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TIFF: Behind the mask of horror

Jim Emerson

Eric Rost, hawking his wares.

JT Petty’s “S&MAN” (pronounced “sandman”) is a little like “The Blair Witch Project” in that it starts off as a documentary about a filmmaker making a documentary, and then turns itself around on the viewer. (Also in the way it uses the web as an extension of the movie.) Petty himself has made transgressive horror films (“Soft Digging”), and he’d originally planned to make a doc for HDNet about a video peeping tom who got away with his crime because the neighbors he’d been spying on didn’t want his footage made public if introduced as evidence in a trial. But (o, irony!) the peeper wouldn’t agree to appear on camera. A person has a right to some privacy.

So, the movie Petty wound up making instead incorporates interviews with academics, psychiatrists, and underground horror actors and filmmakers that explores the line between horror and documentary, and the sado-masochistic aspects of both.

Professor Carol Clover, author of the seminal (sorry) “Men, Women, and Chain Saws” — and some of the horror filmmakers themselves — talk about their sensitivity to the mistreatment (or apparent mistreatment) of animals on the screen because, as Clover puts it, that feels to her like an “unmediated” experience. Footage involving humans, no matter how horrific, is still “mediated” because unless you can be certain — and you rarely can — that it’s a genuine snuff film (like terrorists beheading their captors on the Internet), you can be reasonably sure it’s not “real.”

Termite booster: Manny Farber 1917-2008

Jim Emerson

“I get a great laugh from artists who ridicule the critics as parasites and artists manqués — such a horrible joke. I can’t imagine a more perfect art form, a more perfect career than criticism. I can’t imagine anything more valuable to do.”

— Manny Farber, quoted in Roger Ebert’s appreciation of the late, great critic

Painter and critic Manny Farber, whose book “Negative Space” is one of the essential collections of visual-arts criticism, has died at the age of 91. Farber’s writing was scrappy, unpretentious and iconoclastic, not unlike the films and filmmakers he favored, from the genre pictures of Sam Fuller, Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah and John Wayne, to the visionary and experimental work of Werner Herzog, R.W. Fassbinder, Andy Warhol and Chantal Akerman. (See pages from the expanded 1998 edition here.)

Unquestionably his most famous and reverently-quoted essay was 1962’s “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.” Modern art, he wrote, had become “a yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition: far inside are tiny pillows holding up the artist’s signature, now turned into mannerisms by the padding, lechery, faking required to combine today’s esthetics with the components of traditional Great Art.”

Farber is as much fun to read as he is to agree — and argue– with. I can think of no better tribute than to cite a few excerpts from his “termite art” treatise:

Singin’ 2: Electric Boogalooing in the Rain

Jim Emerson

OK, now they’ve done it. They’ve shown that they really can take performances from old movies and re-animate them to make new scenes the original actors never did. And make it look pretty convincing. Take a gander at this astonishing UK ad for the VW Golf GTI (“The original, updated.”), in which Gene Kelly does a whole new kind of singin’ and dancin’ in the rain. Sacrilege or marvel? Whatever you make of it, at least it’s a hell of a lot better made than the infamous 1997 Dirt Devil spot with Fred Astaire and the vacuum cleaner, based on the famous “dancing on the ceiling” bit from “Royal Wedding”…

(tip: AS)

IFC signs pact with devil Blockbuster

Jim Emerson

View image The site says “NC-17” but the box art says “R.” Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution” won the Venice Film Festival last year. But that’s not the version Blockbuster carries. Would you have known you weren’t seeing the version released in the US — especially if you rented it based on the contradictory online info you see here?

IFC Entertainment has made a two-year agreement with Blockbuster® Video, giving the moribund sales and rental mega-chain “an exclusive 60-day rental window, including both the physical and digital rental distribution channels, for each title as it becomes available. During this period no title will be available on a retail basis in any format.”

According to a joint press release, “After the 60-day period, the IFC titles will be available on a non-exclusive basis both for retail and digital distribution. However, Blockbuster will retain the exclusive physical rental distribution rights for IFC titles for three years after each street date.” (You read that right: It’s a two-year agreement with a three-year exclusive.)

Currently, some IFC Films, released on their First Take label (“Paranoid Park,” “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 days,” “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”), have been available via Comcast’s On Demand service the same day they arrive in theaters. Will that still be the case?

