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Kael, Pauline. "The Current Cinema." The New Yorker, 18 October 1982, 173-178.
This extremely critical review of Fitzcarraldo offers an insight into the production of the film, historical context, and mindset of Herzog. After praising Aguirre the Wrath of God, Pauline Kael gives the historical inspiration for the film. An Irishman, Fitzcarrald, who made a fortune in the Peruvian rubber trade made hundreds of natives disassemble a small boat and carry it from one river to another. In contrast to the film character, the real life he had already made a fortune and had no desire to build an opera house. Herzog then took this story, multiplied the size of the ship by ten, used a mountain twice as steep, and decided to not disassemble his ship. He did elect to use several hundred native Amazonians. Additionally, Kael mentions the inspiration of the ruins at Carnac on Herzog’s decision to move the ship. She then argues that film relies on illusions, which Herzog ignored in the production of Fitzcarraldo. To Herzog, using sets and models would have made the picture look fake, but Kael argues special effects can create a convincing picture without endangering the lives of everyone involved. She also notes that Herzog sees the making of a film as a challenge for all involved, seeing it as a curse. He views the fatalities that occurred on the set as a setback, all in the name of filmmaking and great art.
This review helps one to understand the mindset of Herzog going into Fitzcarraldo and the creative liberties he took in using historical facts. By contrasting the actual rubber baron with Kinski’s character, one sees how Herzog made the character more interesting. Whereas the actual person sought only financial gain, the film character seeks to build an opera house modeled after that of Manaus. The moving of the ship over the mountain gives the character a new dimension of determination, with the ultimate goal of creating great art, an opera house. Herzog’s characters often have desires to accomplish incredible feats, not unlike himself. His fanaticism in risking peoples’ lives to make a movie poses a great moral question, particularly given his disgust at the exploitation of Amazonian Natives over the years. While Kael sees the ordeal of Fitzcarraldo’s production as unnecessary, it still remains a remarkable feat.
The New Yorker
The Financial Page
Fuel for Thought
by James Surowiecki July 23, 2007
In the auto industry, there’s one thing you can always count on: if a new environmental or safety rule is proposed, executives will prophesy disaster. In the nineteen-twenties, Alfred Sloan, the president of General Motors, insisted that the company could not make windshields with safety glass because doing so would harm the bottom line. In the fifties, auto executives told Congress that making seat belts compulsory would slash industry profits. When air bags came along, Lee Iacocca told Richard Nixon that “safety has really killed all our business.” A few years later, when Congress was thinking about requiring fuel-economy standards, auto executives warned that instituting such standards would create “massive financial and unemployment problems.” And now, with Congress debating a bill to raise fuel-economy standards, for the first time in almost twenty years, the Chicken Littles are squawking again, forecasting doom for Detroit and asserting that making higher-mileage vehicles is technologically unfeasible and economically suicidal.
Of course, much of this is simply stonewalling by executives determined to keep meddlesome politicians out of their business. But sometimes the industry’s fears have been founded on real market research. In the case of safety glass, G.M. believed that consumers weren’t prepared to pay more for cars with safety glass, so Sloan worried that it would be hard to recoup the cost of installing it. Similarly, when, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, G.M. offered front-seat air bags as an option on Cadillacs, Buicks, and Oldsmobiles, they didn’t sell. Fuel-economy standards present the same difficulty: although there are plenty of affordable models that get good gas mileage, over the past two decades some of the most powerful and least fuel-efficient vehicles on the market—S.U.V.s and pickup trucks—have also been among the best-selling. Thirty years ago, so-called “light trucks” accounted for about a fifth of all auto sales. Today, even with a recent slowdown, they account for more than half.
The criminal odyssey of Chinatown’s Sister Ping.
by PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE
CARNAL KNOWLEDGE
How I became a Tuscan butcher.
by BILL BUFORD
Issue of 2006-05-01
If you want an introduction o all the issues surrounding the contemporary newspaper industry, read this article. It focuses on the trials and tribulations that the executive editorial staff of the Los Angeles Times has had with the “empty suits” of the Tribune Company, and given that the article appears in the New Yorker, I am sure you can imagine which side is portrayed the most sympathetically—rightfully so from my view. The issue is that the editors see the newspaper as fulfilling a social role and for them what is at stake is creating the best possible paper. For the corporate management, they want to meet (if not exceed) Wall Street’s profit expectations each quarter, and thus even when readership and revenue are faltering, rather than invest in the paper to make it one of the best in the nation (the editors admit that for various reasons—most of them pecuniary—papers such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal are not its true peers) to ensure long-term growth and profitability, they cut costs. For quick digression, granted the gap between the LA Times and the aforementioned papers is close, and the editors believe they could close the gap, but those who occupy the corporate offices see differently. For them, they do not want to have the best possible paper; rather, they want to have the most profitable paper with the largest margins (income as a percent of revenue). If the two coincide, great. But, insofar as quality is a long-term investment, the current management would rather cut the size of the newsroom staff and trim expenses to satisfy investors’ ravenous desires for ever growing profits.
So much for my partisan take on the article. It is not nearly that skewed in its presentation, although it does lend itself to being interpreted as such. One important fact the article touches on (albeit tangentially) is ruinous competition. The corporate officers of the Tribune Company would like all of their papers to share office space and staff in some of their bureaus outside of their main marketplaces (the Washington Bureau, for example). Many editors resist this, for they want control, uniqueness and particularity in their paper—if the lose their direct control, they might as well just use a wire service. Nevertheless, perhaps the corporate managers are on to something. Ruinous competition does not just hurt the newspapers, it also damages consumers, insofar as resources that could be used to create content desired by a particular audience are instead expended on creating duplicates of editorial pieces that already exist. For a better explanation on ruinous competition, see C. Edwin Baker’s book Media, Markets, and Democracy pages 30 to 37 and pages 177 to 178.