had a rainbow on it. This was Off-White’s secret shame: “He only knits really cute things,” Ostergar said. “It’s his way to decompress.”
The film’s premise sounded fun and wry and a little hokey. It was aiming for that Pixar-ish sweet spot, which is typical of the animated shorts that B.Y.U. students have made every year since the program started in 2000. (See, for example, ‘‘Las Piñatas,” about two anthropomorphic piñatas who, having been hoisted up at a child’s birthday party, panic and reconsider their careers.) Those films have consistently racked up student Emmys and student Academy Awards. They’ve played at Cannes and Sundance. Most important, they’ve impressed recruiters. Out of nowhere, B.Y.U. — a Mormon university owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — has become a farm team for the country’s top animation studios and effects companies. Unlikely as it sounds, young Mormons are being sucked out of the middle of Utah and into the very centers of American pop-culture manufacturing.
Praising the program in a speech on campus in 2008, the president of Pixar, Edwin Catmull, noted: “It’s the perception not just of Pixar, but also at the other studios, that something pretty remarkable is happening here.” (During the production of “Brave,” for example, a 14-person team tasked with rigging the complicated musculature in horses and wrangling Princess Merida’s curls included six B.Y.U. alumni.) Once Catmull’s speech circulated online, prospective students from around the world started e-mailing the director of B.Y.U.’s program, R. Brent Adams, wanting to apply. Adams did what he always does. He sent each a link to the university’s honor code. Students must regularly attend church services. No sex outside of marriage. (“Live a chaste and virtuous life.”) No alcohol or coffee. (There aren’t even caffeinated sodas in the vending machines.) No swearing. No deviations from the university’s meticulous grooming standards. (“If a yearly beard exception is granted, a new Student ID will be issued after the beard has been fully grown and must be renewed every year by repeating the process.”) Adams told me: “I never heard from any of those people again.”
The typical B.Y.U. student doesn’t seem like a natural fit for Hollywood. Mormon culture tends to see the entertainment industry as both a reflection of and contributor to our “morally bereft society,” as one alumnus put it. Many of the students I met rarely, if ever, watch R-rated films and could name the handful of exceptions they had made. One 27-year-old junior remembered seeing the Civil War drama “Glory” in high school. Another was working part time at a company in Salt Lake City that cleaned up Hollywood films and released family-friendly versions on DVD. Recently, the student told me, he digitally replaced a cigarette in a character’s hand with a pretzel.
The B.Y.U. program is designed to be a similar kind of ethical counterweight: it’s trying to unleash values-oriented filmmakers into the industry who can inflect its sensibility. “Without being preachy about it,” Adams told me, “if we can add something to the culture that makes people think about being better human beings — more productive, more kind, more forgiving — that’s what we want to do.”
At first, I struggled to understand the specifics of that mission. Everyone talked about wanting to make “clean movies” or “movies I wouldn’t be afraid to take my mother to,” but these phrases were shibboleths, loaded and tough to pin down. It wasn’t simply a matter of avoiding sex and violence. (A few times, I heard even “Shrek” described disapprovingly: too many fart jokes, too much cynicism.) There was, instead, a fixation on whether you walked away from the movie feeling uplifted. That question superseded everything, even the usual genre and age-demographic lines. A senior, Megan Lloyd, told me: “I just saw ‘The Dark Knight.’ It was wonderful, but it’s just so dark. I didn’t feel better about myself after I saw it. Instead, I felt like, I’m a horrible human being — like all human beings are. Now,” she went on, nearly in the same breath, “contrast that with a film like ‘Wreck-It Ralph.’ That teaches you: Hey, you can be a better person. Here’s how!”
Maybe it was inevitable then, but Ostergar’s story about the knitting pirate soon took another, even more tender left turn. Midway through his pitch, he revealed that Off-White Dakin is really a family man at heart. He’s knitting those sweaters for his daughter, whom he left at home and misses very much. As he knits, he clutches a framed picture of the baby girl.
Eventually Off-White’s shipmates find him out. He’s mocked, ostracized and nearly executed. But when the ship’s sail catches fire, it’s only Off-White’s knitting skills that can save the crew. In one of the final sequences, Ostergar explained, we see the pirates collaboratively knitting a patchwork replacement for their sail, embellishing it with all kinds of adorable puppies and kittens.
