What is the art of immersion? The focus of the book is on how the internet is changing storytelling; and the idea is really that every time a new medium comes along, it takes people 20 or 30 years to figure out what to do with it, to figure out the grammar of that medium. The motion picture camera was invented around 1890 and it was really about 1915 before the grammar of cinema–all the things we take for granted now, like cuts and point-of-view shots and fades and pans–were consolidated into first what we would recognize as feature films. Birth of a Nation being the real landmark. It wasn’t the first film that had these characteristics but it was the first film to use all of them and that people settled on that really made a difference. I think we are not quite there yet with the internet but we can see the outlines of what is happening, what is starting to emerge; and it’s very different from the mass media that we’ve been used to for the past 150 years. (…)
NotSoSerious.com–the campaign in advance of the Dark Knight. This was what’s known as an alternate reality game. This was a particularly large-scale example that took place over a period of about 18 months. Essentially the purpose of it was to create this experience that kind of started and largely played out online but also in the real world and elsewhere that would familiarize people with the story and the characters of the Dark Knight. In particular with Heath Ledger as the Joker. Build enthusiasm and interest in the movie in advance of its release. On one level it was a marketing campaign; on another level it was a story in itself–a whole series of stories. It was developed by a company called 42 Entertainment, based in Pasadena and headed by a woman named Susan Bonds who was interestingly enough educated and worked first as a Systems Engineer and spent quite a bit of time at Walt Disney Imagineering, before she took up this. It’s a particularly intriguing example of storytelling because it really makes it possible or encourages the audience to discover and tell the story themselves, online to each other. For example, there was one segment of the story where there were a whole series of clues online that led people to a series of bakeries in various cities around the United States. And when the got to the bakery, the first person to get there in each of these cities, they were presented with a cake. On the icing to the cake was written and phone number and the words “Call me.” When they called, the cake started ringing. People would obviously cut into the cake to see what was going on, and inside the cake they found a sealed plastic pouch with a cell phone and a series of instructions. And this led to a whole new series of events that unfolded and eventually led people to a series of screenings at cities around the country of the first 7 minutes of the film, where the Heath Ledger character is introduced. (…)
The thing about Lost was it was really a different kind of television show. What made it different was not the sort of gimmicks like the smoke monster and the polar bear–those were just kind of icing. What really made it different was that it wasn’t explained. In the entire history of television until quite recently, just the last few years, the whole idea of the show has been to make it really simple, to make it completely understandable so that no one ever gets confused. Dumb it down for a mass audience. Sitcoms are just supposed to be easy. Right. Lost took exactly the opposite tack, and the result was–it might not have worked 10 years ago, but now with everybody online, we live in an entirely different world. The result was people got increasingly intrigued by the essentially puzzle-like nature of the show. And they tended to go online to find out things about it. And the show developed a sort of fanatical following, in part precisely because it was so difficult to figure out.
There was a great example I came across of a guy in Anchorage, Alaska who watched the entire first season on DVD with his girlfriend in a couple of nights leading up to the opening episode of Season 2. And then he watched the opening episode of Season 2 and something completely unexpected happened. What is going on here? So he did what comes naturally at this point, which was to go online and find out some information about it. But there wasn’t really much information to be found, so he did the other thing that’s becoming increasingly natural, which was he started his own Wiki. This became Lostpedia–it was essentially a Wikipedia about Lost and it now has tens of thousands of entries; it’s in about 20 different languages around the world. And it’s become such a phenomenon that occasionally the people who were producing the show would themselves consult it–when their resident continuity guru was not available.
What had been published in very small-scale Fanzines suddenly became available online for anybody to see. (…)
The amount of time people devote to these beloved characters and stories–which are not real, which doesn’t matter really at all, which was one of the fascinating things about this whole phenomenon–it couldn’t have happened in 1500. Not because of the technology–of course they are related–but you’d starve to death. The fact that people can devote hundreds of hundreds of hours personally, and millions can do this says something about modern life that is deep and profound. Clay Shirky, who I believe you’ve interviewed in the past, has the theory that television arrived just in time to soak up the excess leisure time that was produced by the invention of vacuum cleaners and dishwashers and other labor-saving devices.
