Cellar victim Kampusch raped, starved in film of ordeal

VIENNA (Reuters) – A new film based on the story of Austrian kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch shows her being repeatedly raped by the captor who beat and starved her during the eight-and-a-half years that he kept her in a cellar beneath his house.

Kampusch was snatched on her way to school at the age of 10 by Wolfgang Priklopil and held in a windowless cell under his garage near Vienna until she escaped in 2006, causing a sensation in Austria and abroad. Priklopil committed suicide.

Kampusch had always refused to respond to claims that she had had sex with Priklopil, but in a German television interview on her 25th birthday last week said she had decided to reveal the truth because it had leaked out from police files.

The film, “3,096 Days” – based on Kampusch’s autobiography of the same name – soberly portrays her captivity in a windowless cellar less than 6 square metres (65 square feet) in area, often deprived of food for days at a time.

The emaciated Kampusch – who weighed just 38 kg (84 pounds) at one point in 2004 – keeps a diary written on toilet paper concealed in a box.

One entry reads: “At least 60 blows in the face. Ten to 15 nausea-inducing fist blows to the head. One strike with the fist with full weight to my right ear.”

The movie shows occasional moments that approach tenderness, such as when Priklopil presents her with a cake for her 18th birthday or buys her a dress as a gift – but then immediately goes on to chide her for not knowing how to waltz with him.

GREY AREAS

Antonia Campbell-Hughes, who plays the teenaged Kampusch, said she had tried to portray “the strength of someone’s soul, the ability of people to survive… but also the grey areas within a relationship that people don’t necessarily understand.”

The British actress said she had not met Kampusch during the making of the film or since. “It was a very isolated time, it was a bubble of time, and I wanted to keep that very focused,” she told journalists as she arrived for the Vienna premiere.

Kampusch herself attended the premiere, looking composed as she posed for pictures but declining to give interviews.

In an interview with Germany’s Bild Zeitung last week, she said: “Yes, I did recognize myself, although the reality was even worse. But one can’t really show that in the cinema, since it wasn’t supposed to be a horror film.”

The movie, made at the Constantin Film studios in Bavaria, Germany, also stars Amy Pidgeon as the 10-year-old Kampusch and Danish actor Thure Lindhardt as Priklopil.

“I focused mainly on playing the human being because… we have to remember it was a human being. Monsters do not exist, they’re only in cartoons,” Lindhart said.

“It became clear to me that it’s a story about survival, and it’s a story about surviving eight years of hell. If that story can be told then I can also play the bad guy.”

The director was German-American Sherry Hormann, who made her English-language debut with the 2009 move “Desert Flower”, an adaptation of the autobiography of Somali-born model and anti-female circumcision activist Waris Dirie.

“I’m a mother and I wonder at the strength of this child, and it was important for me to tell this story from a different perspective, to tell how this child using her own strength could survive this atrocious martyrdom,” Hormann said.

The Kampusch case was followed two years later by that of Josef Fritzl, an Austrian who held his daughter captive in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her.

The crimes prompted soul-searching about the Austrian psyche, and questions as to how the authorities and neighbors could have let such crimes go undetected for so long.

The film goes on general release on Thursday.

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan, Editing by Paul Casciato)

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Jane C. Wright, Pioneering Oncologist, Dies at 93

Dr. Jane C. Wright, a pioneering oncologist who helped elevate chemotherapy from a last resort for cancer patients to an often viable treatment option, died on Feb. 19 at her home in Guttenberg, N.J. She was 93.

Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College

Dr. Jane C. Wright was the only woman among seven physicians who founded the American Society of Clinical Oncologists.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter Jane Jones, who said her mother had dementia.

Dr. Wright descended from a distinguished medical family that defied racial barriers in a profession long dominated by white men. Her father, Dr. Louis T. Wright, was among the first black graduates of Harvard Medical School and was reported to be the first black doctor appointed to the staff of a New York City hospital. His father was an early graduate of what became the Meharry Medical College, the first medical school in the South for African-Americans, founded in Nashville in 1876.

Dr. Jane Wright began her career as a researcher working alongside her father at a cancer center he established at Harlem Hospital in New York.

Together, they and others studied the effects of a variety of drugs on tumors, experimented with chemotherapeutic agents on leukemia in mice and eventually treated patients, with some success, with new anticancer drugs, including triethylene melamine.