The Weinstein Company made an “exclusive” four-year deal with Blockbuster that went into effect in 2007, although that hasn’t prevented NetFlix or other competitors from renting or selling Weinstein movies under the “first sale doctrine.” As the Dallas Morning News reported at the time of the Weinstein-Blockbuster agreement: “Under federal statute, companies such as Blockbuster and Netflix are able to rent out the movies they purchase without getting permission from anyone.”

Written in the Flesh: A Crash Course in David Cronenberg

Jim Emerson

No filmmaker has more daringly and relentlessly explored what it means to be human than David Cronenberg.

Two weeks ago, critic Robert Horton and I discussed Cronenberg’s work as part of Robert’s Magic Lantern Series at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. This short film, conceived as a self-contained critical essay/appreciation, has been expanded and refined from the seven-minute version I assembled the night before that occasion, tracing Cronenberg’s thematic obsessions and the development of his artistic vision across 40 years of filmmaking. “From the Drain” to “Eastern Promises” (neither of which are included here), it’s all one big Cronenberg movie, no matter what the genre: horror, science-fiction, fantasy, biography, crime thriller…

Clips from nine chapters in the ever-mutating cinematic saga of David Cronenberg (“The Brood” to “A History of Violence”) are interwoven to illuminate some of the director’s major themes: technology (and art) as an extension/expression of the mind and body (guns, game pods, television, cars, computers, typewriters, eyeglasses…); the human appetite for extreme sensations; violence as sex, and sex as violence; the evolution of humankind beyond biology, and the inevitable dissolution of the flesh through mutation, disease, aging; corporate co-option of the intellectual property behind new technologies… all in only 12 minutes!

I warn you, it’s going to be a wild ride…

If David Lynch directed Michael Jackson’s life story

Jim Emerson

Steven Boone at Big Media Vandalism has composed a mesmerizing collage (OK, montage) using text from Jackson’s 1988 biography “Moonwalk,” audio interviews with MJ, and footage from some of Lynch’s films, notably “The Elephant Man,” “Mulholland Dr.,” “The Straight Story,” “The Grandmother” and “Eraserhead” to imagine a biography of Michael Jackson directed by David Lynch. He calls it “Notes for a David Lynch adaptation of Moonwalk.”

Boone writes:

It all comes down to what you believe, because none of us knew the man….

Larry King accuses Polanski of murder (accidentally)

Jim Emerson

The 2008 documentary “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (which I recommend to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the charges facing him now) documents a public perception of Roman Polanski that blamed him not only for the darkness of his films, but even for surviving the Holocaust and for the Manson-led murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, and friends. All of this years before he pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor and then fled the country before sentencing.

I don’t know what was going through Larry King’s mind last night on his CNN show, but here’s what happened (from the CNN transcript):

KING: Joining Lawrence Silver with us now is Debra Tate, Roman Polanski’s former sister in law, the sister of the late Sharon Tate. On a persona note, I knew Sharon Tate. I had interviewed her a couple of months before her tragic murder. What do you want to see happen?

DEBRA TATE, FMR. SISTER IN LAW OF ROMAN POLANSKI: I would like to see this whole thing go away. I think that there has been a lot of time that has passed and we need to bring it to an end.

KING: Have you ever talked to Roman Polanski?

TATE: I have.

KING: How can you have a civil conversation with someone who so brutally murdered your sister?

TATE: Roman didn’t murder my sister.

KING: I’m sorry. When the fact that he would have this terrible thing happen to him after the death of your sister, to once again focus you into the public light. That’s what I meant.

Bizarre how easily the lines get blurred…

Gérard Brach, 1927 – 2006

Jim Emerson

Collaborator with Roman Polanski on “Repulsion,” “Cul-de-Sac,” “Fearless Vampire Killers,” “The Tenant,” “Tess,” “Frantic,” “Bitter Moon” and others. From The Guardian:

“Cul-de-Sac” (1966) had echoes of “Waiting for Godot,” but was more directly influenced by Harold Pinter, not only in the casting of Donald Pleasence, who had triumphed in Pinter’s “The Caretaker” a few years previously, but also in the portrayal of sexual humiliation and in the relationship of the two gangsters. However, the depiction of a married couple’s sexual tensions that erupt into violence when an outsider intrudes on their world was a favourite theme developed in the Polanski-Brach screenplay…. […]

Throughout their partnership, Brach did most of the writing. “We talk and then he writes it,” Polanski explained. “Then he comes back into the room and we change it together.”

