The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight: Kwame Holman updates the Elian Gonzalez story; Susan Dentzer and Margaret Warner get the news on a final map of the human genetic code; Spencer Michels reports on digital movie-making; Elizabeth Farnsworth talks about capitalism with author Walter Moseley, and Ray Suarez visits the work and genius of Walker Evans. It all follows our summary of the news this Thursday.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: The father of Elian Gonzalez's arrived in the United States today. Juan Miguel Gonzalez flew to Washington with his wife and baby, Elian's half-brother. They'll stay at the home of a Cuban official in Bethesda, Maryland. Gonzalez spoke to reporters at Dulles International Airport.

JUAN MMIGUEL GONZALEZ (Translated): In the last few days my family and I have been alarmed to see the passion at such a rate in Miami and danger displayed on television - for the sake of my son. I'm truly want to have him returned to me as soon as possible and go back to Cuba together immediately.

JIM LEHRER: In Miami, a spokesman for the boy's U.S. relatives challenged the father's statement.

ARMANDO GUTIERREZ, Relatives' Spokesman: It was Juan Miguel who called and said, "please find my little boy. He's supposed to be in Miami with his mother." And then it was Juan Miguel who saw him in the hospital and said take care of him, take him home. He read a prepared speech. We hope that the press that is here today will be able to get the opportunity to ask the same questions you have asked the family here, you know, and that you'll be able to do your job as you've done with the last one.

JIM LEHRER: The Miami relatives and U.S. Immigration officials continued their talks today on handing over the boy. His father is to meet with U.S. Attorney Reno tomorrow. We'll have more on all of this right after the News Summary. A private U.S. company announced today it has completed the first step of mapping the human genetic code, or genome. Celera Genomics said it's decoded the DNA of a single person. Ultimately, the company will need to map the genes of five people to assemble the overall human genome. We'll have more on this story later in the program tonight. Lockheed Martin denied today it illegally helped China with satellite technology. The State Department charged it with 30 separate violations of arms export controls. The company said it followed the rules in assessing a satellite motor for the Chinese. It could face a $15 million fine and a three-year ban on some exports. Overseas today, Pakistan's deposed premier, Nawaz Sharif, was sentenced to life in prison for trying to prevent last year's coup. We have a report from Robert Moore of Independent Television News.

ROBERT MOORE: This morning, tight security surrounded the movements of the former prime minister as he was driven to court to hear the verdict. This is one of the most politically charged and diplomatically sensitive cases in Pakistan's history. Nawaz Sharif, a democratically elected leader on trial for his life, charged following October's successful military coup. The charges follow the murky events that played out just before the coup. The head of the army, General Musharraf, was flying to Pakistan on board a commercial plane, but sensing a coup was imminent, Nawal Sharif briefly tried to stop the aircraft from landing. The Pakistan judge, today decided that amounted to hijacking and terrorism. The sentence will be widely seen as a compromise, the judge deciding against the death penalty. There were signs of some protest outside the court before the verdict, but no widespread unrest or violence.

JIM LEHRER: Lawyers for Sharif said they would appeal. Back in this country, the Senate today took a symbolic stand against reducing the federal gas tax. It voted 66-34 that next year's budget should not assume any cut. At issue was the 4.3-cents-a- gallon increase enacted in '93. Critics said rolling it back would have short-changed highway funds. Also today, there was good news about summer gasoline prices. The Energy Department said the average would be about $1.46 a gallon. That's some 30 cents lower than the forecast a month ago. The new estimate comes after OPEC's decision last month to increase oil production. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to an Elian Gonzalez update, a finished map of the human genetic code, digital movie-making, a conversation with Walter Mosley, and the genius of Walker Evans.

UPDATE - TUG OF WAR

JIM LEHRER: Kwame Holman has the day's developments in the Elian Gonzalez story.

KWAME HOLMAN: Juan Miguel Gonzalez was accompanied by President Fidel Castro himself as he prepared to depart Havana, Cuba, this morning hoping to reclaim his son, Elian. A group of friends and relatives was there to bid farewell to Gonzalez and his party. Two and a half hours later, Gonzalez, his wife and their six-month-old son stepped on to U.S. soil at Dulles Airport near Washington D.C. Gonzalez immediately read in Spanish from a prepared statement.

JUAN MIGUEL GONZALEZ (Translated): I've arrived in Washington where I hope to hug very soon and for the first time in four months my son, Elian Gonzalez. With me is my wife and six- month-old son. They are the true family that Elian has, and we love him very much. Exactly 137 days, I have been cruelly separated from my child. Never has he needed his father and his family more, his school more, than during the and anguishing period beginning November 21. It's been an agonizing experience to see my son submitted to cruel psychological pressures aimed at influencing his personality, already weakened by the terrible trauma. Worse still, Elian has been paraded and exhibited in public rallies and by the media with a clear intent to obtain political advantage from this tragedy. Politicians, lawyers, journalists, publicity agents, and others unrelated to the family have been harassing my son. I've been told that I should still wait for two more months before I can take Elian back to his small hometown, Cardenas, where he was growing up well- loved and cared for. In the face of this new and unfair delay, I've asked the U.S. Government to allow me to come here with a small group of Elian's classmates and teachers -- as well as psychologists, pediatricians, and nurses who would help me care for him. Anyone understands that in the process where my son Elian recovers from this trauma, he can be guided only by my fatherly love.