After her father died in 1952, Dr. Wright took over as director of the center, which was known as the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Foundation. In 1955, she joined the faculty of the New York University Medical Center as director of cancer research, where her work focused on correlating the responses of tissue cultures to anticancer drugs with the responses of patients.

In 1964, working as part of a team at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine, Dr. Wright developed a nonsurgical method, using a catheter system, to deliver heavy doses of anticancer drugs to previously hard-to-reach tumor areas in the kidneys, spleen and elsewhere.

That same year, Dr. Wright was the only woman among seven physicians who, recognizing the unique needs of doctors caring for cancer patients, founded the American Society of Clinical Oncologists, known as ASCO. She was also appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the President’s Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke, led by the heart surgeon Dr. Michael E. DeBakey. Its recommendations emphasized better communication among doctors, hospitals and research institutions and resulted in a national network of treatment centers.

In 1967, Dr. Wright became head of the chemotherapy department and associate dean at New York Medical College. News reports at the time said it was the first time a black woman had held so high a post at an American medical school.

“Not only was her work scientific, but it was visionary for the whole science of oncology,” Dr. Sandra Swain, the current president of ASCO, said in a telephone interview. “She was part of the group that first realized we needed a separate organization to deal with the providers who care for cancer patients. But beyond that, it’s amazing to me that a black woman, in her day and age, was able to do what she did.”

Jane Cooke Wright was born in Manhattan on Nov. 30, 1919. Her mother, the former Corinne Cooke, was a substitute teacher in the New York City schools.

Ms. Wright attended the Ethical Culture school in Manhattan and the Fieldston School in the Bronx (now collectively known Ethical Culture Fieldston School) and graduated from Smith College, where she studied art before turning to medicine. She received a full scholarship to New York Medical College, earning her medical degree in 1945. Before beginning research with her father, she worked as a doctor in city schools.

Dr. Wright married David D. Jones, a lawyer, in 1947; he died in 1976. In addition to their daughter Jane, she is survived by another daughter, Alison Jones; and a sister, Dr. Barbara Wright Pierce.

As both a student and a doctor, Dr. Wright said in interviews, she was always aware that as a black woman she was an unusual presence in medical institutions. But she never felt she was a victim of racial prejudice, she said.

“I know I’m a member of two minority groups,” she said in an interview with The New York Post in 1967, “but I don’t think of myself that way. Sure, a woman has to try twice as hard. But — racial prejudice? I’ve met very little of it.”

She added, “It could be I met it — and wasn’t intelligent enough to recognize it.”

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Sequestration Takes Effect, but Impact Is Not Immediate

WASHINGTON — University officials, city managers, day care providers and others spent Saturday assessing how they would absorb their part of the across-the-board cuts in federal spending that began taking effect over the weekend.

But even as the institutions that depend on federal money nervously took stock, most Americans were largely unaffected by the cuts, at least for now. At Los Angeles International Airport, John Konopka, 45, suffered no delays as he arrived from Atlanta.

“This is just another travel day,” Mr. Konopka said. “I think all of it’s been talked up a bit, way too politically, to make it seem a lot worse than it is. I don’t think it’s going to be the gloom and doom that some people are saying it would be.”

Others were less sanguine. Joel Silver, 63, a retiree from the Bronx, said he feared the cuts would affect the most vulnerable. He said he was angry that President Obama and lawmakers had not prevented what he called “an invented crisis.”

“What’s the point of a Congress?” he asked. “Aren’t they supposed to sit down and talk about things and figure them out? The economy was just recovering and now it’s going to slide back.”

Across the country, the impact of sequestration, as the cuts are known, appeared to be as varied as the thousands of federal programs, big and small, that now have shrunken pots of money from which to draw.

In Baltimore, the mayor called for an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss the reductions in federal money and their impact on a city that already has a projected deficit of $750 million over the next decade.

At research universities, administrators sent e-mails to faculty members and students warning that changes were coming. Samuel L. Stanley Jr., the president of Stony Brook University, said the institution would lose $7.6 million in “vital federal funding” for research grants and other programs. The University of California, Berkeley, warned that “as sequestration translates into fewer federal grants, the campus will be forced to hire fewer researchers.”

The Air Force Thunderbirds, the elite team of F-16 pilots who perform flight maneuvers at air shows around the country, announced on their Web site that all of their shows had been canceled starting April 1.

Federal officials began sending letters to governors, informing them of smaller grants. Shaun Donovan, the secretary of housing and urban development, wrote to Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio, “You can expect reductions totaling approximately $35 million.”

