FORMULA – The International Autosport Magazine

“A little possessed with it all!”
5/26/2005 5:39:06 PM



With just time to empty and refill a suitcase since Monaco, the F1 teams are all set up in the Nurburgring paddock for this weekend’s seventh round of the world championship. Michael Schumacher’s first job was dealing with questions from the media in the FIA press conference and the journalists seemed to be hoping for a war of words between the Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro driver and his brother Ralf, after the world champion tried a daring overtaking move on the Toyota man, as they approached the chequered flag in Monaco.

The press was to be disappointed, as the two brothers seem to have agreed to put the matter behind them. “We are both highly competitive racing drivers,” said Michael. “On the track, every driver fights for himself and his team and the fact we are brothers does not count. But, after the race, you remember you are still brothers, you are still blood relations. If you knew the two of us, you would know all the stories about this in the press are rubbish.”
The Ferrari man also revealed that he spoke to his team-mate Rubens Barrichello, whom he passed in a daring move at the chicane on the last Monaco lap. “I rang him on the Monday after the race, as it was his birthday and all was fine.”

On to more serious matters, the German was asked for his opinion on the new qualifying format that comes into effect at this race – only one qualifying session, with race fuel load on board, taking place on Saturday afternoon. “Qualifying, as everyone knows has been our weak point this season,” he commented. “So from the aspect that there is a single session, I can say that at the very least, it means we will only face this problem once, not twice!” In general terms, Schumacher was confident about this weekend. “We have been competitive at a lot of races this year, even though we have struggled in qualifying. But I think that here we will handle the situation better.”
Knowing his love of football, Michael was also asked if Liverpool’s comeback to win the European Champions League yesterday after being 3-0 down to AC Milan, encouraged the Ferrari man in his own attempt to fight back this season. “Do you want me to upset the Italian press?” he joked. “It certainly proves that you have to continue to fight right to the very last moment,” he said.”


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Buffett Pays $5.1 Billion for Utility and Promises More Deals

By HEATHER TIMMONS and JAD MOUAWAD

LONDON, May 24 – Warren E. Buffett struck a deal on Tuesday to buy the electric utility PacifiCorp for $5.1 billion from Scottish Power, his largest purchase in eight years. Sounding a bullish note for the energy industry in general, he promised to buy similar assets in the future.

Mr. Buffett, whose investing style has been scrutinized this year because of an investigation into the insurance industry, one of his longstanding favorites, said Tuesday that energy companies were a good fit with his company, Berkshire Hathaway, because they need capital and provide steady returns.

He also trumpeted an eagerness to do big deals and a willingness to look outside the United States.

“There is no limit to the amount of money we would have available for the right acquisition,” Mr. Buffett said during a news conference in London about the PacifiCorp deal. “Frankly, the bigger, the better,” he said. Berkshire Hathaway has more than $40 billion to invest at the moment, he said. “If you have a big one out there, try us out.”

Berkshire Hathaway will also assume $4.3 billion in debt in the deal.

The purchase of PacifiCorp is Mr. Buffett’s largest since Berkshire bought the General Re reinsurance business in 1998. That acquisition has not paid off as expected. A deal in 2000 between General Re and the American International Group is a focus of an investigation by government officials and regulators into transactions that made A.I.G.’s financial condition look better than it was. Mr. Buffett is not a target of the investigation, but he has cooperated as a witness.

In the deal announced on Tuesday, PacifiCorp, which provides electricity to 1.6 million customers in six states in the Northwest, will become part of MidAmerican Energy Holdings, Mr. Buffett’s utility company, which is based in Des Moines. The purchase will create a company with $10 billion in annual revenue.

Energy will be “an important industry 10, 20, 50 years from now, and Berkshire Hathaway hopes to expand its investments” in the sector, Mr. Buffett said during the news conference, where he appeared by teleconference. “We will look at energy assets around the world,” he said, and invest through MidAmerican. MidAmerican owns CE Electric UK in Northeastern England.

“The energy field is one that I basically like,” Mr. Buffett said in a phone interview later on Tuesday. “It’s not a business you can dream about, however. It’s a capital-intensive business that provides decent returns. It’s stable and it’s predictable.”

Scottish Power, which bought PacifiCorp in 1999 for about $10 billion, will record a £927 million ($1.7 billion) charge because of the sale, which is expected to close early next year. The deal is subject to regulatory approval.

PacifiCorp has been a disappointment to Scottish Power investors. The company, based in Glasgow, failed to increase PacifiCorp’s revenue as predicted and said on Tuesday that the unit’s earnings were below expectations. Over all, Scottish Power reported pretax profit of £1 billion ($1.83 billion) for the year ended March 31.

In November, Scottish Power started a review of PacifiCorp, which provides about half its earnings. Scottish Power executives said Tuesday that after looking at capital requirements and regulatory developments, they decided to sell the business.

“This cash-consumptive, low-return profile was clearly too much to bear” given the stronger performances of the company’s other divisions, Merrill Lynch said Tuesday in a research report about the deal.

The company is a good fit for Berkshire Hathaway’s investors, who have different needs, Mr. Buffett said. Unlike Scottish Power investors, Berkshire investors would rather see their profits reinvested than receive dividends, he said. Shares of Berkshire rose $2,010 on Tuesday, or 2.4 percent, to $85,500. Scottish Power rose 27.75 pence, or more than 6 percent, to 469.75 pence in London.

Some analysts said the PacifiCorp acquisition could be a precursor to a buyout of Portland General Electric in Oregon, which is owned by Enron. Both companies are based in Portland, and a combination could provide some savings. “It would make sense to own both of these utilities,” said Doug Fisher, an electric utility analyst at A. G. Edwards.

Erik Sten, a Portland city commissioner , said, “Any effort to consolidate PacifiCorp and Portland General Electric would be a divisive issue and would bolster support by industrial customers for the city to take over Portland G.E.” The city is negotiating with Enron to acquire the utility. Mr. Sten said the city could significantly cut rates because it would not owe federal income taxes and could raise capital more cheaply than any for-profit owner.

The PacifiCorp deal comes as a new wave of buyers are showing interest in utilities like water and electricity worldwide. Cash-rich investors looking for a place to park their money are attracted to the relatively unglamorous, generally highly regulated industries because of their steady returns.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was part of an effort to buy Portland G.E., which Oregon regulators rejected in March. Bill Gates serves on the board of Berkshire Hathaway and is Mr. Buffett’s frequent bridge partner.

In Britain, local and American banks and private equity investors have bought up a large portion of the country’s water industry. Private equity investors have been particularly drawn to the sector because the steady revenue allows them to take out hefty loans against the companies. Banks, meanwhile, can turn the steady stream of revenue into securities, which they package and sell to bond investors.

In the United States, utility companies, which operate as regulated monopolies, are trying to expand through acquisition after several quarters of streamlining businesses. But they face intense regulatory scrutiny and a long approval process, analysts said, which might slow future purchases.

“There is no doubt the industry is consolidating,” said Paul Patterson, an analyst at Glenrock Associates in New York. “But I don’t think there will be a wave of mergers. There are several barriers to entry, namely at the state and federal level, and there’s been little recent track record of how the regulators will ultimately treat such mergers.”