KWAME HOLMAN: The Gonzalez family then rode several miles in a police motorcade to Bethesda, Maryland, and the home of Fernando Ramirez, head of the Cuban diplomatic mission to the U.S.. Meanwhile in Miami today, Elian played in the yard of the home of his great uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez. The great uncle and other Miami relatives long have said Elian's father should come there to Miami's Little Havana community to reunite with Elian. Lazaro Gonzalez has told reporters Elian knows his father is in the United States but one of Elian's cousins said the six- year-old appears confused.

ALFREDO GONZALEZ (Translated): He seems unaware of what has happened. When he saw his father on TV this morning, he didn't seem to recognize him at all.

KWAME HOLMAN: This morning, a spokesman for the Miami relatives said this:

ARMANDO GUTIERREZ, Relatives' Spokesman: The family has invited Juan Miguel to come to their house, and the family has told the government that they would like to have three independent psychologists interview, analyze Elian, because all they want to find out what is best for Elian.

KWAME HOLMAN: Back in Washington, the number two official at the Justice Department, Eric Holder, also met with reporters with the Elian issue.

ERIC HOLDER, Deputy, Attorney General: There have been some who claimed that the government has acted in a heavy-handed manner. I reject this notion. In January, the INS decided, and we agreed, that only Juan Miguel has the authority to speak on his son's behalf regarding immigration matters. Mr. Gonzalez has clearly and sincerely stated that he wants to be reunited with his son. Today we are as committed as ever to reuniting the two in a manner that is most sensitive to Elian's well-being. This morning, we will continue discussing these issues with the lawyers for the relatives in Miami.

KWAME HOLMAN: Juan Miguel Gonzalez appeared briefly outside his temporary new home this morning, and late this afternoon his Washington- based attorney arrived for a meeting. Moments later in Miami, an attorney for Elian's relatives there emerged from all-day meetings with U.S. Immigration officials. He complained about the government's stance.

JOSE GARCIA-PEDROSA, Lawyer for Miami Relatives: The government will not guarantee that it will not take Elian away or try to take him away in the middle of the night. The government has made the decision, and they have told us this: That they will revoke or transfer parole and that they will change the custody to the father even though the government has never even spoken to the boy, met with the boy, or, most importantly, had the boy evaluated by psychologists or psychiatrists, trained to determine whether he will be harmed by such changes. So, clearly, this boy has not been talked to, interviewed, evaluated by the United States Government, and he has not had his day in court.

KWAME HOLMAN: Nonetheless, Justice Department officials say they want both sets of relatives to agree on when and where a father-son meeting will take place.

FOCUS - BREAKING THE CODE

JIM LEHRER: Now today's news on mapping the human genetic code. Susan Dentzer of our health unit begins. The unit is a partnership of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

SUSAN DENTZER: Today's announcement by a private company, Celera Genomics, that it had completed the sequencing of one human being's genome caught many by surprise. Celera's president, J. Craig Venter, made the announcement at a congressional hearing.

J. CRAIG VENTER: This is a very exciting milestone in Celera's history and in science. We're going to have now the complete repertoire of human genes, which is the beginning of the next phase of science.

SUSAN DENTZER: With that, Celera seemed to have passed a major milestone in its effort to win a scientific horse race. For the past two years, that race has pitted Celera against the Human Genome Project -- a consortium of university researchers funded primarily by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and a private British charity, the Wellcome Trust. Both have been rushing to decode the human genome, or the sum total of all the DNA that makes up a human being.

Sometimes called "The Book of Life," the genome consists of roughly 3 billion chemical units of DNA arranged along 23 pairs of chromosomes that contain an estimated 80,000 or more individual genes. Identical copies of all these genes are contained in almost every cell of the human body, where they serve as the recipe for producing the proteins that perform the body's essential work. Knowing how all the chemical units of DNA are arranged -- in other words, the sequence -- is a monumental breakthrough in understanding how the entire body really works. David Botstein heads the Genetics Department at Stanford University Medical School.

DAVID BOTSTEIN: It's like having the entire parts list for some project that you want to put together, a bicycle or we used to have kits for making amplifiers. So every transistor, every wire, every resistor, every little part is there and accounted for. So, for example, if one of them goes wrong, you can actually figure out which one is the one that's missing or isn't doing what it's supposed to. So it's really major progress.

SUSAN DENTZER: Yet at the same time, genomics experts quickly raised red flags about the significance of Celera's announcement. In reality, they said, Celera hadn't truly determined the order of the entire genome. Instead, the company had identified the chemical composition of millions of individual chunks of DNA - each about 600 units long -- but it hadn't gone the final important step of understanding how all these jigsaw pieces really fit together as chromosomes. Celera agreed and said that critical step would take another three to six weeks. Some of the company's critics also charged that Celera was trying to steal some limelight from the public Human Genome Project. The Project recently announced that it had completed the actual sequence of three-fourths of the genome and would finish its so-called "rough draft" by late May. Unlike the private Celera, which hopes to earn substantial profits from much of its sequencing information, the public project has been posting its findings on the Internet for the benefit of genetics researchers around the world.

JIM LEHRER: And to Margaret Warner.

MARGARET WARNER: And with me is Craig Venter, the President and chief scientific officer of Celera Genomics.

Welcome, Mr. Venter.

CRAIG VENTER: Thank you.

MARGARET WARNER: At the risk of repeating what's in the set-up, this is a hard concept to get. Let me see if I can get this. We're talking about the human genome is the whole set of human genes in the body, 80 or 100,000.

CRAIG VENTER: All are chromosomes.

