1917

Roughly a century before 2019, when the film, 1917, was made, the Great War, or what would subsequently be renamed, World War I, was raging in Europe. Incredibly, soldiers had to live in dug-out trenches for years. It is no wonder that the war would bring the Spanish Flu to both Europe and America. In 2020, roughly a century after that flu, the coronavirus pandemic was occurring globally, yet without any war to have incubated that virus. By 2020, Europeans and Americans alike could not have imagined what life must have been like in the trenches. The film’s finest contribution, I submit, is in capturing that context, which in effect does a great deal of the story-telling. The film is thus a good illustration of the role that context can play in story-telling in an audio-visual medium such as film.

The full essay is at "1917."

Lehman's Dick Fuld as the Antagonist in the film, "Too Big to Fail"

The reporter-author of Too Big to Fail, Andrew Ross Sorkin, expressed the following fear as his 600-plus-page book was being made into a movie: "I went into the process I think worried – as I imagine most writers would be – that it would be sexed up and hollywoodized in some other way." To be sure, putting the Dick Fuld (CEO of Lehman Brothers) character into any sort of sex scene would have been counterproductive at best.

The full essay is at "Lehman's Dick Fuld."

See related essay: "Leadership at Lehman: On the Failure of Richard Fuld"

Computer Technology Revolutionizing Industries: Books and Films

Crude oil was first drilled in 1859 in northwestern Pennsylvania (not in the desert of the Middle East). It was not long before oil lamps became ubiquitous, lengthening the productive day for millions beyond daylight hours. Just fifty or sixty years later, as electricity was beginning to replace the lamps, Ford’s mass-produced automobile was taking off, providing an alternative use of crude oil. For those of us alive in the early decades of the twenty-first century, electric lighting indoors and cars on paved roads have been around as long as we can remember. As a result, we tend to assume that things will go on pretty much as they “always” have. Other than for computer technology, the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century looks nearly indistinguishable from the last thirty or forty years of the last century. As the second decade of the 21st century began, applications based on computer technology were reaching a critical mass in terms of triggering shifts in some industries that had seemingly “always” been there.  Books, music and movies were certainly among the fastest moving,  perhaps like the dramatic change in lighting and cars beginning a century and a half before with the discovery of crude oil.

The full essay is at "Computer Technology Revolutionizing Industries."