Mr. Buffett said he did not expect regulatory opposition to his offer. “We’re the kind of owners they will be looking for,” he said during the interview. “We will be the last owners of these properties, and we have the capital to invest in them.”

Heather Timmons reported from London for this article, and Jad Mouawad from New York. David Cay Johnston contributed reporting.

• Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Annie Marie Musselman for The New York Times

Eric Rudder, a rising star at Microsoft.

May 25, 2005
A Front-Runner at Microsoft, but There’s No Race Yet
By STEVE LOHR

REDMOND, Wash. – The path to the top at Microsoft is not for the timid. Anyone hoping to make the ascent must be able to match wits with two of the most formidable and combative intellects in corporate America: Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder, and Steven A. Ballmer, its chief executive.

Eric Rudder, a senior vice president, demonstrated that skill not long after he arrived at Microsoft. In 1992, Mr. Rudder, then 25, had a confrontation with Mr. Gates, recalled Brad Silverberg, a former senior Microsoft executive. The dispute centered on some now-forgotten technical matter in the Windows desktop operating system.

“Bill, you’re absolutely, totally wrong,” Mr. Rudder said, according to Mr. Silverberg. “And here’s why.”

After hearing him out, Mr. Silverberg said, Mr. Gates conceded the point, saying: “You know what? I guess you’re right.”

Careers at Microsoft are built on such episodes, proof of the right stuff. Yet more is required to climb up the executive ladder, notably a deep understanding of technology and a deft grasp of business.

“And you have to deliver, you have to be in charge of building products that generate huge growth in revenues and profits,” observed Michael A. Cusumano, a management professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied Microsoft for years.

No one recently has delivered more than Mr. Rudder. For two years, he has led Microsoft’s fast-growing business for server products – the software powering computer networks behind everything from Web pages and e-mail to corporate back-office systems.

There is no heir apparent at Microsoft. Both Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer are only 49, and neither has suggested that he wants to step aside soon. Yet by putting Mr. Rudder, 38, in charge of a business earmarked for near-term growth, they singled him out as the likely front-runner among the next generation of leaders.

“Bill and Steve see a lot of themselves in Eric,” said Mr. Silverberg, who is now a venture capitalist.

Mr. Rudder’s group has grown at 15 percent to 20 percent annually for the last few years, reaching $10 billion a year in sales. It has become Microsoft’s third big business by expanding at roughly twice the pace of the more mature desktop divisions, the Windows operating system and the Office software package. Microsoft’s server group has posted faster growth than the software businesses of big corporate rivals like I.B.M. and Oracle, and has not suffered much so far from Linux, the popular free operating system.

Someday, Microsoft’s fledgling divisions could also be big and profitable, like its Xbox video game consoles and software, and its MSN e-commerce Web sites and search. Young executives from those groups, and others, are also in the running to head the company someday. They include Steven Sinofsky, a senior vice president leading the Office business; Chris Jones, a vice president guiding Windows development; Yusuf Mehdi, a senior vice president in charge of MSN; and J Allard, a vice president who heads the Xbox team.

But Mr. Rudder’s server division is the first real winner in Microsoft’s strategy to move beyond its desktop stronghold.

That success reflects an evolution in Microsoft’s corporate culture and the way it must compete in the future, especially in newer markets where the company is not dominant.

Put simply, Microsoft is moving beyond its heritage as an often insular place focused entirely on shipping and selling software products. That mentality struck many corporate customers as a Microsoft-knows-best arrogance. In fact, the company’s surveys of customer satisfaction showed a declining trend for five years until 2003, when the trend reversed.

Microsoft remains first and foremost a technology product company, but one that is far more open to outsiders – and Mr. Rudder’s group, by most accounts, has led the way. Corporate customers are brought in to help with product designs early on. Engineers are now routinely dispatched to the field to see how customers use technology and what they want.

More than a thousand engineers and product managers in Mr. Rudder’s unit have started blogs in the last couple of years to explain what Microsoft is doing and to field comments and criticism from customers and programmers outside the company.

“It’s a huge cultural shift for us,” said Simon Witts, a vice president who is a 14-year veteran at Microsoft.

To spend more time with customers himself, Mr. Rudder decided to move to Paris for a year, starting last August, along with his wife and their two children, a 10-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son.

As someone who came up through the technology side of the business, spending his career at the suburban Seattle headquarters, Mr. Rudder said he felt the need to spend more time in the field, seeing things through the eyes of Microsoft’s sales teams and their corporate customers. He has traveled to dozens of countries throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

“I wanted to encourage our people to spend more time in the field,” Mr. Rudder explained in an interview while on a trip to Microsoft headquarters here. “So I felt I should lead by example.”

The brainpower and competitive zeal valued at Microsoft were evident long before he arrived at the headquarters here in 1988. Growing up on Staten Island, Mr. Rudder had an aptitude for math and science, owned a Commodore home computer and did some programming on an I.B.M. minicomputer in high school. At Brown University, he did not plan to major in computer science initially, but he was lured by the challenge. A computer graphics course had the reputation for being both fascinating and the toughest undergraduate course at Brown.

As a student from a public school attending an Ivy League college, Mr. Rudder recalled, he was determined to test himself in that class. “It could have been marine biology,” he said.

At Microsoft, Mr. Rudder found an environment suited to his skills and temperament. He became a product manager, building software and heading teams of engineers working on networking technology, Windows and programming tools.

In 1997, Mr. Gates picked Mr. Rudder as his technical assistant, a sign he was being groomed, and he served as Mr. Gates’s aide for technology strategy until 2001, the longest tenure for anyone in that job. Mr. Rudder was then placed in charge of the strategically important software tools business at a time when developers were flocking to Java as the programming tool of choice for the Internet era of open communication and data sharing, instead of locking up information inside a supplier’s proprietary technology.

Microsoft’s alternative is its .Net programming tools, which are linked to Windows but embrace Internet and Web technologies. The .Net strategy was a technological answer to market imperative and customer demand. “We needed to link things together and work with other vendors,” Mr. Rudder explained. “And we had the model with the Internet.”

Mr. Rudder kept the tools business when he took charge of the server division in 2003. Today, Microsoft’s .Net has closed the gap with the Java programming environment, called J2EE, which is backed by the software companies including I.B.M., Sun, Oracle and BEA Systems, and according to some surveys has pulled ahead of Java.

Bret Rupe, a chief architect for information technology at Weyerhaeuser, has been impressed by the changes at Microsoft. “We want suppliers who play well with others,” he said. “Microsoft has really moved away from its proprietary view in the last few years.” Assured by that trend, Weyerhaeuser, a big lumber and paper company, decided 18 months ago to increase its investment in Microsoft’s server software in its data centers.

Mr. Rudder himself has adopted a somewhat more accommodating style lately, colleagues say, shedding a “never give an inch” mind-set that could stifle contributions from others. His future at Microsoft will hinge on how the company fares against the challenge of open-source software, which is distributed free and is improved by cooperative networks of programmers.

Windows and Linux have both done well in recent years because both systems run on machines using low-cost microprocessors from the personal computer industry – and corporations are increasingly adopting these servers to cut costs.