MARGARET WARNER: All arranged on these 23 chromosomes, all in every single cell almost in the body.

CRAIG VENTER: That's correct.

MARGARET WARNER: So what is it that your company has done?

CRAIG VENTER: The difficulty with trying to determine the sequence of every one of our chromosomes is the current technology gives us about 500 letters at a time. So the question is, how do you sequence something that's 100 million letters long?

MARGARET WARNER: When you say "sequence," do you mean identifying all the bits or arranging them in the right order?

CRAIG VENTER: Determining the exact genetic code of something that is 100 million letters.

MARGARET WARNER: Of all these bits.

CRAIG VENTER: There's two different approaches that have been taken: the public approach has been to take, to map small segments, they're called back clones, bacterial artificial chromosomes, they're about 100,000 letters long, and to line those up along the chromosomes, and then to sequence the individual clones. What we showed was the first three genomes in history that we did at the Institute for Genomic Research is we could use mathematical algorithms and large computing capacity to solve the jigsaw puzzle of whole genomes. We did this first with the key pathogens from influenzae that causes meningitis in children, ear infections. The challenge was to see if that could be done on larger chromosomes. So we break chromosomes down, in the case of the human genomes, into millions of pieces and we determine the actual sequence, the actual genetic code of those pieces.

MARGARET WARNER: And that's where you are now.

CRAIG VENTER: That's where we are now. That's the phase that just got finished, a major phase of all the sequencing. And as it happens with the different projects at different phases, with the whole genome, you do everything at once. You do all the sequencing. And over the next few weeks we'll be feeding this to our super computer and trying to assemble it until we get the complete sequence of each of the chromosomes.

MARGARET WARNER: Let me read you one description that was in the "Washington Post" - how they describe it. They said essentially that you sheered this genetic material into bits tiny enough to be read by a computer or machine.

CRAIG VENTER: By the machine.

MARGARET WARNER: That's what you've done. If we use the analogy of the man in the set-up, it's as if you now have all the parts of that transistor or whatever out there. And then what you're going to do is put them in the order that makes sense, that makes....

CRAIG VENTER: That's right. It's like a giant jigsaw puzzle, only this jigsaw puzzle has about 30 million pieces to it. Each of those pieces are strings of letters of genetic code 500 or 600 letters long. You can see why people thought it was impossible to do and to have computers do it. Last week we published the largest genome in history, that of the fruit fly. They said that was impossible to do with this technique. It worked fantastically. And that was actually harder to do than it looks like the human is in the assembly phases.

MARGARET WARNER: Now is this shotgun strategy as you call it and everyone else calls it, is it as accurate or complete as the approach taken by the publicly funded Genome Project?

CRAIG VENTER: In fact, it's more accurate and more complete because we have to have the highest standard of sequence quality in order to do these massive computer assemblies. So if we were sequencing smaller clones, we could accept slightly lower quality sequences. We have to have nearly perfect sequences in the raw data or the computer, the biggest super computer built by a civilian group, couldn't deal with the information. We published between Celera and the work I did at the Institute for Genomic Research now15 complete chromosomes, including the one for tuberculosis, malaria, cholera, meningitis, the drosophila genome. These are the most accurate sequences that are out there, they're of outstanding quality.

MARGARET WARNER: Of what use... is it fair to call this right now, you call it a milestone or a breakthrough -- if all the pieces are still out there and they haven't been reassembled, is it of any use yet?

CRAIG VENTER: Yes, it is. We have lots of pharmaceutical subscribers that are -- in fact -- even using the pieces and have been while we've been generating to make key medical breakthroughs. There's some very exciting work now already going into the drug development process to help deal with key diseases. But in a matter of weeks it will be put together in the long strings of sequences that we know as the chromosomes. That's when the exciting phase will begin. That's where we begin to really interpret the genetic code, where we define how many genes there are. Nobody knows. We still guess, you know, it's 80 to 100,000 genes. Why do we guess? Because nobody knows. That's the phase we'll begin in a few weeks, of deciphering this information, knowing for the first time the complete repertoire of genes.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, you mentioned that your subscribers could get this information. And that does raise the issue about how accessible your data is. Can only people who have paid to subscribe get this data?

CRAIG VENTER: At the present time, yes. I mean that's, you know, we're not using taxpayer money to sequence the human genome. We're using private investment capital to do this. We couldn't wait for the other effort. It was not going to be done until the end of this decade until Celera announced what it was doing. We spurred forth the government program and the Celera program. It's good for everybody. We're going to get the genome much faster that way. We just published the drosophila genome; that is on the Internet. Anybody can download.

MARGARET WARNER: It's the fruit fly one.

CRAIG VENTER: The fruit fly. As soon as the human genome is of the same quality standard that we just published for the fruit fly genome, it will be in the same place. It can be downloaded and used by anybody on the Internet. There's different styles in science. Most scientists don't publish their findings until they're really complete and accurate. The Wellcome Trust made the U.S. Government labs dump its data nightly because that's what they were doing. That's not what most scientists do with their information, putting out the raw data. They interpret it. They make sure it's accurate. I'm not complaining about what the government is doing. In fact, it's terrific. We're helping make good use out of that information like most of the other groups in the world are but Celera is going to publish the complete finished thing when it's done to that quality.

MARGARET WARNER: So though President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair three weeks ago called on companies like yours-- I imagine they were thinking of your company-- to put out the raw data just the way the public does. That doesn't faze you?

