Working in the Movies

I remeber Roger Ebert discussing work and jobs in the movies. In particular, he spoke about Michelle Pfieffer’s character in the forgettable One Fine Day:

I amused myself by trying to figure out Michelle Pfeiffer’s job. She works for a big company, I guess, but her only colleague seems to be her elderly and powerful boss. When she trips and falls and breaks the model of a big architectural project, it’s her job to take it downtown and hire a guy to glue it back together again, and yet she also seems to be the designer, or planner, or salesperson, or broker, or something, of this whole undertaking. We don’t know for sure because it’s all flimflam. Her job scenes should be subtitled “Obligatory Scenes Necessary So Little Maggie Can Be Taken to the Office.”

This is a common phenomenon in films: the job only serves to advance the plot. We rarely see films about working. For example, with rare exceptions (Pirates of Silicon Valley springs to mind), there are no major films that discuss the dotcom era of the software industry. Well, you might say, who wants to see films about work? We work all day…we don’t want to go home and watch that. On the contrary, we love to watch that. Steven King insists that readers are always telling him that they love to read about work.

This is just a long lead up to this link: local writer Crawford Kilian references Busfilm, a weblog about business in the movies–an admirable if underappreciated topic. Why the blogs author–one Larry Ribstein–has the latest entry at the bottom of the page, I’ll never know. Still, informative reading. In particular, I like his list of the
most and least business-friendly films.