Teorema (1968) is an Italian language movie directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and starring Terence Stamp. It was the first time Pasolini worked primarily with professional actors. (…)
Terence Stamp plays a mysterious figure who appears in the lives of a typical bourgeois Italian family. He engages in sexual affairs with all members of the household: the devoutly religious maid, the sensitive son, the sexually repressed mother, the timid daughter and, finally, the tormented father. The stranger gives unstintingly of himself, asking nothing in return. Then one day he leaves, as suddenly and mysteriously as he came.
Teorema means theorem in Italian. Its Greek root is theorima, meaning simultaneously “spectacle,” “intuition,” and “theorem.”
Lisa and Louise Burns, the actresses who played the Grady daughters, are identical twins; however, the characters in the book and film script are merely sisters, not twins.
Stuart Ullman: My predecessor in this job left a man named Charles Grady as the Winter caretaker. And he came up here with his wife and two little girls, I think were eight and ten. And he had a good employment record, good references, and from what I’ve been told he seemed like a completely normal individual. But at some point during the winter, he must have suffered some kind of a complete mental breakdown. He ran amuck and killed his family with an axe. Stacked them neatly in one of the rooms in the West wing and then he, he put both barrels of a shot gun in his mouth.
The 1980s was a heady and decadent time for rock stars. Stories of bad behavior by some of rock’s finest – be it trashing hotel rooms or simple prima donna demands – were splashed all over the headlines. And few of those stories were as famous as the “Van Halen and M&Ms” story.
In case you weren’t around during the 80s, the rock supergroup Van Halen had a clause in their concert contracts that stipulated that the band would “be provided with one large bowl of M&M candies, with all brown candies removed.” (…)
David Lee Roth: “I came backstage. I found some brown M&M’s, I went into full Shakespearean “What is this before me?” …you know, with the skull in one hand… and promptly trashed the dressing room. Dumped the buffet, kicked a hole in the door, twelve thousand dollars’ worth of fun.”
Häxan (English title: The Witches or Witchcraft Through The Ages) is a 1922 Swedish/Danish silent film written and directed by Benjamin Christensen.
Based partly on Christensen’s study of the Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th century German guide for inquisitors, Häxan is a study of how superstition and the misunderstanding of diseases and mental illness could lead to the hysteria of the witch-hunts.
The film was made as a documentary but contains dramatized sequences that are comparable to horror films. With Christensen’s meticulous recreation of medieval scenes and the lengthy production period, the film was the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever made, costing nearly two million Swedish krona. Although it won acclaim in Denmark and Sweden, the film was banned in the United States and heavily censored in other countries for what were considered at that time graphic depictions of torture, nudity, and sexual perversion.
{ The man who founded a religion based on The Big Lebowski. When he saw the Coen brothers’ hit movie, Oliver Benjamin had an epiphany, and he is now the “Dudely Lama” of The Church of the Latter-Day Dude in Chiang Mai. | CNN | full story }
Enthusiasm for The Wire is hardly limited to law professors, but the series does seem to hold a special appeal for us, especially if we teach criminal law and criminal procedure. What accounts for that appeal? Not, I think, the widely praised realism of The Wire, at least not in the most obvious ways. The series does have an almost visceral sense of place, and it does show, in grim detail, many of the ways the criminal justice system goes wrong. But the loving attention to Baltimore does little to explain the particular pull the series has for those of us who teach and write about criminal justice, and the institutional failures that the series spotlights—the futility of the war on drugs, the cooking of crime statistics, the often casual brutality of street-level policing—are, let’s face it, hardly news. Even among law professors, it’s hard to imagine any documentary about those failures, no matter how accurate, generating the kind of excitement The Wire has generated.
It has to be said, too, that there are important ways in which The Wire isn’t all that realistic. It is not particularly good, for example, at capturing the workaday feel of law enforcement. Any number of less celebrated television programs—Barney Miller, Cagney & Lacey, Hill Street Blues, even Law & Order—have done a better job of that. Nor, for the most part, does The Wire seem especially perceptive about leadership. The organizational dynamics of law enforcement, and the compromised politics of city government, often have a crazed, over-the-top feel in the series—entertaining, but not strikingly true to life. In these respects, and some others, The Wire aims less for verisimilitude than for the power of myth.