The film’s message was about community and about the temptation to look down on people who are different from you and lose sight of their humanity and talents. It was a solid message; I tried, in Provo, to keep it in mind.
“All these pirates are like, Oh, this is weird,” Ostergar went on. “But they all end up loving it!”
The mind-bending tedium of computer-animation work can’t be overstated. In an animated film, after all, everything we see, in every frame, has been methodically conjured out of a computer by a human being. Consider the school’s current film, “Chasm,” an allegory about a stubborn inventor who must abandon her technological contraption and take a literal leap of faith over a canyon. When I visited, a senior named Meredith Moulton was in her ninth month of rigging the heroine’s hair, struggling to make her bun wobble and a few strands of her bangs waft free — in just the right way — when she jumped into the wind and flew. Another student was tasked with making atmospheric dust particles swirl convincingly around the inventor’s body as she walked through a shaft of light coming from a window. Someone else was creating the shaft of light. And so on. Consequently, while the students did consider the moral messages of the films pitched at the meeting that evening, most were focused on the technical ambitions of each idea: the millions of digital puzzles that they’d spend the next year trying to solve, just to produce five or six minutes of animation.
Seated a few rows behind me was Garrett Hoyos, a 24-year-old sophomore from Kansas, who specializes in giving digital materials their texture. Hoyos sized up Ostergar’s pitch the way a climber takes in a rock wall, mapping out his route. He felt immediately exhilarated by it: he wanted a chance to render the weathered wood of the pirate ship, the chop of the ocean, the fleecy yarn. The raising of the new, patchwork sail, if he could pull it off, would be a killer shot to have on his demo reel when he applied for jobs. “I just love materials!” Hoyos told me.
Like many of his classmates, Hoyos claims to have been called to animation early and with strange specificity. At age 13, he was in line to see “Shrek” when he found himself gazing at the deep, rough folds of Shrek’s burlap vest on the movie poster — gazing into them, really — and suddenly he knew he wanted to build digital fabric for a living. “Since then, I’ve been so observant of the world around me,” he said. “All I want to do is texture all the awesome things we have in real life.” In 2008, after high school, he went to San Francisco to serve a two-year mission for the church. When he wasn’t preaching the word of Christ, he was connecting with B.Y.U. alumni at Bay Area animation studios and effects companies like Pixar and DreamWorks.
The school’s animation program was just eight years old at the time. Brent Adams had been mentoring his computer-science students on animation side projects for years when, in 2000, he persuaded the Arizona homebuilder Ira Fulton to donate a supercomputer so that he could create a proper animation major. (Fulton, a Mormon, told me he has invested more than $10 million in the school’s program, which he is proud to see spawning values-driven animators and “clean” entertainment. “You can’t find many family-oriented films anymore,” he said. “If something says PG on it, lots of luck!” B.Y.U. named the supercomputer Mary Lou, after Fulton’s wife.) That year, a tight-knit group of students produced the program’s first short, “Lemmings.’’ It’s about a lone, enlightened lemming who tries to stop his comrades from running off a cliff.
Animating a throng of 2,000 muttering lemmings was, technically, an audacious feat, and “Lemmings” won both a student Emmy and a student Academy Award. The graduates fanned out into the industry. One, Tom Mikota, was part of a team that won an Oscar for the visual effects in “Avatar.” Another, Paul Schoeni, is a 3-D modeler at DreamWorks and a founder of a company called Caffeine-Free that builds family-friendly iPad apps. (Schoeni told me that he and his three Mormon co-founders have 15 children between them — a robust, in-house focus group for their products.) From there, the B.Y.U. diaspora intensified. By 2007, the university had made enough of a name for itself that the program’s film that year — “Pajama Gladiator,” about a small child who is beamed to another planet and must fight blobby aliens with his blankey — almost wasn’t finished because so many of the seniors were hired away before graduation.
The industry has found a new breed of employee in Utah. One recruiter from Sony Animation Pictures described the typical B.Y.U. grad as perhaps not as talented artistically as students from the other premier schools, like CalArts, but equipped with “a different mind-set.” In most animation programs, each student leads production on his or her own film. But at B.Y.U., everyone works as a team on a single film because, unlike at art schools, students are too busy with religion courses and other requirements to be full-time filmmakers. Out of necessity, production on each year’s film winds up mirroring the way the industry actually works. B.Y.U. students emerge committed to a specialty and to collaboration — prepared for an entry-level job rather than expecting to be treated as visionary auteurs.
