Pretty fricking great: This morning Google added dozens of old magazines to its Book Search database. These are scans of entire magazines, ads included. What a trove it is, and I’m sure it’s just the beginning. Here is New York magazine in its earliest glory days:

Now we just gotta get them to add the full run of Spy (the funny years, at least).

On this thrilling and historic day, here are two photos I took during the course of this year. They’re bookends, of a sort, to this inspiring man’s incredible run. I expect great things of you, sir.

Nashua North High School, Nashua, New Hampshire, January 5, 2008, 12:30 p.m.:

Max Meltzer Community Center, 94 East 1st Street, New York, New York, November 4, 2008, 11:03 a.m.:

For its latest cool project, the merry pranksters of Improv Everywhere arranged for hundreds of people to stand along the Brooklyn Bridge at night and fire camera flashes in sequence, capturing everything on video from a fair distance away. I love the increasingly larger scale of Improv Everywhere’s missions.

But I thought I should note that on two different occasions back in 1999 and 2000, a group of my friends organized a very similar project at the top of the Empire State Building. Led by my pal Tom Igoe, a world-class tinkerer who teaches at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, a group of several dozen people gathered on the skyscraper’s southern observation deck to do waves of sequenced camera flashes.

The New York Times ran a story about the 2000 event a couple of weeks later. Both Flash-a-Thons were captured on video, the second from two locations downtown: one at the Tisch School of the Arts on Broadway and Waverly, the other from an apartment on East 18th Street. In the low-res compilation video below, the flashes go left to right and then right to left, and then there’s some assorted mayhem at the end.

You can read more about the 1999 and 2000 Flash-a-Thons on Tom’s site.

There’s no current hook for this post about a little-known Hollywood scandal. It’s just something I’ve been meaning to post about for a couple of years. The bare details have been mentioned online, but only in passing, and as far as I know the scandal has never been officially reported anywhere.

So here it is: Much of the plot setup and some of the dialogue in Martin Scorsese’s excellent 1985 film After Hours—a significant portion of the movie’s first 30 minutes, in fact—were brazenly lifted from “Lies,” a 1982 NPR Playhouse monologue by Joe Frank, the great L.A.-based radio artist who’s gotten a lot of love here on Panopticist. Joe Frank never received official credit for his contributions, and he appears to have been paid a generous amount of money to settle the plagiarism suit and keep everything quiet. It’s possible that this scandal was reported in the film-industry trade press around the time of the film’s release, but neither Nexis nor Google reveal evidence of any media coverage. I learned of the similarities in 2004 or 2005 through chatter on the unofficial Joe Frank mailing list. The closest thing I’ve found to a reference in a traditional media outlet is in this March 2000 Joe Frank profile in Salon, which mentions that Frank was “paid handsomely by producers of a Hollywood film (which he won’t name) that plagiarized his dialogue.”

The Wikipedia page for the screenwriter of After Hours, Joseph Minion, mentions that the film included some “minor details” borrowed from Joe Frank, and that Frank successfully sued over it. But the theft was far from minor. Many of the details in the film’s first half hour are similar, if not copied outright: the chance meeting of a man and a kooky but sexy woman; the woman’s offer to set the man up with some of her artist roommate’s plaster of paris bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights; the man’s late-night phone call to the woman; his cab ride to meet her, at the end of which his only cash flies out the window; her wearing of a loosely tied bathrobe when she answers the door; her tale of having been raped by man who came down the fire escape; and so forth.

Here’s the entire monologue so you can judge for yourself. It’s 11 minutes long. If you’ve seen the film, much of this will sound very familiar indeed:

(If you don’t see the Flash audio player, here’s a direct link to the audio file.)

Joseph Minion apparently created the script in his mid-twenties as part of his work at Columbia’s Graduate Film Program. It was later optioned by Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson, who showed it to Scorsese. Minion’s IMDb credits are pretty thin after the early 1990s, so his career seems to have been really hurt by this, no surprise.

There’s also a weird twist: The cabbie who drives Griffin Dunne downtown is played by an actor named Larry Block, and he’s apparently the same Larry Block who appeared on many of Joe Frank’s shows for KCRW in the 1990s. Was the plagiarism discovered during the making of the film, and the role given to Frank’s friend Block as part of the lawsuit negotiations? Whatever the reason, it’s hard to believe Block’s casting was just a coincidence.

If you have any insight into any of this, post away in the comments…

Even the most conservative, unimaginative logotype can be very effective at putting forth a brand identity. Take the Crate & Barrel logo—it’s basically Helvetica Bold (or a minor tweak of it) with a very round, un-Helvetica-like C:

When it comes to corporate graphics, nothing is hoarier than good old Helvetica Bold. But the Crate & Barrel logo is memorable enough, and it pops nicely when stamped in big black type on the white bags and boxes that customers carry out of the store.

In Crate & Barrel’s early days, company executives probably paid tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to the design firm that created the logo, and the company likely considered dozens or hundreds of variations on the current logo before choosing one. The creation of a logo is often a painstaking process, and the end result is supposed to be an unalterable design whose elements are always rendered in exactly the same way.

So I was amused last fall when I noticed that some things had gone terribly wrong with the sign above the Crate & Barrel store on the northwest corner of Broadway and Houston. Below is what the sign looked like in late September. The r in “Crate” and the e in “Barrel” have rotated counter-clockwise, as if drunk, and the second r in “Barrel” is hovering above the baseline, as if it’s trying to float away:

A few weeks ago, I walked through that intersection and noticed that someone had performed first aid on the sign. It looks better, but it’s still not perfect. Here’s a photo from this afternoon:

The r in “Crate” looks fine now, and the e in “Barrel” has been rotated back into more or less the proper position. But the second r in “Barrel” is still trying to escape. Fly away, poor little r! Run off and join the American Apparel logo, where at least the use of Helvetica Bold is somewhat ironic!