Besides his work with Polanski, Brach co-wrote screenplays for several of the most notable films of the 1980s, mostly for non-French directors: “Identification of a Woman” (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982), “Favourites of the Moon” (Otar Iosseliani, 1984) and “Maria’s Lovers” (1984) and “Shy People” (1987), both by Andrei Konchalovsky. Nevertheless, his most acclaimed screenplays were for Frenchmen: Berri, the two-part Marcel Pagnol adaptation, “Jean de Florette” and “Manon des Sources” (1986); and Jean-Jacques Annaud, “The Name of the Rose” (1986), “The Bear” (1988), “The Lover” (1992) and “Minor,” currently being shot in Spain.

Brach was agoraphobic, and for almost the last 10 years he hardly ever left the Paris apartment where he lived alone, rarely receiving visitors, except for the occasional director.

I am part of a secret left-wing conspiracy…

Jim Emerson

… against Glenn Beck, involving puppy shooters, “Video Gaming Expertes,” loiterers and transvestite prostitute solicitors, according to the satirical christwire.org, a site that’s so satirical it comes all the way around the other side to where it sometimes uncannily resembles reality (see the story headlined “Chinese are Evil and Racism is Always Unacceptable”).¹

A priest reviews A Serious Man

Jim Emerson

Here’s a spoiler-loaded reading of the Coens’ masterpiece from Father Robert Barron, self-described “Catholic Evangelist.” I don’t know anything about Fr. Barron, but this is certainly a Catholic interpretation — of the movie, of the book of Job, and of the Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.” Of course, I don’t see the movie the way he does (and he doesn’t even mention Larry’s doctor or Schrödinger’s cat or the… dybbuk?), but he does have some interesting ways of looking at it. I do like the way he understands how we reconsider the rabbis’ counsel as the movie goes along.

And Fr. Barron makes one simple, important point that I think some people overlook: “No one in the movie disbelieves in God. It’s not a question of is there a God or not. But they’re trying to discern, what does God want? What is God doing?” That is correct. The film takes place in a world in which God is obviously not dead (although it’s set not long after the TIME cover) because these people still believe Hashem is a presence in their lives — if a somewhat distant one. Instead, God is either silent, indifferent, passive-aggressive, or nonexistent. The question, then, becomes not so much what God wants from these characters as what these characters want from the (unexamined?) vision of God that they cling to, and how are they going to square that faith with the day-to-day world they live in?

What do you think? And let’s agree that all comments below are for people who’ve seen the movie…

For Your Consideration: Anton Chigurh, Supporting Actor

Jim Emerson

View image Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem): You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but believe me, you don’t.

(A comment by Phillip Kelly in reply to an earlier post made me chuckle and got me thinking. He wrote: “I guess my theorizing [of] Anton Chigurh as main character doesn’t stand now that Miramax is touting him for Best Supporting Actor. Too bad.” That’s the jumping-off place for this entry.)

The New York Film Critics Circle gave Javier Bardem its 2007 Best Supporting Actor award for his role as Anton Chigurh (“shi-GUR”) in Joel and Ethan Coen’s “No Country For Old Men” (which was also named Best Picture). The funny thing is, so much of the discussion of the of the movie centers around Chigurh that you’d think he was was the lead. And critical reservations about “No Country” tend to focus on interpretations of Chigurh, and whether the critic accepts him as a character or a mythological presence or a haircut or some combination thereof.

“No Country” traces the path of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), from his opening narration to his closing monologue, from his nostalgia about the “old times” and his fear of the violence in this modern world to his account of two dreams about his father. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), sets things in motion by taking the satchel of drug money, and Chigurh spends most of the film relentlessly tracking him down, while Ed Tom follows a trail of blood to catch up with them both. None of these characters is a conventional “lead.” We never even see Moss or Ed Tom come face-to-face with Chigurh. He exists in the physical world, but his presence is strongest when it’s felt by these other two characters, even though they don’t share screen space with him.

Another critical voice severed

Jim Emerson

Voice Media slashes another film critic.