CRAIG VENTER: They changed that two days ago. They said they weren't really talking about the private company that's sequencing the genome. There's only one and it's Celera. It's not like there's a long string of them. We are making our data... It's pretty extraordinary what we're doing with our own investment capital. We're sequencing the genome for the world for free, not at taxpayer expense, and we're giving it to the world because it's going to drive discovery that will make people need our databases and our software and our computer capacity much more than they would now.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. But then at what point... How do your investors recover their investment? You're obviously going to have to make serious money off this. What do you charge for?

CRAIG VENTER: The general public and scientists actually don't usually use the kind of database services that people in the news industry, lawyers uses, Lexus-Nexus, Bloomberg, we say we're going to be the Bloomberg's of the scientific world, somebody from Bloomberg told me their goal is to become the Celera of the business world. These are big, complex databases that software tools are put together to help people interpret it. Instead of having to go gather all that information yourself, you can sit down at your computer terminal and generate whatever information you want to very quickly out of this vast data source. We're doing the same for genomics, only it will be a far bigger database. Celera's database is already 80 terabytes of data. That's five or six time the national Library of Congress. It's a massive amount of information. Bloomberg's has I think over $1 billion a year revenue. That's how you get it is by subscriptions that people want to help in interpreting the information, it's not because we're keeping it secret.

MARGARET WARNER: Somebody... We were discussing this, this afternoon, compared this. The fact that your company, little known, fairly small, took on this huge project of real basic research and took on and said you were going to race the U.S. Government project, it would be a private company saying they're going to beat NASA getting on the Moon or something. Is that more possible today and if so why? Is this a new model for a new approach to really kind of basic research?

CRAIG VENTER: It was an exciting set of opportunities. Our parent company, P.E. Biosystems are the ones that developed the new sequencing technology, the instruments, that in fact the federal funded scientists use as well as ourselves. So, you know, basically we are combined P.E. Biosystems and Celera, a tool company. But major breakthroughs in technology, you can go back 400 years. Galileo had a telescope. That changed science and changed our view of the world. Having new scientific instruments like Mike Hunkapeler developed from P.E. Biosystems gave us a new tool set to approach genomics with. That coupled with the new algorithms to deal with the massive compute structure and the high end computing... We're dealing with the limits of computing power right now. We're waiting for the next generation computers already because Biology's needs are greater than any other in computing right now. All these came together: High-end computing, exciting new automated instruments, and new mathematical algorithms, altogether to solve the genetic code.

MARGARET WARNER: With the potential pay-off of real pharmaceuticals and everything else in the end.

CRAIG VENTER: And understanding everything we can about our new scientific heritage.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Well, thanks, Mr. Venter, for being with us.

CRAIG VENTER: Thank you.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, digital movies, a conversation with Walter Mosley, and the photography of walker Evans.

FOCUS - DIGITAL MAGIC

JIM LEHRER: Last night we looked at the impact of digital technology on the future of television. Tonight, a new world of filmmaking. Spencer Michels has our report.

SPOKESMAN: Where are you going to be? Can you sit up without doing all that right now?

ACTOR: Well, no, I'd be up here. You could probably do A...

SPOKESMAN: I need you to slide back, though.

SPENCER MICHELS: In a tiny San Francisco backyard, filmmaker Rob Nilsson is directing two actors in a film called "scheme." It's about a homeless man and his father, a cop. And it's being produced for a fraction of the cost of a high- budget Hollywood film.

SPOKESMAN: We're moving, so I want to probably keep this live.

SPENCER MICHELS: Nilsson's cameraman is using a digital video camera, a D.V. Cam that records images much like a computer does. The camera itself is cheaper than a traditional film camera, and costs about a third that of a professional video camera, and the tape is cheap. Filming digitally encourages the spare approach-- a far cry from the techniques of most movies or TV shows that employ legions of extras, stand-ins, gaffers, camera operators and assistants, caterers and makeup artists. For Nilsson, who follows the action through a monitor built into his goggles, the advantages of the new equipment amount to a revolution.

ROB NILSSON, Digital Filmmaker: Nowadays, having small, little cameras that get you into every little nook and cranny without having to worry about a whole lot of lights and a big crew and a big truck-- cheapness, accessibility, and I contend that it's a more intimate medium.

ROB NILSSON: And action.

SPENCER MICHELS: Nilsson says it works well for his style of filmmaking, where the focus is on the actors' spontaneity rather than special effects. A host of filmmakers like Nilsson are using the new technology to produce hundreds of new films and documentaries that would never have been made otherwise, because now the filmmakers can afford to experiment.

ROB NILSSON: In terms of its cheapness for young people starting out or even old people still... still with the fire in the belly, this is the art of the possible. This is something you can do. No matter what Hollywood says, no matter who doesn't want to fund what idea, we as artists can go out and we're going to make our film no matter what the world says.

SPOKESMAN: No.

SPENCER MICHELS: As for the video quality, Nilsson says it's different than film-- more gritty, more real.

ROB NILSSON: It does have those qualities. Now will it, when it's blown up on the screen coming from D.V. Cam, be quite as lustrous and Hallmark card-like? Probably not, but we've seen that, so do we need to see it again and again?

ACTOR: I heard he was out playing games again, counting...

SPENCER MICHELS: After a day of shooting, Nilsson takes advantage of another aspect of the digital age.

ACTOR: And they're unhappy with you...

SPENCER MICHELS: He gives his rushes to an internet company that immediately puts them on its web site so that anyone with a connection to the internet can look at them and comment.

