Fatal Mountaineer by Robert Roper

Author:Robert Roper [ROPER, ROBERT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312302665
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

THIRTEEN

Americans on Everest, a film seen by 20 million viewers when first aired in the United States, has the heroic tone of other preseventies mountaineering accounts. Orson Welles narrates in his orotund style, reading from a script by Ullman that only occasionally resorts to purple passages on the order of “After three weeks Jim Whitta-ker's maypole still stands fast, with Old Glory streaming in the winds of space.” Welles earned $7,000 for three hours' work in a recording studio in Rome. Dyhrenfurth, who directed but was given no director's credit by National Geographic—and who earned not a dime because, in his eagerness to get the expedition going, he'd accepted a bad contract—commented, bitterly, “Nice work if you can get it!” In addition to his work as expedition organizer, Dyhrenfurth labored on the mountain as principal cinematographer, constrained at all times by a National Geographic contract that required that he be looking through the camera on every shot. (“Look, it doesn't work that way out here in the Himalaya,” he told his National Geographic overlords in Washington. “I can't be everywhere at once! I have to use an assistant!”)

Ullman's script for Americans on Everest, like his book of the same name, belongs to the same school of mountain writing as Elizabeth Knowlton's Naked Mountain, Herzog's Annapurna, and just about everything else written before the end of the sixties. Both book and film hate to report bad news, and in fact, never knowingly attribute unworthy motives to any climber; by the same token, they love to find evidence of heroism, self-sacrifice, and team spirit in the complex story of the expedition. That story, thoroughly researched by Ullman, who had access to the climbers' diaries and other intimate writings, is told with clarity and admirable completeness. The book amasses a mini-Everest of facts about the trip, from the contents of a two-man summit ration package (“2 pkg. Metrecal cookies … 2 6-oz. pkg. Jell-O … 1 meat bar … 1 12-oz. can mixed nuts,” etc.) to the kind of camera supplied each member (“Nikon F single-lens reflex … 50-mm f/20 Nikkor lens … 28-mm f/3.5 Nikkor wide-angle lens thoroughly tested in a cold chamber”). At the same time, we encounter passages like this:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.