Still, Linux poses a real long-term threat to Microsoft. In most markets, Microsoft has adopted a high-volume, low-cost strategy. Yet open-source software is an “up from the bottom” phenomenon, a very different kind of competitor for Microsoft.

Mr. Rudder and his lieutenants marshal a series of arguments as to why “free” software is not free at all, once maintenance and support costs are included.

They point to the vast Microsoft “ecosystem” of millions of programmers worldwide and hundreds of thousands of companies who use Microsoft product and tools.

Linux and its open-source cousins, analysts say, could yet batter Microsoft’s profit margins and growth. “Revenues may not go to zero but they can certainly stop growing,” said Mr. Cusumano, the M.I.T. professor. “That’s the nightmare for Microsoft, that happening sometime over the next 10 years.”

Finishing off a boxed lunch, Mr. Rudder gave no hint of any such qualms. He is a true believer in the proposition that Microsoft’s best days are surely ahead, and any suggestion to the contrary is emphatically dismissed.

“Microsoft is a growth company, absolutely,” Mr. Rudder declared. “The opportunities are unlimited.”

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Driving for Danica
Tuesday May 31, 2005 4:00AM PT

Danica Patrick

Dan Wheldon took the final lead and gulped the winner’s milk at the Indy 500 this weekend, but it was a slight 23-year-old who stole the show. Danica Patrick — 5-foot-2, 100 pounds, a rookie, a woman — set several records at the Brickyard, propelled TV ratings through the roof, and spiked 436% yesterday alone (and an astonishing 1,130% over the past week). Racing fans sped to the Web for every kind of search related to the young driver, gunning their engines especially for Patrick pictures, biography, and wallpaper.

Patrick may dominate our top racing searches for now, but that could change at any moment. Driver Sarah Fisher, formerly of the Indy Racing League, tailgated into Buzz yesterday with a 272% jump. Apparently, word is out that NASCAR may “take note of the Danica effect.” Also, uh, kinda related to racing, swimmer Amanda Beard rose 112% over the past week. Besides being a record-setting athlete and part-time model, she’s dating NASCAR driver Carl Edwards.

Other female athletes on the rise in search spring from the court and the green. Tennis continues to slam searches over the net with Maria Sharapova (+5%), Lindsay Davenport (+150%), and Mary Pierce (+121%) all up at the Search box thanks to the French Open. Meanwhile, coming in from the LPGA (+20%), Annika Sorenstam (+12%) and Natalie Gulbis (+47%) also spiked. Like Danica Patrick, Gulbis is a young and marketable star. She has a swimsuit line in the works and a reality show set to air on The Golf Channel. Is Danica, too, destined for bathing apparel and reality programming? More importantly, is she a one-race wonder? We’ll keep our eyes on the track to find out…

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Richard Patterson for The New York Times

A new owner wants to tap the glamour of the 1950′s Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach, to help establish a chain of resorts

May 25, 2005
Taking 1950′s Miami Beach Chic to the Desert
By ROBERT JOHNSON

By design and by legendary reputation, the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach is truly one of a kind. The Fontainebleau, South Florida’s largest hotel, opened in 1954 with its Morris Lapidus-conceived curves that accented the resort’s shoreline as surely as a sheer dress clinging to a fashion model.

Hollywood came calling in the 1950′s and 1960′s, when Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin played, on stage and off. Those were the heady days when Jackie Gleason based his hit TV variety show there. And Sean Connery as 007 roamed the pool deck in “Goldfinger.”

But now the Fontainebleau is about to become a brand extension-2,500 miles from the original-and on the Strip instead of the beach. The closest wave at the planned second Fontainebleau in Las Vegas, on the north end of the Strip close to the venerable Riviera hotel and casino, will be at an old water park nearby. Still, the developer of the new Fontainebleau hopes to create a splash with promises of celebrity chefs, a fancy spa and high-profile entertainment.

The Florida Fontainebleau’s new owner, the developer Jeffrey Soffer, announced the plans this month for the Las Vegas resort, which will be a combination casino, hotel and condominium. Construction is expected to cost $1.5 billion to $2 billion, ground is to be broken next year and the 4,000-room hotel is to open in the second half of 2008.

“The Fontainebleau is a magical name, an icon known all over the country and the world,” Mr. Soffer said.

Mr. Soffer, who is 37, concedes that the Fontainebleau might not have the same name recognition for people in his age group. “It was a very wonderful and famous hotel in its day,” he said. “Obviously I wasn’t born when it was that innovative. But when I was a kid growing up in Miami Beach, my parents and their friends would say that if you didn’t go to the Fontainebleau, you were nobody.”

That raises an essential question about whether a hotel brand can be successfully extended four decades after its heyday.

Very likely, said Dave Schwartz, an assistant professor who is coordinator of gaming studies research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “The Fontainebleau name has an appeal to an older generation,” he said. “That gives it a base and a start, but it doesn’t necessarily limit the appeal. If the marketing is done right, they can appeal to a whole new younger audience and add to the base.”

Still, there is a risk that many Las Vegas patrons from the West Coast are not as familiar with the Fontainebleau name as are people from the Midwest and the Northeast. “If you ask me what famous hotel names I can think of, Fontainebleau wouldn’t be on the list,” said Thomas Brown, senior consultant at the Power Decisions Group, a San Francisco-based brand research company. “The Las Vegas visitors who are from the West probably didn’t go to Florida very much in the 1950′s and 1960′s, and the Fontainebleau name may not resonate with them.”

Yet clever marketing can enable such customers to discover the brand, Mr. Brown said. “The name itself, Fontainebleau, has a certain phonetic and evocative quality as a word, even if you don’t speak French. It’s a name that has the quality of sophistication, and there’s a melodic flow to the brand, almost like Mercedes-Benz.”

Fontainebleau is a small town in northern France, a 40-minute drive from Paris. The town’s most famous structure, the Royal Chateau de Fontainebleau, was built in the 1500′s by King Francis I as a summer palace.

Mr. Soffer has hired Glenn Schaeffer, who before last month was president of the Mandalay Resort Group, to lead his Las Vegas venture. His tenure there ended in April when MGM Mirage bought Mandalay for $7.9 billion. Mr. Schaeffer, who is president and chief executive of Fontainebleau Resorts, is credited with making the Mandalay worth its purchase price.

His assignment with Fontainebleau Resorts is to start building a chain with its second location in Las Vegas and eventually more destinations in other countries, which the company would not yet identify.

Although some Fontainebleau resorts will not have casinos – the original in Florida does not – condominium units are likely to be a big part of the global concept, said Mr. Soffer, who is the chief executive and majority partner of Turnberry Associates in Aventura, Fla. Turnberry bought the Fontainebleau in Florida from Hilton hotels this month.

Turnberry plans a $350 million renovation of the original Fontainebleau, expanding it to 1,750 rooms from the current 1,300. In addition, a 36-floor condominium tower, called the Fontainebleau II, opened nearby this year after selling all its residences – at prices ranging from $400,000 to $1 million. Plans for another neighboring condo tower, the 18-story Fontainebleau III, were recently announced.

It is this success that Turnberry is hoping to capitalize on in Las Vegas and elsewhere.

