Most of his points aren’t new, but they’re delivered in less-hysterical terms than you often see.

The music people used to say, “How can you can compete with free?” And now you ask anybody in digital music and they’ll tell you, “I’m just trying to compete effectively with free.” They’ve embraced the very condition that up until very recently they said they would reject. I’m telling you, you are going to compete with free. Sometimes you’re even going to win, once you make the commitment to living in the marketplace as it is and not as you wish it were or as it once was.

Garland shares my sympathy for international viewers, who are often told to wait months for movies that the U.S. gets on day one. If you don’t give the audience a convenient and legal way to watch something, they’re going to find a convenient and illegal way. And it’s hard to blame them.

I have much less sympathy for users outraged that Hulu is going to start charging. “Hulu is dead to me” is the common refrain on messageboards and Twitter.

But here’s the thing: you don’t have a god-given right to free shows, just as you can’t walk into Barnes and Noble and start shoving books in your backpack. We’ve conflated the ideas of intellectual liberty and zero cost into a big bundle of entitlement.

While I disagree with many points in Chris Anderson’s Free , he makes a useful distinction between flavors of “free.” I’d argue that movies and television need to be free as in accessible — by a global audience on their timetable. But you can have that kind of free without setting the price at zero. In fact, charging for something often makes it more accessible, by making it economically worthwhile to keep the systems running.

Right now, Hulu competes very effectively with free torrents on price. But if it chooses to move to a subscription model, it can ultimately offer more content at higher speeds, allowing it to compete better with free torrents on access.

Netflix is often seen as a tremendous bargain, offering a vast selection of movies and TV on demand for a low subscription price. That’s what Hulu may morph into, and that’s not cause for alarm.

Gary Whitta wrote in with his proposed moratorium: the wall of expository newspaper clippings. They’re a movie staple, but I’ve never seen one of these in real life.

However, I have in fact seen parents’ shrines to their children’s accomplishments, which is why I’m (barely) able to give myself a pass for this moment at the end of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:

Part of the difference may literally be the framing. Newspaper clippings pinned to the wall reads as crazy/obsessive. Clippings nicely mounted and hung reads simply as pride.

The high technology wireless radio devices that are concealed in the ear canals of the good guys for surreptitious communication work just fine without sticking your finger in your ear. And yet on NCIS Los Angeles last week –- in a pivotal scene where a guy is being shadowed -– there were all the protagonists, obvious as could be, looking like they forgot to take a Q-Tip to their ears for the last month.

For once, writers are off the hook. Nowhere in the scene description do we tell actors to poke their fingers in their ear canals.

Rather, it’s directors who are likely propping up this cliché, worried that the audience — particularly a CBS audience — won’t understand why characters are talking to invisible people.

8. The Matrix: Why do the machines need humans?

The intelligent machines have all humans hooked up to elaborate devices to harvest their body heat and chemicals, right? But they also have sophisticated fusion reactors. The energy production of fusion reactors compared to that of humans (with all the maintenance required, including The Matrix itself) is so much more efficient it’s just ridiculous -— and we’re supposed to believe that intelligent machines, which would presumably operate logically, would keep the humans around anyway? It’s obviously necessary for the plot, but it just makes no sense.

But what would make sense is if humans were used not as batteries, but rather as organic CPUs.

For all its processing power, perhaps the Matrix can’t do something that human brains can. So they use the connected humans as a fleshy cloud computer to keep the Matrix running.

As a viewer, I’d be willing to accept an incredibly simple answer here. On page 50, instead of…

…how about…

For example, if you View Source on the new Answer Finder I built, you can see the JavaScript (and jQuery) that drives the menu and shows/hides various the sections.

What you can’t see is the PHP on the server that generated those sections. In my case, this is a good thing, because the PHP is so awful and kludgy that I can’t explain or defend why it works.

So to make that one page, I’m relying on a bunch of technologies with vastly different levels of transparency.

