Welcome to the first installment of The Micro Five. As I explained yesterday, the goal of The Micro Five is to restore purpose to the exercise of movie list-making by concentrating on, well, concentration. The rules: each list will be limited to five entries that direct follow from the established micro-topic. At the end of this list, I will tag five bloggers and/or Spout-ees who are invited to create their own list on the same topic. If I don’t tag you but you’d still like to participate, post your response on your own blog (if you don’t have one, you can start one for free at Spout) and paste a link to your entry in the comments on this post. At the end of the week, I’ll revisit this post to compile their responses.

So, here we go: Five Improbable Werner Herzog Anecdotes. This topic was inspired by Patrick Goldstein’s awesome Herzog profile in this weekend’s LA Times. As Goldstein writes,

For Herzog, the borderline between fiction and reality is hazy at best. Facts, he says, are for accountants. He often tells stories that seem as hyperbolic as anything in his movies, beginning with the tale that his childhood was spent in a Bavarian village so remote that he didn’t see a banana until he was 12.

What follows are my picks for the five best hyperbolic Herzog stories. I completely avoided the Kinski years, as well as anything resulting from Werner’s collaborations with Harmony Korine, in order to give everybody else something to work with. In no particular order:

1) Werner Herzog Loves L.A.

Several scenes of Zak Penn’s Herzog meta-joke Incident at Loch Ness take place in what is allegedly Werner Herzog’s Hollywood Hills home. It all seems suspiciously … beige. In the LA Times piece, Goldstein describes how Herzog settled into his comfortably banal, upper-middle-class lifestyle:

After years of traveling, [Herzog] and his wife, Lena