QUESTION: Why are so many male movie stars kind of short, with big heads?
ANSWER: This is a Hollywood tradition. Ever since the silent film era, actors have had small bodies with large craniums. Gore Vidal, in "Hollywood," calls them "the little people, who were like dolls until properly lit and told to move about in that nine-foot-square area where the photoplay had its cramped limited life."Pat Sajak once said that he and Vanna White were picked by Merv Griffin to star in "Wheel of Fortune" in part because they both have large heads. Griffin's theory, apparently, is that big-headed people are always popular. (Think about it: You are instinctively drawn to big-headed people. They have presence. At some primal Darwinian level you want a bigger head.)
A better theory, though, is that the camera loves a head that fills up the frame. It looks normal to the audience. We once saw Don Johnson, the Miami Vice guy, in person, and our instant reaction was, this is a modest-sized man with a big head. Yet on TV his proportions look normal. The rule that the camera adds 15 pounds is too simple: It also redistributes body mass, increases height and improves looks all around.
And yes, a lot of stars are short. Casting director Mike Fenton told us that there is a profusion of male stars between 5 feet 7 and 5 feet 9 and one half. "I think Sylvester Stallone is about 5-8. Chuck Norris is 5-7," he said.
Paul Newman, Mel Gibson, Robert DeNiro, James Woods, Tom Cruise and Robert Redford are all shorter in real life than they appear to be on the screen. We've heard people insist that Redford is only about 5 feet 5, or even 5 feet 2. Redford once told Esquire magazine, "I'm 5 feet 10 and a half. I've been 5-10 for a long, long time. That's why I'm not (perturbed) about all the stories wondering how tall I am. If I were some midget who had to have ditches dug for the actresses playing opposite me, if I were 5 foot 2 or something, then I would be (perturbed)."
The truth is, movie stars are of normal height. For every Dustin Hoffman, there's a Gregory Peck. The average American male, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, is 5 feet 9 inches tall. So even if Redford is fudging by an inch or two, that would make him of about average height.THE MAILBAG:
A certain Mrs. Richards, a teacher at South Middle School in Belleville, Mich., sends us a conundrum and demands an explanation:
"A man climbed up on the roof, then he jumped off. Q: Where was he when he jumped? A: On the roof? No, he was on the roof before he jumped. A: In the air? No, he was in the air after he jumped."
This is not When Things Are, but we'll handle it anyway. This is, on the surface, just a semantics issue. Mrs. Richards is concerned that the word "jump" refers solely to the precise moment when the man loses contact with the roof. But a jump is a complex sequence of events that starts when he's on the roof (her first possible answer) and ends when he's in the air (the second possibility). Recommendation: Say "he jumped from the roof."
Lurking beneath this simple semantical problem is a paradox that has been around for a couple of millennia. Mrs. Richards is perhaps confused by the idea that an infinitely reduceable series of steps can add up to a finite result. This is the famous Zeno's Paradox. Zeno of Elea, a Greek philospher who lived 2,500 years ago, basically said that it ought to be impossible to even walk across the room, much less climb a ladder and jump off the roof. He gave as an example a race between Achilles and a tortoise.
He said, imagine that Achilles runs 10 times as fast as the tortoise. But the tortoise has a head start of 10 feet. The race begins. At some point Achilles will reach the 10-foot mark, but he won't have caught the tortoise, because it would have moved forward another foot. Without pause, Achilles keeps zooming forward, but when he reaches the 11-foot mark he still is trailing, because by that time the tortoise will have inched forward a bit. Zeno argues that Achilles, in fact, can never catch the tortoise, because there is always another little gradation, ever smaller and smaller, between the man and the creature.
The Greeks were so perplexed by this that they began to dread the concept of the infinite. Since then, mathematicians have calmed down and realized that when something gets infinitely small - in this case the distance between Achilles and the tortoise - it reaches zero. It may be true that, as Zeno said, there are infinite divisions within a finite distance, but the distance itself is still finite. That's why it's possible to walk to the other side of the room, notwithstanding the infinite gradations along the way.
Zeno's Paradox is thus a psychological problem, not a mathematical one. Psychologically, we find it hard to conceive that an infinite series of steps would have a finite result.
This just goes to show that if you think too hard, you'll get nowhere in life.