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NOTES FROM A HACK: Unorganized, Semi-Coherent Thoughts About DRIVE

I read the script for DRIVE a little while back and loved it, thought it was one of the best reads of the year, had high hopes indeed for the movie, hopes that weren't quite met in the theater but, still, all in all I thought they did a pretty good job considering the extremely limited budget they were obviously saddled with ($10M)... But then, looking back on it, each time I mentally review the movie in my head, I'm finding it gets just a little bit worse, and I'm actually starting to wonder, now, if I didn't give it more credit than it deserves, simply because everything else this year has been so very, very bad...

So to hop on the ever-growing "DRIVE Really Didn't Work For Me--And on a Number of Different Levels" Internet Bandwagon, check out the following ("Unorganized"! "Semi-coherent"!!) review of DRIVE from NOTES FROM A HACK--

I get movies that are slow. Movies without a lot of talking. That's fine. But this was beyond that. This was uncomfortable and not representative of real life. There are long stretches where he is asked a question and just stares without saying a word. That doesn't happen. People don't do that. And people that do do that, are fucking weirdos who don't get Carey Mulligan.

She says "you want some water", and he stares at her for a good minute and a half, and then says "uh, sure".

Love!

He's in love now! She's in love now! That's all it took. They have no connection other than physical, I guess. And even that is questionable. Do they have anything in common? Nope. What do they talk about? Well, water and how refreshing it is. Not even that, just the offer of water and the acceptance of it.

Oh, but one time, she touched his hand.

Love!

Yeah, I find I've really gotta agree with The Hack on this one--watching the interaction between Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan, I was thinking the exact same thing: "A glass of water--and they're in love? Really?"

(Or maybe Gosling just ordered that pheremone cologne off the Internet... Hmm...)

>> To read the full review at NOTES FROM A HACK click here

"You see, the film studio of today is really the palace of the sixteenth century..."

A wonderful quote I was just sent from my dear friend Nesya Blue--

You see, the film studio of today is really the palace of the sixteenth century. There one sees what Shakespeare saw: the absolute power of the tyrant, the courtiers, the flatterers, the jesters, the cunningly ambitious intriguers. There are fantastically beautiful women, there are incompetent favorites. There are great men who are suddenly disgraced. There is the most insane extravagance, and unexpected parsimony over a few pence. There is enormous splendor, which is a sham; and also horrible squalor hidden behind the scenery. There are vast schemes, abandoned because of some caprice. There are secrets which everybody knows and no one speaks of. There are even two or three honest advisors. These are the court fools, who speak the deepest wisdom in puns, lest they should be taken seriously. They grimace, and tear their hair privately, and weep.

-- Christopher Isherwood, Prater Violet, 1945

NY Times: Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?

Three men doing time in Israeli prisons recently appeared before a parole board consisting of a judge, a criminologist and a social worker. The three prisoners had completed at least two-thirds of their sentences, but the parole board granted freedom to only one of them. Guess which one:

Case 1 (heard at 8:50 a.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

Case 2 (heard at 3:10 p.m.): A Jewish Israeli serving a 16-month sentence for assault.

Case 3 (heard at 4:25 p.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

There was a pattern to the parole board’s decisions, but it wasn’t related to the men’s ethnic backgrounds, crimes or sentences. It was all about timing, as researchers discovered by analyzing more than 1,100 decisions over the course of a year. Judges, who would hear the prisoners’ appeals and then get advice from the other members of the board, approved parole in about a third of the cases, but the probability of being paroled fluctuated wildly throughout the day. Prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70 percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 percent of the time.

The odds favored the prisoner who appeared at 8:50 a.m. — and he did in fact receive parole. But even though the other Arab Israeli prisoner was serving the same sentence for the same crime — fraud — the odds were against him when he appeared (on a different day) at 4:25 in the afternoon. He was denied parole, as was the Jewish Israeli prisoner at 3:10 p.m, whose sentence was shorter than that of the man who was released. They were just asking for parole at the wrong time of day.

There was nothing malicious or even unusual about the judges’ behavior, which was reported earlier this year by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University. The judges’ erratic judgment was due to the occupational hazard of being, as George W. Bush once put it, “the decider.” The mental work of ruling on case after case, whatever the individual merits, wore them down. This sort of decision fatigue can make quarterbacks prone to dubious choices late in the game and C.F.O.’s prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening. It routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and nonexecutive, rich and poor — in fact, it can take a special toll on the poor. Yet few people are even aware of it, and researchers are only beginning to understand why it happens and how to counteract it.

Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain. You start to resist any change, any potentially risky move — like releasing a prisoner who might commit a crime. So the fatigued judge on a parole board takes the easy way out, and the prisoner keeps doing time.

Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in homage to a Freudian hypothesis. Freud speculated that the self, or ego, depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy. He was vague about the details, though, and quite wrong about some of them (like his idea that artists “sublimate” sexual energy into their work, which would imply that adultery should be especially rare at artists’ colonies). Freud’s energy model of the self was generally ignored until the end of the century, when Baumeister began studying mental discipline in a series of experiments, first at Case Western and then at Florida State University.

These experiments demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to scarf down M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterward they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, like working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation. To study the process of ego depletion, researchers concentrated initially on acts involving self-control ­— the kind of self-discipline popularly associated with willpower, like resisting a bowl of ice cream. They weren’t concerned with routine decision-making, like choosing between chocolate and vanilla, a mental process that they assumed was quite distinct and much less strenuous. Intuitively, the chocolate-vanilla choice didn’t appear to require willpower.

But then a postdoctoral fellow, Jean Twenge, started working at Baumeister’s laboratory right after planning her wedding. As Twenge studied the results of the lab’s ego-depletion experiments, she remembered how exhausted she felt the evening she and her fiancé went through the ritual of registering for gifts. Did they want plain white china or something with a pattern? Which brand of knives? How many towels? What kind of sheets? Precisely how many threads per square inch?

“By the end, you could have talked me into anything,” Twenge told her new colleagues. The symptoms sounded familiar to them too, and gave them an idea. A nearby department store was holding a going-out-of-business sale, so researchers from the lab went off to fill their car trunks with simple products — not exactly wedding-quality gifts, but sufficiently appealing to interest college students. When they came to the lab, the students were told they would get to keep one item at the end of the experiment, but first they had to make a series of choices. Would they prefer a pen or a candle? A vanilla-scented candle or an almond-scented one? A candle or a T-shirt? A black T-shirt or a red T-shirt? A control group, meanwhile — let’s call them the nondeciders — spent an equally long period contemplating all these same products without having to make any choices. They were asked just to give their opinion of each product and report how often they had used such a product in the last six months.

Afterward, all the participants were given one of the classic tests of self-control: holding your hand in ice water for as long as you can. The impulse is to pull your hand out, so self-discipline is needed to keep the hand underwater. The deciders gave up much faster; they lasted 28 seconds, less than half the 67-second average of the nondeciders. Making all those choices had apparently sapped their willpower, and it wasn’t an isolated effect. It was confirmed in other experiments testing students after they went through exercises like choosing courses from the college catalog.

For a real-world test of their theory, the lab’s researchers went into that great modern arena of decision making: the suburban mall. They interviewed shoppers about their experiences in the stores that day and then asked them to solve some simple arithmetic problems. The researchers politely asked them to do as many as possible but said they could quit at any time. Sure enough, the shoppers who had already made the most decisions in the stores gave up the quickest on the math problems. When you shop till you drop, your willpower drops, too.

Any decision, whether it’s what pants to buy or whether to start a war, can be broken down into what psychologists call the Rubicon model of action phases, in honor of the river that separated Italy from the Roman province of Gaul. When Caesar reached it in 49 B.C., on his way home after conquering the Gauls, he knew that a general returning to Rome was forbidden to take his legions across the river with him, lest it be considered an invasion of Rome. Waiting on the Gaul side of the river, he was in the “predecisional phase” as he contemplated the risks and benefits of starting a civil war. Then he stopped calculating and crossed the Rubicon, reaching the “postdecisional phase,” which Caesar defined much more felicitously: “The die is cast.”

The whole process could deplete anyone’s willpower, but which phase of the decision-making process was most fatiguing? To find out, Kathleen Vohs, a former colleague of Baumeister’s now at the University of Minnesota, performed an experiment using the self-service Web site of Dell Computers. One group in the experiment carefully studied the advantages and disadvantages of various features available for a computer — the type of screen, the size of the hard drive, etc. — without actually making a final decision on which ones to choose. A second group was given a list of predetermined specifications and told to configure a computer by going through the laborious, step-by-step process of locating the specified features among the arrays of options and then clicking on the right ones. The purpose of this was to duplicate everything that happens in the postdecisional phase, when the choice is implemented. The third group had to figure out for themselves which features they wanted on their computers and go through the process of choosing them; they didn’t simply ponder options (like the first group) or implement others’ choices (like the second group). They had to cast the die, and that turned out to be the most fatiguing task of all. When self-control was measured, they were the one who were most depleted, by far.

The experiment showed that crossing the Rubicon is more tiring than anything that happens on either bank — more mentally fatiguing than sitting on the Gaul side contemplating your options or marching on Rome once you’ve crossed. As a result, someone without Caesar’s willpower is liable to stay put. To a fatigued judge, denying parole seems like the easier call not only because it preserves the status quo and eliminates the risk of a parolee going on a crime spree but also because it leaves more options open: the judge retains the option of paroling the prisoner at a future date without sacrificing the option of keeping him securely in prison right now. Part of the resistance against making decisions comes from our fear of giving up options. The word “decide” shares an etymological root with “homicide,” the Latin word “caedere,” meaning “to cut down” or “to kill,” and that loss looms especially large when decision fatigue sets in.

Once you’re mentally depleted, you become reluctant to make trade-offs, which involve a particularly advanced and taxing form of decision making. In the rest of the animal kingdom, there aren’t a lot of protracted negotiations between predators and prey. To compromise is a complex human ability and therefore one of the first to decline when willpower is depleted. You become what researchers call a cognitive miser, hoarding your energy. If you’re shopping, you’re liable to look at only one dimension, like price: just give me the cheapest. Or you indulge yourself by looking at quality: I want the very best (an especially easy strategy if someone else is paying). Decision fatigue leaves you vulnerable to marketers who know how to time their sales, as Jonathan Levav, the Stanford professor, demonstrated in experiments involving tailored suits and new cars.

The idea for these experiments also happened to come in the preparations for a wedding, a ritual that seems to be the decision-fatigue equivalent of Hell Week. At his fiancée’s suggestion, Levav visited a tailor to have a bespoke suit made and began going through the choices of fabric, type of lining and style of buttons, lapels, cuffs and so forth.