SPOKESPERSON: We got ten in yesterday, 15 today.

SPENCER MICHELS: The web site distributing Nilsson's rushes is I-Film, founded by Rodger Raderman. He says that because of digital technology, film distribution is undergoing a revolution as profound as filmmaking.

ROGER RADERMAN, CEO, I-Film: It's been enormously difficult for those filmmakers and artists out there to take their films and put them in front of a mass audience. The up side is that every film doesn't have to be totally commercially viable anymore. It doesn't have to go on television, it doesn't have to go on theater. There's another outlet right now. What we have to remember is, it's the very early days, and we're going to see more and more prominent directors and filmmakers and actors begin producing films for the Internet. (Indistinguishable)

ACTOR: I hope you go blind and... And I hope you die! Now die! Get out of here!

SPENCER MICHELS: Raderman says you can watch most movies on the Internet for free today, but eventually there may be a charge. One problem he faces is that not everyone can easily watch movies posted on web sites.

SPENCER MICHELS: I tried this on my computer this morning, and I had a hard time getting any motion in the picture. What's going on?

ROGER RADERMAN: It could have been a number of things. You might have had an older computer that didn't have enough processing speed. It didn't have enough horsepower to deliver the goods. More likely is that you didn't have what's called bandwidth.

ACTOR: ...Could be closing all the time.

SPENCER MICHELS: "Bandwidth" means getting lots of information-- pictures, sound, text-- into your computer by using a direct high-speed, high-capacity connection to the Internet-- not just a modem and a phone line.

ROGER RADERMAN: When you're talking about high-resolution video and audio, it's a lot of data that has to go through that pipe, and most people don't have that, a fat- enough pipe yet in their home.

SPENCER MICHELS: Raderman predicts that in ten years or less, most movie fans will be able to bypass the video store and maybe even the cinema and get films off the Net. In fact, some Hollywood heavyweights are already investing millions in distributing movies over the Internet.

ACTOR: I've been in situations where...

SPENCER MICHELS: Documentary filmmakers are also benefiting from the digital revolution.

SPOKESMAN: It's very Berkeley.

SPENCER MICHELS: John Else, who teaches graduate students filmmaking at the University of California, says digital video encourages more production at a time when funding has dried up. Some of those documentaries he says are very good. (Singing) This one-- "Long Night's Journey into Day," about South Africa's struggle with its own apartheid past-- was shot with inexpensive equipment and won an award at Sundance, an independent film festival. Else, a judge at that festival, says making that film was possible only because the producers could act quickly.

JOHN ELSE: When an idea strikes, a documentary filmmaker does not have to hunker down for a year or two to raise a half million bucks to make the movie. They can bite the bullet, go with their credit card, you know, buy a cheap little camera, cheap little editing system, get on an airplane, go to South Africa, go to Thailand, go to Alabama, make the movie -- at least get it started, at least get it off the ground.

SPENCER MICHELS: And Else says that's good for American society.

JOHN ELSE: You know? I mean, the more documentaries that get made, including lousy ones that'll never get shown, the more documentaries that get made, the better off American citizens are. It's like having... You know, it's better for the country to have more newspapers rather than fewer.

SPOKESMAN: You already know the best actors, the best comedians...

SPENCER MICHELS: While most people may never make a documentary or a feature film, the new technology is now available for parents and grandparents to make and edit home movies.

SPOKESMAN: Maybe you should be a director.

SPENCER MICHELS: Apple Computer's CEO Steve Jobs introduced its new system last year.

STEVE JOBS: We think this is going to be the next big thing-- desk top video. (Applause)

SPENCER MICHELS: The I-movie is a system to edit home movies on an I-Mac computer, costing less than $1,500.

JOHN BASS: Okay, so we've just captured the video from the camera, and now we're going to start assembling it.

SPENCER MICHELS: For Apple, the key to selling I-movies is the simplicity. Marketing manager John Bass contends that editing home movies will bring out the director in any hobbyist.

JOHN BASS: We're looking at a software application that's called final cut pro.

SPENCER MICHELS: Apple and several other companies have also come out with new digital editing systems for professionals. Selling for $9,000 to $15,000, they are ten to 20 times cheaper than many editing systems in use today.

JOHN BASS: You can pick up all of these components for less than $10,000.

SPENCER MICHELS: That's much less than the industry standard: This avid editing system, which costs about $200,000, allowing for very high-quality work. But for some filmmakers, quality is less important than getting inner-city youngsters involved in the process. In San Francisco's tenderloin neighborhood, these teenagers are making movies about their own lives, in a program run by Spencer Nakasako at the Vietnamese Youth Development Center.

SPOKESMAN: Now say you want to do that edit and you want to lay it down and get it into the clip. So we've got...

SPENCER MICHELS: On this day, the kids were being taught how to edit the material they shot on digital DV cameras that they were given to document their personal stories.

SPENCER NAKASAKO, Filmmaker/Teacher: Where the sort of DV revolution is, is helpful is that we're able to get stories that we'd never could get in, say, 16 millimeter or with... when beta cam first came out, simply because, you know, working with young people, you know, and this small format is accessibility. Number two, we can fail. I mean, you try something, it doesn't work, you try something else. I mean, it allows that experimentation. It allows us to go after stories that maybe are chancy, and we start them up and they don't work, and so we just dump them and go onto something else.

SPOKESMAN: Let's go...

SPENCER MICHELS: Nakasako and the kids have had some of their documentaries broadcast on national television.

