This is the most successful local newspaper, ever

On television you have heard, “The most successful movie of all time!� So, you’re thinking “Avatar� or “Lord of the Rings, “right? Wrong. Well, how about “Titanic�? Not even close.

It all depends on what you mean by “most.� People play with numbers to sensationalize their story, to make you sit up and listen. To make you believe that what they are saying is really important and that, in the hyperbole, you will find something of worth (or believe what they say is true).

“Avatar� was the most expensive movie budget of all time, right? Well, that’s not even close. It all depends on how you measure, how you count and what you count with as a measuring stick (then and now).

In 1939 the budget for making “Gone With The Wind� was a little over $4,000,000. Yes, just $4 million. However, what you may not be taking into account is that the price of a private house on Park Avenue in Manhattan around 67th Street was about $5,000 in 1939. That same house now costs a little north of $165,000,000.

Using that ratio, the cost of making “Gone With The Wind� in today’s dollars would be $132 billion, with a “b.� It all makes sense really. In 1939, nearing the end of the Depression, people were making 50 cents to $1.25 a day as extras (and there were thousands of extras in that movie). Today the same person would make $75 a day. I think you can see where this conversation is going.

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Now, how about success for the all-time greatest movie? Depends on what you want to measure. If you measure money (so-called box office), then you get one set of winners. If you measure bums on seats, you get another winner. If you measure eyeballs (people who have seen it in any form), you get a third winner.

Look, when movie tickets cost a nickel in 1922 to 1925, Charlie Chaplin had more bums on seats than anyone before or after, period, no contest. When “Gone With the Wind� first played in theaters, it sold more tickets than any movie before or since, period.

Want to measure eyeballs? There it gets tricky. Because “Gone With the Wind� has played on TV more times than any other classic except for “Miracle on 34th Street,� it could be that “Miracle� has actually been seen by more people. For example, for just one showing in 1983 there were 22 percent of all TV sets in America tuned into this Christmas perennial, that’s upward of 35,000,000 pairs of eyeballs for just one airing. All this begins to make “Titanic� look like a rowboat.

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And you may think that the national deficit is the largest it has ever been or that the stimulus money was the largest the government has ever spent (or invested, depending on your viewpoint). You would be mathematically wrong, horribly wrong.

Using that example of property in Manhattan again, the national debt FDR inherited was $22.5 billion with even the most optimistic expecting it to increase by $4 billion a year until the Depression was over. In today’s money that would be — hold on to your hat — a deficit of about $742,000 billion (or $742 trillion). Makes our paltry $13 trillion-plus look like chicken feed.

Not only that, when FDR  took over  two years after the Depression got rolling under Hoover (much like Obama taking over after Bush), unemployment had already reached 22 percent as he took the oath of office and looked like it wasn’t about to decline anytime soon.

His much-hated and much-criticized programs to rescue the country’s economy were much more controversial then than Obama’s are now, and perhaps if it were not for World War II, we might never have stopped complaining and actually pulled ourselves clear.

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So, are things as great, biggest, most expensive, highest and other media-hyped words as we are lead to believe? No, in comparison they are not. Life is like Major League Baseball. If you use the same bats and balls you always have a standard to compare to, one that means something. Today’s “biggest box office� movie, or “highest rated TV show,� or “biggest deficit in history� are all, in fact, baloney, numbers on steroids. A cheat.

The question you should always ask yourself is this: Compared to what? If that house, book, day of labor, movie ticket or cost of a month’s food is compared dollar for dollar to past times, you may find things are not as bad as the media tells us, that star may not be as popular as Hollywood would like us to think, and that the stimulus spending is less than 20 percent of what FDR spent.

When you know the real value of these exaggerated figures that we are all force-fed every day, you may make better decisions on the very real fortunes of the real world we actually live in. And if you know better than the media and politicians screaming at you, you may better be able to navigate your ship out of troubled waters.

Oh, and why is this the most successful local newspaper ever? The turnover in dollars for today’s edition is far greater than the same coverage newspaper 10, 20, 30, 40 or even 50 years ago. In today’s inflated dollars, of course.

Peter Riva, formerlly of Amenia Union, lives in New Mexico.