“By the time I got through the third pile of fabric swatches, I wanted to kill myself,” Levav recalls. “I couldn’t tell the choices apart anymore. After a while my only response to the tailor became ‘What do you recommend?’ I just couldn’t take it.”

Levav ended up not buying any kind of bespoke suit (the $2,000 price made that decision easy enough), but he put the experience to use in a pair of experiments conducted with Mark Heitmann, then at Christian-Albrechts University in Germany; Andreas Herrmann, at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland; and Sheena Iyengar, of Columbia. One involved asking M.B.A. students in Switzerland to choose a bespoke suit; the other was conducted at German car dealerships, where customers ordered options for their new sedans. The car buyers — and these were real customers spending their own money — had to choose, for instance, among 4 styles of gearshift knobs, 13 kinds of wheel rims, 25 configurations of the engine and gearbox and a palette of 56 colors for the interior.

As they started picking features, customers would carefully weigh the choices, but as decision fatigue set in, they would start settling for whatever the default option was. And the more tough choices they encountered early in the process — like going through those 56 colors to choose the precise shade of gray or brown — the quicker people became fatigued and settled for the path of least resistance by taking the default option. By manipulating the order of the car buyers’ choices, the researchers found that the customers would end up settling for different kinds of options, and the average difference totaled more than 1,500 euros per car (about $2,000 at the time). Whether the customers paid a little extra for fancy wheel rims or a lot extra for a more powerful engine depended on when the choice was offered and how much willpower was left in the customer.

Similar results were found in the experiment with custom-made suits: once decision fatigue set in, people tended to settle for the recommended option. When they were confronted early on with the toughest decisions — the ones with the most options, like the 100 fabrics for the suit — they became fatigued more quickly and also reported enjoying the shopping experience less.

Shopping can be especially tiring for the poor, who have to struggle continually with trade-offs. Most of us in America won’t spend a lot of time agonizing over whether we can afford to buy soap, but it can be a depleting choice in rural India. Dean Spears, an economist at Princeton, offered people in 20 villages in Rajasthan in northwestern India the chance to buy a couple of bars of brand-name soap for the equivalent of less than 20 cents. It was a steep discount off the regular price, yet even that sum was a strain for the people in the 10 poorest villages. Whether or not they bought the soap, the act of making the decision left them with less willpower, as measured afterward in a test of how long they could squeeze a hand grip. In the slightly more affluent villages, people’s willpower wasn’t affected significantly. Because they had more money, they didn’t have to spend as much effort weighing the merits of the soap versus, say, food or medicine.

Spears and other researchers argue that this sort of decision fatigue is a major — and hitherto ignored — factor in trapping people in poverty. Because their financial situation forces them to make so many trade-offs, they have less willpower to devote to school, work and other activities that might get them into the middle class. It’s hard to know exactly how important this factor is, but there’s no doubt that willpower is a special problem for poor people. Study after study has shown that low self-control correlates with low income as well as with a host of other problems, including poor achievement in school, divorce, crime, alcoholism and poor health. Lapses in self-control have led to the notion of the “undeserving poor” — epitomized by the image of the welfare mom using food stamps to buy junk food — but Spears urges sympathy for someone who makes decisions all day on a tight budget. In one study, he found that when the poor and the rich go shopping, the poor are much more likely to eat during the shopping trip. This might seem like confirmation of their weak character — after all, they could presumably save money and improve their nutrition by eating meals at home instead of buying ready-to-eat snacks like Cinnabons, which contribute to the higher rate of obesity among the poor. But if a trip to the supermarket induces more decision fatigue in the poor than in the rich — because each purchase requires more mental trade-offs — by the time they reach the cash register, they’ll have less willpower left to resist the Mars bars and Skittles. Not for nothing are these items called impulse purchases.

And this isn’t the only reason that sweet snacks are featured prominently at the cash register, just when shoppers are depleted after all their decisions in the aisles. With their willpower reduced, they’re more likely to yield to any kind of temptation, but they’re especially vulnerable to candy and soda and anything else offering a quick hit of sugar. While supermarkets figured this out a long time ago, only recently did researchers discover why.

The discovery was an accident resulting from a failed experiment at Baumeister’s lab. The researchers set out to test something called the Mardi Gras theory — the notion that you could build up willpower by first indulging yourself in pleasure, the way Mardi Gras feasters do just before the rigors of Lent. In place of a Fat Tuesday breakfast, the chefs in the lab at Florida State whipped up lusciously thick milkshakes for a group of subjects who were resting in between two laboratory tasks requiring willpower. Sure enough, the delicious shakes seemed to strengthen willpower by helping people perform better than expected on the next task. So far, so good. But the experiment also included a control group of people who were fed a tasteless concoction of low-fat dairy glop. It provided them with no pleasure, yet it produced similar improvements in self-control. The Mardi Gras theory looked wrong. Besides tragically removing an excuse for romping down the streets of New Orleans, the result was embarrassing for the researchers. Matthew Gailliot, the graduate student who ran the study, stood looking down at his shoes as he told Baumeister about the fiasco.

Baumeister tried to be optimistic. Maybe the study wasn’t a failure. Something had happened, after all. Even the tasteless glop had done the job, but how? If it wasn’t the pleasure, could it be the calories? At first the idea seemed a bit daft. For decades, psychologists had been studying performance on mental tasks without worrying much about the results being affected by dairy-product consumption. They liked to envision the human mind as a computer, focusing on the way it processed information. In their eagerness to chart the human equivalent of the computer’s chips and circuits, most psychologists neglected one mundane but essential part of the machine: the power supply. The brain, like the rest of the body, derived energy from glucose, the simple sugar manufactured from all kinds of foods. To establish cause and effect, researchers at Baumeister’s lab tried refueling the brain in a series of experiments involving lemonade mixed either with sugar or with a diet sweetener. The sugary lemonade provided a burst of glucose, the effects of which could be observed right away in the lab; the sugarless variety tasted quite similar without providing the same burst of glucose. Again and again, the sugar restored willpower, but the artificial sweetener had no effect. The glucose would at least mitigate the ego depletion and sometimes completely reverse it. The restored willpower improved people’s self-control as well as the quality of their decisions: they resisted irrational bias when making choices, and when asked to make financial decisions, they were more likely to choose the better long-term strategy instead of going for a quick payoff. The ego-depletion effect was even demonstrated with dogs in two studies by Holly Miller and Nathan DeWall at the University of Kentucky. After obeying sit and stay commands for 10 minutes, the dogs performed worse on self-control tests and were also more likely to make the dangerous decision to challenge another dog’s turf. But a dose of glucose restored their willpower.

Despite this series of findings, brain researchers still had some reservations about the glucose connection. Skeptics pointed out that the brain’s overall use of energy remains about the same regardless of what a person is doing, which doesn’t square easily with the notion of depleted energy affecting willpower. Among the skeptics was Todd Heatherton, who worked with Baumeister early in his career and eventually wound up at Dartmouth, where he became a pioneer of what is called social neuroscience: the study of links between brain processes and social behavior. He believed in ego depletion, but he didn’t see how this neural process could be caused simply by variations in glucose levels. To observe the process — and to see if it could be reversed by glucose — he and his colleagues recruited 45 female dieters and recorded images of their brains as they reacted to pictures of food. Next the dieters watched a comedy video while forcing themselves to suppress their laughter — a standard if cruel way to drain mental energy and induce ego depletion. Then they were again shown pictures of food, and the new round of brain scans revealed the effects of ego depletion: more activity in the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward center, and a corresponding decrease in the amygdala, which ordinarily helps control impulses. The food’s appeal registered more strongly while impulse control weakened — not a good combination for anyone on a diet. But suppose people in this ego-depleted state got a quick dose of glucose? What would a scan of their brains reveal?

The results of the experiment were announced in January, during Heatherton’s speech accepting the leadership of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the world’s largest group of social psychologists. In his presidential address at the annual meeting in San Antonio, Heatherton reported that administering glucose completely reversed the brain changes wrought by depletion — a finding, he said, that thoroughly surprised him. Heatherton’s results did much more than provide additional confirmation that glucose is a vital part of willpower; they helped solve the puzzle over how glucose could work without global changes in the brain’s total energy use. Apparently ego depletion causes activity to rise in some parts of the brain and to decline in others. Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards and pays less attention to long-term prospects.

The discoveries about glucose help explain why dieting is a uniquely difficult test of self-control — and why even people with phenomenally strong willpower in the rest of their lives can have such a hard time losing weight. They start out the day with virtuous intentions, resisting croissants at breakfast and dessert at lunch, but each act of resistance further lowers their willpower. As their willpower weakens late in the day, they need to replenish it. But to resupply that energy, they need to give the body glucose. They’re trapped in a nutritional catch-22:

1. In order not to eat, a dieter needs willpower.

2. In order to have willpower, a dieter needs to eat.

As the body uses up glucose, it looks for a quick way to replenish the fuel, leading to a craving for sugar. After performing a lab task requiring self-control, people tend to eat more candy but not other kinds of snacks, like salty, fatty potato chips. The mere expectation of having to exert self-control makes people hunger for sweets. A similar effect helps explain why many women yearn for chocolate and other sugary treats just before menstruation: their bodies are seeking a quick replacement as glucose levels fluctuate. A sugar-filled snack or drink will provide a quick improvement in self-control (that’s why it’s convenient to use in experiments), but it’s just a temporary solution. The problem is that what we identify as sugar doesn’t help as much over the course of the day as the steadier supply of glucose we would get from eating proteins and other more nutritious foods.

The benefits of glucose were unmistakable in the study of the Israeli parole board. In midmorning, usually a little before 10:30, the parole board would take a break, and the judges would be served a sandwich and a piece of fruit. The prisoners who appeared just before the break had only about a 20 percent chance of getting parole, but the ones appearing right after had around a 65 percent chance. The odds dropped again as the morning wore on, and prisoners really didn’t want to appear just before lunch: the chance of getting parole at that time was only 10 percent. After lunch it soared up to 60 percent, but only briefly. Remember that Jewish Israeli prisoner who appeared at 3:10 p.m. and was denied parole from his sentence for assault? He had the misfortune of being the sixth case heard after lunch. But another Jewish Israeli prisoner serving the same sentence for the same crime was lucky enough to appear at 1:27 p.m., the first case after lunch, and he was rewarded with parole. It must have seemed to him like a fine example of the justice system at work, but it probably had more to do with the judge’s glucose levels.