The “transparent” technologies are available for anyone interested in looking. And that’s mostly good: Peeking beneath the hood is a great way to learn how a technology works. I often find myself opening the CSS for sites I like to see how they’re constructed.¹

I’m classifying HTML as semi-transparent because so much of the HTML you see when you “View Source” for a site is generated by scripts running on the server, and it’s not automatically clear how or why. Wordpress, for example, mixes in at least four parts (Header, Content, Footer and Sidebar) to make any given page. Someone familiar with WordPress might be able to deduce a basic structure, and figure out which parts were generated by The Loop. But in some cases it’s arbitrary. For example, the category links at the bottom of most pages on this site could be hard-coded or generated on the fly, and you wouldn’t be able to tell.

While you can find a lot of information about the images used on a site, including where they’re stored, you don’t necessarily know how they were generated. The chart above, for example, is a .png made from a snapshot of a Numbers document.

In the fully-opaque category are PHP and MySQL, who do most of the heavy lifting for the site but are completely insulated from the user.

Traditionally, programmers have been able to disappear behind the opacity of a compiler. Designers could hide behind the printing or manufacturing process. With the web, the process behind the product is much more visible.

(End of Geek Alert)

The same thing is happening to movies. Not too long ago, a movie came into existence in popular culture just shortly before its release, when the first ads and trailers started running. I didn’t know anything about Die Hard before I saw a trailer. I saw The Blair Witch Project without any idea who made it or how.

Now, long before the marketing begins — before production even begins — details of projects spill across the internet for consumption and criticism. Scripts leak. Photographers sneak pictures of the set, or the costumes. The omission of a giant squid becomes the focal point of conversation for a movie that doesn’t yet exist.

For movies and television, I’m not sure we’re better off “showing the work” in advance.

I appreciate reading American Cinematographer to see how Robert Elswit lights There Will Be Blood, but I don’t read those articles before seeing the movie, lest I get too distracted by those details when I watch it. Likewise, I wish I didn’t know what I know about Terminator: Salvation or Dollhouse. It’s not insider knowledge, but rather the media reporting on the media.

This isn’t transparency, an invitation to come look inside. It’s forced exposure. It’s uncomfortable, and by nature we try to avoid uncomfortable things.

1. Keep in mind that you can learn bad habits this way.

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to screenwriting. When it comes to making a film, the screenwriter’s craft is probably the most direct and transparent. What did you do? You wrote the script, the 120-or-so pages of Courier around which everything else revolves. Your work is front-and-center.

Cinematographers, production designers and editors can’t point to a product which is “theirs.” In the finished film, the light is lovely; the world is stunning; the pacing is tight. All wonderful accomplishments, but inextricably bound to the work of others. That wonderful light would go unnoticed if it didn’t highlight the sets, and the sets would be meaningless if the editor favored close-ups. And the contribution of directors, who marshall all these forces in addition to actors’ performances, is probably the most difficult to judge.

As a concise, pre-existing document, the screenplay is probably the only thing that can be judged independently of the finished film. Put another way, the screenwriter shows his work.

But the irony is, after the film is made, no one asks to see his work.

Indeed, we award “best screenplay” based on a viewing of the finished film. If the movie was good, we figure the screenplay was probably pretty good. We guess. Even though we don’t need to guess, because the screenplays for “award contender” movies are commonly available. But frankly, it would be a lot of work to read all those screenplays, so we don’t make that a requirement, even for the WGA Awards. The more honest award would be titled, “Best Film based on a Screenplay which was Probably Good, and Presumably Didn’t Get Messed Up by the Director or Others.”

Worse, we also presume that a bad movie came from a bad screenplay. At some point, I’ll fund a comprehensive study of film reviews from the past 10 years, tracking exactly how many times the film’s screenwriter’s name is mentioned. My gut tells me that the writer’s name is three-to-four times more likely to be mentioned in a negative review than a positive one. But I’d love to see data.

In the meantime, screenwriting will continue to be the most transparent and opaque part of moviemaking.

A comment (#6) on an article about Objective-C programming had a good simile for this situation:

It is like I showed a chain saw to a early American colonist, and he said, “Can I cut down the tree without starting the engine? I don’t like the noise. Maybe I can just bang it against the tree?”

