Born November 10, 12: Roland Emmerich, Roland Barthes

Nothing says "a Roland Emmerich film" like the two words "global smash." The auteur of the apocalypse has been so phenomenally successful worldwide at destroying the Earth in Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow, by the time he made 2012, he negotiated for one-fourth of the gross. Twenty-five percent of the total box office is $192 million. Overall, his movies have grossed $3.2 billion. The 57 year-old was born in Stuttgart and, with his sister Ute, runs Centropolis Entertainment, also responsible for Stargate, The Patriot, and 10,000 BC. Emmerich says he has witnessed plenty of racism in Hollywood (the studio did NOT want to cast Will Smith in ID; nor did they want an interracial couple in TDAT) but no homophobia. His historical drama Anonymous, arguing that Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare's work, was roundly panned yet earned an Oscar nom for best costume design. An early Hillary Clinton supporter, Emmerich is a big donor to LGBT and anti-global warming causes. If you think his movies are an assault on the senses, wait till you see his 1830 townhouse in Knightsbridge. Yes, that's a life-size wax replica of the pope reading his own obituary. And, yup, Princess Di is flipping you her middle finger. Embracing controversy, next year on Pride weekend he'll release an action movie, White House Down, in which Channing Tatum saves a black president (Jamie Foxx) from a white paramilitary coup.

Who, in the mid-1950s, but a closeted, chain-smoking, French homosexual intellectual who lived with his mother could look at the Abbé Pierre’s haircut and spark an essay on how personality-driven charity prevented people from seeing the root causes of poverty? Roland Barthes was among the first to bridge high and low culture, showing that absolutely anything anywhere could become a text for him to parse. In his canonical book Mythologies he closely “read” the nuances of topics as varied as wrestling, Einstein, the new Citroën, photography, toys, movies, wine vs. milk, soap vs. detergent, literature, and Garbo’s face. Because he saw so much in everyday objects, French companies tried to hire him to predict consumers’ reactions, work he flirted with then avoided. Among his eighteen books, the most praised are S/Z, his intricate study of Sarrasine by Balzac; Camera Lucida, a study of photography launched by the significance of a single photo of his beloved mother; and his essay “The Death of the Author,” about the irrelevance of writers to their work. After leaving a luncheon given by François Mitterrand in February 1980, Barthes was struck by a laundry truck and died one month later, age 64. Published posthumously, Incidents ruefully describes his amorous (mis)adventures with men throughout Europe and Morocco. His Mourning Diary was published in 2010.

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