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Guide opening:
Business is terrific! You and your partners have been making tidy profits from traditional
operations and you foresee the situation continuing. You've been dealing with routine
challenges and problem solving. Then you get a big idea, a vision: an idea so big it will
revolutionize your industry. You know it will work. Everything - your experience, your
sense of the market, your intuition - tells you it will work. Your partners, however, just
don't get it. They are conservative investors and expect immediate returns on their
investments. You don't focus on the money; to you it's the achievement that counts. How
can you proceed with building your dream?
In Fitzcarraldo, German director Werner
Herzog tells the story of the eccentric and visionary Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, who dreams
big dreams while running an ice factory in an outback region of Peru. Among his plans is
an idea to build an opera house in the rain forest and bring Enrico Caruso to sing there.
To finance that venture he decides to first set up another, a navigation company on a
previously undeveloped river system. To do that he must get a steamship into that system;
and the only way to do it is to drag the ship across land, float it up river, develop a
profitable trading company, use the profits of the company to build the opera house and
then convince Caruso to sing there! The movie, based on a true story, depicts the power of
fervently held ideas and the pitfalls of linking too many of them together.
An excerpt from the commentary:
Fitzcarraldo's real-life protagonist, Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, was a visionary of epic
proportion - and director Werner Herzog emulated his subject in filming the movie. Herzog
insisted, for example, that every aspect of the film be done for real, i.e., without
special effects. That meant that when Fitzcarraldo's steamship is being dragged over the
mountain, you're looking at a real steamship actually being hauled, by real people pulling
on real ropes, aided by real pulleys. Not even Fitz himself did that! He broke the
boat down, hauled it in pieces and reassembled it. Herzog's obsession with the
movie - which is flawed by both its length and its odd pacing - illustrates the infectious
power of the visionary. Fitzcarraldo's vision not only inspired Herzog to make a movie,
but to do it in a style that would have been appreciated by its subject. Herzog's effort,
in turn, inspired another filmmaker, Les Blank, to make a movie (Burden of Dreams)
about Herzog's efforts.

The commentary is supplemented by BREAKOUT BOXES
dealing with these topics:
 |
Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald: The
Real Story |
 |
Fitzcarraldo's Rules for
Making the Impossible Possible |
 |
Three Management Types: Visionary, Builder, Maintainer |

THE GUIDE also includes an essay that looks at business as depicted in
the movies. For an introductory section on how to use the Management Goes to
the Movies program, click through to Using The MGTTM Training Program.
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