I saw something rarer than the nightingale last week in New York; rarer than someone saying “after you” on the subway. It was in downtown Manhattan at a retrospective of Michael Roemer, the 86-year-old German film director.
On the first night they screened two of his films. Cortile Cascino, a documentary commissioned by NBC in 1962 about a slum in Palermo, Sicily, and spiked by the TV network when Roemer delivered something more visceral than they’d expected: in one scene, a baby-sized coffin was thrown into the back of a van and driven to a mass, unmarked grave. The second, Faces of Israel, was shot in the Middle East in 1967 just before the Six Day war, and is full of poignant scenes of Arabs and Israelis dancing in sunlight.
After the screening, Roemer came reluctantly to the front, standing in the shadows until someone yelled at him to step into the spotlight. “These films are 50 years old,” he apologised. “I think they’re good, but of course I was there. I’m not sure anyone else should be interested.” In a town in which people sell themselves down to their very last atom, Roemer’s humility made the audience laugh with delight.
He never did have an eye for commercial success: another of his documentaries, shown later in the week, is the story of three terminally ill people and is called, simply, Dying. You have to be having an exceptionally good day to trot along to that after work. It’s one of the best documentaries I have ever seen, but still.
At the end of the session, someone asked about NBC pulling Cortile Cascino. Roemer blinked and said, “Ja, and the crazy thing is we took the worst of it out – we didn’t even mention the incest.”
Profit of doom
The second season of The Profit, the latest hit reality TV show in the US, has just started. Marcus Lemonis, a multimillionaire investor, goes into failing businesses to help turn them around. Last week, he visited a meat packing factory in Brooklyn, mocked the stupidity of the manager, bamboozled the two guys who ran the place and, from where I was sitting, seemed for the price of his participation to make off with the only valuable bit of the company: a line of products called Brooklyn Burgers. The owners were so dazzled they would probably have thrown in their wives if he’d made it a condition of sale.
Lemonis, along with private equity partners, puts his own cash into these businesses, so he is assuming some risk. But he is also using the power of his celebrity, and the way in which cameras can get people to act against their best interests, for financial gain. At least on American Idol the participants are only made to look a bit foolish. In The Profit, desperate business owners are signing over large chunks of their equity. Perhaps it’s worth it if Lemonis saves them from going under, but one wonders at what price.
Lemonis has a motto for success, the three Ps: people, process and product – whatever that means. But his approach is better summed up by a line from The Thick of It, when junior minister Ben Swain gets chewed up by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight: “It’s like watching a lion raping a sheep, but in a bad way.”
Ava word
The most aggravating phrase in the American lexicon is “good job”. It’s empty, evil and spells the death of integrity and degradation of meaning.
And yet you find yourself saying it, especially to children. On the street yesterday, I watched two mothers stop to chat. Their babies were tiny, but when one waved its hand in the other’s direction, the mum screamed, “Good job, Ava! See how she’s saying hello?” I hope she’s saving for Ava’s therapy bills – for when she finds out that what Mum thinks are good jobs are just basic motor skills.
