Now that the Oscar nominations are out, it may interest Jack Nicholson to learn that some in the industry give him an excellent chance of winning another best actor award.
That’s the actuary industry, not the entertainment industry.
Who better to calculate Nicholson’s prospects? They may be number-crunching nudniks as he so superbly portrayed one in “About Schmidt,” but their job is to project the future based on the past.
“I’d put his chances at about 50 percent,” said Charlie Larimer, a Chicago actuary. “But that’s only looking at the trends of the last few years, and I’m operating here without all the data you’d need. Doing a nude scene with Kathy Bates in a hot tub might drop it a few points, though.”
No matter how Nicholson fares when the envelopes are opened next month in Los Angeles, “About Schmidt” was — and remains — off the charts among actuaries, most of whom, if asked, seem ready to give the film four stars even if it didn’t get nominated for best picture. At the very least, they’re having a lot of fun with it.
Mocked in “Dilbert” cartoons and the butt of jokes elsewhere, the Society of Actuaries responded to its math-obsessed image in the movie with a press release labeling their onscreen image as 97.28892 percent incorrect.
Naturally, actuaries being actuaries, the analysis didn’t stop there. A spokesman for the 17,000-member society said “About Schmidt’s” depiction of actuaries as singularly focused on numbers was 94.00632 percent incorrect. Furthermore, it was 98.34343 percent wrong that they are socially disconnected.
Oh, and about that bad comb-over sported by Nicholson? Well not to split hairs, said the SOA, but this was simply 99.67893 percent erroneous — give or take a millionth of a point or two.
Who says actuaries can’t enjoy themselves? When your basic job description is computing insurance and pension rates based on data such as death and sickness statistics, you take kicks where you find them.
“We continue to get bombarded with telephone calls,” said Bill Breedlove, a spokesman for the Schaumburg-based SOA. “Let’s face it. Actuaries as a main character in a Hollywood production are few and far between. No one ever expected to see Jack Nicholson playing one.”
Those attending the society’s general convention last fall got a hint of things to come when an “About Schmidt” preview clip was shown during a general assembly. Even if they weren’t sure what to make of it then, it can be reported now that few in this detail-oriented audience missed the authenticity of the American Academy of Actuaries and Society of Actuaries diplomas hanging on Nicholson’s wall.
“Then the big excitement for everyone came when they panned the books on his shelf, and one of them was the Directory of the Society of Actuaries,” said Larimer, a fledgling screenwriter himself. “You could hear an `oooooohhh’ go through the room. For some of us, it was like we were actually in the movie.”
In addition to the tongue-in-cheek SOA release, a Web site discussion forum for actuaries has materialized in response to “About Schmidt.” One entry noted the movie’s R rating meant 40 percent more people were likely to go than if it had been PG. Another noted “Financial Economics, GAAP, and Atkinson and Dallas” textbooks on Nicholson’s shelf and said: “No wonder this guy is sad.”
Mitch Serota, who has his own actuary firm in Skokie, says that the necessary skills in the profession — calculating specific risk, statistics, percentages, probabilities, life expectancy — are employed in numerous movie characterizations, including actor Edward Norton in “Fight Club.”
“In that film, he was doing actuarial work when he was calculating the value of a car crash with the cost of potential lawsuits versus the cost of repair and defects,” Serota said. “That is a risk analysis. That was an actuarial function.”
However, Nicholson’s turn in “About Schmidt” was the first time Serota — or anyone else — could remember a film’s star specifically playing an actuary. “The buzz among us is how nice that at least someone finally discovered who we are,” he said. “Then I saw a CNN review talking about him [Schmidt] being an insurance salesman. That misses the point entirely!”
Schmidt’s image — play-it-safe, dull, methodical, cheap, narrow-focused — is just as applicable to other professions, said actuary Thomas R. Herget, an executive vice president for PolySystems Inc. in Chicago. He’s not taking the actor’s characterization personally, however.
“I thought it was an excellent movie, but it didn’t, as far as I was concerned, have that much to do with actuaries,” Herget said. “I never thought of Nicholson playing one, though. He always seems to play grimmer roles. I don’t think of us as grim. Maybe some of our work can be a little tedious, but not all of it.”
“When I read `Dilbert,’ I feel we’re being stereotyped, but I do think we have exciting elements to our jobs,” he added. “We have to deal with the unknown and constantly update our estimates and revise what happened. We have to have both scientific skills as well as good English skills.”
No shortage of creativity
Gary Lange, an actuary in the Chicago office of Munich American Reassurance Co., can concur that there is also no shortage of attempts at creativity within the profession. He organizes the society’s annual Actuarial Speculative Fiction contest. The rules are simple: The story line must revolve around an actuarial topic, an author must have passed at least one actuarial exam and entries should not exceed 6,000 words.
“If you have to count, you probably are using too many,” he warned contributors.
Lange said the subject of life expectancy is especially popular among entries. “I remember one story had dead people returning to Earth as aliens, which, when you think about it, has all sots of implications in our industry,” he said.
While the stories Lange sees may not make dents in the literary world, Denise Tiller, an actuary living in Kansas, did get a mystery novel published — “Calculated Risk” — in which the crime-solver is Liz Matthews, actuary. “She uses her black belt in mathematics to solve a murder,” said Tiller, who hopes to work her character into a series of books.
Actuaries are natural detectives, she said.
Actually, there are more
Tiller’s book is not the only one on the market with an actuary as a protagonist. There’s also “The Policy,” published two years earlier. In this book, the crime-solver is a student actuary — Alex Tynan — working for a Providence, R.I., insurance firm.
Sadly, this effort fell short as far as a reviewer in a trade publication was concerned.
“I was disappointed that Alex’s sleuthing didn’t capitalize on her actuarial strengths — getting a dry pile of numbers to unlock secrets,” wrote James P. Lynch, of QBE Reinsurance in New York writing for Casualty Actuarial Society newsletter. “As it is, Alex could’ve been an underwriter, claims handler, or clerk.”
“About Schmidt” thus remains the biggest splash in the pop culture pool for actuaries, and maybe the ripples will grow into an Oscar triumph. Based on the past, Larimer noted, there may be a favorable future — look what happened with “A Beautiful Mind,” which reaped several Oscars last year.
“Apparently, the Oscar voters have nothing against voting for misguided mathematicians, whose families have a hard time understanding them,” he said. “That’s not a bad thing.”
