When I criticized Rob Ager’s analysis of spatial impossibilities in The Shining, I didn’t realize the extent of wild theories about Kubrick’s film:

“Room 237,” the first full-length documentary by the director Rodney Ascher, examines several of the most intriguing of these theories. It’s really about the Holocaust, one interviewee says, and Mr. Kubrick’s inability to address the horrors of the Final Solution on film. No, it’s about a different genocide, that of American Indians, another says, pointing to all the tribal-theme items adorning the Overlook Hotel’s walls. A third claims it’s really Kubrick’s veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the Apollo Moon landings.

Of course, we’ll never know Kubrick’s true intentions, because he’s dead.

Unless he isn’t.

Craig and John discuss the screenwriter’s role in casting, then segue to the New York Times profile of producer/executive Lindsay Doran and her approach to story.

Doran argues (persuasively) that successful movies are often less about whether the hero wins or loses, but rather how his achievements are measured. For example, a character’s victory is much more satisfying when there is someone to share it with — the real moment isn’t the game-winning touchdown, but when the quarterback kisses his wife afterwards.

She’s not pitching happy endings, but rather positive outcomes. It’s an interesting way to look not just at how we tell stories, but also which stories we tell.

We also touch on the advantages of mentally casting your movie as you write, writing (or rewriting) for the cast you are given, and the delicate art of making someone think he came up with an idea on his own after you plant it in his head.

This and more mind-control tips on the 21st episode of Scriptnotes.

Podcast: Download | Embed

LINKS:

• Go casting sides for Mannie
• The Remnants casting sides
• The New York Times on Lindsay Doran
• Martin Seligman on Wikipedia
• INTRO: Wild Wild West theme
• OUTRO: Pizzicato Five – Sweet Soul Revue

You can download the episode here: AAC | mp3.

UPDATE 1-26-12: The transcript of this episode can be found here.

I haven’t said much about SOPA/PIPA, largely because the whole thing makes me so depressed about the industry I work in and the lawmakers who are too stupid or too lazy to understand what they’re voting on.

As Mike Davidson puts it:

If you want to pass any sort of bill that affects the internet, you better vet it with the people who control the internet. […]

It would be like the EPA trying to sneak through a law that automobiles get 100mpg by year’s end without even talking to the car companies first.

But that’s just what Congress did, and was shocked when freedom-loving citizens and giant corporations — never best buds — rose up together in protest.

When you stir stupid and lazy together, they form a toxic compound called Smug Ignorance. It’s non-partisan and always fatal. The symptoms are phrases like, “I don’t know much about computers, but…” or “Look, no one knows if climate change is real.”

Senator, someone knows. It’s your job to ask.

In an old article that Scientific American recently reprinted, Antonio Damasio looks at how Hitchcock’s “no cuts” feature Rope squeezes 105 minutes into 80:

Where do the missing 25 minutes go? Do we experience the film as shorter than 105 minutes? Not really. […]

First, most of the action takes place in the living room of a penthouse in summer, and the skyline of New York City is visible through a panoramic window. At the beginning of the film, the light suggests late afernoon; by the end night has set in. Our daily experience of fading daylight makes us perceive the real-time action as taking long enough to cover the several hours of the coming night, when in fact, those changes in light are artificially accelerated by Hitchcock.

His analysis of Rope’s timeline is a sidebar to a longer article about how the brain time-stamps information to make the past seem orderly and the present feel “present.”

But in terms of Hitchcock’s film, I think Damasio overstates his case.

All movies exist in unreal time, not because of cuts and gimmickry, but because the experience of watching a movie involves surrendering to that film’s reality. We go into dream mode, especially when watching something on a giant screen in a dark theater.

Psychologists could — and I suspect have — shown test subjects a hour-long continuous shot of humdrum video. When asked to report its duration, guesses would vary considerably.

That’s not cinematic mastery. That’s our brains being only so-so at gauging time, particularly when denied outside clues.

In movies, unless something seems wildly impossible — driving from LA to New York in an hour — audiences are extremely forgiving about time, particularly if overall story logic seems to be consistent. In many of my favorite movies, I couldn’t tell you how many hours or days or months have elapsed in story time.

When movies work, you don’t care.

The rest of Scientific American’s special A Matter of Time issue (on newstands) is fascinating, by the way, touching on quantum matters, ancient clocks and other geekery. My very first screenplay was about Boulder’s atomic clock, so I’m a sucker for these things.

Jeremy Dylan doesn’t share my zeal for renting movies:

In a recent episode, August and Mazin presaged a dystopian future in which entertainment exists only in an ethereal online space and nobody owns anything. Apparently, we are marching inexorably towards this brave new world and any attempts to halt the approach would be futile.

I like owning things. I own The Philadelphia Story. I own all seven seasons of The West Wing. I own The Last Waltz. I paid a one-off charge at a store at some point, and in exchange, I own these things. I can watch them as often as I feel like, whenever I feel like, in perpetuity, and it costs me nothing further. I don’t need to be connected to the internet to do so. And no one can take away my ability to watch it. If I come across someone who’s never seen The West Wing (seriously?), then I can lend them my copy. While they have it, I can’t watch it, which is only fair. If they get bitten by the Sorkin bug, they can trot off and buy their own copies, and enjoy the associated privileges I listed above.

Valid points, every one of them.

I think one reason DVDs (and Blu-rays) have been so successful is that they hit a sweet spot of being cheap enough and small enough that you can afford to keep an extensive collection in a normal-sized apartment. If, at two in the morning, you suddenly have a jones for the second season of 24, you can pull out the discs and start watching.

That is, as long as you’re at your apartment. If you’re in a hotel room in New York with your iPad, the ability to get that through streaming is much more appealing.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been travelling so much — or because I’m going through a general discardia phase — but I’m much happier to not own things. If a book is the same price in hardback or on Kindle, I’ll always take the Kindle edition.

With movies, yes, there’s the risk that I won’t be able to watch what I want when I want it. But that’s my argument for more pervasive licensing and rights-packaging. With HBO Go, I can watch that episode where David gets carjacked and confirm that oh shit, yeah, that was insane. It’s like having all the DVDs to all the seasons of all the HBO shows, and I’m happy to pay for access to it.

But that’s me. I rarely re-watch movies. I rarely re-read books. For folks wired the other way — which I suspect is a sizable majority — ownership of atoms makes a lot of sense. I think we’ll continue to have ways to buy physical books and movies. It’s not either/or.

John and Craig take an in-depth look at how screenwriting credits are determined. In some ways, credit arbitration is a luxury problem — the movie you wrote got made! — but it’s one of the most controversial, contentious and misunderstood parts of a screenwriter’s career.

Ideally, you’re the first, last and only writer employed on a movie. For Go and The Nines, that was the case. In situations where more than one writer works on a movie, figuring out who deserves credit can become an ordeal.

Most non-animated Hollywood features are written under a WGA contract. Part of that contract specifies that the WGA ultimately determines who receives screenplay and story credit (which collapses into “written by” credit if the same writer receives both). This week, we take a look at the rules, principles and guidelines, and offer advice for writers who find themselves facing a credit arbitration.

Plus, a quick visit to CES.

Podcast: Download | Embed

LINKS:

• Mat Honan’s sad-and-accurate portral of CES
• WGA’s screen credits manual
• Craig’s guide to writing an effective arbitration statement
• INTRO: CHiPs opening titles
• OUTRO: Stereophonics: You Sexy Thing

You can download the episode here: AAC | mp3.

UPDATE 1-18-12: The transcript of this episode can be found here.