UPDATE: More discussion here.

Wherefore isn’t a fancy way of saying where. It’s a fancy way of saying why or therefore:

As longtime readers will know, I’m generally not Mr. Stickler when it comes to word usage. I’ve gotten several terms wrong over the years, including “begging the question.” I fully understand that words change meaning over time as languages grow and adapt. English is particularly nimble in this regard, and that’s a good thing. English is not Latin.

So why my beef with “wherefore?”

Wherefore isn’t a modern word in any sense. Its only use is in lame callbacks to the balcony scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. So every time it’s misused as a synonym for “where,” the writer reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the iconic scene.

She’s not asking where he is. She’s asking why this hot guy she’s in love with has to be Romeo, a Montague, member of the rival gang. If we were writing that line now, it would be something like:

But the where/wherefore mistake is so fundamentally entrenched that we now expect Juliet to be straining at the edge of the balcony, looking out in the night with hopes of seeing her true love. It sets up the idea that she knows he’s coming, that a rendezvous has been set. It changes the scene in fundamental ways.

I’m a realist: this fight will never be won. I’m certain I’ll go to my grave having just read a headline on the Mentalinet which makes the exact same mistake. I’m calling it out simply in hopes that some of my readers might join the fraternity of people who know that it’s wrong, and will bristle when they see it.

What’s most clear, however, is that they’re sticking with the bizarre and unfortunate editing interface.

Yes, I have the curse of knowledge: I know how an editing system is “supposed to” work, as it does in Final Cut, Avid and to some degree, the original iMovie. But I’m always game for a new and better idea, particularly if it makes heretofore complicated things easier for newcomers to understand. iMovie is supposed to let ordinary Mac users cut together simple videos. I get that.

But worse than being unlike real editing systems, iMovie is unlike any normal Mac application. Take a look at how Precision Editor works in the new iMovie.

You move the mouse along the gray bar, or inside one clip or inside another clip. You’re not clicking or dragging; you’re just floating. Unlike every other Mac application in which a click selects something (or moves the insertion point), a click in iMovie is a cut — or more precisely, it adjusts the out point of the top clip. A click in the lower clip adjusts its in point. There’s feedback, in the sense that the video suddenly jumps, but it’s not immediately clear what’s changed, or what would be undone if you hit Undo.

Throughout iMovie, there’s a lot of WTF? Important things are hidden in pop-up menus, often attached to clips. I understand and support the idea of attaching actions to objects, but how is Precision Editor an action? It’s a noun, not a verb, and opens as a separate viewer.

The timeline is the other major frustration. Anyone who has ever watched YouTube understands that in video, time moves from left to right. If you drag the playhead — the little circle — you’re moving forward and backward in the clip. But not in iMovie. In iMovie, time wraps like text, left to right then up and down. Apple has created a new and inferior grammar for no good reason.

Fortunately, Final Cut Express is only $169 on Amazon. It can import iMovie projects, and you’ll definitely want to. While it seems more complex at the start (more menu items), it consistently rewards your expectations about how video and Macs are supposed to work.

It will shock exactly no one that I voted for Obama. Twenty months ago, I attended an early fundraiser for his campaign, and left with guarded optimism. “Wouldn’t it be great if..?” was how I spoke of his candidacy, trying to imagine a president who would inspire rather than infuriate. At every step, I tried to temper my hopes and brace for disappointment. But I was constantly surprised by the intelligence behind the eloquence, and the consistency of message and tone he maintained over a ridiculously long trial. It was a great pleasure to ink the dot beside his name.

While the presidential campaign has been going on since the Pleistocene, the more recent and urgent issue in California is Proposition 8, a ballot measure that would take away my marriage by amending the California constitution. I’ve written about it before, particularly in Off-Topic, and have had a virtual yard sign on the sidebar for months.

On Saturday, I sent a long email to friends and colleagues making sure they understood how urgent it was that this ballot issue be defeated. While only Californians can vote on this proposition, the impact will no doubt be felt nationally and beyond. So in that spirit, I’m reprinting my letter here. I know that a huge portion of the readership lives outside the state — and nearly a quarter of readers are overseas — but if it helps a few voters understand what’s at stake, that’s something.