In a 70-page report to Congress accompanying the sequestration order and detailing the reductions — agency by agency and program by program — Jeffrey D. Zients, Mr. Obama’s budget director, called them “deeply destructive to national security, domestic investments and core government functions.”

Among the $85 billion in cuts for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30: $3 million less for Pacific coastal salmon recovery; $148 million less for the patent office; a $1 million cut in support by the Defense Department for international sporting competitions; $289 million less for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; a $1 million cut in the Interior Department’s helium fund; and $16 million less for the Sept. 11 victim compensation fund.

But even as the reductions became official, the result of a stalemate between Mr. Obama and Congressional Republicans over increasing taxes, some of the immediate impact was difficult to see.

The process of trimming government budgets is slow and cumbersome, involving notifications to unions about temporary furloughs, reductions in overtime pay and cuts in grant financing to state and local programs. Less federal money will, over time, mean fewer government contracts with private companies. Reduced overtime pay for airport security checkpoint officers will make lines longer, eventually.

And so as the first weekend began for the new, slimmer government, little of that was evident yet.

At Kennedy International Airport in New York, travelers who arrived extra early were greeted by short lines, not the drastic delays that federal transportation officials have said could emerge as security officers are furloughed to save money.

“The check-in was fine, at least for now. I’m surprised,” said Chris Achilefu, 45, who arrived at the airport four hours before his flight to Lagos, Nigeria. Normally Mr. Achilefu, an automotive exporter who lives in Upper Darby, Pa., would arrive two hours early, but he said he was concerned about lines.

“I was listening to what the president said yesterday, that it won’t kick in right away,” he said. “Hopefully the two parties will come together, hopefully they will resolve it before another month.”

At the main San Ysidro port of entry between Mexico and San Diego, traffic moved smoothly late Friday night, just hours after the sequestration began, and border lines had only a few dozen vehicles in each lane.

Vendors who line the street where cars sometimes idle for hours waiting to enter the United States perked up when they heard about the cuts.

“That’s good for business,” said Emilio Gomez, an employee at a stand selling rugs, china figurines and soda. “When people are waiting, they get bored and they buy more stuff.”

In his weekly address on Saturday, Mr. Obama acknowledged that not everyone would be affected equally. “While not everyone will feel the pain of these cuts right away, the pain will be real,” he said. “Many middle-class families will have their lives disrupted in a significant way.”

In the Republican response to Mr. Obama’s address, Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington also called the cuts “devastating,” but said that Republicans in the House would not yield on taxes. “Spending is the problem, which means cutting spending is the solution,” she said. “It’s that simple.”

Reporting was contributed by Robbie Brown from Atlanta; Will Carless from San Ysidro, Calif.; Ian Lovett from Los Angeles; and Marc Santora and Ravi Somaiya from New York.

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Bell jurors ordered to begin anew after panelist is dismissed

After nearly five days of deliberations, jurors in the Bell corruption trial were ordered Thursday to begin anew after a member of the panel was dismissed for misconduct and replaced by an alternate.

The original juror, a white-haired woman identified only as Juror No. 3, told Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy she had gone onto a legal website to look up jury instructions and then asked her daughter to help find a definition for the word "coercion."

Although all but one defense attorney requested that the woman stay, Kennedy said the juror needed to be removed. "She has spoken about the deliberations with her daughter, she has conducted research on the Internet, and I've repeatedly, repeatedly throughout this trial — probably hundreds of times — cautioned the jury not to do that," the judge said.

The removal came after jurors notified the judge that they were deadlocked and that continued deliberations seemed fruitless.

It was unclear how to interpret the day's events, whether the dismissed juror had been a lone holdout or an indication of a fractured jury.

The juror started to tell the judge which way she was leaning in the case, saying she had gone online "looking to see at what point can I get the harassment to stop.... How long do I have to stay in there and deliberate with them when I have made my decision that I didn't think there was —"

Kennedy cut her off before she could finish.

The woman clasped her hands over her mouth and said, "I'm sorry."

Two defense attorneys thought she was leaning toward acquittal and wanted her to stay. "I would have preferred the deadlock to a guilty verdict," said Alex Kessel, the attorney for George Mirabal, one of six former council members charged with misappropriation of public funds.