Nonetheless much of what makes The Wire so gripping—and, I think, much of what makes it especially gripping for professors of criminal law and criminal procedure—does seem to have to do with a certain kind of realism. It isn’t detailed accuracy about institutional failures, or the drug trade, or post-9/11 Baltimore, but something at once bigger and more basic: the dimensions of human and moral complexity that criminal justice work, in pretty much any time or place, will inevitably bring to the surface.
{ David Alan Sklansky, Confined, Crammed, and Inextricable: What The Wire Gets Right, 2011 | SSRN | Continue reading }
Despite the first ‘Cars’ movie’s somewhat unimpressive reviews and ticket sales, Pixar is rolling out a sequel. Why? Because the animated film sparked a long-lived licensing bonanza.
In the five years since its 2006 release, “Cars” has generated global retail sales approaching $10 billion, according to Disney. That ranks the Pixar film alongside such cinematic merchandising standouts as “Star Wars,” “Spider-Man” and “Harry Potter.”
No fewer than 300 toys — and countless other items, including bedding, backpacks and SpaghettiOs — are rolling out in stores, in anticipation of the “Cars 2″ opening.
“We anticipate the consumer products program to be the largest in industry history, eclipsing the high water mark set by ‘Toy Story 3,’” Disney Consumer Products Chairman Andy Mooney said in a webcast last week before the annual toy licensing show in Las Vegas. Last year, the third installment of “Toy Story” generated $2.8 billion in merchandise sales.
How appropriate that you had to use someone else’s joke to take a swipe at me. I told you my idea. You did it two weeks later, VERBATIM. Spew revisionist shit all you want. Everyone knows you’re a hack. Also, everyone knows how you fucked over Paul Feig on the new show. All your press mentions “your” brilliant “Freaks and Geeks,” as if Feig didn’t even do the series. It must have killed you when the true genius behind it got nominated for an Emmy. Is your wife still livid about someone in the neighborhood building a house just like hers? Tell her I know how she feels. The reason I called was to tell you to piss off. We’ll never be “friends,” regardless of the pussy whining from your last email. I respect you zero.
{ From an exchange of emails in fall 2001 between Judd Apatow, the creator of the sitcoms Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared and a successful writer of Hollywood screenplays, and Mark Brazill, the creator of That ’70s Show. | Harper’s magazine | Continue reading }
Television showrunners are notorious multitaskers, with the most successful able to toggle easily between the roles of CEO and auteur. But Louis C.K.’s work on Louie requires a whole different level of personal oversight. The show is based on his life. Louis is the director. He’s also the only writer, the sole editor (he no longer shares duties with the co-editor he had last season), not to mention the person who oversees music (when the music guy’s budget ran out, he decided to do it himself). He also hired his own casting team: Last season, he turned down FX’s offer to help out and doesn’t inform them about casting in advance. But perhaps the most unusual aspect of the show is that Louis C.K. gets no notes from the network during filming, no script approval—an unheard-of “Louis C.K. deal” that has made him the envy of comics and TV writers alike.
The fact that we’re living in a nightmare that everyone is making excuses for and having to find ways to sugarcoat. And the fact that life, at its best, is a pretty horrible proposition. But people’s behavior makes it much, much worse than it has to be.
In my business you’re only as good as your last move, like an actor in his last movie. Just because I got one thing right four years ago doesn’t mean I get everything right now. The most important thing is to be right… your reputation depends on being right day by day.
In the 2006 movie, Borat: Cutural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, English comedian Sacha Baron Cohen plays the role of an outrageously inappropriate Kazakh television reporter who journeys across the United States to film a documentary about American culture. In the course of his travels, the title character uses his bizarre persona to elicit offensive statements and behavior from, as well as to generally humiliate, a number of ordinary Americans who are clearly not in on the joke. How did the producers convince these unfortunate stooges to participate in the project? According to several who later sued, the producers lied about the identity of Borat and the nature of the movie when setting up the encounters in advance over the telephone, and they then contradicted and disclaimed the lies in a waiver that the stooges signed without reading just before the cameras began to roll.
This talk article explains the doctrinal and normative reasons that the Borat problem, which arises frequently, although usually in more mundane contexts, divides courts. It then suggests an approach for courts to use when facing the problem that minimizes risks of exploitation and costs of contracting.