It’s simple enough to imagine reforms for the parole board in Israel — like, say, restricting each judge’s shift to half a day, preferably in the morning, interspersed with frequent breaks for food and rest. But it’s not so obvious what to do with the decision fatigue affecting the rest of society. Even if we could all afford to work half-days, we would still end up depleting our willpower all day long, as Baumeister and his colleagues found when they went into the field in Würzburg in central Germany. The psychologists gave preprogrammed BlackBerrys to more than 200 people going about their daily routines for a week. The phones went off at random intervals, prompting the people to report whether they were currently experiencing some sort of desire or had recently felt a desire. The painstaking study, led by Wilhelm Hofmann, then at the University of Würzburg, collected more than 10,000 momentary reports from morning until midnight.

Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception. Half the people were feeling some desire when their phones went off — to snack, to goof off, to express their true feelings to their bosses — and another quarter said they had felt a desire in the past half-hour. Many of these desires were ones that the men and women were trying to resist, and the more willpower people expended, the more likely they became to yield to the next temptation that came along. When faced with a new desire that produced some I-want-to-but-I-really-shouldn’t sort of inner conflict, they gave in more readily if they had already fended off earlier temptations, particularly if the new temptation came soon after a previously reported one.

The results suggested that people spend between three and four hours a day resisting desire. Put another way, if you tapped four or five people at any random moment of the day, one of them would be using willpower to resist a desire. The most commonly resisted desires in the phone study were the urges to eat and sleep, followed by the urge for leisure, like taking a break from work by doing a puzzle or playing a game instead of writing a memo. Sexual urges were next on the list of most-resisted desires, a little ahead of urges for other kinds of interactions, like checking Facebook. To ward off temptation, people reported using various strategies. The most popular was to look for a distraction or to undertake a new activity, although sometimes they tried suppressing it directly or simply toughing their way through it. Their success was decidedly mixed. They were pretty good at avoiding sleep, sex and the urge to spend money, but not so good at resisting the lure of television or the Web or the general temptation to relax instead of work.

We have no way of knowing how much our ancestors exercised self-control in the days before BlackBerrys and social psychologists, but it seems likely that many of them were under less ego-depleting strain. When there were fewer decisions, there was less decision fatigue. Today we feel overwhelmed because there are so many choices. Your body may have dutifully reported to work on time, but your mind can escape at any instant. A typical computer user looks at more than three dozen Web sites a day and gets fatigued by the continual decision making — whether to keep working on a project, check out TMZ, follow a link to YouTube or buy something on Amazon. You can do enough damage in a 10-minute online shopping spree to wreck your budget for the rest of the year.

The cumulative effect of these temptations and decisions isn’t intuitively obvious. Virtually no one has a gut-level sense of just how tiring it is to decide. Big decisions, small decisions, they all add up. Choosing what to have for breakfast, where to go on vacation, whom to hire, how much to spend — these all deplete willpower, and there’s no telltale symptom of when that willpower is low. It’s not like getting winded or hitting the wall during a marathon. Ego depletion manifests itself not as one feeling but rather as a propensity to experience everything more intensely. When the brain’s regulatory powers weaken, frustrations seem more irritating than usual. Impulses to eat, drink, spend and say stupid things feel more powerful (and alcohol causes self-control to decline further). Like those dogs in the experiment, ego-depleted humans become more likely to get into needless fights over turf. In making decisions, they take illogical shortcuts and tend to favor short-term gains and delayed costs. Like the depleted parole judges, they become inclined to take the safer, easier option even when that option hurts someone else.

“Good decision making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it’s always there,” Baumeister says. “It’s a state that fluctuates.” His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.

“Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested and their glucose is low,” Baumeister points out. That’s why the truly wise don’t restructure the company at 4 p.m. They don’t make major commitments during the cocktail hour. And if a decision must be made late in the day, they know not to do it on an empty stomach. “The best decision makers,” Baumeister says, “are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.”

via www.nytimes.com

Drew McWeeny: Why RIDLEY SCOTT returning to BLADE RUNNER really is the beginning of the end

It is easy to get worked up over remakes and prequels and sequels these days, but it's also not terribly productive.  This is the modern Hollywood film industry in the year 2011, and you can either accept that or you can rail against it, but either way, they're going to keep on doing business this way until there is a compelling reason for them to not do business this way.

I wrote about my experience at Comic-Con this summer with the "Prometheus" panel, and certainly I hope that film delivers something special when it is released next year.  I am willing to walk into it open-minded, especially since it's not like the "Alien" franchise is this untouched, pristine thing.  Any time your iconic creation has already been roughed up behind the bleachers by Paul "Show me on the teddy bear where he touched your favorite movie" W.S. Anderson, it's fair game for anyone.  Besides, having Ridley Scott back in the world that he helped create in the original 1979 film is interesting, no doubt about it.

But that "helped create" is important, and something to consider today as the news breaks that once again, Ridley Scott is planning to revisit one of the SF worlds he was part of with a "follow-up" to "Blade Runner" being announced this morning.  And while I'm a big fan of the 1982 film, I think the notion of any sequel or prequel in that world is a terrible one.  Awful.  Catastrophically bad.

The simple truth is that not all films are franchises, and not every narrative can support a sequel or a prequel.  This disturbing idea that has taken hold that we need to wring every drop of creative juice out of any film that has ever attracted any audience of any size is, quite honestly, death.  This is what the death throes of studio filmmaking look like, folks, and the only real or substantial thing that film fans can do is grab a bag of marshmallows to roast as the whole thing goes up in flames.  People love to point at the occasional fluke like "Inception" as proof that the system isn't broken beyond repair, but the only reason that film happened was because Christopher Nolan made a remake, which convinced the studio he was responsible enough for them to trust him with a reboot, and then he made a sequel to his reboot that made a billion dollars.  And for that, finally, they "rewarded" him with the opportunity to make something he wrote.  That ended up making the studio some $800 million, which is great, and which guarantees him more freedom.  So far, he's used that freedom to sign on to direct another sequel while producing, yes, another reboot.  This is the guy film fans love to hold up as an example for how to do it right in Hollywood, but so far, what I see is a very good filmmaker who is still having to navigate the same blood-filled waters as everyone else.  He does it well, certainly, but he's still stuck in the same box that other filmmakers are, and his work hasn't changed the system at all.  If anything, he's given the studios more ammunition to prove that what they are doing is right.  It works.  It's the correct model to follow.

Ridley Scott may never set foot on a set for a "Blade Runner" follow-up.  Signing a deal is one thing, while making the actual film is something totally different.  There's a long way to go before that film is a real and tangible thing.  And in that time, they may end up deciding not to ever roll film, something that's happened with plenty of in-development projects, particularly with things Ridley Scott has been attached to over the years.  After all, I'm not sitting down this summer to a big-screen giant-budget version of "The Forever War," so just because he says he's going to direct something, that doesn't mean it will really get a greenlight.

With "Blade Runner," though, there is a special level of anxiety that the announcement brings.  I've said before that the real problem with filmmakers who go back to continue screwing around with a film after it's been in release is that filmmakers often have no understanding of what it is that an audience loves about a film.  Once you've released it, you have to stop touching it, because further adjustments could well erase the thing that made it important to someone.  You could screw up a character or the timing of a sequence or a thematic point, and the various versions of "Blade Runner" perfectly highlight that problem.  When I first got Internet access in 1994, I was amazed to find people in newsgroups debating ideas like "Was Deckard a replicant in 'Blade Runner'?," especially since I know from firsthand experience in 1982 that general audiences totally rejected the film.  That ambiguity, and the way the film left room for interpretation, was one of the reasons it lingered so well.  When Ridley Scott started playing around with the movie and adding new effects and tinkering with it after the brief release of the Workprint version, all of a sudden that ambiguity started getting a lot less ambiguous, and Scott seemed determined to answer the question for us.  I found it infuriating, but at least I knew I still had the original version of the film to go back to.  If Scott's planning to return to the world of the movie, I'm afraid of him creating something which will not just rob that first movie of any and all ambiguity, but which will make me wonder if what I saw in the original film was ever really there at all.  He can't erase the original from existence, but he can absolutely destroy my interest in the narrative, and I'm afraid that when it comes to "Blade Runner," he's the last person I want to see playing around with that property.

Let's assume, though, that it will be brilliant and awesome and just as good as the first film.  It still worries me deeply that this is the best job we can find for Sir Ridley Scott at this point in his career.  He's created iconic images and characters and movies for 30-plus years, and the best Hollywood can come up with is, "Hey, want to do the exact same thing AGAIN?"  It is a failure on every level.  It would be one thing if some young filmmaker who grew up in love with "Blade Runner" managed to get into a position where he had a shot at adding something to that property, something substantial, and took it out of a genuine creative drive to play with this thing that inspired him.  If Duncan Jones was the name attached this morning, my interest level would be higher because I know that Jones holds the first movie sacred and that he's had years to let it rattle around inside of him.  I'm willing to bet that anything he made in that universe would feel organic and motivated by a genuine desire to tell a new story.  The piece that ran on the LA Times today about how Ridley Scott ended up in the director's chair again pays lip service to the idea of Ridley as a storyteller, but the word that is the real subtext here is "BRANDING."  And it doesn't even matter if "Blade Runner" was a box-office disaster in 1982, which it was.  After all, there's a prequel to "The Thing" coming out this year, and last Christmas saw a sequel to "TRON" on the bigscreen, so obviously box-office failures in one decade are catnip to studio executives in another, all because of the legwork that real fans did in the decades in-between.

Maybe that's the real reason this rubs me so wrong.  "Blade Runner" failed by every standard of business measurement.  It was beaten senseless by critics at the time.  But I was twelve years old, and I didn't care what critics said.  I knew when I sat in that theater and saw that film that I loved it, and for years afterwards, any time it came up in conversation, I would find myself defending it to people who only knew it as a failure.  The film's long ancillary life was driven by genuine love, by fans who passed it along, by people who refused to have their opinion determined by opening weekend numbers or by toy sales.  And now, because of that love, because we kept the film alive long after even its own studio gave up on it, it has become this asset, a valuable widget, and Hollywood wants to make some money with it.  And they are counting on those of us who love the original to carry the word.  They hired Ridley Scott because they figure that makes them bulletproof.  "You can't get upset! We got Ridley Scott back!"