“Honestly,” says Marilyn Friedman, the former head of outreach at DreamWorks, who visited B.Y.U. frequently, “the first few times I went to Provo, I was like: What am I doing here? I’m a little Jewish girl from back East. But I was just amazed by how absolutely lovely those kids are. They couldn’t be nicer, humbler, more respectful. It’s a pleasure. And when they come here, they stay that way.” Many students are already married with children by the time they graduate; they want to excel at their jobs to give their families stability. Many have served missions abroad, often deposited in third-world countries amid great suffering, and are years older than the typical college student by the time they graduate. “It means there’s a maturity level there,” says Barry Weiss, a longtime animation executive and former senior vice president at Sony. “If I’m a senior executive and I want to get people on my team, they’ve got to be hard-working and serious people. They’ve got to understand that this is a business — it’s not just art for art’s sake. The kids coming out of B.Y.U., they’ve got that box checked.”
Many of the students I met in Provo grew up in insular, Mormon communities. They came from what’s dismissed as flyover country. They don’t smoke or drink, and I noticed that one faculty member, for example, kept saying, “Holy schnikeys!” whenever he wanted to curse. And yet creative types in Hollywood kept raving to me about how much “more worldly” these Mormons were than the moody, Gen Y art-school grads coming out of New York and Los Angeles and how grateful they were to have them onboard. This cut against so many different stereotypes — of Mormons, of Hollywood, of tortured artsy kids — and at the oddest angles. By coincidence, it seemed, Mormon culture was grooming its young people to be ideal employees of the same industry it predisposed them to be wary of.
“The man is superexcited. Yes, this stick is finally here! And the dog looks at the stick like: Really? That’s it? That’s what you’re so excited about? This stick?”
Jeff Raines, a lanky junior with glasses, had been pitching his film for several minutes. It was not going well. The film, called “Fetch,” was about a man teaching his dog to play fetch with a mail-order stick. But Raines’s telling was flat, uncertain and granular. Just the buildup to the first throwing of the stick felt interminable. Someone in the back forced an encouraging laugh.
“One of the horrible things about Mormons is that we’re so polite,” Kelly Loosli, a faculty member, later told me. “It’s one of the serious issues facing our community: our polite culture is problematic for excellence.” Loosli has taken it upon himself to be the program’s bad cop, showing students how to tell one another when their work looks terrible, to get them industry-ready. “I’ve made a lot of people cry,” he told me, proudly. At the end of the evening, “Fetch” received only one vote — and that was only after the faculty coaxed Raines into raising his hand: he felt sheepish about voting for his own idea.
As Raines finished, I noticed Morgan Strong slip out of the room. Strong is 24, a contemplative and steady-seeming senior. He was the producer on “Chasm,” the current project. Having borne the managerial stress of the production all semester, he insisted on carving out some time that night with his wife, who was six months pregnant with their first child. Even though Strong was about to graduate, “Chasm” was the first film he worked on at B.Y.U. He wasn’t technically an animation major — he was on the university’s more strait-laced computer-science track. He’d felt an artistic itch all his life but, like a lot of his classmates, felt pressure to pursue a more pragmatic career. (A junior named Daniel Clark described spending his childhood making elaborate stop-motion animation films with his father’s video camera. Still, he convinced himself that he should major in construction management at B.Y.U. It was during an estimating class — a lecture covering how to estimate bids for construction jobs, down to approximating the number of screws you’d need — that Clark finally jumped ship.) Strong told me, “Saying you’re going to be an artist for a career is kind of like buying a cardboard box as a house.”
Earlier, Brent Adams told me that his students’ idealism about reforming the entertainment industry often comes from their recognition, as they’ve matured, of the negative influence that films and games had on their own lives. I wasn’t sure I believed him — he sounded like a father figure projecting his values onto his children. But Strong was a perfect example. We had a long talk one afternoon in the computer lab, and he told me that growing up in northern Idaho, he was an undisciplined teenager — hanging around with girls who drank and hiding those friendships from his parents. His dishonesty unsettled him, but he repressed the feeling. Then, during his freshman year at B.Y.U., his outlook changed. He saw students who were all striving to be kind and moral people but also having fun and enjoying solid friendships with one another. The uneasy compromises between his principles and his popularity didn’t seem necessary anymore. It was the reverse of the typical coming-of-age-at-college story: he felt liberated enough to experiment, so he experimented with returning to the values he was raised with. “I realized I can be whoever it is that I want to be,” he said. “That thought just hit me like a ton of bricks. And I discovered I want to be a really good person.”