SPENCER NAKASAKO: In many cases, a lot of times the kids will think, "my story's not important," or "my story isn't very interesting." And then when an audience sees it, they actually go, "wow, people are interested, people are, you know, do want to know what's going on in my life."

SPOKESMAN: All the video that we shoot we end up digitizing...

SPENCER MICHELS: For Nakasako's teenagers, just as for independent filmmaker Rob Nilsson, the digital video is simply a tool to enhance the artistry.

ROB NILSSON: It's the poet's stubby pencil, is what we have now. And the poet is not sitting there wondering well, how much lead he's got left. He's doing it passionately, immediately, right there. And that's, that's what video is to me.

SPENCER MICHELS: While the digital video revolution is encouraging independent filmmakers, no one is predicting it will replace Hollywood's blockbusters. But it has already had an impact that will only grow as the technology improves.

CONVERSATION

JIM LEHRER: Now another in our series of conversations about new books, and to Elizabeth Farnsworth.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The new book is "Workin' on the Chain Gang: Shaking off the Dead Hand of History" by Walter Mosley. His first non-fiction book, it looks at what he calls "the chains that define our range of motion." Mosley has written, among other books, seven critically- acclaimed mysteries, featuring a reluctant private eye named Easy Rawlins. One of those novels, "Devil in a Blue Dress," became a movie starring Denzel Washington. "A Story Collection," featuring a character named Socrates Fortlow, an ex-con who's a kind of moral guide in South Central Los Angeles, became a movie on HBO. Walter Mosley grew up in Los Angeles, went to college in Vermont, became a computer programmer and then wrote his first novel in his mid-30s. His books have been translated into 20 languages. Thanks for being with us, Mr. Mosley.

WALTER MOSLEY, Author, "working' on the Chain Gang:" Thank you.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What are the chains you see? Who's still working on the chain gang?

WALTER MOSLEY: Well, we're all working on the chain gang. I mean, that's what I wrote the book about. I was originally going to write a book about black people in the 21st century, and as I started to study and to think about and wonder about the problems that black people had, it blossomed out to cover everybody. So it seemed to me that even though maybe not everybody is aware of it, that we're all in the same boat, that we're all laboring under that margin of profit.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Okay. Keep going. What do you mean we're all working on the chain gang, margin of profit?

WALTER MOSLEY: Well, you know, the idea that we're stuck in our... Most of us are stuck in our labor, that we're three or four, maybe five or six paychecks away from poverty and homelessness, that it's almost impossible to pay for good education for more than one or two kids, that it's hard for young people to buy a house, to make enough money to pay for both eating and the rent, all of these things that come together in America. America, you know, which is the land of plenty; America which is the richest country in the history of the world-- it seems that if you're in the working class, which as most of us are, no matter what kind of class we want to call ourselves in, it's a big struggle. And the struggle is getting harder; it's not getting easier.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And you think the profit motive is to blame for this?

WALTER MOSLEY: I think that the way that capitalism works and the way that it is understood is the problem. I mean, a lot of people think that democracy and capitalism are the same thing when they're two very different things. You know, it's a very simple book. I'm not really... I'm not saying things that haven't been said before. I'm not talking about some kind of new system or some kind of scientific way to get out of problems. I'm just trying to say, "listen, we're stuck inside of this margin of profit, and the margin of profit... The only place really to make money is off the labor of the people working for you, and so we're the one who pays for it."

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And I was struck by how careful you were to say that you didn't propose any other kind of system, especially any system that's utopian or too idealistic, as you put it.

WALTER MOSLEY: Well, you know, the idea that most of the... The people all the way back, 2,000, 2,500 years to Plato who tried to come up with theories or ideas about how society will grow necessarily, from the Republic to Das Kapital, they always end up saying, "well, for a little while we're going to need a dictatorship. For a little while we're going to need the few dominating the many." I don't want that. I mean, I think that we live in it today. I don't want it here, I don't want it any other time. I want us to come together. I want us to work in a democratic way, in a democratic process to try to change the world.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And how? How do we get... How do we all get rid of our chains?

WALTER MOSLEY: Well, you know, it's so difficult to talk about, and certainly to be certain about. And in this book, you know, you have to understand, when I talk about a non-fiction book, I usually think that nonfiction books lie. They tell... because they're trying to convince you of their argument. I'm not trying to convince anybody of my argument. But what I'm trying to say is that we need to cut out the distractions, the spectacles and illusion. It would be nice to give up television and drinking and big arena sports for 12 weeks, let's say; just to sit down in your house and think about who you are and what you are and where you are -- from that point, to begin to start to list, what are the most important things in our lives? What do we need to do? What do I think the most important thing is? And then to ask questions. I mean, simple questions like, "who can become president?" You know, when I think of it and when somebody asks me, "well, who do you think could be president?" I say, "well, I can tell you... I don't know who's going to be, but I can tell you that it's a him, that he's white, that he's over 35 and under 60, that he's tall, that he's handsome, that he speaks well, that he's probably wealthy, that he's straight, that he's married. You know, there's... when you finish describing who can be president, you realize, well, you don't live in a democracy, because only 1% of the country can be president.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Mr. Mosley, do you think that being a novelist gives you the imagination to see things as they might be, and that's one reason you can write a book like this?