The council members are charged with inflating their salaries in what prosecutors contend was a far-reaching web of corruption in which fat paychecks were placed ahead of the needs of the city's largely immigrant, working-poor constituents.

When attorneys and defendants were summoned to the courtroom Thursday morning, they were initially told that the jury appeared to be deadlocked.

"Your honor, we have reached a point where as a jury we have fundamental disagreements and cannot reach a unanimous verdict in this case," read a note signed by two jurors, including the foreman, that was given to Kennedy.

A note from another juror alerted the judge that Juror No. 3 had consulted an outside attorney. That did not appear to be the case, but her other actions were revealed under questioning from the judge.

The same juror made a tearful request Monday to be removed from the panel because she felt others were picking on her. Kennedy told the woman that although discussions can get heated, it was important to continue deliberating.

On Thursday, however, the juror again broke into tears and said she had spoken with her daughter about "the abuse I have suffered." She said her daughter told her, "Mom, they're trying to find the weak link."

The woman said she had turned to the Internet to better understand the rules about jury deliberations and came across the word "coercion." After her daughter helped her look up the word's definition, she wrote it down on a piece of paper and brought it with her to court. When the judge asked to see the paper she went into the jury room to retrieve it.

The woman later left the courtroom in tears.

With an alternate in place, Kennedy told the panel to act as if the earlier deliberations had not taken place. The alternate had sat in the jury box during the four-week trial but did not take part in deliberations.

Former council members Luis Artiga, Victor Bello, George Cole, Oscar Hernandez, Teresa Jacobo and Mirabal are accused of drawing annual salaries of as much as $100,000 a year by serving on boards that did little work and seldom met, part of a scandal that drew national attention to the small city in 2010.

Prosecutors said that Bell's charter follows state law regarding council members' compensation. In a city the size of Bell, council members should be paid no more than $8,076 a year.

The trial began in late January, and the case went to the jury last Friday.

As the jury resumed deliberations in downtown Los Angeles, the verdict was clearly in on the streets of Bell.

One resident unfurled old protest banners and signs from the days when the pay scandal was first exposed and then called former members of an activist group that had led the charge for reform in the city.

"We're holding our breaths and waiting," Denise Rodarte, a member of the grassroots group Bell Assn. to Stop the Abuse, said in regard to a verdict.

"It's cut and dry: Local elected officials were supposed to make a certain amount of money, and they made a lot more."

corina.knoll@latimes.com

jeff.gottlieb@latimes.com

Times staff writer Ruben Vives contributed to this report.

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New York by Gehry: This Building of the Week Has Curves

Each week, Wired Design brings you a photo of one of our favorite buildings, showcasing boundary-pushing architecture and design involved in the unique structures that make the world's cityscapes interesting. Check back Fridays for the continuing series, and feel free to make recommendations in the comments, by Twitter, or by e-mail.

Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry went residential for the first time on his tower at 8 Spruce Street, completed in 2011 just outside the financial district in New York City. The tallest apartment building in the western hemisphere (for now) at 870 feet, the New York by Gehry incorporates the architect's iconic curved steel exterior, rippling and reflective, like a wave in the sky.

In addition to pricey apartments — upwards of $40,000 a month for penthouses — the bottom floors of the tower houses a public school. The building's design is meant to make residents feel they could step right out into space, and from afar, the wavy metal has the same effect on the eyes.

Top photo: Courtesy of Gehry Partners, LLP

Bottom photo: dbox

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Well: A Rainbow of Root Vegetables

This week’s Recipes for Health is as much a treat for the eyes as the palate. Colorful root vegetables from bright orange carrots and red scallions to purple and yellow potatoes and pale green leeks will add color and flavor to your table.

Since root vegetables and tubers keep well and can be cooked up into something delicious even after they have begun to go limp in the refrigerator, this week’s Recipes for Health should be useful. Root vegetables, tubers (potatoes and sweet potatoes, which are called yams by most vendors – I mean the ones with dark orange flesh), winter squash and cabbages are the only local vegetables available during the winter months in colder regions, so these recipes will be timely for many readers.

Roasting is a good place to begin with most root vegetables. They sweeten as they caramelize in a hot oven. I roasted baby carrots and thick red scallions (they may have been baby onions; I didn’t get the information from the farmer, I just bought them because they were lush and pretty) together and seasoned them with fresh thyme leaves, then sprinkled them with chopped toasted hazelnuts. I also roasted a medley of potatoes, including sweet potatoes, after tossing them with olive oil and sage, and got a wonderful range of colors, textures and tastes ranging from sweet to savory.