But we can.  And we are.  And we don't want it.  I am fatigued from all of this, and like everyone else, I've gotten to the point where I almost don't notice it.  This past week, I had a meeting at a studio, and they brought up a film that they want to remake, a film I (A) love and (B) acknowledge isn't as good as I wish it was, and right away, I started thinking about what a great opportunity it is and how much fun it would be to get my hands on it and pull it apart and rebuild it the way I always wanted to see it done.  And I acknowledge that having that meeting and writing this article in the same week makes me a rotten, rotten hypocrite.  I'll chase that job, too.  I want that job.  And if I get it, I'm sure there will be many editorials about what a sell-out piece of crap I am for doing so.  And you'll be right.  It is blatantly hypocritical, and I know it.  And even so, I still say I don't want Ridley Scott to return to "Blade Runner" for a prequel or a sequel or a requel or a reboot or a remagining or, frankly, anything.  I just don't want him to do it.  I don't want to see it. I don't want to cover it.  I don't want to know it's out there.

I don't blame Alcon Entertainment for buying the rights.  I'm sure they were able to produce numbers on a spreadsheet that justify the purchase.  But this craven age is burning down my love of movies in general, and it is starting to get terrifying.  I don't want to spend the next decade of my life feeling this way, but I don't get a vote.  All I can do is spend my money to support the things that are genuinely fresh or new or motivated by more than market share, and that's all you can do, as well.

With that in mind, are you for or against this one?  Would you or would you not happily hand over your ticket price?

Answer wisely, because Hollywood is listening, and they are more than happy to ruin any property you can name.

via www.hitfix.com

Raymond Chandler: Writers in Hollywood (Brilliant Essay in THE ATLANTIC from 1945)

To the writing of his detective stories RAYMOND CHANDLER brings the experience and the skepticism of a newspaper reporter, the narrative gifts of a born storyteller, and a mastery of pungent American dialogue. His leading character, Philip Marlowe, is a professional detective who has held the spotlight thus far in four novels, all of which have been purchased by the movies. One of them, The Big Sleep, in which Lauren Bacall plays the lead, is soon to be released. In his screenplays as in his books, Mr. Chandler has scored a personal success, but he has done so without losing sight of the difficulties encountered by the creative writer in the studios. For this is the anomaly: the producers pay their authors large fees apparently for the purpose of disregarding their advice and their text. 

1

HOLLYWOOD is easy to hate, easy to sneer at, easy to lampoon. Some of the best lampooning has been done by people who have never been through a studio gate, some of the best sneering by egocentric geniuses who departed huffily - not forgetting to collect their last pay check – leaving behind them nothing but the exquisite aroma of their personalities and a botched job for the tired hacks to clean up.

Even as far away as New York, where Hollywood assumes all really intelligent people live (since they obviously do not live in Hollywood), the disease of exaggeration can be caught. The motion picture critic of one of the less dazzled intellectual weeklies, commenting recently on a certain screenplay, remarked that it showed "how dull a couple of run-of-the-mill $3000-a-week writers can be." I hope this critic will not be startled to learn that 50 per cent of the screenwriters of Hollywood made less than $10,000 last year, and that he could count on his fingers the number that made a steady income anywhere near the figure he so contemptuously mentioned. I don't know whether they could be called run-of-the-mill writers or not. To me the phrase suggests something a little easier to get hold of.

I hold no brief for Hollywood. I have worked there a little over two years, which is far from enough to make me an authority, but more than enough to make me feel pretty thoroughly bored. That should not be so. An industry with such vast resources and such magic techniques should not become dull so soon. An art which is capable of making all but the very best plays look trivial and contrived, all but the very best novels verbose and imitative, should not so quickly become wearisome to those who attempt to practice it with something else in mind than the cash drawer. The making of a picture ought surely to be a rather fascinating adventure. It is not; it is an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion.

Hollywood is a showman's paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made. The publisher and the play producer are showmen too; but they exploit what is already made. The showmen of Hollywood control the making – and thereby degrade it. For the basic art of motion pictures is the screenplay; it is fundamental, without it there is nothing. Everything derives from the screenplay, and most of that which derives is an applied skill which, however adept, is artistically not in the same class with the creation of a screenplay. But in Hollywood the screenplay in written by a salaried writer under the supervision of a producer - that is to say, by an employee without power or decision over the uses of his own craft, without ownership of it, and, however extravagantly paid, almost without honor for it.

I am aware that there are colorable economic reasons for the Hollywood system of "getting out the script." But I am not much interested in them. Pictures cost a great deal of money—true. The studio spends the money; all the writer spends is his time (and incidentally his life, his hopes, and all the varied experiences, most of them painful, which finally made him into a writer) - this also is true. The producer is charged with the salability and soundness of the project - true. The director can survive few failures; the writer can stink for ten years and still make his thousand a week - true also. But entirely beside the point.

I am not interested in why the Hollywood system exists or persists, nor in learning out of what bitter struggles for prestige it arose, nor in how much money it succeeds in making out of bad pictures. I am interested only in the fact that as a result of it there is no such thing as an art of the screenplay, and there never will be as long as the system lasts, for it is the essence of this system that it seeks to exploit a talent without permitting it the right to be a talent. It cannot be done; you can only destroy the talent, which is exactly what happens - when there is any to destroy.

Granted that there isn't much. Some chatty publisher (probably Bennett Cerf) remarked once that there are writers in Hollywood making two thousand dollars a week who haven't had an idea in ten years. He exaggerated—backwards: there are writers in Hollywood making two thousand a week who never had an idea in their lives, who have never written a photographable scene, who could not make two cents a word in the pulp market if their lives depended on it. Hollywood is full of such writers, although there are few at such high salaries. They are, to put it bluntly, a pretty dreary lot of hacks, and most of them know it, and they take their kicks and their salaries and try to be reasonably grateful to an industry which permits them to live much more opulently than they could live anywhere else.

And I have no doubt that most of them, also, would like to be much better writers than they are, would like to have force and integrity and imagination enough of these to earn a decent living at some art of literature that has the dignity of a free profession. It will not happen to them, and there is not much reason why it should. If it ever could have happened, it will not happen now. For even the best of them (with a few rare exceptions) devote their entire time to work which has no more possibility of distinction than a Pekinese has of becoming a Great Dane: to asinine musicals about technicolor legs and the yowling of night-club singers; to "psychological" dramas with wooden plots, stock characters, and that persistent note of fuzzy earnestness which suggests the conversation of schoolgirls in puberty; to sprightly and sophisticated comedies (we hope) in which the gags are as stale as the attitudes, in which there is always a drink in every hand, a butler in every doorway, and a telephone on the edge of every bathtub; to historical epics in which the male actors look like female impersonators, and the lovely feminine star looks just a little too starry-eyed for a babe who has spent half her life swapping husbands; and last but not least, to those pictures of deep social import in which everybody is thoughtful and grown-up and sincere and the more difficult problems of life are wordily resolved into a unanimous vote of confidence in the inviolability of the Constitution, the sanctity of the home, and the paramount importance of the streamlined kitchen.

And these, dear readers, are the million-dollar babies—the cream of the crop. Most of the boys and girls who write for the screen never get anywhere near this far. They devote their sparkling lines and their structural finesse to horse operas, cheap gun-in-the-kidney melodramas, horror items about mad scientists and cliffhangers concerned with screaming blondes and circular saws. The writers of this tripe are licked before they start. Even in a purely technical sense their work is doomed for lack of the time to do it properly. The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement. Such a technique requires experiment and elimination. The cheap pictures simply cannot afford it.

2

LET me not imply that there are no writers of authentic ability in Hollywood. There are not many, but there are not many anywhere. The creative gift is a scarce commodity, and patience and imitation have always done most of its work. There is no reason to expect from the anonymous toilers of the screen a quality which we are very obviously not getting from the publicized litterateurs of the best-seller list, from the compilers of fourth-rate historical novels which sell half a million copies, from the Broadway candy butchers known as playwrights, or from the sulky maestri of the little magazines.

To me the interesting point about Hollywood's writers of talent is not how few or how many they are, but how little of worth their talent is allowed to achieve. Interesting - but hardly unexpected, once you accept the premise that writers are employed to write screenplays on the theory that, being writers, they have a particular gift and training for the job, and are then prevented from doing it with any independence or finality whatsoever, on the theory that, being merely writers, they know nothing about making pictures, and of course if they don't know how to make pictures, they couldn't possibly know how to write them. It takes a producer to tell them that.

I do not wish to become unduly vitriolic on the subject of producers. My own experience does not justify it, and after all, producers too are slaves of the system. Also, the term "producer" is of very vague definition. Some producers are powerful in their own right, and some are little more than legmen for the front office; some - few, I trust - receive less money than some of the writers who work for them. It is even said that in one large Hollywood studio there are producers who are lower than writers; not merely in earning power, but in prestige, importance, and aesthetic ability. It is, of course, a very large studio where all sorts of unexplained things could happen and hardly be noticed. 

For my thesis the personal qualities of a producer are rather beside the point. Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur. In so far as the writing of the screenplay is concerned, however, the producer is the boss; the writer either gets along with him and his ideas (if he has any) or gets out. This means both personal and artistic subordination, and no writer of quality will long accept either without surrendering that which made him a writer of quality, without dulling the fine edge of his mind, without becoming little by little a conniver rather than a creator, a supple and facile journeyman rather than a craftsman of original thought.

It makes very little difference how a writer feels towards his producer as a man; the fact that the producer can change and destroy and disregard his work can only operate to diminish that work in its conception and to make it mechanical and indifferent in execution. The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences. There is little magic of word or emotion or situation which can remain alive after the incessant bone-scraping revisions imposed on the Hollywood writer by the process of rule by decree. That these magics do somehow, here and there, by another and even rarer magic, survive and reach the screen more or less intact is the infrequent miracle which keeps Hollywood's handful of fine writers from cutting their throats.

Hollywood has no right to expect such miracles, and it does not deserve the men who bring them to pass.  Its conception of what makes a good picture is still as juvenile as its treatment of writing talent is insulting and degrading. Its idea of "production value" is spending a million dollars dressing up a story that any good writer would throw away. Its vision of the rewarding movie is a vehicle for some glamorpuss with two expressions and eighteen changes of costume, or for some male idol of the muddled millions with a permanent hangover, six worn-out acting tricks, the build of a lifeguard, and the mentality of a chicken-strangler. Pictures for such purposes as these, Hollywood lovingly and carefully makes. The good ones smack it in the rear when it isn't looking.

3

For all this too there are colorable economic reasons. The motion picture is a great industry as well as a defeated art. Its technicians are now in their third generation, its investments are world-wide, its demand for material is insatiable. Five hundred pictures a year must be made or the theaters will be dark, countless people will be thrown out of work, financial organizations will totter, and bankers will start jumping out of their office windows again. Hollywood does not possess enough real talent to make one tenth of five hundred pictures, even if it could find stories to base them on. But the rest must be made somehow, and they are made—with great effort and bitter struggle, with the hardening of many arteries and the graying of many hairs, and with the slow deadening of such real ability as could have been saved by happier tasks.