Adding further grist to the discussion of “critical sameness” (“The Stepford Critics?),” Village Voice Media has cut another (film-)critical voice from its payroll. This time it’s National Society of Film Critics member Rob Nelson, of the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages. GreenCine Daily quotes critic Dave Kehr:

This is not good. Soon, we will have a choice between the re-animated Paulettes who dominate the print media and the Knowles-nothing fan boys who dominate the internet. Which in my book isn’t much of a choice at all.(See Kehr’s clarification in comments below.)

As far as I can tell from the CP web site, Nelson’s final piece for them was on the critically acclaimed documentary “No End in Sight” (“Surge This,” August 22, 2007):

As the movie’s more begrudging admirers will likely acknowledge, Ferguson is no Michael Moore. His background is as a scholar and a Brookings wonk, and “No End in Sight” — his first film, amazingly — is less a work of investigation (or activism) than history. There’s no psychology in the movie (e.g., Dubya has daddy issues), and neither are there conspiracy theories (e.g., the war is about redrawing the Middle East map and further fueling Halliburton’s tank). On some level, it even endeavors to be a film without politics—and might be that if such a thing were possible. […]

Call him “Mr. Contrarian”

Jim Emerson

Latest Contrarian Week News:

In his New York Observer year-end wrap-up (and ten-best list), Andrew Sarris attempts to steal the thunder of one of his New York “alternative weekly” rivals.

Sarris writes:

Fortunately, modern technology makes it almost impossible for a good movie to get “lost” because of end-of-the-year mental exhaustion. So, with the proviso that I still have a great deal of catching up to do, here are my considered choices for the various 10-best categories, and one of my patented 10-worst lists under the provocative heading of “Movies Other People Liked and I Didn’t.” I am not at all deterred in dishing out my annual supply of negativity by the correspondent who informed me last year that he preferred all the films on my 10-worst list to all the films on my 10-best list. I have long ago become resigned to my fate as a reviled revisionist ever since my first column in The Village Voice in 1960 hailed Alfred Hitchcock as a major artist for “Psycho,” and inspired more hate mail than any Voice column had received up to that time. That clinched my job at the ever-contrarian Voice, and I have simply gone on from there.So, how contrarian is the “reviled revisionist” 46 years later? Let’s see:

“The Departed” as best film of the year. (Only in New York!)

“Blood Diamond” as #5.

Best Supporting Actresses:

1) Jennifer Connelly, “Blood Diamond”

2) Gong Li, “Miami Vice”

3) Maggie Gyllenhaal, “World Trade Center”

And then there’s this:

