MINE SHAFT.(Hollywood portrayal of nine rescued Quecreek miners)(Brief Article)

In a season of dolor--when the news is mostly of economic ruin, climatic foreboding, the abduction of children, and, of course, terrorism, war, and rumors of war--the rescue of the Quecreek Nine was an interlude of gladness. Nine coal miners trapped deep beneath a cow pasture in southwestern Pennsylvania, the equivalent of twenty-four stories straight down; the miners scratching and crawling their way through pitch-black, four-foot-high tunnels fast filling with icy floodwater to find one another and a pocket of stale air; the rescue team aboveground, improvising a plan to pump in compressed air to push the water back, snapping a drill bit, almost losing hope; the miners, preparing for imminent death, sealing notes to their loved ones in a watertight bucket; time and air running out; and then, finally, as midnight approached on the fourth night, a breakthrough, joy and weeping, the miners lifted out one by one, all nine of them, haggard but whole.

It's a fine, uplifting story, full of terror and suspense, grit and determination--a story that shows, as did the story of September 11th and its aftermath, that a working-class hero is something to be. And this story has what that one did not: a happy ending. So Hollywood said: We're there. A week after the rescue, the nine miners, plus one of the lead rescuers, inked a Tinseltown pact, as Variety might put it. Or, as Variety actually did put it: "The Walt Disney Co. has locked up a nearly $1.5 million deal for the exclusive book and TV movie rights to the personal stories of the nine Pennsylvania miners. . . . Mouse web ABC will produce a two-hour telepic about the rescue operation, while Disney publishing unit Hyperion is expected to release a book about their ordeal." That's a hundred and fifty grand per miner, before taxes and lawyers' fees--which is either a lot or a little, depending on what you compare it with.

If you compare it with what the miners (who, among them, had more than two hundred man-years on the job) were making before, it's a lot. Their yearly wages, which are about forty per cent higher than the county average, come to around forty thousand dollars each, counting overtime. So the Disney deal will yield them upward of three years' pay. On the other hand, if you compare it with what their employers get, it's a little. As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, the Quecreek mine, "although portrayed during the rescue efforts as a tiny operation, is closely linked to a web of companies controlled by the venture-capital arm of Citigroup Inc." In 2001, Sanford Weill, the chairman of Citigroup, collected eighteen million dollars in salary and bonuses, which means it took him around five hours to rack up what one of those miners made all year. What about the miners' new boss? According to the calculations of Forbes magazine, Michael Eisner, the C.E.O. of Disney, received seven hundred and twenty-three million dollars in salary, bonuses, and stock options from 1996 to 2001, a yearly average of roughly a hundred and forty-five million. That could pay the yearly wages of more than three thousand coal miners (and, thanks to mechanization, there are only seventy thousand in the whole country). To be fair, on an hourly basis Disney paid Eisner only thirty-five times what it's paying the miners for each of the seventy-seven hours they were ...