And the men who turn out this essentially dreary product are well paid by the standards of other industries. This reward is not, of course, due to any big-heartedness on the part of the financial big shots who control the working capital. The men with the money and the ultimate power can do anything they like with Hollywood - as long as they don't mind losing their investment. They can destroy any studio executive overnight, contract or no contract; any star, any producer, any director—as an individual. What they cannot destroy is the Hollywood system. It may be wasteful, absurd, even dishonest, but it is all there is, and no cold-blooded board of directors can replace it. It has been tried, but the showmen always win. They always win against mere money. What in the long run - the very long run - they can never defeat is talent, even writing talent.

It is, I am afraid, a very long run indeed. There is no present indication whatever that the Hollywood writer is on the point of acquiring any real control over his work, any right to choose what that work shall be (other than refusing jobs, which he can only do within narrow limits), or even any right to decide how the values in the producer-chosen work shall be brought out.  There is no present guarantee that his best lines, best ideas, best scenes will not be changed or omitted on the set by the director or dropped on the floor during the later process of cutting - for the simple but essential reason that the best things in any picture, artistically speaking, are invariably the easiest to leave out, mechanically speaking.

There is no attempt in Hollywood to exploit the writer as an artist of meaning to the picture-buying public; there is every attempt to keep the public uninformed about his vital contribution to whatever art the movie contains. On the billboards, in the newspaper advertisements, his name will be smaller than that of the most insignificant bit-player who achieves what is known as billing; it will be the first to disappear as the size of the ad is out down toward the middle of the week; it will be the last and least to be mentioned in any word-of-mouth or radio promotion.

The first picture I worked on was nominated for an Academy award (if that means anything), but I was not even invited to the press review held right in the studio. An extremely successful picture made by another studio from a story I wrote used verbatim lines out of the story in its promotional campaign, but my name was never mentioned once in any radio, magazine, billboard, or newspaper advertising that I saw or heard - and I saw and heard a great deal. This neglect is of no consequence to me personally; to any writer of books a Hollywood by-line is trivial. To those whose whole work is in Hollywood it is not trivial, because it is part of a deliberate and successful plan to reduce the professional screenwriter to the status of an assistant picture-maker, superficially deferred to (while he is in the room), essentially ignored, and even in his most brilliant achievements carefully pushed out of the way of any possible accolade which might otherwise fall to the star, the producer, the director.

4

IF ALL this is true, why then should any writer of genuine ability continue to work in Hollywood at all? The obvious reason is not enough; few screenwriters possess homes in Bel-Air, illuminated swimming pools, wives in full-length mink coats, three servants, and that air of tired genius gone a little sour. Money buys pathetically little in Hollywood beyond the pleasure of living in an unreal world, associating with a narrow group of people who think, talk, and drink nothing but pictures, most of them bad, and the doubtful pleasure of watching famous actors and actresses guzzle in some of the rudest restaurants in the world.

I do not mean that Hollywood society is any duller or more dissipated than moneyed society anywhere: God knows it couldn't be. But it is a pretty thin reward for a lifetime devoted to the essential craft of what might be a great art. I suppose the truth is that the veterans of the Hollywood scene do not realize how little they are getting, how many dull egotists they have to smile at, how many shoddy people they have to treat as friends, how little real accomplishment is possible, how much gaudy trash their life contains. The superficial friendliness of Hollywood is pleasant - until you find out that nearly every sleeve conceals a knife. The companionship during working hours with men and women who take the business of fiction seriously gives a pale heat to the writer's lonely soul. It is so easy to forget that there is a world in which men buy their own groceries and, if they choose, think their own thoughts. In Hollywood you don't even write your own checks - and what you think is what you hope some producer or studio executive will like.

Beyond this I suppose there is hope; there are several hopes. The cold dynasty will not last forever, the dictatorial producer is already a little unsure, the top-heavy director has long since become a joke in his own studio; after a while even technicolor will not save him. There is hope that a decayed and makeshift system will pass, that somehow the flatulent moguls will learn that only writers can write screenplays and only proud and independent writers can write good screenplays, and that present methods of dealing with such men are destructive of the very force by which pictures must live.

And there is the intense and beautiful hope that the Hollywood writers themselves - such of them as are capable of it - will recognize that writing for the screen is no job for amateurs and half-writers whose problems are always solved by somebody else. It is the writers' own weakness as craftsmen that permits the superior egos to bleed them white of initiative, imagination, and integrity. If even a quarter of the highly paid screenwriters in Hollywood could produce a completely integrated and photographable screenplay under their own power, with only the amount of interference and discussion necessary to protect the studio's investment in actors and ensure a reasonable freedom from libel and censorship troubles, then the producer would assume his proper function of coordinating and conciliating the various crafts which combine to make a picture; and the director - heaven help his strutting soul -would be reduced to the ignominious task of making pictures as they are conceived and written - and not as the director would try to write them, if only he knew how to write.

Certainly there are producers and directors - although how pitifully few - who are sincere enough to want such a change, and talented enough to have no fear of its effect on their own position. Yet it is only a little over three years since the major (and only this very year the minor) studios were forced, after prolonged and bitter struggle, to agree to treat the writers according to some reasonable standard of business ethics. In this struggle the writers were not really fighting the motion picture industry at all; they were only fighting certain powerful elements in it - employees like themselves - who had hitherto glommed off all the glory and prestige and most of the money, and could only continue to do so by selling themselves to the world as the true makers of pictures.

This struggle is still going on; in a sense it will always go on, in a sense it always should go on. But so far the cards are stacked against the writer. If there is no art of the screenplay, the reason is at least partly that there exists no available body of technical theory and practice by which it can be learned. There is no available library of screenplay literature, because the screenplays belong to the studios, and they will only show them within their guarded walls. There is no body of critical opinion, because there are no critics of the screenplay; there are only critics of motion pictures as entertainment, and most of these critics know nothing whatever of the means whereby the motion picture is created and put on celluloid. There is no teaching, because there is no one to teach. If you do not know how pictures are made, you cannot speak with any authority on how they should be constructed; if you do, you are busy enough trying to do it.

There is no correlation of crafts within the studio itself; the average—and far better than average—screenwriter knows hardly anything of the technical problems of the director, and nothing at all of the superlative skill of the trained cutter. He spends his effort in writing shots that cannot be made, or which if made would be thrown away; in writing dialogue that cannot be spoken, sound effects that cannot be heard, and nuances of mood and emotion which the camera cannot reproduce. His idea of an effective scene is something that has to be shot down a stairwell or out of a gopher hole; or a conversation so static that the director, in order to impart a sense of motion to it, is compelled to photograph it from nine different angles.

In fact, no part of the vast body of technical knowledge which Hollywood contains is systematically and as a matter of course made available to the new writer in a studio. They tell him to look at pictures – which is to learn architecture by staring at a house. And then they send him back to his rabbit hutch to write little scenes which his producer, in between telephone calls to his blondes and his booze-companions, will tell him ought to have been written quite differently. The producer is probably correct; the scene ought to have been written differently. It ought to have been written right. But first it had to be written. The producer didn't do that. He wouldn't know how. Anyway he's too busy. And he's making too much money. And the atmosphere of intellectual squalor in which the salaried writer operates would offend his dignity.

I have kept the best hope of all for the last. In spite of all I have said, the writers of Hollywood are winning their battle for prestige. More and more of them are becoming showmen in their own right, producers and directors of their own screenplays. Let us be glad for their additional importance and power, and not examine the artistic result too critically. The boys make good (and some of them might even make good pictures). Let us rejoice together, for the tendency to become showmen is well in the acceptable tradition of the literary art as practiced among the cameras.

For the very nicest thing Hollywood can possibly think of to say to a writer is that he is too good to be only a writer.

via www.theatlantic.com

The Bitter Script Reader: Is mediocre the New "Good"?

Go Into The Story's Scott Myers and I exchanged a few tweets Friday night, which was motivated by my assessment of Green Lantern, which was "Not as good as I hoped, but not nearly as bad as I feared."

Scott replied: "Rinse, repeat for all comic book movies / sequels? Mediocrity = The New Good?"

I have to admit, I'm wondering if that's the case. I've seen a lot of movies this year that have been "just okay." Almost six months in, I can't think of a single release that's blown me away. I've been entertained, certainly, by movies like Thor, Paul, X-Men: First Class, and Super 8 among others, but I've yet to come across a film that really made me saw "WOW! Why can't I make that?"

In other words, it seems like Hollywood is doing a good job of getting on base even hitting a few triples, but no one's hit a home run yet - let alone a grand slam. Yet every now and then it seems that film fans try so hard to praise a particular film as not just good, but as the second coming of film. I'm not naming names, but there's been a recent release or two that seems to have gotten more credit than they're due.

For instance, something that's an original idea in a sea of remakes seems to get an A grade just by virtue of the fact that it's not a rehash. Yet if the film were held to a more objective standard. It might be more of a B.

So is this how we rate movies now? "A for effort?" All flaws are forgiven so long as the filmmakers had pure motives?

Which brings me to a couple tweets from screenwriter Justin Marks (Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.)

First he said, "Go find me a bad Hollywood movie, then find me the director who says he wasn't trying to do something special with it. Doesn't exist."

This remark clearly ruffled some feathers and I saw one reply Justin wrote, saying to a person arguing with him, "I refuse to accept your premise that there are people who intentionally set out to spend 2 yrs making a bad movie!"

No, of course no one sets out to make a bad movie, but that doesn't mean there aren't cynical reasons for making a movie - reasons that perhaps lead creators to cut corners creatively. There's also the fact that these movies are a product with a release date, and sometimes, creators have to make sacrifices to meet their deadline.

Let's put it this way - when you were in school and had a 20 page paper due, I'm sure you didn't set out to get a D grade. However, the circumstances under which you approached completing that assignment might not have been the most conducive to an A grade. You don't necessarily have to be lazy to be incapable of putting the best effort possible. Maybe the material was beyond your grasp, maybe you completely misunderstood the assignment, maybe you completely lost sight of the goal.

Whatever the reason, when the teacher handed you back your work, explained all the ways in which you failed the assignment, I'm willing to be you didn't offer a defensive "I tried!" and expect that to wipe the slate clean.