“I think the Fontainebleau concept can work largely because they got the right person to run it,” said Mr. Schwartz, the university professor. “Glenn Schaeffer made Mandalay Bay synonymous with hip and fun on the Strip. Put that talent together with a brand name that a lot of people already know, and there’s tremendous potential.”

Mr. Schaeffer could not agree more. “The original Fontainebleau was very Las Vegas in its personality,” he said. “So it will be coming home in a way when we build the second one.”

He has already hired other former Mandalay Bay executives who were part of his team there and commissioned an art critic to research what the Strip’s Fontainebleau should look like. The exterior “will certainly be reminiscent of Morris Lapidus, who was one of the most important commercial architects of the century,” Mr. Schaeffer said.

The new resort’s interiors will be “International style meets Hollywood stage set,” he said.

Of course over-the-top architecture is the norm in Las Vegas, where casinos take the shape of everything from Caesar’s Palace to an Egyptian pyramid. There’s a periodically erupting volcano in front of the Mirage and life-size pirate ships battling outside the Treasure Island.

The Miami Beach Fontainebleau did not have that kind of competition when it came to distinguishing itself from commercial landmarks. The beachfront Eden Roc is also Lapidus-designed and its name does have a nice ring, but it pales in comparison with the Bellagio on the Strip, where giant fountains dwarf the water-spewing wonders of Europe that inspired their look. And the Bellagio’s creator, Steve Wynn, is gaining new attention with the recent opening of his new $2.7 billion resort, called simply Wynn Las Vegas.

Mr. Schaeffer said he was well aware that the new Fontainebleau “won’t be the most expensive property on the Strip, but we intend to be the most stylish.”

Podium: race winner Fernando Alonso with Nick Heidfeld and Rubens Barrichello
F1 > European GP, 2005-05-29 (Nürburgring): Sunday raceThe Weekly Wrap

Iceman Frozen With Finish In Sight – May 29, 2005


Alonso Victorious On Last Lap

The final lap of a race is clearly not the safest and most secure time during a Grand Prix, especially for any Finnish driver in a Mclaren. Think back to the Spanish Grand Prix in 2001, when Mika Häkkinen was forced to retire due to a clutch failure on the last lap. Now, it was his followers turn, as Kimi Räikkönen was forced to hand over victory to title competitor Fernando Alonso on the last lap following a suspension failure that sent him flying off track at the beginning of the final lap of the race. Instead of closing the points gap to twenty points, the gap between first and second in the title race has sprouted open once again to 32 points.

Thankfully, I’m not the journalist who has to interview Räikkönen after the race, because there’s probably not much fun in asking him any questions at the moment. Räikkönen had controlled the race from the beginning, overtaking pole-sitter Nick Heidfeld in the run-up to the first corner and never looking back. Unlike previous races, Kimi was forced to relinquish his lead during the pitstops for a matter of laps, but nonetheless was set to take his third victory in a row. Despite a strong charge from Fernando Alonso towards the end of the race, when Kimi’s speed was hampered by an almost square front right Michelin, the pair entered the last lap with one and a half seconds of difference, enough to ensure the Mclaren a most probable victory.

Thus, Alonso has once again opened up his lead in the championship but, with twelve rounds to go, there’s still a lot of ground to cover. The way the season is shaping up could not be any better for audiences with some of the most exciting races in modern F1 coming weekend after weekend, the European GP being no exception today. Right from the off the sparks were flying. As expected, the tight first corner provided immediate drama when a collision between Mark Webber and Juan Pablo Montoya ended Webber’s race and stirred up the event for several others including Takuma Sato, Michael Schumacher and his brother Ralf. Whilst Schumacher emerged unscathed yet behind, Ralf and Sato were forced to pit for new nosecones.

David Coulthard took full advantage of the first corner méléé and rose from twelth on the grid to fourth place, holding a very good pace from thereon out. A penalty for speeding in the pitlane ended his hopes for a podium, which would have been realised without his drive-through as the Scot eventually finished fourth, thirteen seconds behind Rubens Barrichello. Red Bull Racing definitely proved its worth on the grid once again, and sadly was forced to miss out on another chance at a podium (one that will most certainly be achieved before the season is over), and DC even led the race for a short period of time between pitstops!

Alonso, obviously elated at the misfortune of Räikkönen, did not look like a great challenger early on, racing in fifth place behind Coulthard until the first pitstops. Even then, his speed was not comparable to the front running Räikkönen and Heidfeld, and only towards the end of the race did the threat of his Renault truly become apparent. Heidfeld, racing on a three-stop strategy, was never in the position to challenge for the win, having to make an extra pitstop very late in the race for a final spray of fuel into the Williams. Alonso, however, only increased his pace late in the race, while Räikkönen was clearly beginning to struggle following a pair of lockups that most certainly contributed to the tyre failure that ended his race.

Alonso was close to throwing it all away, as well. In his charge for fast laps prior to his second and final pitstop, Alonso spun at the Dunlop-hairpin and lost what at that point seemed like the deciding handful of seconds that would ensure Räikkönen’s grip on the lead. It soon became clear that Alonso would receive another chance, when the onboard camera view from Räikkönen’s car proved all too clearly how his tyre was falling apart lap by lap. It wasn’t the most beautiful thing to watch, and anyone supporting him could only hope it would hold out for the last number of laps.

Alas, the tyre was causing such vibration in the suspension that it was the suspension which let go completely under braking for the first turn of the final lap, and Kimi was relegated back to eleventh place on the official timing sheet. Michelin will have a significant amount of explaining to do, with Felipe Massa also experiencing a tyre failure that made him lose many places in the final laps of the race. Obviously, these kinds of things happen in racing, but it will not be fun for Mclaren to look back on at the end of the year if Kimi were to lose out to Alonso in the title race by the amount of points lost at the Nurburgring. It happened two years ago, when Kimi’s Mercedes let go whilst in the lead, and the Finn lost the championship to Michael Schumacher by two points.

The North American tour is up next, with the Canadian race at Montreal in a fortnight followed by the United States Grand Prix in Indianapolis a week later. Ferrari is climbing back up, with strong performances from both cars at this weekend’s race, and the next two races have been friendly for their team. Historically, these races have also been successful races for the Mclaren squad, but with Alonso’s current form, the Spaniard will be a tough contender to beat…


The Weekly Wrap By Jens Sorensen
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Fernando Alonso
F1 > European GP, 2005-05-28 (Nürburgring): Saturday practice 1

Mark Webber off-track
F1 > European GP, 2005-05-27 (Nürburgring): Friday practice 2

Nick Heidfeld
F1 > European GP, 2005-05-28 (Nürburgring): Saturday practice 2

Kimi Raikkonen
F1 > European GP, 2005-05-28 (Nürburgring): Saturday practice 1

Michael Schumacher
F1 > European GP, 2005-05-27 (Nürburgring): Friday practice 2

Podium: race winner Fernando Alonso with Nick Heidfeld and Rubens Barrichello
F1 > European GP, 2005-05-29 (Nürburgring): Sunday race

Fernando Alonso
F1 > European GP, 2005-05-28 (Nürburgring): Saturday practice 1

Alonso wins tense European GP
Racing series F1
Date 2005-05-29 (Nurburgring)

By Nikki Reynolds – Motorsport.com

Fernando Alonso took his fourth win of the season at the European Grand Prix, in what was a tense race that seemed to be going Kimi Raikkonen’s way. But in the closing laps, when Raikkonen was leading, his McLaren had trouble with the right front tyre and eventually the Finn crashed out on the last lap, promoting Alonso’s Renault to the lead and the victory.

