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As soon as I started the story I knew I shouldn’t tell it. It was the story about Captain Kale wanting to bring the Chinook into the middle of the hooches, and me letting him do it. I couldn’t find the right tone. My first instinct was to make it somber and regretful, to show how much more compassionate I was than the person who had done this thing, how far I had evolved in wisdom since then, but it came off sounding phony. I shifted to a clinical, deadpan exposition. This proved even less convincing than the first pose, which at least acknowledged that the narrator had a stake in his narrative. The neutral tone was a lie, also a bore. How do you tell such a terrible story? Maybe such a story shouldn’t be told at all. Yet finally it will be told. But as soon as you open your mouth you have problems, problems of recollection, problems of tone, ethical problems. How can you judge the man you were now that you’ve escaped his circumstances, his fears and desires, now that you hardly remember who he was? And how can you honestly avoid judging him? But isn’t there, in the very act of confession, an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it? And isn’t it just like an American boy, to want you to admire his sorrow at tearing other people’s houses apart? And in the end who gives a damn, who’s listening? What do you owe the listener, and which listener do you owe?
In Pharaoh's Army
Tobias Wolff
One thing that stability training has taught me is that most “acute” injuries, such as a torn ACL or a hamstring tear, are rarely sudden. While their onset may be rapid—instantaneous back or neck or knee pain—there was likely a chronic weakness or lack of stability at the foundation of the joint that was the true culprit. This is the real iceberg in the water. The “acute” injury is just the part you see, the manifestation of the underlying weakness. So if we are to complete the goals we have set in our own Centenarian Decathlon, we need to be able to anticipate and avoid any potential injuries that lie in our path, like icebergs at sea. This means understanding stability and incorporating it into our routine. Stability is tricky to define precisely, but we intuitively know what it is. A technical definition might be: stability is the subconscious ability to harness, decelerate, or stop force. A stable person can react to internal or external stimuli to adjust position and muscular tension appropriately without a tremendous amount of conscious thought.
Whatever small doubts they might have harbored over RKO’s prospective publicity efforts, however, the Disneys had a much greater issue with their new distributor—one they almost seemed afraid to broach. As naïve as it may have sounded after their nearly fifteen years in the film business, they had no idea what to charge exhibitors for the film and no idea what RKO’s return to them might be, which they fully realized made them vulnerable to RKO’s machinations. The larger studios typically sold their films in blocks, so their advice wouldn’t have been particularly helpful to a studio with only one feature to sell. What the Disneys needed was an independent producer to guide them, of which there were very few in Hollywood at the time. As it turned out, the knight who rode to their rescue was Walt’s old idol, Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin offered to give the Disneys all his “records and experience,” most importantly his ledgers from Modern Times, which permitted Roy to press RKO to “go out and ask Chaplin prices” and to get the same terms in foreign markets as Chaplin had gotten. Thanking Chaplin after Snow White’s release, Walt called it an “invaluable service” and wrote, “Your records have been our Bible—without them, we would have been as sheep in a den of wolves.”
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