Filmmakers made bad decisions for reasons other than laziness - and just saying "Well, they tried" isn't good enough. That doesn't mean that an utter failure like G.I. Joe or Wolverine gets a walk. True, perhaps some criticisms of those films step too far into personal attacks, and I suspect that's what Mr. Marks is reacting to.

But when we start arguing that motive and effort are on an equal par with quality - that's what leads to what Scott was talking about - the day that medicore is the new good.

via thebitterscriptreader.blogspot.com

ACADEMY AWARD WINNING MOVIE Trailer

HITCHCOCK on "Pure Cinematics" (aka "The Bikini Effect")

Cinematical: Is This The Age of the Bland Action Hero?

When last afternoon brought the news of a fourth Mission: Impossible film, I only felt a tepid sort of interest. I enjoyed the third one and all, but I'd be hard pressed to really remember anything about it other than Keri Russell's hideously brilliant death scene. For me, the answer is simple -- it's because Ethan Hunt is the most boring character to lead a franchise. The reason I remember Keri Russell's character is because I felt some level of empathy for her (and a "How did they do that to her eyes?"), but I can't really feel anything for Hunt. So why should I sit through the impressive action sequences? It doesn't really matter if he lives or dies, because he's not really there in any appreciable way.

By now, someone out there is violently disagreeing with me, and that's cool. But I ask those people to tell me something really significant about Ethan Hunt. I know he had a fiancee in Mission: Impossible 3, so that doesn't count. Tell me something else. His favorite weapon, perhaps, or his biggest fear. What does he do in his off time? What does he feel about his job, and the body count it requires? If you can answer any of these questions, I will give you a gold star. (Well, figuratively.)

But Ethan Hunt isn't the only tepid culprit. This decade seems to be the one full of the bland action heroes who are inexplicably given franchises when they don't have anything but a name. I feel the same way about John Connor in Terminator: Salvation (and, sadly, in its short-lived "companion" The Sarah Connor Chronicles). I can't remember one significant thing about Jack Ryan beyond that he was a nice guy, and had a "cover" as a historian (and that was only thanks to his last "reboot", The Sum of All Fears) so I can't understand why he's a viable property. The only thing all these guys have in common is that they have cool names.

But James Bond, John Rambo, Martin Riggs, Harry Callahan, Paul Kersey, Mad Max Rockatansky, Jason Bourne, Indiana Jones, John McClane, and Snake Plissken all have cool names too. But they're not just a name or a cool jacket. There was a reason people kept going back to them again and again, and keep clamoring for their return. You knew who they were. You knew Riggs had a dog named Sam, liked The Three Stooges, and couldn't cook anything but chili. You knew Indiana Jones hated snakes, and John McClane was two steps away from being an alcoholic. You can tell me something significant about every character on this list, and how it informs their actions.

At this point, I'd happily settle for a rip-off of any of the above if it would give our franchises some flavor. Say what you will about Jason Statham's films, but at least I know that Frank Martin of The Transporter has Rules, served in the military, and has tastes for finer things. (I did, however, have to look up his name so he loses major points there.) I don't know if Ethan Hunt has rules, although the films tell me he is a good guy. But how do I know, really? I'm still not even clear who he works for. At least I know Martin works for himself.

This is why people experience such powerful nostalgia for the action films of the 1970s and 1980s. It's not that they were particularly good or rich in character development, but John Rambo looks like King Lear in comparison to John Connor -- and that's despite giving Connor overblown speeches about the Resistance. This is why people can't be sated when it comes to superhero films or Jack Sparrow installments. They can rattle off character facts and appreciate where they are going. Who can say that about any of the so-called "marketable" franchises that are being flogged into fourth and fifth installments today?

via www.cinematical.com

NUIT BLANCHE: a gorgeous short film, spectacularly rendered

Nuit Blanche explores a fleeting moment between two strangers, revealing their brief connection in a hyper real fantasy. A gorgeous short film, spectacularly rendered, and a must see.

ScriptShadow: ENDER'S GAME movie script review (and download)

Been waiting for this one for a long, long time. Here's Roger (via ScriptShadow) with his thoughts re: the latest screenwriting take on one of the greatest science-fiction novels ever written.

Genre: Science Fiction, Action, Coming of Age
Premise: Aliens have attacked Earth and have almost destroyed the human species. To make sure humans win the next encounter, the world government has started breeding military geniuses and trains them in the arts of war. The early training takes the form of games, and Ender Wiggin is a genius among geniuses who wins all the games. But is he smart enough to save the planet?
About: Ender's Game started out as a novelette by Orson Scott Card in the August 1977 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. When it was expanded into a novel, it won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel. In May 2003, Card released his latest version of the screenplay to Warner Brothers. D.B. Weiss (and later, David Benioff), working closely with director Wolfgang Petersen, wrote a new script. Petersen eventually departed and Card announced in February 2009 that he had completed a new script for Odd Lot Entertainment.
Writers: D.B. Weiss (author of the videogame-themed novel, Lucky Wander Boy and one of the scribes for the screen adaptation of Bungie's Halo and George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire Series for HBO) based upon the novels Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card. Also based upon the screenplays by Orson Scott Card, and Michael Dougherty & Dan Harris (X2, Superman Returns).
Details: Draft is dated 7/7/05



Before there was Harry Potter and Quidditch, there was Ender's Game and Battle School. Sure, when it comes to narrative voice, Miss Rowling is heavily influenced by Roald Dahl, but when it comes to plot elements, it's hard not to draw comparison between Hogwarts and its various houses (Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, et al.) and Battle School and its various armies (Salamander, Dragon, etc.).

I've never read Ender's Game, Rog. What the hell is Battle School?

It's a space station where children are trained in the art of war.

You see, humanity is almost wiped out when a race of aliens with insectoid physiognomy called Formics (from the Latin formica, which means ant) invade Earth. Due to the heroics of a backwater half-Maori commander, one Mazer Rackham, the Earth survives the invasion and the Formics retreat.

To prepare for future confrontations, a shaky international military unit is formed, called the International Fleet (IF).

Many children around the world dream of passing the battery of tests the IF conducts so they can leave Earth and train at Battle School.

It's at Battle School where students, some as young as six-years old, are organized into armies and participate in simulated micro gravity battles. The children learn everything from historical battle formations to space combat tactics. Needless to say, the teachers and adults at the school encourage the students to be competitive, cultivating their bloodlust and violent nature.

Picture a combination of the Danger Room from the X-Men comics, a Quidditch Arena from Harry Potter, but set in a ginormous zero-g spherical arena.

Who's this Ender kid?

In the script, we meet Ender Wiggin when he is eleven years old as he undergoes his IF testing. Colonel Graff administers this particular round, "Shapes appear on your end, you arrange them to match the larger shape on my end. It's a test of your facility with spacial relationships." Ender dons a pair of haptic feedback gloves and puts together each puzzle with dizzying speed. Graff manages to remain stoic at Ender's ease with the test, and sends the boy on his way.

Disappointed, Ender walks home and is bullied by his older brother Peter. Peter is a nasty piece of work. Brutal and aggressive, his only goal in life is to attend Battle School, and he loathes his empathetic and weak younger brother, constantly picking on him, infuriated that he can never get Ender to lash out at him in violence. At Ender's house, we meet his sister, the ginger Valentine Wiggin, another empath who shares a close relationship with her younger brother.

In the novel, it should be noted that Peter is jealous of this relationship. In this iteration of the story, there is no character development that suggests such envy. The very Greek psychological subtext is, for the most part, non-existent.

It's here where we cut over to the ruins of Westminster, where we meet an eleven-year old urchin named Julian "Bean" Delphiki. Bean is even smaller than Ender, and he hacks an automated ration teller to gain a bounty of chocolate bars. Unfortunately, he's attacked by a gang of bullies led by Achilles (a nice touch, as Achilles de Flanders is the primary antagonist in the Bean Quartet, the parallel novels told from Bean's perspective). Bean is tasered and left at the scene of the crime, where he is collected by the police and deposited at a hospital. At the hospital, a social worker named Sister Carlotta is intrigued that such a young boy, who has never been to school, has the proficiency to hack machines.

And just like that, Bean takes the IF tests and is on his way to Battle School.

Quick digression: Now, all this is material out of the parallel novel, Ender's Shadow.
Sometimes I think Bean's story is more affecting, more sentimental, because Bean is an orphan. There's an Oliver Twist-like Dickensian sadness to his perspective that's hard not to emphasize with. An urchin who protects Ender, carrying a burden and existing as a hero unsung whose courage breaks my heart. I'm glad to see that he's utilized as a major character in this draft. It's a smart choice. Sadly, there's no later confrontation with Achilles at Battle School, which in the novels, serves as a nice point of character contrast between Ender and Bean when it comes to conflict resolution. One would think that's the type of stuff worth exploring (if one is going to turn to Ender's Shadow for scene material).

Back in America, Mazer Rackham arrives at the Wiggin household to inform Ender and his shocked family, that indeed, he is going to Battle School. As a matter of fact, Ender "scored higher on the Battle School cognition battery than any applicant we ever tested".

Soon after, Ender is on a shuttle with Bean and the other kids who have been accepted to Battle School. Mazer informs them, "You all think you're brilliant already. You're wrong. Less than half of you will advance to the Tactical Academy, and one in ten of those will move on to Central Command. I hope against hope that one of you will be strong enough, smart enough, good enough to be of some real use.

"But honestly, in my opinion, the only one of you worth the fuel it takes to lift you into orbit is Ender Wiggin."

Does Ender being singled out as top talent jeopardize his life at Battle School?

Yep.

Every new "launchie" is required to go to Battle Room training before they can be assigned to an army.

But not Ender.

Ender is told that he's been assigned to Salamander Army. This incites the ire of Commander Madrid, the fifteen-year old leader of Salamander, who sees Ender as a liability whose presence will ruin his team's undefeated winning streak.

Much of the 2^nd Act is spent in the Battle Room.

Have the rules of the games been changed from the novel?

Oddly, yes.

The students are still attired in hydraulics-reinforced flash suits, helmets and propulsion packs (to control their movement).

But in the script, it reads less like zero-g war games and more like a game of Quidditch.

The goal still consists of getting a player through the other team's gate, but that's it. This player needs no support from his teammates. In the novel, the goal was to destroy or "freeze" all of the opposing players. Then four teammates were required to touch the enemy gate with their helmets while the fifth player passed through it.

During these games, Madrid forces Ender to affix himself to a floating obstacle and basically hide as the rest of his team fights. He's not to get in the way at all.

Sucky. Does Ender eventually get his chance to shine?

At first, Ender pleads with Mazer to be demoted out of the Salamander Army, but Mazer refuses.

