Samizdata

I watched a bit of The Apprentice on the BBC last night, the show featuring UK tycoon Sir Alan Sugar, who among other things owns a large stake in Tottenham Hotspur FC. The programme, like the American version, is engrossing and it nicely builds up the tension as Sugar confronts his teams of wanna-be businessfolk with their performance and fires one of them.

I have mixed views overall about the show. As pure entertainment, it succeeds in drawing the viewer in, although I am not sure in fact how well it really explains the qualities needed to be a good entrepreneur. The message seems to be that business is a dog-eat-dog, zero-sum game in which if some people win, others must lose. Which is wrong since everyone benefits from trade, otherwise why else trade in the first place? If a person who is smarter than me gets a job I covet, then the overall economic pie gets bigger than it otherwise would, so we all benefit, even though I might feel disappointed.

The Apprentice also seems to celebrate aggression to a considerable degree, and yet businessmen and women in my experience come a cropper if they stop listening to what their customers want and refuse to learn from experience. A degree of humility is actually smart. A quality I do not see much of in the show is that of sheer courage in taking business risks, something that is not sufficiently appreciated except by writers such as George Gilder.

I wonder whether Sugar (what an ill-suited surname he has!) is really a great advocate of business, at least as far as this show goes. Yes, I can admire how he rose from nothing in London’s East End to become one of Britain’s richest men (he has a net personal worth of 800 million pounds, according to the TV commenter), but he comes across as a bit of a braggart, the sort of bore one might encounter in a pub bragging to his mates about how ‘ard he is and how ruthless he can be. Yawn. I suspect that many of the greatest businessmen, while undoubtedly workaholics, ruthless and driven people, have to be able to rub along with other people. Maybe in Britain’s anti-business culture someone like Sugar stands out and he feels the need to put himself about.

Or perhaps Sugar is just hamming it up for the cameras and is a delightful fellow. You can never tell with these sort of ‘Reality TV’ shows. I would certainly watch some of the other shows in the series.

In 1982, Disney released the movie Tron, the first film incorporating large amounts of computer graphics. (Actually it only included about 15 minutes of actual graphics. The rest of the film was drawn art designed to look like computer graphics, whereas today’s films are often full of computer graphics being used to look like more naturalistic things). The film was not successful at the box office, possibly because as well as being made by computer nerds, the film was also about computer nerds, and what might be referred to as the Silicon Valley culture was at that point extremely marginal, particularly in pop cultural terms. (Having said that, the film was set in Los Angeles, but I will forgive it that). However, for those of us that saw it, the film was rather mind blowing. It became a tremendous influence on many people working in computer animation and special effects today, and on people who were inspired by that technological culture in general. When these things did become mainstream, many of the people who were behind the scenes were people who had loved Tron.

However, the people who made Tron itself generally did not prosper from it. The film was too far ahead of its time, and Hollywood did not know what to make of it or what to do with the people who had made it. In what now seems staggering given that this is possibly the most groundbreaking film ever made from a special effects point of view, the film did not receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects. This was partly because the film was perceived as a failure, and the academy doesn’t often reward failure, but it also had to do with a peculiarity of the Academy Awards nomination process, which is that (usually) the people who nominate films in a particular category are those who have been nominated in that category before. In 1982 “Special Effects” meant mattes (ie drawn artwork) and models. Using computer graphics was seen almost as “cheating”, and as a minimum an entirely different thing from what members of the Visual Effects branch of the Academy did. So, no nomination. (Things have changed since then. A couple of years ago I made an observation to another blogger that Master and Commander had excellent effects, and in response I was told that they were “not special effects”, because it was done with models in a tank in Mexico rather than with computer graphics.

To many people today, “special effects” means computer graphics, and that is that). That said, Master and Commander does use some computer graphics, just nowhere near as intensively as, say, The Lord of the Rings). However, as far as I am concerned Master and Commander does use special effects, computer based or not, and in fact it uses them dazzlingly, as I felt that a 19th century ship in the Royal Navy was really like that. Getting this kind of thing right is breathtakingly hard, which is why that film a couple of years ago deserved the visual effects Academy Award. But (although it was nominated) it didn’t get it. (It did win a very well deserved Academy Award for cinematography, however).

If Tron had been nominated for an Academy Award when it was released in 1982, it might or might not have actually won. And this may even have been fair. It would have been up against Blade Runner, possibly the greatest achievement ever in matte based special effects. However, although that film was nominated, it didn’t win either. (Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial won). Such once again is the academy’s reluctance to give awards to movies not perceived as successes. But in retrospect the lack of a nomination was a travesty.

And as sometimes happens in Hollywood, it has been decided to acknowledge retrospectively that it was a travesty. Gary Demos, who was largely responsible for the computer graphics in “Tron”, has been awarded an honorary Academy Award this year. This may be ultimately unimportant and trivial, but it is nonetheless about time.

“You can’t fight in here – this is the War Room!”
– Peter Sellers, playing the President of the United States in Dr Strangelove.