Now, Strong said, he avoids even some PG-13 movies. “You never know what’s going to come up on that screen, and once you see something, you can’t get it out of your head. Ever.” He thought a moment, then asked: “What’s the name of that film?” I don’t know what I expected him to say, but I was surprised when he said, “ ‘Wedding Crashers.’ ”
In high school, a friend persuaded him to sneak into the movie, and the nudity, as well as Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson’s general attitude toward women, shook him. After that, when he saw a girl, his first thoughts would be about whether she was attractive; he felt himself moving through the world essentially casting or rejecting its inhabitants as possible extras in “Wedding Crashers.” You could argue that this was only the harmless awakening of a teenage male mind. But Strong didn’t see it this way. In fact, he feels so uneasy about this stretch of his life that later, when he began dating his future wife, he made a point of discussing it with her. (“I had changed,” he explained, “but I wanted anything like that to be open between us.”) “In the L.D.S. church,” he told me, “a really strong message is that everyone’s a child of God — that they’re a sacred individual. They’re born into this world clean and pure and beautiful.” “Wedding Crashers” altered his vision. He spent some time looking at the world through “Wedding Crashers”-colored glasses, and it was not only disrespectful of other people, he felt, but it also deprived him of experiencing them in a more genuine way. Why couldn’t films subconsciously encourage us to use the eyes that God gave us instead? “To view people through that window puts a positive, beautiful spin on your life,” he said.
It was easy to worry about how students like Strong would fare out in the wilds of the film industry after graduation. But talking with alumni, I uncovered only a handful of mildly uncomfortable conflicts. There was the case of Mike Warner, finishing postproduction on the latest “Die Hard,” who signed on to the film reassured by the studio’s strictly business-minded goal of keeping it tame enough to land a PG-13 rating. Ultimately the film was rated R. “It’s a bummer,” Warner said, “but what can you do?” There was a story Adams told me about an alumnus who panicked when asked to animate ants for a Budweiser commercial. (Adams talked him down. “I said: ‘O.K., Vern, are you breaking any commandments by working on a beer commercial? Not technically.’ ”) But mostly, I sensed a nuanced and pragmatic understanding of what it meant to be a Mormon in Hollywood: a commitment to avoid contributing to negativity whenever possible, but also a parallel obligation — and maybe a more important one — to create the maximum amount of good. A modeler and rigger at Pixar, Jacob Speirs, told me that working at Pixar probably meant he would never be asked to create images of violence or promiscuity. But he had recently asked the company to stock nonalcoholic drinks, and not just Champagne and beer, for its many in-house celebrations. Even non-Mormon co-workers frequently thank him for it, Speirs said; they didn’t always want a drink in the middle of the workday and were relieved to have another option. “And Pixar keeps it fun too,” he added. “It’s not like they just throw in a can of 7-Up. They bring in novelty sodas.”
I kept being reminded that B.Y.U.’s program was only 13 years old: most of the moral emissaries that it has been pouring into the industry are still climbing to the positions from which they’ll be able to truly influence a film’s tone and content. One day, there will be alumni directing and producing, students insisted — it’s an inevitability. “Right now we’re the workhorses,” an alumnus at DreamWorks told me. “But I think our future is bright in terms of being able to shape the industry.”
The last pitch of the night was for a film called “Bothered.” The student who got up to give it was a small woman with jagged bangs and cat-eye glasses named Christina Skyles. She wore black tights with skeleton legs stitched along the length of her actual legs.
Skyles is from Portland; she loves animé and Tim Burton, especially “Ed Wood,” in which Johnny Depp plays the cross-dressing B-movie director. She voted for Obama, not Romney. In all the most superficial ways, she screamed “film student,” which is to say, she couldn’t have seemed more out of place, slowly making her way to the front of this room full of film students. “I’m coming,” she called. Her voice was creaky, impatient — unburdened by any trace of pep. This felt like a formality to her; she expected her story would be too dark, too personal, to attract any interest. In fact, a friend had already encouraged her not to pitch the film, worried that her singular vision could only get diluted and scrambled if she subjected it to the program’s collaborative process.