But hope comes in the form of the comicbook-reading Salamander star player, Petra Arkanian. Petra empathizes with Ender and his sink-or-swim plight.

She takes him under her wing, showing him how to work his suit and maneuver in a zero-g environment. She also teaches him how to handle his firepower and control his shooting.

Everyone questions Ender's talent, until Petra takes him to the Game Room (for recreation) and he discovers a cluster of 2D Real-Time Strategy Games that most of the kids ignore. I imagined something akin to a holographic StarCraft. Entranced, Ender studies the RTS game and is eventually approached by an older cadet, who shows him the rules and challenges him to a game.

This is where it gets interesting.

Petra returns to find Ender, playing ten games at once, against ten other cadets. "He ranges back and forth along the lines, barely taking time to look at each screen before slapping the Command button and barking out commands with Eminem rapidity." A huge crowd forms as Ender defeats all ten cadets, establishing his presence as a tactical wargame phenom.

How does Ender's genius translate to the Battle Room?

Ender begins practicing with a ragtag group of launchies to not only perfect his movement and shooting, but to develop strategies that are much different from what most of the other armies are using. He teaches the other kids, "Even the best armies are thinking about the Battle Room the wrong way. Platoons, lines, columns, phalanxes –- they're all battlefield tactics."

Ender develops guerilla-style zero-g tactics, and it's not long before Rackham puts Ender in command of a new army: The Dragon Army. Ender and his group of young launchies showcase their new style of play and become the new team that racks up an undefeated record, eventually catching up to Madrid and his crew.

The games eventually culminate into a huge battle where Ender and his crew are forced to fight against two armies at once. Of course, using some innovative thinking, Ender leads his team to victory.

This really pisses off Madrid, and soon Ender is forced to finally, truly fight for his life when he's thrown into the Battle Room without his suit as Madrid and his henchman try to kill him. This is a sanitized version of what actually happens in the book, and I think it falls short.

Not a good thing, as this is a major turning point in the novel and it's one of those character-changing and character-defining moments that defines the theme of the story.

OK. So what about this war with the Formics?

Ender survives his ordeal with Madrid and graduates to Command School. Mazer takes him to one of the moons of Jupiter, to the ruins of the command center the Formics used for their invasion against Earth. It is inside the moon where we find the Ansible, a giant blue sphere covered in intricate geometric designs, "It's how they communicated with their home world –- faster than light. We don't know how it works, but we figured out how to use it."

By using the Ansible, they can instantaneously control their entire fleet with no lag. The Ansible is one of those classic science fiction tropes, like Unobtainium in Avatar, that readers of the genre will recognize. Coined by Ursula K. Le Guin, it's derived from the word "answerable", meaning it's a device that will let its users receive answers quickly across interstellar distances.

Ender is taken to the Command Simulator, where he is told that actual Admirals train. Coincidentally, it operates in almost exactly the same way as the Game Room's RTS game (You know, the one he was so good at).

The only fishy detail is that the fleet's ships appear to be models that are thirty years old. Ender is suspicious and confronts Mazer about this detail. He is told, "The prototype craft are great public morale boosters for the air and space shows. This is what we've really got. Learn how to use it."

So all of this is just a simulation, right?

Well, that's what Mazer tells Ender. That it's a training sim, a game to prepare the boy for the real deal.

Upon his first match, Ender thinks he's playing against AI. Remember, this is his first time playing this game. He's still learning. But he seems to be doing well. He's victorious upon his first try.

And apparently, he wasn't playing against AI.

We learn that he just defeated another of Mazer's star pupils, Andrei Karpov. And not only that, he also defeated all four of Karpov's subcommanders. At the same time.

Who the hell is Karpov?

Good question. He's not in the novel. As far as I can tell, he's just a plot device to make an allusion to the competitive chess world, and his existence tells us that Ender is like a chess prodigy.

The final thirty or so pages are Ender and his subcommanders engaged in their final exam on the simulator.

Ender thinks he's playing against Mazer.

He's not.

What? So who's he really playing against it?

Formics.

Ender is controlling the fleet that's, in actuality, an attack on the Formic home world. He doesn't know he's killing a race of sentient creatures.

To the audience's horror, we gain this knowledge when Bean gains it. As Bean hides this newfound knowledge from Ender, we share his guilt and culpability as Ender sacrifices human beings like pawns to try and best Mazer.

But we know it's not Mazer, it's the Formic Queen.

And to add to the horror, the Formics are ultimately presented as a peace-loving race who travelled to Earth out of curiosity.

Understand: They never shot first. We did.

Damn. That's rough. So, does this screenplay do justice to the novel and its fans?
 

D.B. Weiss' draft is a fascinating read, but I don't think it's the movie fans are waiting for.

I'm not holding anyone at fault here, far for from it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but even Orson Scott Card himself hasn't written a draft he seems to be pleased with, and I think he's written like fifteen or so.

I also don't think he's ever been satisfied with any of the drafts attempted by other screenwriters, as the closest anyone has come to translating the novel to a visual medium is comic-book scribe, Chris Yost, who has done a bang-up job with the Ender's Game: Battle School mini-series for Marvel Comics (Yost's approach is to pretend he's writing for the HBO mini-series, and he tries to include everything from the novel.)

There are four elements that make this particular from-book-to-screen adaptation a true screenwriter's challenge:

(1) Ender's Game is a bildungsroman with a protagonist who is a child of few words. Much of the novel is Ender's internal narration. And since Ender's mind is that of a brilliant tactician who is trying to understand not only his emotions, but the complicated world around him, it's simply hard to take that internal monologue and give it a visual treatment. Might be good to take a nod from Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind or Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes and create visual sequences that exploit what Ender sees when he thinks. Merely an idea. And maybe a bad one at that...

(2) Ender's Game requires a large child cast. When Ender is recruited by the IF, he is six years old. When the novel ends, Ender has exterminated an entire race of creatures. He is twelve. I think it's a bad idea to skew the characters towards older teenagers, as it destroys the innocence lost aspect of the story that it is known for. Already, many fans of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series are upset that the characters in the movie version are older than they are in the books. I can understand why Hollywood would want older actors. It's a difficult thing, finding talented child actors, but for Ender's Game, it is essential.

(3) Ender's Game has child-on-child violence. Nowhere near the gory exploitation of Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale, but there's ugly stuff (cruelty) in it that's not going to settle easily into the consciousness of a mass audience. But it's also the type of stuff that gives other coming-of-age novels like William Golding's Lord of the Flies and John Knowles' A Separate Peace raw emotional power. It's the type of stuff that sings of nostalgia and loss. In the book, Ender fights Madrid in a shower, ultimately sending him back to Earth in a body bag.

(4) Ender's Game has a purity and perfection to it that's only going to be muddled with multiple cooks in the kitchen. The egos of multiple filmmakers, from producers to screenwriters to directors, are going to do nothing but scathe a narrative that already works. Sure, find a way to translate Ender's narrative visually, but when you sanitize the story and try to change it, you're already making the adaptation more difficult than it has to be. In this sense, Ender's Game is a novel that may never be turned into a movie fans will be satisfied with.

It's been a while since I read the novel (I was probably around 12 or 13), but one thing that stuck with me all these years was the sense of bonecrushing fatigue Ender experiences as he takes his "final exam". It's a novel that really beats you up, and you feel a loss when you close its pages.

Those feelings, those emotions, are absent from this script.

That's how you know it's not the same.

Link: Ender's Game (This script is meant for educational purposes only. If you are the writer or copyright holder of this script and would like it taken down, please e-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com and I will do so immediately)

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: This script really made me think about theme and character development.

There was some dissonance concerning Ender's character development. Something felt missing, something felt off. I thought about the novel. Sure, it's about innocence lost, but Ender's characterization in the novel was concrete. He was a kid who had to learn how to take care of himself, even if it meant hurting another human being in self-defense. The message wasn't so much that violence is sometimes necessary (if we learn from Bean and Achilles, we know that there are other solutions besides violence), but that Ender had to make a stand and confront aggressors.

But...in the script, it's almost the opposite. The lesson that he must learn to take care of himself is buried under the message that, perhaps, yes, violence is the answer. Is that really the theme? And I think this muddling of theme can be traced to Ender's character development. His set-up. Like we're not being presented with the correct scenes to establish Ender's presence as an empath. There's a lot of talk about how unaggressive and empathetic he is. Almost too much talk that tends to work against the showing.

So I guess I learned that showing is always better than telling, and that theme is best expressed through clear character development. And how do you achieve that clarity? Through structure and scenes that show rather than tell.

via scriptshadow.blogspot.com

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

-- HBO series

-- International cast

-- The children are 12 and under

-- It is Ender's Game AND Speaker for the Dead

-- It is NOT Ender's Shadow

-- Seasons 1, 2, 3 Ender's Game; seasons 4, 5 Speaker for the Dead

-- Don't sell it out

Enough said.

Video Montage: The Films of the 2000s

the films of the 2000s video montage by Paul Proulx

TED Talk: J.J. Abrams THE MYSTERY BOX

via www.youtube.com

The Guardian: Why are there so few female filmmakers?

For Vanity Fair's annual ­Hollywood issue a few years back, photographer Annie Leibovitz created a classic image of a film director at work. Posing beneath a stormy sky, George Clooney stood with his shirt ripped open, trousers tucked rakishly into his boots, arms outstretched – a young Orson Welles meets Michelangelo's vision of God. His crew were a crowd of female models in flesh-coloured lingerie; not the obvious costume for a camera operator, but there you are. This was the auteur as masculine genius, a warrior amid a sea of passive women.

This has long been the archetype of the film director, but over the last few months a host of women have been making waves: Sam Taylor-Wood with Nowhere Boy, Lone Scherfig with An Education, Andrea Arnold with Fish Tank. Then there are Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion, both trailing Oscar buzz for The Hurt Locker and Bright Star respectively.

So, is this a new era for female film-makers? Unfortunately, the numbers suggest otherwise. In a study published last year, Professor Martha Lauzen of San Diego State University found that only 9% of Hollywood directors in 2008 were women – the same figure she had recorded in 1998. If Bigelow is nominated for the best directing Oscar in March, it will be only the fourth time a woman has been nominated, out of more than 400 director nominations altogether (the other three were Lina Wertmüller in 1976, Jane Campion in 1993, and Sofia Coppola in 2003). No woman has ever won. No wonder, then, that last year Campion entreated ­aspiring female directors to "put on their coats of armour and get going".

