MEDIAWATCH
by Jim Scalzitti

(1) THEY'RE EVERYWHERE I GO.... 

I thought that maybe I should just get my mind off of monitoring the way that 
we are portrayed in the media, so I went to the movies. There were at least 
three movies I wanted to see before they went to DVD, so I caught them all in 
the same weekend. They included that new English movie with Hugh Grant, the 
latest adaptation of an Oscar Wilde story, and a highbrow, arty movie based 
on a story by Herman Melville. 

The last thing I expected that weekend was to be assaulted with a needlessly 
ugly picture of an Italian-American character. The surprising thing, it 
should be noted, is that this assault did not come from the wholly 
contemporary Nick Hornby-penned film, it was from the Melville tale. 

“What?” you say, “I didn’t know Melville was the sort who would pen an 
anti-Italian story!” Well, I don’t know what Melville thought of the 
Italians, but don’t go out and burn your copies of “Moby Dick” just yet. It 
turns out that Melville’s tale of “Bartleby the Scrivener” has suffered from 
some revisionist screenwriting. The worst of it is that the offense occurred 
under the watch of one of our own.

“Bartleby” the movie is generally the same story as Melville’s. It is about 
a guy who gets a very dull job in a very non-descript office, and gradually 
stops doing his assigned work, telling those who give him work to do, “I 
would prefer not to.” It was an entertaining tale, if about 20 minutes too 
long, since it’s a one-joke film. In order to make it about 90 minutes long, 
the producers apparently added a character or two and a storyline that was 
not included in Melville’s story. 

One of Bartleby’s officemates is named “Rocky,” and was played by Joe 
Piscopo. Now, I was actually looking forward to seeing Piscopo playing a 
non-comedic role, but the experience quickly soured. Piscopo’s character was 
a lady’s man, juggling multiple long- and short-term girlfriends. That was an 
imperfection I was able to live with, but later, once Bartleby stopped 
working, and his boss didn’t know what to do with him, Piscopo’s character 
turns into what a review in the Austin Chronicle called “a thugish Frank 
Sinatra.” Typical dialogue for “Rocky” was something along the lines of, 
“Hey boss, you want me teach our Bartleby a little lesson?” while looking 
menacingly at the title character, and grinding his fists together. 

What makes this experience even worse is that “Bartleby” was co-written and 
co-produced by Catherine di Napoli. On the Bartleby Web site 
(www.bartlebythemovie.com), di Napoli’s bio makes a great deal of saying that 
“she spent six months in Rome studying Italian film.” And this is what she 
learned? It also adds that she and fellow Bartleby producer Jonathan Parker 
“are collaborating on their next project.” I can hardly wait for that.
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(2) WHERE WERE WE?

A recent UCLA study on how ethnic minorities in the United States are 
represented on television found that African Americans are concentrated in 
situation comedies, while other minorities are underrepresented on the small 
screen.

Among the findings were that, although Latinos make up 12.5 percent of the 
U.S. population, they comprise only two percent of the characters on TV. 
According to the study, about 30 percent of black characters had occupations 
that “were not clear from the sampled episodes.” Also, “with the exception 
of criminals, who accounted for three percent of all black characters, each 
of the other significant occupations suggested a middle-class to upper-class 
lifestyle.” 

Say what you will about the study’s findings (so, blacks are concentrated in 
comedies? what’s wrong with that?). The real story here, I think, is that a 
major university released a study on the portrayals and representations of 
select ethnic groups on television and it received news coverage across the 
board, on TV, radio and newspapers, in the days after its release. 

The weird thing is that the talking heads who repeated the story really 
didn’t have anything interesting to say and the study sparked no perceptible 
discussion. Now if they only would have included how disproportionately 
Italian Americans are portrayed as criminals on TV, then they would have had 
a story!
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(3) STAMP OF APPROVAL

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass seems to be on a mission to give due 
recognition to Antonio Meucci, the Italian man who supporters say invented 
the telephone before Alexander Graham Bell laid claim to it. He’s already 
commented on it once in a column, but in his June 10 column, regarding his 
recipe for cooking chicken with a beer can in it (this is not a joke — 
apparently otherwise normal people do this and brag about how good the 
chicken tastes) he complained that someone else is making money off of his 
idea. 

“Some guy named Steve has come out with a quickie book about how to grill my 
famous beer-can chicken,” Kass wrote. “What’s worse, he’s charging an 
outrageous $12.95, while I’ve given it away in the paper.”

Kass, a Greek who is married to a Sicilian (as he often tells us in his 
columns), later commented, “Now I know how that Italian guy felt, Signore 
What’s-His-Name, the fellow who invented the telephone before Alexander 
Graham Bell ripped him off and got rich.”

Whenever the ceremony to honor Antonio Meucci is held, Kass should be an 
honored guest. While he hasn’t written full-length columns about the guy, he 
has, no doubt, introduced him to many people who might not otherwise have 
ever been aware of him.
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TONY, TONY, TONY

For your information, yes, the following is a media-related item of interest 
to Italian Americans, and no, I am not including it just to rub something in 
the faces of our New York brothers and sisters. 

For most sports fans, the news on Wednesday, June 12, was all about the L.A. 
Lakers winning half as many NBA Championships as the Chicago Bulls did in 
their heyday not too long ago. But for the rest of us (no, not Mac users, but 
White Sox fans) the news of the night was that one man seemed to 
single-handedly beat the mighty New York Mets. In Chicago, the top sports 
story on the late news on the NBC affiliate after the NBA game wasn’t about 
the basketball game, but about the Sox victory over the Mets. It’s of 
interest to Italian Americans, because the onscreen graphic that accompanied 
the sports report was a picture of White Sox infielder Tony Graffanino, and 
the headline read, “TONY AWARDS.” 

Graffanino, a utility infielder who has outperformed all the Sox regulars 
both with his bat and his glove, hit one home run, drove in a couple runs and 
made some outstanding catches to prevent the Mets from scoring. This was no 
fluke, however. Graffanino is one of the few members of the Sox to be hitting 
over .300 as I write this in mid-June. I know it’s really no big deal to hear 
an Italian name mentioned on a sports report, but Tony has a not terribly 
common, four-syllable name, which this particular sportscaster mentioned at 
least four times, without mispronouncing it once. I have no idea what the guy 
is like personally, but if you’re looking for positive Italian-American role 
models, Tony Graffanino is a good guy to start with. For the record, the Mets 
did score in that game; some fella named Piazza hit a home run. 
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Distributed with Permission, From Paul Basile, Editor
(Copyright 2002, Fra Noi News Service, a division of Fra Noi Inc.)