Sweet winter vegetables also pair well with spicy seasonings. I like to combine sweet potatoes and chipotle peppers, and this time in a hearty lentil stew that we enjoyed all week.

Here are five colorful and delicious dishes made with root vegetables.

Spicy Lentil and Sweet Potato Stew With Chipotles: The combination of sweet potatoes and spicy chipotles with savory lentils is a winner.

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Roasted Carrots and Scallions With Thyme and Hazelnuts: Toasted hazelnuts add a crunchy texture and nutty finish to this dish.

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Carrot Wraps: A vegetarian sandwich that satisfies like a full meal.

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Rainbow Potato Roast: A multicolored mix that can be vegan, or not.

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Leek Quiche: A lighter version of a Flemish classic.

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Hasbro Expands Transformers Brand Into New Media

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Ryan Yzquierdo, who has been a Transformers fan since he was 7, is introducing his daughter to the franchise.

To Hasbro, no one is too young or too old to play with a Transformers robot, watch a Transformers television show or play a Transformers video game.

The toy maker started the Transformers franchise with a Japanese partner in 1984. The concept — robots disguised as everyday objects — was originally aimed at 5-year-old boys. But as those boys have grown up and had children and even grandchildren, Hasbro has expanded the brand into other media and added new toy lines to appeal to everyone from toddlers to adults.

Take Rescue Bots, for example.

The main Transformers brand contains mature themes, with big robots battling for control of the planet. To engage children ages 3 to 7, Hasbro introduced Rescue Bots in 2011, featuring toy robots as first responders.

“The goal there is to take what you have and bring an age-relevant message, which is to get away from the battle and the fighting and focus on the heroic nature of Transformers,” said Jay Duke, global vice president for the Transformers brand at Hasbro.

That was enough to convince Ryan Yzquierdo, who has been a Transformers fan since he was 7, that Rescue Bots were a good way to introduce Transformers to his 3-year-old daughter.

“Each toy focused on a different motor skill, which was a big selling point for me and my wife,” said Mr. Yzquierdo, who started a Web site, Seibertron.com, devoted to Transformers in 2000.

When buying toys and games for their children, parents often look to favorites from their own childhood. Their nostalgia for beloved toys from their past helps create a bonding experience with their little ones.

Toy makers have long tried to build enduring brands that can be passed down to the next generation. Those intellectual properties are cheaper to develop because the toy companies do not have to pay a licensing fee to an outside partner. They also bring in added revenue through licensing fees paid by other companies, like makers of apparel and school accessories.

In Transformers, Hasbro has one of the most valuable brands among toy makers. In 2011, the year the third Transformers movie was released, Hasbro recorded $960 million in sales from products related to Transformers and Beyblade, a spinning top game, according to the company’s latest annual earnings report.

When it was developed in 1984, Transformers consisted of a toy line and an animated television series.

But in 2007, Hasbro began a new strategy to build the brand into a worldwide franchise that now includes live-action movies, video games, publishing and even theme park rides.

“There are not a lot of brands like that in the world that have that strong emotional resonance across generations,” said John A. Frascotti, global chief marketing officer at Hasbro.

For older boys, Hasbro has extended the brand into mobile apps, video games and comic books. For adults, the company has licensed an annual Transformers convention called BotCon and organizes events at conventions like Comic-Con International in San Diego.

But the growth of the Transformers franchise has had its pitfalls, too. When there is not a Transformers movie rumbling through theaters, the toy line stumbles. Hasbro reported net income of $130.3 million for the fourth quarter of 2012, a 6.3 percent decline from the previous year. Sales in its boys business fell 23 percent in the quarter from the same period in 2011, the year the last Transformers movie came out.

Analysts say it is important for Hasbro to keep the Transformers brand fresh in non-movie years.

“Hasbro focuses on these big, home-run movies. When they don’t have one, they get punished for it,” said Jaime M. Katz, an analyst at Morningstar.

Investors expect sales in the boys category to decline this year as well, but to rebound in 2014 when the next Transformers movie is released, said Felicia R. Hendrix, a Barclays analyst. “The real problem around this is that their boys’ line seems to be very movie-driven,” Ms. Hendrix said, adding that Hasbro should try to make the brand more evergreen.

