“And pity the poor actors [in Poseidon] who suffered from vertigo as they had to navigate their way across a narrow plank high above the ground with flames licking their heels. ‘It was not for the faint of heart,’ [a production associate] says. Instead of having nets below, the actors were attached from above to safety cables, which won’t be visible on film.” — from Robert Welkos‘s L.A. Times piece (5.7) on the making of Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon , which opens Friday (5.12). “Pity the poor actors”? It’s apparently time once again to repeat something that Werner Herzog has been saying for a long time, which is that nobody out there pities the poor actors or anyone else who has worked on a big-studio film because nobody believes in the reality of anything they’re seeing on-screen these days, least of all eye-popping effects in big-budget films. Alongside William Goldman‘s famous “nobody knows anything” line, there should be another line about big-scale visual effects: “Nobody believes anything.”