Skyles elicited a mix of respect and protectiveness from the other students in the program. She later explained that she has a lot of social anxiety and doesn’t handle stress well. When she feels overwhelmed or intimidated, she starts crying. “It’s just this weird biochemical thing happening in my head,” she said. But it tends to startle and upset those around her, which upsets her more. The whole thing confused her. She wanted to make a film about it.
“So my story’s called ‘Bothered,’ ” she began. “It’s kind of hard to explain in words.” She cued up a rough, three-minute animatic of the film — a complete sequence of hand-drawn storyboards strung together with dialogue. A young woman, Maggie, is drawing in her sketchbook on the subway, head down, hair pouring over her eyes from under a hoodie, when she’s interrupted by a taller, louder girl named Lucy. Lucy knows Maggie; Maggie can’t place her. But Lucy, clueless, starts nattering at her anyway — about school and switching majors. Her blabbing is guileless but oppressive. Maggie sketches more violently; her panicked interior monologue — “Why so friendly?” — starts appearing scrawled on the wall behind her, the words multiplying like graffiti tags. They cover everything. Then, suddenly, all of that ink recoils into Maggie, and her body erupts, morphing into a levitating, growling monster. Thick columns of ink project from her eyes like oil or vomit. Her black tentacles smash windows and reach for Lucy, who is soon backed against the door, cowering on the floor, quivering and asking: “What is it? What’s wrong?” and apologizing for whatever she did to bring this on. Then, quietly, Maggie reforms into herself. Music plays — spare and sad. “I’m sorry I made you cry,” she tells Lucy. Then she gets off at the next stop.
That was it. There were no more film pitches to get through. A professor asked for questions. All the questions were about “Bothered.”
It was autobiographical, right? Was it meant to be funny? There had been a lot of uncomfortable laughter in the room. “The vibe that I got,” one guy ventured, “is that this is something really different for us, and we don’t know how to react.”
“Um,” another began, “how concerned should we be about children who are watching these?” And would the General Authorities see it — the government of the L.D.S. church?
Eventually Adams stood up. He noted that the version of the film Skyles just showed was composed of two-dimensional drawings. He worried that, animated in 3-D with computers, the protagonist could wind up coming off as either a gruesome animal, and you’d feel viscerally horrified by her instead of sympathetic, or like a campy B-movie demon, and you would laugh. “I’m just truly afraid we’ll ruin your film,” Adams told Skyles.
The conversation became scattered and confusing. There was technical resistance to the project but also, it seemed, emotional resistance that masqueraded as technical resistance. Parris Egbert, the head of the university’s computer-science department, told me: “From a C.S. perspective, I hated ‘Bothered.’ I don’t like it. I dislike it.” But when I asked him why, he said, “It’s just too weird for me,” a critique that was not computer-science-based at all. At one point, Skyles tried to speak and started crying instead.
In the end, the students voted to do “Bothered” as a 2-D short and selected, as their primary project, a film called “Pwned” — a cutesy comedy of errors about the redemption of an obese video-game addict, pitched by a student named Wesley Tippetts. (Adams eventually made Tippetts change the title to “Owned,” fearing no one would be familiar with the slang.)
It wasn’t that the students were rejecting Skyles’s film; they actually greenlighted it — just in 2-D, as a kind of side project — and Skyles, for her part, was surprised and grateful for their support. But from where I sat, at least, it was clear that something very unusual had happened. It was as if some grimy, human emotion at the core of “Bothered” had momentarily disrupted all the persistent sunniness in the room. Just for a moment. Then the sunniness regathered its strength and the grime vanished again in the glare.
“Did you get the message?” Tippetts asked Adams about “Pwned.” With the votes counted, and the course for next year set, everyone was milling around. There was a feeling of camaraderie and collective purpose, like runners stretching before a charity 10K.
“Oh, yeah,” Adams told him.
Tippetts explained the message anyway. “He’s supposed to be full-on addicted to games, and then he’s like, ‘What happened to the rest of my life?’ ” Tippets told Adams. “I know it needs to have a message. I wanted it to have a message. But I didn’t want it to be annoyingly obvious.”
Adams said that the message wasn’t annoyingly obvious. He said that the message was subtle. He said that the message was just right.
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