Other striking male performances were provided by: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Alec Baldwin and Anthony Anderson in The Departed; Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber and Toby Jones in The Painted Veil; Wim Willaert in When the Sea Rises; Leslie Phillips and Richard Griffiths in Venus; Clive Owen, Denzel Washington, Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe, and Chiwetel Ejiofor in Inside Man; Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase and Shido Nakamura in Letters from Iwo Jima; Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Alan Arkin and Paul Dano in Little Miss Sunshine; Edward Norton, Paul Giamatti and Rufus Sewell in The Illusionist; Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley, Noah Emmerich, Gregg Edelman and Ty Simpkins in Little Children; Keanu Reeves, Christopher Plummer and Dylan Walsh in The Lake House; Nicolas Cage, Michael Pena and Stephen Dorff in World Trade Center; Tim Blake Nelson, Pat Corley, Jeffrey Donovan, Stacy Keach and Scott Wilson in Come Early Morning; Ryan Gosling and Anthony Mackie in Half Nelson; Jason Schwartzman, Rip Torn, and Danny Huston in Marie Antoinette; Matt Damon, Michael Gambon, Alec Baldwin, William Hurt, Billy Crudup, Robert De Niro, Keir Dullea, Timothy Hutton, Eddie Redmayne, Mark Ivanir and Joe Pesci in The Good Shepherd; Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Kelsey Grammer, James Marsden, Shawn Ashmore, Aaron Stanford, Vinnie Jones and Ben Foster in X-Men: The Last Stand; Mads Mikkelsen, Jeffrey Wright, Giancarlo Giannini, Simon Abkarian, Sebastien Foucan, Jesper Christensen and Tobias Menzies in Casino Royale; Ebru Ceylan and Mehmet Eryilmaz in Climates; Adrien Brody, Ben Affleck and Bob Hoskins in Hollywoodland; Jamie Foxx, Danny Glover, Keith Robinson and Hinton Battle in Dreamgirls; Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Jason Mewes, Trevor Fehrman, Kevin Smith and Jason Lee in Clerks II; Justin Kirk and Jamie Harrold in Flannel Pajamas; Stanley Tucci, Simon Baker and Adrian Grenier in The Devil Wears Prada; Will Ferrell, Dustin Hoffman and Tom Hulce in Stranger Than Fiction; Samuel L. Jackson, Curtis Jackson, Chad Michael Murray, Sam Jones III and Brian Presley in Home of the Brave; Harris Yulin, Ty Burrell and Boris McGiver in Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus; Max Minghella, John Malkovich, Jim Broadbent, Matt Keeslar, Ethan Suplee, Joel David Moore and Nick Swardson in Art School Confidential; Joseph Cross, Brian Cox, Joseph Fiennes and Alec Baldwin in Running with Scissors; Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, Ciarán Hinds, Justin Theroux, Barry Shabaka Henley, Luis Tosar and John Ortiz in Miami Vice; Michael Sheen, James Cromwell, Alex Jennings, Roger Allam and Tim McMullan in The Queen; Samuel L. Jackson, Ron Eldard, William Forsythe, Anthony Mackie, Marlon Sherman and Clarke Peters in Freedomland; Vin Diesel, Peter Dinklage, Linus Roache, Alex Rocco, Ron Silver and Raul Esparza in Find Me Guilty; Josh Hartnett, Bruce Willis, Stanley Tucci, Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley in Lucky Number Slevin; Hugh Grant, Dennis Quaid, Chris Klein, Shohreh Aghdashloo, John Cho, Tony Yalda, Sam Golzari and Willem Dafoe in American Dreamz; Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Rory Cochrane in A Scanner Darkly; Adam Beach, Ryan A. Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, John Benjamin Hickey, Jon Slattery, Barry Pepper, Jamie Bell, Paul Walker and Robert Patrick in Flags of Our Fathers; Chow Yun-Fat in Curse of the Golden Flower; Sergi López, Doug Jones, Álex Angulo and Federico Luppi in Pan’s Labyrinth; Bill Nighy in Notes on a Scandal.Take that, A—– W—-!

My 10 best list: the movie (WGA strike/Antonioni edition)

Jim Emerson

Ten movies, two or three shots apiece (more or less), 76 seconds, no dialog, no annotations. (The critical comments will come later.) This is my hommage to the ending of the late Michelangelo Antonioni’s “The Eclipse” and to the writers who are currently on strike. (Full disclosure: I’m a WGA/west member and I strongly support the writers.) The effort was to look at my favorite movies of the year (inspired, to begin with, by the opening of “No Country for Old Men”) solely through establishing shots, architecture, landscapes, inanimate objects… and a few glimpses of extras and motionless actors who don’t speak.

How many of them can you name (in one shot? two?). Titles, writers and directors are cited at the end. (For some reason, this iKlipz/Flash version hangs for a few seconds just before the final titles — but they do appear…)

“The Host” LIVES!

Jim Emerson

Poster image for “The Host.”

From today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a story that echoes the scandalous real-life inspiration for the Korean monster movie, “The Host,” which opens in various US markets tomorrow (March 9, 2007):

When Daniel R. Storm, a University of Washington professor whose work includes studying the brain, found out that getting rid of potentially dangerous chemicals in his lab would cost $15,000, he decided to find a cheaper way.

Storm, a professor in the Department of Pharmacology, dumped ethyl ether down the sink.

On Wednesday, Storm, 62, pleaded guilty in federal court in Seattle to pouring the ethyl ether, which can explode or catch fire if handled improperly, down the laboratory sink in June 2006. Prosecutors say Storm then tried to cover up his actions.

He could face up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 for knowingly disposing of a hazardous waste without a permit. But prosecutors are recommending probation, said Emily Langlie, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle.

When the UW’s Environmental Health and Safety Department told Storm that it would cost $15,000 to dispose of the solvent, he broke three metal containers with an ax and poured the liquid down the sink in his lab. He also disposed of an ethyl ether and water mixture in two glass bottles.

