Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards (42 page)

How do you view time? The way you see it affects how you talk about it. For example, if your boss says he wants to move his meeting with you back, does that mean he wants to schedule it earlier or later in time? Some people think moving something “back” in time means to make it earlier, and some people—these are the ones who have the dictionary on their side—know it means to make the meeting later. Technically, moving something
back
means pushing it farther away from where you are (which is the present).

San Alfonso del Mar Lagoon, Chile

At the San Alfonso del Mar resort in Chile there’s a manmade body of water that could fit 6,000 standard-sized eight-meter backyard swimming pools inside it. Called the San Alfonso del Mar Saltwater Lagoon, the pool overlooks the Pacific Ocean and has racked up some impressive stats, according to the
Guinness Book of Records
:

San Alfonso del Mar isn’t just for swimming, either—you can snorkel, scuba dive, kayak, and sail in it. A water shuttle is available to ferry guests from the hotel to ocean side. Naysayers may question building a huge pool next to an ocean, but Chile’s waters often have a fierce undertow, making them inhospitable to swimming.

The lagoon’s crystal-clear, bright-blue saltwater is supplied by the nearby ocean and is kept at a constant temperature of 79° F.
It cost $1.5 billion and took 10 years to complete. Fernando Fischmann, founder of Crystal Lagoon, the company that built the pool, developed a specially patented pool-cleaning process called “pulse oxidation,” which he claims uses 100 times fewer chemicals than normal swimming pools. But since this pool is 6,000 times larger than a normal pool, maintenance costs are still considerable—estimated at more than $4 million. It takes 211,400 gallons (800,000 liters) every day to replenish the San Alfonso del Mar Saltwater Lagoon, and two days to empty it of water.

With its balmy water temperature and sunny location, the lagoon is open most months of the year, but if the weather turns windy or rainy, visitors need not sacrifice their tropical vacation—they can simply retreat to a temperature-controlled beach inside a glass pyramid adjacent to the lagoon. That oasis not only has warm water and jet massages, but waterfalls, bubble beds, and heated sand, too.

Even the sand surrounding the indoor and outdoor pools gets special treatment; it’s washed and filtered to be softer than beach sand. The
Daily Telegraph
reports that the Crystal Lagoon group has plans to open at least six more mega-pools in places like Panama, Argentina, and Dubai.

Some other interesting aquatic tidbits from our “pool of knowledge”:

Peabody was a businessman who switched to public service in 1906 at age 54, working for various universities and the Democratic National Committee. After Peabody died in 1941, the University of Georgia, where he’d served on the board, established the George Foster Peabody Award. Officially presented by the college’s journalism school, the awards honor excellent radio and TV reporting and socially redeeming programming. Winners in 2006 included
The Office
and
Scrubs
.

Movies of the 1970s

The end of Hollywood’s studio system should have spelled disaster for movies in the 1970s. If nothing else, it could have heralded the advent of a long learning period in which actors, directors, producers, and writers all searched for different ways to work together in a new paradigm. But that didn’t happen. Instead, creativity exploded. Young directors began exploring bold new visions. Established actors took chances on unlikely projects. And the result was a decade of more unique and groundbreaking movies being made in a shorter period of time than any other in movie history.

The studio system began in the 1920s, when big movie studios like MGM, Warner Bros., and 20th Century Fox owned nearly every part of the business, right down to the theaters themselves. Even famous actors like Bette Davis, Judy Garland, and Clark Gable were controlled by this system, with the stars being bound by contracts to a single studio that decided what movies the actor made. This monopoly was mostly broken up in 1948 by an antitrust lawsuit, but it was another 20 years before studio contracts and controls were completely dissolved. The Hollywood bigwigs had spent a lot of time and money creating the images of their contracted stars, and they wanted to protect that investment.

By the 1970s, actors and actresses were no longer under contract to a single studio, which allowed performers to fight for the roles they wanted. It also allowed the studios (both big and small)
to hire the actors they wanted, rather than to rely solely on the ones under contract to them.

All this freedom didn’t automatically create a boon at the box office, though. When the 1970s began, Hollywood was facing serious money shortages. Studios were cutting the number of movies produced (MGM production dropped from 15 movies per year to five between 1973 and 1974). A shrinking pool of moviegoers also worried filmmakers—between 1960 and 1969, weekly attendance had dropped by about 35 percent and it hit an all-time low in 1971. Plus, foreign filmmakers were beginning to break through. In particular, French movies under rule-breaking directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer were becoming popular, especially with younger audiences . . . movies’ target group.

So how were the bedraggled Hollywood studios supposed to make money? They hired their own young, creative crop of new filmmakers. Soon this group included some of the biggest names in movie history. But in the early ’70s, no one was sure who they were—or how successful their projects would be. These young mavericks, all in their 30s or younger, included Martin Scorcese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, David Lynch, William Friedkin, Francis Ford Coppola, and John Carpenter.

Older directors, like Woody Allen and Hal Ashby, stuck around too, and like Hitchcock, Capra, and a few other well-known directors before them, they achieved superstardom and helped to usher in an entirely new approach to filmmaking: the age of the auteur—the director whose single, cohesive vision ruled over the film. Previously, a movie’s direction was dictated by the studio; some famous films, like
Gone with the Wind
, even had multiple directors. But now each movie was the director’s artistic statement, and the young mavericks adopted this idea wholeheartedly.

To see what those directors created, we need only to look at the list of Best Picture Academy Award winners from 1970 to 1979:
Patton
,
The French Connection
,
The Godfather
,
The Sting
,
The Godfather Part II
,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
,
Rocky
,
Annie Hall
,
The Deer Hunter
, and
Kramer vs. Kramer
. Of those films,
The Sting
,
Patton
, and
Kramer vs. Kramer
are the only ones that did not make the American Film Institute’s “100 Greatest Movies of All Time” list, a ranking of the 100 best movies of all time. (To be fair,
Patton
made the first list in 1998, but it was dropped when the list was revised in June 2007.) In fact, 20 films from the 1970s made that revised list, more than any other decade:

And when totals are adjusted for inflation, more movies from the 1970s make the top 10 list of the highest domestic box-office moneymakers of all time than any other decade: #2
Star Wars
, #7
Jaws
, and #9
The Exorcist.

Perhaps the greatest movie of the 1970s—some argue it’s the greatest movie ever—is
The Godfather
. Based on Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel, director Francis Ford Coppola gathered some of the most celebrated actors of all time for a masterpiece of American life told through a crime family’s eyes. Puzo cowrote the screenplay with Coppola, who fought to maintain his vision of the film, including its stars. If Paramount had gotten its way, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, and Robert Duvall all might have been replaced by Ernest Borgnine, Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, and Paul Newman. But the players believed in Coppola’s vision and were willing to make concessions to him. Brando (a bit of a prima donna) even agreed to a pay cut to play Vito Corleone and
signed a contract saying he would not hold up production of the movie.