Williams’ Nick Heidfeld took his second consecutive second place with a strong drive that kept him in the top three throughout the race. Ferrari was finally back on the podium, as Rubens Barrichello kept himself out of trouble to come home third. The Nurburgring event was mostly about strategy and tyres — and the notorious first corner.

Giancarlo Fisichella stalled on the grid at the start of the formation lap and the Renault appeared to be stuck in gear as the marshals couldn’t move it. Eventually mechanics were allowed back onto the grid and removed the car to the pit lane on a jack, and Fisichella started from there. The rest of the pack lined up again and the first corner changed the whole look of the race.

Raikkonen got ahead of pole man Heidfeld in the run down to turn one and the trouble happened behind them. Third placed Mark Webber had another poor start in the Williams and Juan Pablo Montoya’s McLaren came hurtling up along side him. Webber braked quite late and Montoya turned in, resulting in contact that sent them both off.

Meanwhile, Ralf Schumacher’s Toyota hit the back of Alonso’s Renault and Ralf also spun, while the Ferraris and the BAR of Takuma Sato got mixed up in it as well. Somewhere in all the confusion, David Coulthard’s Red Bull went barrelling through to fourth from 12th and Sauber’s Felipe Massa also made his way through, up to sixth from 11th.

Once the mess had sorted itself out, Webber was out of the race and Sato and Ralf dived in the pits for front wing changes. Webber was disappointed but did not blame Montoya. “Getting away (from the line) hasn’t been one of our strengths,” the Australian said ruefully.

“Both Nick and I were a little bit on the back foot down to the first corner. I was trying to defend against Jarno (Trulli) and I couldn’t quite turn in at the apex, so that was a shame. It’s not up to Juan Pablo to give me room — he turned in, for sure, but he’s got to get round the corner too.”

After the incident, the order was Raikkonen from Heidfeld, Trulli’s Toyota up one to third and Coulthard fourth. Alonso gained one place to fifth but he had the problems of Coulthard and Trulli between him and the leaders. Massa was sixth and Red Bull’s Tonio Liuzzi also gained from the confusion, up to seventh, as did Jenson Button’s BAR in eighth.

One of Alonso’s problems was solved when Trulli got a drive-through penalty, as the Toyota mechanics had spent too long on the grid after the 15 second signal was given before the start. Bad luck for Trulli and he rejoined in ninth. Montoya had dropped back to 10th and Michael Schumacher to 11th and they both started working their way up the order.

Rubens Barrichello had also lost out at the first corner but his Ferrari got past Button after a scrap through turns one, two and three to take eighth. Montoya then homed in on Button and got past, while Fisichella had got away from the pit lane start and had made his way up to 12th.

Barrichello closed down Liuzzi and dispatched the Red Bull at the Coca-Cola curve and further down the field the Jordans of Tiago Monteiro and Narain Karthikeyan were running 13th and 14th ahead of the Sauber of Jacques Villeneuve. Raikkonen was not escaping from Heidfeld, the gap between the top two just two seconds.

Trulli’s penalty had promoted Coulthard to third and Michael finally got past Button for 10th in the run up to the first round of pit stops. Barrichello was first in on lap 11, a bit earlier than most had expected, and he and Heidfeld turned out to be on three-stop strategies. Heidfeld was in on the next lap and rejoined in fourth ahead of Massa, who was doing a good job keeping the Sauber in contention.

Villeneuve got past Karthikeyan, and Montoya was closing on Liuzzi, and Raikkonen was next to pit, also earlier than expected. He rejoined third behind Alonso, which left Coulthard in the lead. Liuzzi and Montoya dived into the pits together and Juan got the jump on the Red Bull to come out ahead.

Coulthard pitted next and subsequently got a drive-through penalty for speeding in the pit lane, which dropped him to fifth after he took it. Button and Fisichella had been arguing over 11th and Fisichella won the position but then went into the pits anyway. Alonso finally took his first stop on lap 22 and the order after the shakeout was Raikkonen, Heidfeld, Alonso, Barrichello, Coulthard, Massa, Michael, Montoya.

Ralf and Sato were late stoppers but the first corner antics had dropped them outside the top ten. Raikkonen was comfortably ahead of Heidfeld but then had a mad moment and it all went a bit pear shaped. The McLaren shot across the gravel and grass after the chicane then into the gravel at the next turn, allowing Heidfeld to nip past into the lead.

Raikkonen recovered and unfortunately for Heidfeld his three-stop strategy meant he had to pit again not long after. Minardi’s Christijan Albers got a drive-through for ignoring the blue flags and Ralf was next to come grief, spinning into the gravel after going wide over the kerbs, which was the end of his race.

Raikkonen was having one or two random off track excursions, locking up at turn one and going wide, and it seemed the McLaren had flat-spotted a front tyre somewhere along the way. However, there was 15 seconds between him and Alonso so he was getting away with the odd mistake or half a dozen.

The middle stint of the race was fairly static, with the points scoring positions not changing. Montoya had a go at Michael at the first corner and they came so close to banging wheels but made it through unscathed. Michael then put some distance between them and Raikkonen was the first to take his second stop, on lap 44. The McLaren’s right front barge board was broken but it appeared not to be a major problem.

Alonso took the lead and promptly set the fastest lap of the race, while Monteiro got a drive-through, also for ignoring the blue flags. Massa and Montoya pitted, Massa staying ahead, and Michael beat both of them in his stop to rejoin sixth. Alonso wandered into the gravel at the hairpin and lost some time, but scrambled out and took his second stop.

Massa was struggling with his tyres and was next into the gravel, going off track for a considerable amount of time and looking more like he was rallying than circuit racing. The Sauber apparently took some damage and a couple of laps later Massa was crawling round, then his left front tyre, which was peeling, hit the front wing and he had to go into the pits for a change.

That little episode let Montoya move up one and Raikkonen was next to start displaying some rather alarming tyre behaviour. His right front was indeed flat-spotted and wobbling like mad, little strips peeling off, although not quite delaminating. Alonso was closing at a rate of over a second a lap — seven seconds the gap and seven laps left to run…

Michael charged through the gravel as well but was far enough ahead of Fisichella to stay in fifth, and Karthikeyan followed suit, narrowly missing teammate Monterio on the rebound. At the front Alonso was storming up behind Raikkonen, the gap now just 1.5 with three laps to go. Would Raikkonen’s tyre hold to the end or would McLaren pull him in for change?

Such a move would probably have dropped Raikkonen to third, which may have been an acceptable compromise but it didn’t happen. Kimi stayed out and with one lap to go the inevitable happened. The tyre was so unbalanced it broke the front suspension, rather than the tyre itself failing, and Raikkonen ditched into the barrier at the first corner, narrowly missing punting Button out as well.