Toward that end, the company showed previews of two new Transformers toy lines, Beast Hunters and Construct-Bots, last month at the annual Toy Fair in New York. The Beast Hunters theme, which features robots that morph into predatory animals, will encompass several areas, including television, toys and licensing, while Construct-Bots will allow boys to build their own Transformers.

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Jury in Bell corruption trial may be deadlocked

A court spokeswoman said Thursday the jury in the Bell corruption case appears to be deadlocked.

“The jurors may be at an impasse,” said Patricia Kelly, a spokeswoman for L.A. County Superior Court.

Jurors sent a note to the judge Thursday morning, and all the attorneys in the case were called in.

Six former Bell City Council members are accused of stealing public money by paying themselves extraordinary salaries in one of Los Angeles County’s poorest cities.

Luis Artiga, Victor Bello, George Cole, Oscar Hernandez, Teresa Jacobo and George Mirabal are accused of misappropriation of public funds, felony counts that could bring prison terms.

They were arrested in September 2010 and have been free on bail.

The nearly $100,000 salaries drawn by most of the former elected officials are part of a much larger municipal corruption case in the southeast Los Angeles County city in which prosecutors allege that money from the city’s modest general fund flowed freely to top officials.

The three defendants who testified painted a picture of a city as a place led by a controlling, manipulative administrator who handed out enormous salaries, loaned city money and padded future pensions. Robert Rizzo, the former adminstrator, and ex-assistant city manager Angela Spaccia are also awaiting trial.

The four-week trial of the former council members turned on extremes.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Edward Miller said the council members were little more than common thieves who were consumed with fattening their paychecks at the expense of the city’s largely immigrant, working-poor residents.

Miller said the accused represented the “one-percenters" of Bell who had “apparently forgotten who they are and where they live."

Defense attorneys said the former city leaders -- one a pastor, another a mom-and-pop grocery store owner, another a funeral director -- were dedicated public servants who put in long hours and tirelessly responded to the needs of their constituents.

Jacobo testified that Rizzo informed her she could quit her job as a real estate agent and receive a full-time salary as a council member. She said she asked City Attorney Edward Lee if that was possible and he nodded his head.

"I thought I was doing a very good job to be able to earn that, yes," Jacobo said.

Cole said Rizzo was so intimidating that the former councilman voted for a 12% annual pay raise out of fear the city programs he established would be gutted by Rizzo in retaliation if he opposed the pay hikes.

The defense argued that the prosecution failed to prove criminal negligence -- that their clients knew what they were doing was wrong or that a reasonable person would know it was wrong.

The attorney for Hernandez, the city’s mayor at the time of the arrests, said his client had only a grade-school education, was known more for his heart than his intellect and was, perhaps, not overly “scholarly.”

Prosecutors argued that the council members pushed up their salaries by serving on city boards that rarely met and, in one case, existed only as a means for paying them even more money.

Jurors were also left to deal with the question of whether council members were protected by a City Charter that was approved in a special election that drew fewer than 400 voters.

Defense attorneys say the charter allowed council members to be paid for serving on the authorities.

But the prosecutor argued that the charter -- a quasi-constitution for a city -- set salaries at what councils in similar-sized cities were receiving under state law: $8,076 a year. Because council members automatically serve on boards and commissions, the district attorney said the total compensation for all of each council member's work was included in that figure.

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What Ousted Groupon CEO's <cite>Battletoads</cite> Reference Meant

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason is many things, and one of them is clearly a Nintendo kid from the 1980s. After his firing Thursday from the daily-deals company that he co-founded, he sent a jocular e-mail to his staff admitting that he had been fired, asking for recommendations for a “fat camp” so he could lose the “Groupon 40,” and most inscrutably (to some) comparing his dismissal to playing the videogame Battletoads:

I’m OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through.

This was, to put it lightly, an extremely specific metaphor. It probably has a lot of investors scratching their heads today. To those of us about Mason’s age who played the same videogames he did, it makes total sense.

You might infer, with no other context, that Battletoads must be a really hard videogame. It’s probably fair to say that for those of us whose primary gaming device was the Nintendo Entertainment System, Battletoads was the hard videogame. It was by Rare, the developer that seemed to squeeze more juice out of the aging 8-bit console than anyone, even Nintendo itself, could manage. (It got a license to develop software after it impressed Nintendo by reverse-engineering the device.) Battletoads was the pinnacle of its performance on the NES. It had absolutely gorgeous graphics. Every level had a totally different gameplay feel than the last, never feeling repetitive.