WALTER MOSLEY: Well, I think that in order to change what America is, we need imagination. I don't know if, you know, being a novelist, or being a photographer, or a painter, or a journalist or... You know, there's a lot of creativity in a lot of different people in America, but in order to change America, we need to be creative, and we need to reject the creativity that's boxed and sold to us like on the television and radios. We need to say, "well, maybe there's something better than getting on a game show and winning $1 million" or, you know, stripping down to my underwear and maybe attracting somebody for $1 million.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: At first I thought this was a departure. It's non-fiction. Your other books are mysteries. But all your work seems to me to be about morality when I look at it again. Socrates, after all, the name, Fortlow is the moral philosopher, even though he's an ex-con. Where did this strong interest in morality and moral dilemmas really, the solving of moral dilemmas come from?

WALTER MOSLEY: Well, you know, it's really interesting. When I was traveling around talking about my Easy Rawlins novels here and there around the country, a lot of people would ask me, you know, my mother's Jewish, my father's black. A lot of people would say, "Where does your Jewish side come from?" Or "where's your white side," not thinking that that's Jewish. And I'm going, what do you mean? They say, "you know, we see easy doing all of these things that we consider black, but now that we've seen him reading books, intellectual books, we think, "well, that's where the white side is: The part that reads." And I look at these people, and I say, but you know, black people read, and black people think. But it was very hard to convince them. That's the reason I wrote about Socrates Fortlow. And I guess Socrates led me into writing this book that... The biggest thing in black America is that we're solving problems. We're always solving problems, because we're faced with more dilemmas all the time. Do you want to do wrong in order to make it? Do you want to do right and suffer instead? There are all kinds of problems that we face, and now you have to understand, I think that it's not just black people, I think it's all people in America. You know, from far right white movements to far left or radical black movements, everybody's worried about how can they get good medical care for their family and their children. Everybody's worried about having a good job and making sure that they and the people that they love can do well in their lives. And the reason I wrote the book is to say, "listen, we come together." When Malcolm X says, "you have been bamboozled," he's not just talking to me. He's not just talking to black people. Everybody in America's been bamboozled. And we have to back away from that, look at it a little closer, and then wonder how we can do better with this nation.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But I'm really glad you brought that up, because you write in the book that the chains might be more recognizable in the black experience, but they chain us, they restrain us all. And you do feel that African Americans have something to teach other Americans in this. Explain that.

WALTER MOSLEY: Well, one of the problems with being marginalized, black people being marginalized, is that it's easy to say well, black history is a special thing; it's an elective, it's the month of February, it's not something important. But really, black American history speaks to all of America. To begin with, it is American history. The organization of labor, the labor of black people, is the foundation of how labor is organized in America. When black people were freed, the way that they were kind of re-chained to their labor, you know, becoming sharecroppers instead of slaves, is the way that almost everybody relates to their labor in America. And the way that we fought it, the way through the civil rights movement, through the Black Panthers, through the black nationalist movement, through the Congress, everything that we've done is a way to teach other people how to move ahead and how to fight against oppression in America. And indeed, there is oppression in America, as much as people don't want to think there is.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Are people listening? Are you pleased with the reception you've gotten so far?

WALTER MOSLEY: Well, you know, I'm very happy about it because young people, between 18 and maybe 25, 30, have really enjoyed the book. People who are older, people who have been brought up in the system of the 20th century, which means to say that political systems should have answers-- you know, if you do A, B, and C, then it will work. No matter what it is-- you know, if it's democracy, or communism, or fascism, whatever, those people, the older people have some problems with it. They say, "well, you wrote all this stuff. You didn't give me an answer." I say, "well, the answer lies within us." We have to find the answer in ourselves, and we have to find the connection between us in order to make things different.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Well, Walter Mosley, thank you very much for being with us.

WALTER MOSLEY: Thank you.

FINALLY- THE HUNGRY EYE

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, creating with a camera, and to Ray Suarez.

RAY SUAREZ: These stark, black and white, deceptively simple photographs are among the best known images of the rural South during the Great Depression. These pictures have become part of our memory bank, part of America's shared visual catalogue of a time long gone and places changed beyond recognition. When they first appeared 65 years ago, these pictures immediately established the reputation of an artist, who helped move photography in new directions as an art form: Walker Evans. For weeks now, people have been crowding a new exhibit of Evans' work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Jeff Rosenheim is the curator of photography at the museum.

JEFF L. ROSENHEIM, Curator: I think Evans had a unique idea, which really distinguishes him from many other artists. He set himself up as a historical model to see the present as if it were already the past. And if he could do that at the time, he could stand for all time, and I think that his success is that he achieved his goal to photograph what was most American about America, but also to photograph those things in the present with the eye of tradition. And I think that those pictures are timeless.

RAY SUAREZ: Evans called the style he was striving for, lyric documentary. It was stripped down, meant to record the world as it is, instead of using a tool, the camera, to create a world the eye cannot normally see. Whether shooting the frank, unadorned, straight-ahead gaze of the poorest Americans, small- town streetscapes with no people to be seen, or decaying advertising signs, Evans' art simply emerged from knowing what to put in, and what to leave out.

JEFF L. ROSENHEIM: He wanted his role to disappear. He wanted to hide his hand, if you will, so that we can stand where he stood and look at the world and come to terms with it directly, unfiltered by the artist's perceptions, but of course influenced directly by them.