Alonso sailed past to take the lead and the victory. “It was a very, very good race from our side,” said the Spaniard. “It is true that I lost so much at the start. I nearly finished my race at the first corner, I don’t know who pushed me in the back, and I thought that maybe something broke in the back of the car but it felt okay and obviously I lost so much I was happy with the second place.”

“The car was so nice to drive, so quick, and we were pushing McLaren and Kimi so hard until the point that they had a failure in the tyres. We were very lucky today, but at the same point we were also very strong and able to push them like at the beginning of the season, not like the last two races.”

Heidfeld drove confidently to second after what was a fairly uneventful race for Nick. “Obviously, we did a three-stop race and a short first stint but we just did that because we hoped to get the best result, which we in the end got with the second place,” he comemnted.

“I just pushed as hard as possible in the first stint and I tried to get a gap, which worked pretty well, and I think the car was really nice but as I had to push hard at the start I lost rear tyres a little towards the end.”

Barrichello also had a pretty quiet time to come home third, while Michael made it a double points finish for Ferrari in fifth. Coulthard split the scarlet pair in fourth. Barrichello believes it’s the start of the Ferrari revival that many have been expecting.

“It is very unfortunate that we have been out of the podium for a long time, the car is very reliable, the engine is good and the tyres are fantastic, it is just that we had a difficult time at some point into the season but we are coming back and I feel the Ferrari team will be very strong from now to the end of the year and we are going to be winning races hopefully soon,” he said.

Fisichella bravely made up the lost ground from his pit lane start to cross the line sixth, followed by Montoya and Trulli in seventh and eighth respectively. It was a shame for Massa, after running in the points all through the race until his problems, who finally finished 14th, one behind teammate Villeneuve, who didn’t really make an impression at all.

Liuzzi was ninth and Button and Sato had a tough time to finish 10th and 12th. Both Jordans and Minardis made it to the line, Monteiro and Karthikeyan in 15th and 16th, Albers ahead of Patrick Friesacher for 17th and 18th. It was quite a low attrition rate considering all the on and off track incidents. Raikkonen was classed 11th.

The result will give Renault and Alonso a bit of breathing space at the top of the standings, but while Raikkonen appears to be Alonso’s main rival, Trulli and Heidfeld are only two points behind the Finn. The gap between Alonso and Raikkonen is now 32 points, and between Renault and McLaren 23 points.

The question most people will be asking is should McLaren have bought Raikkonen in for a tyre change? With hindsight the answer is obviously yes but at the time it was a very tough call to make. The risk was big but so was the gain if it worked out. It didn’t work out and McLaren and Raikkonen had to pay the price.

“We jointly decided to go for the win and no member of the team including Kimi regrets this decision,” said McLaren team principal Ron Dennis. “The resulting suspension failure was understanedable in the circumstances.”

However, it maybe casts a bad light on the one set of tyres per qualifying and race rule. Tyres have become even more of an influence this season and many times we’ve seen drivers struggle with degrading rubber. Raikkonen’s accident, although avoidable if the team had bought him in, perhaps calls into question the safety aspect of the tyre rule.

Despite that, Raikkonen is still a force to be reckoned with and Williams is rapidly gaining ground. Renault may have taken the victory at the Nurburgring but it was by luck rather than judgement. Alonso probably would have been on the podium anyway but the win was unlikely until Raikkonen’s problems.

Canada and America are the next two back-to-back races and the battle looks set to be rejoined just as fiercely. First Renault’s successes and then McLaren’s had people saying that one or the other was going to be dominant, but so far this season has been anything but predictable. Final top eight classification: Alonso, Heidfeld, Barrichello, Coulthard, M. Schumacher, Fisichella, Montoya, Trulli.

Andy Rash

May 29, 2005
‘Vindication’: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Sense and Sensibility
By TONI BENTLEY

IN 1915 Virginia Woolf predicted it would take women another six generations to come into their own. We should be approaching the finish line if Woolf’s math was as good as her English. A little over a century before her, another Englishwoman, Mary Wollstonecraft, declared in her revolutionary book of 1792, ”The Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” that not only had the time come to begin the long slog to selfdom, freedom, empowerment — or whatever current feminist term serves — but that she would be the first of what she called, using the language of taxonomy, ”a new genus.”

It took the renegade second child (of seven) — and first daughter — of Edward John Wollstonecraft, a drinker, and the unhappy Elizabeth Dickson, to take this virtually unimaginable plunge into uncharted waters. And she took this leap while displaying the full measure of female unpredictablity, while the world watched, astounded, dismayed and outraged. This Mary was quite contrary, and her reputation over time, unsurprisingly, has suffered from this complexity. Surely we women have a gene — in addition to those saucy, but ill-mannered, hormones — for theatrics, so frequently do they puncture our inner lives and decorate our outer ones in operatic robes. But occasionally high drama is the most efficient way to break through the status quo, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s radical mission called for extreme measures.

In her wonderful, and deeply sobering, new book, Lyndall Gordon, the distinguished biographer of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë and Henry James, tackles this formidable woman with grace, clarity and much new research. Despite occasional slips into strangely purple prose (when she reproaches her lover, ”retorts — great sprays of indignant eloquence — would fountain from her opening throat”), Gordon relates Wollstonecraft’s story with the same potent mixture of passion and reason her subject personified.

Here’s how things stood for women in the world Mary was born into, the England of 1759: your property and your children were the property of your husband, divorce was impossible, and if you dared to leave your horrid — or abusive — husband you had to desert your children in the process and become an outlaw. Marital rape was perfectly legal, and probably frequent. (In all fairness, a new law in 1782 stated that a husband should not beat his wife with a stick wider than his thumb.)

Samuel Johnson identified the real issue: ”The chastity of women is of all importance, as all property depends on it.” While women were not admitted to universities for another hundred years, the education they did receive was about conduct and little else. One Mrs. Barbauld, a well-known writer and former boarding-school mistress, summarized this teaching when she explained to young ladies, ”Your BEST, your SWEETEST empire is — TO PLEASE.”

Miss Mary Wollstonecraft, however, was not interested in pleasing anyone, most especially a member of the opposite sex. She declared at 15 that she would never marry. Nor, as her life would prove, would she ever internalize her own subjugation to such frivolous teachings. This was no empty declaration, coming as it did from a girl who slept across the threshold of her parents’ bedroom to protect her mother from her father’s rages. Despite her mother’s unloving demeanor, the young girl developed a compassion for women that became what she would call ”the governing propensity” of her entire life. She was obsessed with educating herself against all odds, writing as a teenager, ”I have a heart that scorns disguise, and a countenance which will not dissemble.” The prospects for a woman in her time who chose not to marry were limited to schoolteacher, paid companion, governess and prostitute — all of which Wollstonecraft essayed except the last.

BY 1787 Wollstonecraft had landed in London, setting up house near the publisher Joseph Johnson, and was participating in intellectual circles that included William Blake (who illustrated an edition of her book ”Original Stories from Real Life” in 1791), the naturalist Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), the painter Henry Fuseli, the radical philosopher William Godwin and Thomas Paine. Said Godwin of this outspoken woman, ”I . . . heard her, very frequently when I wished to hear Paine.”She began publishing novels and essays while doing translations (German, Italian, French), book reviews and anthologies. In her first book, ”Thoughts on the Education of Daughters,” she gives us the 18th-century version of ”he’s just not that into you,” when she deplores women’s ”susceptibility to unsuitable men.” She declared there to be no greater misery, besides, than loving someone whom reason cannot respect.