And it was one of the hardest damned games, to the point of absolute unfairness. Beating the first level wasn’t so bad, completing the second one took some practice, and good luck after that unless you had the patience of Job. You couldn’t play Battletoads levels once and scrape by with quick reflexes; you had to play them over and over again, memorizing the traps and enemies so that you could avoid them with pixel-perfect precision. Some players stuck it out; some (like me) gave up.

Mason clearly stuck it out, because the specific level he referenced, the Terra Tubes, comes quite late in the game. Aficionados consider it the difficile de la difficile of Battletoads levels. Watch the video above and see how the player begins to dodge the game’s traps before they even appear on the screen — the only way to get around them.

So there are really two specific things that Mason is implying with this reference:

1. To get to the Terra Tubes on one’s first try, having never played the game before, would be a Herculean, almost impossible, achievement. Therefore, getting this far with Groupon was in and of itself either a colossal feat of genius or a lucky miracle, depending on how charitably you want to interpret the metaphor.


2. Dying on the Terra Tubes, which are designed to make you die over and over, is no shameful thing.

Whether you agree with Groupon’s ousted CEO on these points or not is up to you, of course, but now you understand what he was saying.

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Cellar victim Kampusch raped, starved in film of ordeal

VIENNA (Reuters) – A new film based on the story of Austrian kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch shows her being repeatedly raped by the captor who beat and starved her during the eight-and-a-half years that he kept her in a cellar beneath his house.

Kampusch was snatched on her way to school at the age of 10 by Wolfgang Priklopil and held in a windowless cell under his garage near Vienna until she escaped in 2006, causing a sensation in Austria and abroad. Priklopil committed suicide.

Kampusch had always refused to respond to claims that she had had sex with Priklopil, but in a German television interview on her 25th birthday last week said she had decided to reveal the truth because it had leaked out from police files.

The film, “3,096 Days” – based on Kampusch’s autobiography of the same name – soberly portrays her captivity in a windowless cellar less than 6 square metres (65 square feet) in area, often deprived of food for days at a time.

The emaciated Kampusch – who weighed just 38 kg (84 pounds) at one point in 2004 – keeps a diary written on toilet paper concealed in a box.

One entry reads: “At least 60 blows in the face. Ten to 15 nausea-inducing fist blows to the head. One strike with the fist with full weight to my right ear.”

The movie shows occasional moments that approach tenderness, such as when Priklopil presents her with a cake for her 18th birthday or buys her a dress as a gift – but then immediately goes on to chide her for not knowing how to waltz with him.

GREY AREAS

Antonia Campbell-Hughes, who plays the teenaged Kampusch, said she had tried to portray “the strength of someone’s soul, the ability of people to survive… but also the grey areas within a relationship that people don’t necessarily understand.”

The British actress said she had not met Kampusch during the making of the film or since. “It was a very isolated time, it was a bubble of time, and I wanted to keep that very focused,” she told journalists as she arrived for the Vienna premiere.

Kampusch herself attended the premiere, looking composed as she posed for pictures but declining to give interviews.

In an interview with Germany’s Bild Zeitung last week, she said: “Yes, I did recognize myself, although the reality was even worse. But one can’t really show that in the cinema, since it wasn’t supposed to be a horror film.”

The movie, made at the Constantin Film studios in Bavaria, Germany, also stars Amy Pidgeon as the 10-year-old Kampusch and Danish actor Thure Lindhardt as Priklopil.

“I focused mainly on playing the human being because… we have to remember it was a human being. Monsters do not exist, they’re only in cartoons,” Lindhart said.

“It became clear to me that it’s a story about survival, and it’s a story about surviving eight years of hell. If that story can be told then I can also play the bad guy.”

The director was German-American Sherry Hormann, who made her English-language debut with the 2009 move “Desert Flower”, an adaptation of the autobiography of Somali-born model and anti-female circumcision activist Waris Dirie.

“I’m a mother and I wonder at the strength of this child, and it was important for me to tell this story from a different perspective, to tell how this child using her own strength could survive this atrocious martyrdom,” Hormann said.

The Kampusch case was followed two years later by that of Josef Fritzl, an Austrian who held his daughter captive in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her.

The crimes prompted soul-searching about the Austrian psyche, and questions as to how the authorities and neighbors could have let such crimes go undetected for so long.

The film goes on general release on Thursday.

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan, Editing by Paul Casciato)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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