RAY SUAREZ: Evans was born in 1903, and raised in affluence. His desire to be a writer took him to Paris after the First World War. He started his life's work as a photographer when he returned to America in 1927. Throughout his life, Evans remained a blend of rebel outsider and well-groomed ivy- league sophisticate. His photos of the Brooklyn Bridge, illustrations for a book by his friend Hart Crane, began building his reputation. They were followed by journalistic work in the Caribbean for a book, "The Crime of Cuba." In the mid-1930's Evans was hired by the Farm Security Administration. He chronicled the grinding poverty of southern farmers, and indulged his own interest in southern architecture. Rosenheim says, unlike many of the New Deal artists, he did not have a political agenda.

JEFF L. ROSENHEIM: His agreement is no politics, whatsoever, that there would be no use for propaganda. He was not interested in that, but he was well aware that the agency he was working for was trying to illustrate the efforts by the New Deal administration to relieve some of the terrible poverty that has befallen America during the Depression, and that the efforts made by the New Deal administration to assist them was something, I think, he believed in. What he didn't believe in, is that art could change anything. He believed that the photograph as a record, as a document, would be the greatest thing that could ever have been created by the New Deal administration, and I think it has been.

RAY SUAREZ: It was during this same period that Evans traveled south with writer James Agee. The pair spent several months with the farmers of Hale County, Alabama, in preparation for an article for "Fortune" magazine that would never be published. Instead it became the book, "Let us Now Praise Famous Men," which along with the New Deal photos sealed Evans place in the history of American photography. But he wasn't close to finished. He took pictures for another 40 years. Evans' work was recognized almost immediately for the way it turned documentary photography into an art form. In 1938, the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave Evans their first-ever one-man show in photography.

JEFF L. ROSENHEIM: The art comes in, actually, in the things that are hidden in the picture. It's the angle of light, the illumination of the facade. If you look at one of these pictures, it's in the composition, that doesn't look like it's anything, but nature's composition or the civilization's composition.

RAY SUAREZ: Evans was fascinated with signs. He photographed them, and collected them. Like many earlier 20th century artists, he took ordinary things out of their environment, and treated them as art.

WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY, Artist: I think he laughingly said that he was the father of pop art at one time, but his interest in things found, like that, those go quite a ways back in his work.

RAY SUAREZ: Artist William Christenberry helped Evans collect many of those signs.

WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY: I think he was very much taken with, what I call the aesthetics of the aging process: How time and the elements, bullet holes, rust, whatever, can make something that was once in mint condition have a quality that is more interesting than if it were in mint condition.

RAY SUAREZ: While building the stature of photography, Evans also preserved for us lost pieces of the American past, like these photos taken in the New York City subways. They were taken in secret. Evans hid a camera in his coat, and ran a shutter release cable down his sleeve.

JEFF L. ROSENHEIM: And he would sit opposite his fellow passengers on the subway, and record a hidden, if you will, a surreptitious view of his fellow passengers: the idea being that he didn't like the artifice, and sort of falsity, of commercial portraiture, or studio portraiture. He basically felt like the most honest form of portraiture is a portrait of someone unaware that they're actually having their picture made.

RAY SUAREZ: In a project for "Fortune" on the working people of Detroit Evans hid in plain sight, holding his camera waist high, and quietly snapping passersby. He was fascinated by the variety of faces, classes, and attitudes of Detroiters in the modern economy. The Metropolitan Museum is not only home to thousands of Evans' photographs, but the kinds of artifacts that fill in the man behind the art hanging in the galleries. Evans collected thousands of postcards, admiring the straightforward way this format tells a story. The museum has his letters, his diaries, the books he read, the classified ads for his series on working men and women, and the outtakes from his photographic essays. They tell you more about what Evans was looking for in his work, and reassure you that even a master can take underexposed and out-of-focus pictures.

WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY: Walker Evans' work influenced me greatly.

RAY SUAREZ: In the early 1960's, Christenberry was befriended by the older man. Christenberry himself came from the part of Alabama where Evans had made his famous pictures decades before. The two remained friends until Evans' death in 1975. In the early 1970's, the two men traveled to the same part of Alabama. By then Evans had switched to color and instant photography-- the Polaroid SX-70. Christenberry describes his friend at work.

WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY: He said, "would you look in the car in my duffel bag and get me a box of film?" SX-70 film, I said, "yes, sir," and when I took it back to him he was focusing the SX-70, which for me is kind of an awkward camera to focus, but he'd had it up to his eye. So I approached him, without interrupting, from his left side and I saw his eye looking through that lens. And the best way I can describe it, it was like the eye of an eagle. I mean it was really sharply focused. I don't know how to express that, but it was intense.

RAY SUAREZ: So Christenberry grabbed his own camera, and took this picture, a portrait of the artist, as an old man. In his last years, Evans taught at Yale and tried out the new tools advancing camera technology offered. He said, "the artist's eye must be hungry, and my eye is hungry."

JEFF L. ROSENHEIM: It's in the subway pictures. It's in the labor anonymous pictures, but I think it's in all of his work. It's the struggle between the individual and society. It's what the artist does. The artist is always somewhat distant from the society, in order to be able to observe it from that sort of necessary distance. You'd spoken about, you know, how do we look at photographs, and what does the photograph teach us? How is... What is the language of the camera? And I think Evans was one of the people that defined it.

RAY SUAREZ: The Evans retrospective is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until May 14.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Thursday. Elian Gonzalez's father arrived in Washington, hoping to regain custody of his son. And Celera Genomics announced it has finished decoding all the DNA for a single human being. It's a milestone in the effort to map the overall human genome. We'll see you on-line, and again here tomorrow evening with Paul Gigot and Tom Oliphant, among others. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.