In late 1790 Wollstonecraft’s ”Vindication of the Rights of Men,” the first counter to Edmund Burke’s treatise on the dangers of the French Revolution, was published anonymously; ”all the best journals of the day discussed it.” But when she produced ”The Vindication of the Rights of Woman” just 14 months later, her name was on the title page and all hell broke loose. It was the most immodest emergence of a woman’s voice in memory and the 32-year-old Wollstonecraft became famous. While the American statesman Aaron Burr declared ”your sex has in her an able advocate . . . a work of genius” (and John Adams teased his wife, Abigail, for being a ”Disciple of Wollstonecraft!”) Horace Walpole’s reaction was more typical. He called her a ”hyena in petticoats.”

In her masterwork, Wollstonecraft expounded in dense and literate prose — Gordon might have quoted more extensively here — on the necessity of women becoming less trivial and more rational and educated creatures. She suggests that women ”labor by reforming themselves to reform the world.” A hyena, definitely.

”The minds of women are enfeebled by false refinement,” she wrote, continuing: ”Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind . . . and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to show . . . that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being.” So begins her uncompromising polemic, a document as necessary an admonition today as in her own in its plea to the owners of wombs to invest in that invisible fortification called character before fluffing their petticoats or tattooing their bellies.

And then, astonishingly, within two years, this brilliant, focused woman moved to Paris to write about the French Revolution, lost her virginity at 34 — yes, she was, notably, a virgin when she wrote her germinal work, and perhaps the wiser for it — to the charismatic though clearly ”unsuitable” American adventurer Gilbert Imlay and gave birth to their daughter, Fanny. She attempted suicide with laudanum when Imlay proved faithless. Within two weeks, Imlay persuaded her to spend several months, with baby and French nanny in tow, on a mysterious, madcap mission to Scandinavia to recover, on his behalf, £3,500 worth of silver cargo from a treasure ship. There was no silver, no ship and, when she returned to England, no Imlay; he had taken another mistress.

Still, Wollstonecraft had written a wonderful travel book about her Scandinavian adventures. Then this woman, who so reasonably advocated reason for her own sex, lost her own, and jumped in the Thames in her second suicide attempt in five months. Miraculously, she was found, unconscious, revived and thus lived to have what Virginia Woolf considered the most fruitful experiment of Wollstonecraft’s experimental life — her love affair with William Godwin. Yes, the William Godwin who only a few years earlier had wanted less Wollstonecraft and more Paine.

It is here that one rejoices that this woman who struggled with poverty her entire life (she supported both her father, and numerous siblings, as often as she could until her dying day), who withstood a reputation as a wanton and reckless woman, the writer of an ”amazonian” book, a cornerstone treatise for women’s liberation, attains at the end of her life some experience of comfort, elation and kindness in the arms of a man she could respect.

The story of their love is all the more touching for its brevity — 17 months. Godwin, a reserved bachelor three years her senior, wrote of Wollstonecraft in 1796: ”I found a wounded heart, &, as that heart cast itself upon me, it was my ambition to heal it.” William Hazlitt wrote of Godwin that he has ”less of the appearance of a man of genius, than any one who has given such decided and ample proofs of it,” while a certain Mr. Horseman proclaimed that Godwin and Wollstonecraft were undoubtedly ”the two greatest men in the world.”

After three failed attempts to consummate their attraction, recorded concisely in Godwin’s diary as ”chez moi,” ”chez elle” (twice), victory is finally denoted by ”chez elle toute” — surely one of history’s most succinct sexual success reports. Wollstonecraft’s diary indicated that while it was not entirely ”toute” for her — not the ”rapture” of Imlay, her only other lover — it was an experience of ”sublime tranquillity.”

Once starting their affair they meticulously practiced the most sophisticated birth control of the day: abstention for three days following menstruation and then frequent sex for the remainder of the month (frequency was thought to lower the possibility of conception.) Bingo! Within a few months Wollstonecraft was pregnant and these two outspoken opponents of marriage, married, though they maintained their separate abodes and their mutual, and separate, circles of acquaintances.

Meanwhile Godwin held fast to his belief that matrimony offers ”the most fertile sources of misery to mankind,” while Wollstonecraft softened up considerably to her new marital status, declaring, ”a husband is a convenient part of the furniture of a house, unless he be a clumsy fixture.”

Deciding to have her baby at home with a midwife — hospitals were rife with infection — Wollstonecraft produced, after an 18-hour labor, a girl child on Aug. 30, 1797. But the placenta had not fully expelled itself and a doctor was called in to rip out the rest — for four hours — without anesthesia. She said afterward that she had not known pain before. The botched operation left her with an infection that killed her 11 days later. She was 38.

Her last words were that Godwin was ”the kindest, best man in the world.” He recorded the precise time of her death in his diary followed by three trailing blank lines. In his memoir of his wife, he wrote that she had an ”unconquerable greatness of soul.” One does not doubt him.

And, in turn, that daughter, the future Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, sent forth, 20 years later, in 1818, what she called ”my hideous progeny” in the most famous horror story of all time, ”Frankenstein.” Thus the great Mary Wollstonecraft became grandmother to the most wounded of motherless children and his cautionary fable about the hubris of men, the fears of pregnancy, the dangers of child-rearing and the destruction and despair that ensue from the unloved child. The tale is chilling as legacy alone.

Two years earlier, Mary’s half-sister, Fanny (Wollstonecraft’s daughter by Imlay), had succeeded where her mother had failed, and killed herself with laudanum at age 22. ”The best thing I could do,” she wrote, ”was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate. . . . You will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed.” An eerie loss — and choice of words — indeed.

Who can say that we women are not now all members of the new genus Wollstonecraft so brazenly constructed? Or that each of us does not benefit? Gordon’s book is worthy of its subject. It is also a welcome reminder of a brave woman who lived her brief and difficult life for us, whom she never knew. Or did she? Besides, according to Virginia Woolf, we’re only three generations away from the promised land. Let’s hope we all make it there, and see what the visionary Mary Wollstonecraft saw for us over two centuries ago.

Toni Bentley is the author, most recently, of ”The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir” and ”Sisters of Salome.”

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A Hamburger Today One day soon, there will be a blog for almost everything. Today is not that day, but we are one step closer with the launch of this gathering place for all things burger. Since May has been dubbed National Hamburger Month by the meat industry, now is as good a time as any to peruse a site that’s “favorite condiment…is opinion.” Of special interest to partisans of the patty will be reviews of various burger joints (so far limited to Los Angeles and New York City) and hamburger musings from such regions as London, Ohio, and South Carolina. Ground-beef fans will want to chow down on the recipes section, though low-carb dieters will have to wait for a bun-free version of the site. So vegetarians, look the other way and let the meat-eaters have their day. (in Weblogs)

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Marissa Roth for The New York Times

The screenwriter John August, whose “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” based on the story by Roald Dahl, is scheduled to open next month.