Once, the dearth of women directors could be traced to the small numbers entering film school. These days, that's not the case. Lauzen says women are now well represented in US film schools, while Neil Peplow, of the UK training organisation Skillset, says women make up around 34% of directing ­students in Britain. That translates into a large number of female ­graduates making short films, but few moving on to features.

Over the years, this failure to progress has often been blamed on a chauvinist culture; and certainly, talking to ­established directors, it's easy to ­uncover tales of overt sexism – from the mildly disconcerting to the downright illegal. The British film director Antonia Bird (Priest, Mad Love) says dryly that on her first directing job, "I was the only woman there, and all the guys just ­assumed I was the producer's PA. That was good." Director Beeban Kidron (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) once sacked a male assistant director who called her "the little lady". At the extreme end, US film director Penelope Spheeris, who made the $100m-grossing Wayne's World, remembers meeting an executive at the Beverly Hills Hotel when she was at the start of her career. "And the guy was pretty drunk, and he ripped some of my clothes trying to take them off me, and when I got up and started screaming he said, 'Did you want to make this music video or not?'" She pauses. "You say sexist, I say felony."

When it comes to sexism, Martha Coolidge – director of Rambling Rose and Real Genius, as well as the first woman president of the Directors Guild of America – has heard it all. There was the story of the female president of a major studio who said "no woman over 40 could possibly have the stamina to ­direct a ­feature film. I've heard ­people say that the kind of films they want to make are too big, too tough for a female director. The worst was when my agent sent another woman director in for an interview, and afterwards the guy called up and said, 'Never send anyone again who I wouldn't want to fuck.'"

There are signs that this culture is changing. A 2009 report – carried out by the UK networking organisation Women in Film and Television (WFTV) and Skillset – found that, while "a number of older participants reported direct experience of overt sexism, none of the younger participants [did]". But Coolidge insists that the film industry – and Hollywood specifically – remains a minefield, because "there is such a ­sexual component for the men who go into it. If all they wanted to do is to make money, they could just go to Wall Street. If you're a male executive, a producer – and I'm not talking about everybody, but the vast majority – you're there partly because you're ­surrounded by gorgeous girls. And that means that the older a woman is, the less they want them around. A woman would disrupt the flow of their lives." Coolidge and others point out that this is as true for black, working-class, and gay film-makers – in fact, ­anyone outside a small ­circle of privilege.

More subtle reasons have been mooted for the dearth of women at the top. One suggestion I heard is that women are brought up to ­negotiate in very ­different ways from men, which is problematic in a male-dominated environment. Coolidge doesn't agree with this – "there are plenty of women who are good ­negotiators" – but Kate Kinninmont of WFTV says she has noticed that, while "women are brilliant at pitching ­somebody else, they're not often good at pitching themselves". Lauzen says reporters have told her that "when they talk to the guys, they can't shut 'em up. But when they talk to the women, it's like pulling teeth . . . Women have to promote themselves, but when they do, it's seen as being unfeminine."

There is also the simple fact that the fewer women there are at the top, the fewer role models and mentors there are; those women who do forge ahead often talk of having to actively ignore the figures. Kidron says that when she was making her first film, she had "a phone call from a journalist who said, 'Do you know you're only the third woman ever to make a feature film in Britain?' And I said, 'Oh, please don't tell me,' and put the phone down, ­because I didn't want the pressure."

A lack of female film-makers also seems to have made it difficult for ­studios to imagine women in charge. Film is big business, filled with financial risk, and so "the whole industry is based on demonstrable success," says Peplow. "Unless something has worked in the past, it's very rare that people will take a risk. There's this perception that, well, traditionally it's a man's role, so we won't buck that."

It's true that men have directed the great majority of high-grossing films over the last decade. The website ­indiewire.com recently reported that, of the 241 films that had grossed $100m or more in the US over the last 10 years, only seven were directed by women (Shrek, Shark Tale, Twilight, What Women Want, The Proposal, Mamma Mia!, and Something's Gotta Give).

But a closer look at the figures reveals that women film-makers aren't a bigger financial risk. In 2008, Lauzen conducted a study called Women@the Box Office, which found that the key to big grosses wasn't the gender of the film-maker, but the budget. Big budgets equalled big grosses. "When women and men have similar budgets," she wrote, "the ­resulting box office grosses are also similar."

The problem is that the biggest budgets tend to be given to films that appeal to teenage boys – still considered the most frequent, most enthusiastic moviegoers (this may be because so many films are aimed at them, but that's another argument). There's no reason why women can't make films for this audience – as Spheeris did with Wayne's World. But female directors say that it is difficult to get assigned to the kind of comedy, horror or action movie that would establish their box office chops.

Despite the enormous success of films such as Mamma Mia! and ­Twilight, executives often seem ­perplexed by films with female themes. "I've been there when a film with a female protagonist has been screened," says Lauzen, "and the guys at the top go, 'Well, I don't get it.' When the majority of people in power are male, who are they going to relate to most on screen, and who do they think other people are going to relate to? Males. That's no big conspiracy. I don't even think it's conscious, honestly." Bird agrees. "One of the big problems is that, 90% of the time, the people who you pitch your idea to are male, and even though they might be very ­sympathetic, they do look at the world from a different perspective."

I ask Lauzen whether she thinks ­female film careers are interrupted by motherhood, and she says no, as do Kinninmont and Coolidge (the latter has extensive experience of juggling the two). They point out that directors tend to be highly driven; there are many cases of heavily pregnant women and young mothers making films. "A lot of them will say, 'Look, I wouldn't let that get in my way,'" says Lauzen.

Kidron, however, says that motherhood has affected her ­career "more than gender . . . At a certain point I had to stop making films in America, and make them here, which made a huge difference. Obviously men also give up an ­enormous amount for their families, but there are many male directors who have partners who take primary care of the family, or who are free to travel with them. That is rarely true the other way around. I absolutely don't want to suggest that women are unreliable ­because we're mothers – on the ­contrary. But the question of who brings up the kids has a material ­effect on all women's careers."

Bird agrees. "Film directing is more than a full-time job. When you're ­making a film, it takes up every day of your life, 16 to 18 hours a day, for a year. Trying to have children and being a film director is virtually impossible ­unless you're rich." Bird doesn't have children: "If I look deep down inside myself," she says, "I'm quite sure that I never did it because I never really had time."

The problems facing female ­directors are structural and systemic, a tangled mix of sexism, cultural ­differences between men and women, and maternity issues; in this, they ­mirror the problems affecting many women in male-dominated workplaces. But the film industry magnifies all this. As Spheeris says: "When the stakes are high, when fame and ­extreme amounts of money and power are involved, it's a jungle out there. It's brutal. How hard do you want to fight?"

Thankfully, many women are ­prepared to fight. British director Lindy Heymann, for instance, whose second feature, Kicks, is released this year, says that one of the great lessons from shooting that film was the realisation that she "didn't have to be liked, that that's the last thing you should be thinking about". She's just one of the film-makers heeding Campion's ­rally cry, getting her armour on; given the high visibility of female film-­makers now – Drew Barrymore makes her directorial debut this year, and there are films in the pipeline from Claire Denis, Gurinder Chadha, Nicole Holofcener, Julie Taymor and Sofia Coppola – perhaps others will be ­inspired, too. If Bigelow raises that gold statuette in March, many more women might breach the boys' club.

via www.guardian.co.uk

70-Minute Video Review of STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE

Chances are you probably didn’t like Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace. You might be a Star Wars fan, or at least a fan of the original trilogy. After waiting in line for hours, days, weeks, you may have even written a mini 200-400 word review on an internet message board somewhere. If you were a working movie critic, you might have even written a 1,000-2,000 word review of the film for some newspaper or magazine. All of this exists in the realm of possibility…but what about a 70-minute video review?

Some guy named Mike from Milwaukee, WI put together a 70-minute video review discussing the many reasons why the movie was horrible. And this isn’t your usual fanboy rant, this is an epic, well-edited well-constructed piece of geek film criticism. In fact, the way I learned about the video was from Lost co-creator and Star Trek producer Damon Lindelof, who said “Your life is about to change. This is astounding film making. Watch ALL of it.”

via www.slashfilm.com

Vin Diesel's MULTI-FACIAL: The Short That Got His Career Started

Here, the man went to Cannes, booked a screening room, showed his short film around the clock (about a multi-racial actor trying to make it in LA), invited everyone, a few actually came and saw it, they liked the film, they liked him, sent it to Spielberg, Spielberg liked the film and liked him, put him in Saving Private Ryan, and the man got his career started. Truly, a lesson to us all (and, at a budget of $3,000, absolutely a must see for aspiring actors and filmmakers everywhere...)

David Lynch and Frank Herbert discuss DUNE (1983)

A 1983 promotional interview with Frank Herbert and David Lynch, freshly posted on YouTube, features Dune author Herbert explaining in unambiguous terms his fondness for the Lynch Dune film that polarized his readers.

David Lynch's 1984 adaptation of Dune, with its grotesque baron, lithe Sting and pre-Blue Velvet Kyle McLachlan, sharply divided the audience for what's often considered SF's bestselling novel. It succeeded neither critically nor commercially — even the easy-going Roger Ebert dissed it, calling it "a real mess... incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless." Audiences generally agreed, and many of the novel's fans thought the baroque film took too many liberties.

To the author himself, though, the film succeeds at many levels, in some ways better than his novel. "As far as I'm concerned, the film is a visual feast," he says in the interview, going on to explain that he wants to frame some of the film's stills so he can have them around him. Herbert was heavily involved with the Lynch film, and even admits at one point that his own screenplay for Dune was horrible.

There's much more to the interview, posted in six parts — Lynch mentioning he'd finished a script for Dune 2, the two men saying they'd barely heard of each other until they came to work together, and Herbert explaining the political origins of his 1965 novel which has since spawned several adaptations and a sequel/prequel cottage industry.

Herbert says:

I'm a history buff... and I got the idea that we had not looked at the messianic impulse in human society... the impact of a messiah, on history, as the creator of a power structure. Because no matter how good the messiah, other people enter the scene. Other people are attracted to the power structure. Every messiah I studied in history was a reformer.

Said Lynch of the project of adapting a book with such a large and rabid following: "You've got to be either stupid or crazy to try something like this."

You can watch all 6 parts here.

via io9.com

Video Interview: William Friedkin

Today's video interview is writer-director William Friedkin. His writing credits include Cruising (1980), To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), and The Guardian (1990). Most well-known for directing movies such as The Boys in the Band (1970), The French Connection (1971), and The Exorcist (1973) . The interview is from FORA.tv.

via www.gointothestory.com

The Exorcist, mah babies. Say no more, say no more...