Storm then poured water and an ethanol solution down the drain to dilute the solvent, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

He admitted that he did not want to pay for the disposal from his laboratory account. The liquid was not used in his research, but was found in his lab.

Believe me, I will let you know if a giant, fire-breathing monster (or something worse) emerges from beneath the waters of Lake Washington, Lake Union or Puget Sound in about 2011 or so.

And from an editorial in the 2000 Korea Times regarding the similar precipitating incident that begins Bong Joon-ho’s “The Host” — South Korea’s most popular movie:

“Would they dump toxic chemicals into the Potomac River?” This is the caption of an editorial by Korea’s largest circulation daily on the shocking news that the U.S. Forces Korea admitted to dumping formaldehyde and methanol into the Han River through the drainage system at its Yongsan military base in Seoul. These toxic chemicals are widely known to cause cancer and birth defects.

The Han River supplies drinking water for over 10 million citizens residing in metropolitan Seoul and its satellite cities. Are Koreans disposable people? The materials in question were embalming fluids.

The news is ethically repulsive. Environmentally, the act is destruction-friendly. In psychiatric terms, it comes close to an act of quasi-murder. For, what matters here is the sick mind and attitude that made possible the dumping of the cancer-causing substance. Whether or not the quantity of the discarded, amount was enough to cause cancer is not the issue here. The USFK’s clarification that it at one time dumped up to 20 gallons (75.7 liters) of formaldehyde in no way alters the ethical insanity of the people involved.

In “The Host,” the toxic effect of that “ethical insanity” becomes — quite literally — monstrous. And in answer to the question posed at the beginning of the editorial: Of course “they” would dump toxic chemicals into the Potomac if it was cheaper and they thought they could get away with it. I have no doubt some of “them” are doing it right now. Many corporations and governments do not feel it’s their responsibility to deal with the toxic biproducts they produce because it’s not a revenue-generating activity, and their responsibility is to save (and make) money. They are beholden only to their owners, stockholders and/or campaign contributors.

If the public has to pay the occasional price (death, cancer, etc.), that’s their fault for drinking the wrong water or breathing the wrong air. The price of cleaning up and disposing of these toxins might hurt these corporations’ ability to compete in a free marketplace, and that would result in job cuts and declining stock prices. (Providing health insurance for people who develop these pre-existing conditions would be bad for insurance companies, too.) And all this might hurt the economy in the short-term, whereas releasing poisons into the great big outdoors probably won’t manifest any noticeable effects for years — long after the government has changed or the company has merged with some larger conglomerate, and then it’s someone else’s problem.

Hey, just look at Dick Cheney: When he was at Halliburton in 1998, he arranged the purchase of Dressler Industries. But –oops! — it turned out Dressler had a host of asbestos-lawsuit liabilities. Enough to threaten Halliburton’s existence. So, Halliburton had Dressler and other subsidiaries declare bankruptcy in order to limit their “exposure.”

From a 2005 column by Allan Sloan in the Washington Post:

While Halliburton’s all-stock takeover of Dresser was valued at $7.7 billion when it was announced in February 1998, it was worth only $5.3 billion when it was completed seven months later. The bankruptcy settlement is costing Halliburton just about that much: around $2.8 billion in cash, Halliburton stock with a market value of $2.3 billion the day before Dresser’s bankruptcy was resolved and miscellaneous odds and ends and potential payments.

The bankruptcy resolution, which became final on Jan. 3, covered both the Dresser problems and the smaller asbestos problems that Halliburton already had. […]

I give Halliburton’s current management huge credit for pulling off this tricky maneuver. And I give them big credit for dealing with the problem rather than awaiting a miracle rescue from Congress. Almost from the day it took office, the Bush administration has pushed hard to get Congress to limit asbestos liability. That includes President Bush’s visit to Illinois last week to push his “reform” proposals.

Halliburton, whose fortunes are tied to the oil industry, has profited from the surge in oil prices. Even though its stock has quadrupled from its asbestos-woe low, it’s still below what it was when Cheney left in the summer of 2000. Imagine what Halliburton shares would fetch today had the Dresser problems never happened. Much more than it currently sells for, I’m sure.

A Cheney spokesman said the vice president wouldn’t comment about Halliburton, and referred all queries to the company.

No doubt Cheney feels bad about leaving Halliburton with such a mess. Perhaps someday he can do something to make it up to them.