May 22, 2005

Advanced Screenwriting According to Me

By BOB BAKER

OS ANGELES

JOHN AUGUST, one of Hollywood’s most in-demand script polishers, could have been working on any number of projects on a recent spring morning. There was the script he is writing and hoping to direct. There was the musical adaptation of a novel. There was a movie based on the video game “Prince of Persia,” on which he is serving as an executive producer for Jerry Bruckheimer. And looming over all was July 15, the day his adaptation of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp, opens in theaters.

But instead, as Mr. August sat down at the computer in his spacious Hancock Park house, he logged on, as he does most every day, to www.johnaugust.com, where aspiring writers pelt him with questions. Should I take a job rewriting a bad movie? How much guidance should my script give the actors? Does “based on a true story” have any legal meaning? What kind of printer do you use?

On this morning, Mr. August selected a query from a hopeful screenwriter asking about legal issues involved in adapting a friend’s discarded memoir – unbeknownst to the friend. Mr. August told the correspondent she was on shaky ground legally, then added that he found her appropriation of her friend’s memoir a little – well, unfriendly. He said he told her: “My advice: tell him what you did, and show him the script. Maybe he’ll love it. Maybe he’ll hate it and stop being your friend. I can’t say I’d blame him.”

There are scores of Web sites run by screenwriters, most of them with limited credentials, and a few others run by pros and geared to working writers. By contrast, Mr. August’s site – free, like most of the others – draws an audience reminiscent of the University of Southern California’s film school, where he earned a graduate degree a little more than a decade ago. The site reflects not only Mr. August’s talent for explanation but also his enthusiasm for it. It reveals him to be, in his words, a “big techno-geeky nerd”: he built and administers it himself.

Mr. August, 34, has won a reputation for versatility with scripts like “Go” (1999), the cool and chaotic look at disaffected young people directed by Doug Liman (“Swingers”), and “Big Fish” (2003), the fanciful family tale directed by Mr. Burton. In between, Mr. August has earned enough as a script doctor to buy that expensive house, which he shares with his partner of five years, Mike Douglass.

For all the success, www.johnaugust.com has a decidedly humble, nuts-and-bolts sensibility. To cheer the struggling masses, Mr. August posts a list of the 11 full-length scripts he has sold or written on spec that have never been shot. He jokes that operating the site “is an excuse not to work,” and that it’s “more fun than video games.” But he also calls it “one of those pay it back, pay it forward things.”

Mr. August is 6 feet tall and 170 pounds with a shaved head. But he retains a boyish earnestness, which Hollywood usually strips from people before swallowing them.

To describe his feelings at getting the “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” job, for example, he unselfconsciously invokes a cliché: it was “a dream come true,” he says. And then he retrieves a 28-year-old postcard. His third-grade teacher, in Boulder, Colo., had asked everyone in the class to write to someone famous. Most kids went for President Jimmy Carter. Young John, having read “Charlie,” wrote to its author, Roald Dahl. The postcard that arrived shortly thereafter seemed like a treasured reward: a personal note from the man himself. Eventually, someone broke the news that it was no more than a form letter.

Mr. Burton wanted his film to follow Dahl’s text more faithfully than had the 1971 version, “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” starring Gene Wilder. However, the book offered no guidance about Willy’s boyhood. So Mr. August playfully made him the son of a renowned, candy-hating dentist.

In one of the script’s flashbacks, Willy’s father throws his son’s Halloween candy into the fireplace; in another, Willy finds one piece spared from the flames and bites in. Then, the script says, the opening chords of Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower” begin to play, and “we begin a spinning perspective shot that would leave Hitchcock jealous. In little Willy’s eyes we see a reaction. He’s like Isaac Newton getting beaned by the apple.”

Mr. August said he discovered his craft-to-be at 10, while watching a rented tape of a black comedy, “The War of the Roses.” It occurred to him that “everything the actors were saying and doing was written someplace. So I tried to write down the dialogue and find out what that was like.”

He studied advertising and journalism at Drake University in Iowa, attended a summer film program at Stanford and was accepted at U.S.C.’s prestigious two-year graduate program in film production. After graduation, in the late 90′s, three breaks fell his way in about a year and a half: he sold “Go”; his agent sent him “Big Fish,” a Southern novel by Daniel Wallace; and Columbia asked him to join the dozen or so writers who were trying to salvage a film version of the 1970′s television series “Charlie’s Angels.” Mr. August said yes with an exclamation point. He set out to write an affectionate “giant hug” to the show he’d grown up with, celebrating the Angels’ duality: three women (Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Lu) who were “incredibly proficient on their jobs, and giant dorks when they were off the job.”

“Because comedy isn’t about cool people,” he said. “Comedy is about dorks and idiots.”

Meanwhile, Mr. August had fallen in love with “Big Fish,” which tells the story of a larger-than-life father through his son’s eyes. The narrator is about the same age that Mr. August was when his own father died. Mr. Burton was brought on to “Big Fish” and developed a fondness for Mr. August’s ability to write sweetly without falling into the ditch of sentimentality.

“That was the tricky thing he did very well,” Mr. Burton said. “With families, you can go through years of therapy and not know what it’s about. His great gift is capturing those things that are quite difficult to discuss.”

Mr. August said his sexual orientation has helped him notice things others miss, because for the first 20 years of his life, he said, he was “observing the world and trying to model my behavior to look as straight as possible. It’s sort of this psychological ‘CSI’ you’re doing on a daily basis. You’re always looking for motivation.”

But he’s not especially eager to write a gay-themed picture. “I suspect every gay screenwriter has a big gay-catharsis movie inside them,” he said. “But then you go to a gay film festival and you see everyone else has done their movie, and there’s not a pressing need for you to do yours.”

Some fans of Mr. August’s work pine for more of his unconventional “Go” sensibility and less of his fascination with pop culture icons. They took some satisfaction last year when he was nominated in the best-adapted-screenplay category by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for “Big Fish” and nominated in the worst-screenplay category for the “Charlie’s Angels” sequel by a Hollywood group that honors “raspberries.”

Mr. August regards this dichotomy with a smile. He can afford it. On his side are not just the film executives who keep giving him work but also the acolytes on his Web site, who get to listen in as he finds writing lessons everywhere. A few weeks ago, he was picking up dinner at a fast-food place when he saw a man holding tight to the roof rack of an S.U.V. while the woman driving it tried to pull out of the parking lot.

“Here’s my thought process,” he typed the next morning. First, he recalled, he wondered if the man and woman even knew each other. Was he harassing her? Was she skipping out on the parking charge?

Then, “John August Concerned Citizen slowly reverted into John August Screenwriter,” he wrote, “as I tried to construct scenarios to explain what had just happened.” He thought through a Parking Lot Attendant scene, a Furious Boyfriend scene, an Eerily Calm Stalker, a Random Psycho.

Then he tried to decide what genre it was: “If you put Will Ferrell in the guy’s role, clinging to the side of an S.U.V., then it’s a comedy,” he wrote. “Hugh Grant, and it’s a romantic comedy. Sean Penn, and it’s a thriller.”

And if you put John August in the observation deck, it’s yet another learning opportunity.

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