We love to hate Richard, that is. But as it becomes clear that he will take home the million dollars, I scramble to justify why he should win the money after all. He is, I begin, the smartest, or at least the best at a Machiavellian maneouvering among people who are less observant than him. And those awful things I said about him last week, well, they were out of my grudging sense of respect. And Survivor gets under my skin, in part, because it feels so present-tense, so real.
Cost is the immediate reason.
Even gorging on the highest quality and costliest, Beta video, the budget is a fraction of what it would take to shoot an equivalent amount on film. Video is easier, too. I can feed images directly from a digital video camera into my computer and edit them there. I can fit hundreds of hours of raw footage in a backpack, as tapes or as disks. I could not move the equivalent amount of film without the aid of heavy machinery.