Month: April 2025

Hackman Was the Inspiring Hero of The Poseidon Adventure

I was surprised to see a commentary on Gene Hackman by Ben Stiller, so I started reading. He wrote that one Hackman film had mattered to him a lot.
I doubted that we liked the same film, but I read on, feeling a bit of hope and suspense. I admit I felt a tingle of triumph when I read that we both liked the same film–The Poseidon Adventure.

Stiller said that at age 7 he watched it in the theatre about 10 times. I don’t remember if I ever saw it in the theatre, but I have watched it more than once and I think about it fairly often. What I think about is what the passengers do when the ship is flipped over by a mammoth wave. Almost all of the surviving passengers start hobbling toward the top deck of the ship, hoping for rescue. But the small band of misfits who had been sitting at Reverend Gene Hackman’s table, plus the cruise singer, are convinced by Hackman that the only hope for rescue is to go in the opposite direction, because the hull is now the highest point of the ship.

He convinces them and he leads them in the right direction. At a key moment he acts to save them. The movie had hope in the face of disaster, perseverance paying off, courage when almost everyone else is going in the wrong direction.

Stiller says that the movie, and Hackman’s character in it, inspired him to want to be an actor. When Stiller acted as Hackman’s son in The Royal Tenenbaums, he finally worked up the courage to tell Hackman how much Hackman’s performance in The Poseidon Adventure had meant to him. Hackman smiled at him and simply said “money job.” Then Hackman got up when they called for them to shoot their last scene together. Stiller stayed sitting for several seconds, seeming stunned. In their scene Stiller tells Hackman that he has gone through a lot recently. Hackman looks at him with great empathy, puts a hand reassuringly on his neck and says “I know.” He says it was the same sincerity that he saw in Hackman’s performance in The Poseidon Adventure, and he doesn’t think it was a money job.

Just now I watched a YouTube interview of Hackman by Johnny Carson on the filming of The Poseidon Adventure. Hackman has a modesty to him, and a sense of humor. He talks about the filming being fun, but also talks of being disappointed that they cut a scene in which he did a difficult stunt. He could have just let the stuntman do it, but he chose to do it. When he was doing the movie he took it seriously.
My take is that as a modest man, when he said “money job” he might have been deflating the awkward intensity of what Stiller had told him, and it might not have been the whole truth.

For Stiller’s full commentary see:

Ben Stiller. “Gene Hackman’s Simple Truth.” The New York Times (Sat., March 1, 2025): A19.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Feb. 28, 2025, and has the title “Ben Stiller on Gene Hackman’s Simple Truth.”)

Public Health “Experts” Rebuffed Renegades Who Saw Covid Spread in Aerosols

Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map shows how rigid adherence to the miasma theory of disease shut out alternatives. And an alternative was indeed needed to explain the spread of cholera. But the defeat of the miasma theory for cholera may have been too complete, prejudicing scientists to oppose theories of disease-spread through the air, which turn out to be important for some diseases, such as Covid-19.

(p. C9) In early 2020, as word spread of a frightening new respiratory outbreak in China, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were pressed for advice. Both initially counseled social distancing, guided by the assumption that the disease was spread by large, boggy droplets that fell rapidly to the ground after being expelled by coughing or sneezing.

By avoiding such projectiles and keeping surfaces clean, the reasoning went, infection could be avoided. Yet this advice ignored—with tragic consequences—nearly a century of science suggesting that many respiratory diseases can spread via microdrops that are exhaled during normal breathing and can remain suspended in the air for hours.

In “Air-Borne,” the New York Times science writer Carl Zimmer seeks to explain how public-health officials could have overlooked such an important mechanism of the Covid-19 contagion. He begins his meticulous history with the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, who taught that illness could be caused by “an invisible corruption of the air,” which he termed a “miasma.”

. . .

While the field of aerobiology may have entered the new millennium stuck on a “stagnant plateau,” as one journal article lamented, hope was starting to emerge. Advances in technology led to a more complete characterization of the aerobiome. A range of scientists from around the world, meanwhile, re-examined the possibility of airborne transmission and discovered the evidence against it wanting.

Following the emergence of Covid-19, many of these researchers were appalled by the seemingly reflexive—“mind-boggling,” in the words of one scientist—rejection of airborne transmission by public-health agencies. At first, these renegades individually struggled to have their work published but were largely rebuffed.

After an early Covid-19 outbreak among a choir in Washington state was initially attributed to large-droplet spread, a more detailed analysis by a unified group of skeptical researchers suggested that airborne transmission was far more likely. On Dec. 23, 2021—nearly 21 months after tweeting “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne”—the WHO “finally issued a clear public statement that the virus was airborne,” Mr. Zimmer writes. A triumph for persistent scientists, perhaps, but also a pointed reminder of the complexity, fragility and deeply human dependencies of evolving science.

For the full review see:

David A. Shaywitz. “Microbes in the Mist.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 15, 2025): C9.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 14, 2025, and has the title “‘Air-Borne’: The Microbes in the Mist.”)

The book under review is:

Zimmer, Carl. Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. New York: Dutton, 2025.