Not much, really, but now that the miners are leaving the hospital and settling in to their new lives in which they’re surrounded by lawyers and agents and reporters and teevee cameras, it’s a good time to check out Billy Wilder’s excellent (and in many ways forgotten) film, Ace In the Hole, sometimes referred to as The Big Carnival.

The IMDB page for the movie describes the plot like so: A frustrated former big-city journalist now stuck working for an Albuquerque newspaper exploits a story about a man trapped in a cave to re-jump start his career, but the situation quickly escalates into an out-of-control circus. There’s a longer synopsis over on the Turner Classic Movies site; unfortunately, they don’t have the film scheduled for broadcast anytime soon. They’d do well to rush it onto their schedule, pronto.

As IMDB points out: Actor Victor Desny brought a lawsuit against this film while the script was being written. He claimed the film was an unauthorized version of the Floyd Collins story. Collins was actually stuck in a cave years earlier, as mentioned in the film. Since Desny owned the rights to the Collins story, he claimed copyright infringement. Desny prevailed, although Wilder appealed. The California Supreme Court ruled in Desny’s favor.

If you still need convincing for adding this to your Netflix queue, check out Roger Ebert’s excellent review in which he notes: “The film’s harsh portrait of an American media circus appalled the critics and repelled the public; it failed on first release, and after it won European festivals and was retitled ‘The Big Carnival,’ it failed again.”

Of course, it’s hard to imagine any combination of mine accident and media circus, right? Or that there would be any level of cynicism involved in the event. After all, that only happens in the movies.

“You gotta love livin’, baby, ’cause dyin’ is a pain in the ass.”
—Frank Sinatra

That’s a pretty interesting chart up there, having to do with how organizations view social media when it comes time to slice up the marketing budget pie. Check out the article — and a more readable version of the graphic — over on Marketing Sherpa.

Over on ClickZ, Erik Qualman answers a quartet of common social media questions. There’s a lot of wisdom in this brief article, and I really like this bit:

It’s also important to note that social media requires more of a cultural change in companies than a strategic change.

Bingo. Companies, particularly large companies, are all about command and control. In the world of social media, however, you can’t control what people are saying about you, and being exposed to sometimes negative comments from people who are looking for real answers can amount to significant psychological sticker shock.

Takeaway for marketers: You can’t control what people are saying about you … but you can control whether or not you get involved in the conversation.

Full disclosure: I have absolutely no skin in the game on this one. No one sent me a free copy of the book, I don’t know Daniel Suarez and … well, you get the idea.

With that out of the way, I have to recommend Daemon as one of the best page-turners I’ve encountered in a long, long time … with one huge caveat: If you don’t know your MMORPG from your MS-DOS or your WAN from your LAN, then you should probably think twice about digging in.

But if the idea of a young Tom Clancy with techno-geek tendencies replacing the military-spook stuff sounds intriguing, then don’t miss this one. I’m not going to give anything away, except to say the premise is incredibly intriguing, Suarez gets his tech absolutely right (or if he’s blowing it anywhere I haven’t noticed) and Daemon is going to make one hell of an action thriller in a coupla years.

Thanks to “Podfather” Adam Curry for plugging Daemon several times on No Agenda — just one more reason to listen in on Crackpot and Buzzkill in the morning.