We’re ten days away from the election.

Which seems as impossible as it is welcome. Can you even remember a time when the news wasn’t dominated by election coverage? What did we talk about? What did we do? I look forward to rediscovering it all on November 5th.

In all the non-stop coverage of the candidates and their foibles, a tremendously dangerous ballot initiative has gotten much less attention than it deserves:

Proposition 8 would eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry in California.

Mike and I got married on June 28th. We want to remain married on November 5th. And without your help, we won’t.

Obviously, the fact that you’re a friend and/or colleague means that I think you’re a genius superstar with the heart of a paladin. You know Proposition 8 is wrong. But in daily life, you’re encountering dozens of people who might not get it, and worse, might not have a genius superstar to help them see why they need to Vote No on 8.

So consider this a cheat sheet for those conversations. And an appeal from me to please, please have these conversations, as awkward as they may be. Both sides are expecting this to be extremely close, so it really may come down to how your brother’s girlfriend votes. Yes, this is a long email, but it’s meant to be as much as reference as a rant. Feel free to copy-and-paste, rewrite-and-repurpose anything you see in it if it helps persuade the people in your life to Vote No on 8.

First off: Vote No on 8.

I shudder to think that some well-meaning voters will say to themselves, “Hey, I support gay marriage!” and mark “Yes.” It will happen. That’s why you have train yourself to think “No.” It can help to rephrase the proposition thusly: “Should religious conservatives rewrite the California constitution?” No. They should not.

You have to Vote No on 8. You have to ink that dot.

Many voters only vote the top of the ticket — for president. In a normal election, I wouldn’t care. But for the ballot initiative to pass, they only need to cross the 50% margin of votes cast on that issue. It’s not 50% of ballots — it’s 50% of the votes on that topic. So unless you actually mark the dot or punch the chad for No on 8, it’s as if you didn’t vote at all.

For people who’ve seen the other side’s ads

Vote No on 8, because it has nothing to do with education

Did you see that ad with the little girl talking to her mom about what they taught her about marriage in school? Total fabrication and fear-mongering. Do you remember being taught anything about marriage in school? I remember eating paste and learning my multiplication tables. But that’s the story they’re trying to sell. Fortunately, the state superintendent of schools and every teacher’s group you can think of came out very strongly against this inflammatory untruth.

If the backers of this proposition were worried about education, they should have sponsored a ballot initiative about education, rather than trying to strip away rights from thousands of California families.

Vote No on 8, which has nothing to do with taxes or religious freedom

One of their early ads implied that churches would lose their tax-exempt status if they refused to perform same-sex marriages. Think about that for a moment. Are Catholic churches required to perform Jewish weddings? Would you go to a Mormon temple for a Indian wedding? No. You would not. Churches have always and will always be do choose who they wish to marry, thanks to the First Amendment. (You know, that one before the awesome “right to bear arms” one.)

Believe it or not, this seems to be the major force behind Mormon involvement in Proposition 8. This afternoon, we encountered some Yes on 8 supporters waving signs near the Americana at Brand shopping megaplex. (And let me tell you, it’s weird to encounter people actively protesting your existence.) With Amy on my arm, I went up and spoke with them, asking what would happen if Prop 8 passed. “We wouldn’t be forced to marry gay people in our temple.” I asked them what would happen to me if Prop 8 passed, and they were stumped. “We’re not against two guys getting married,” one explained. “We just want to be able to keep our temple sacred.” They really, truly believe that without Prop 8, a lawsuit will force them to violate their religious tenets. They don’t trust the separation of church and state, so, ironically, they are undermining it even further.

From yesterday’s Salt Lake Tribune: “This time, LDS leaders have tapped every resource, including the church’s built-in phone trees, e-mail lists and members’ willingness to volunteer and donate money. Many California members consider it a directive from God and have pressured others to participate. Some leaders and members see it as a test of faith and loyalty.” It explains the zeal, at least.

Don’t take this as Mormon-bashing; research shows that the majority of the money supporting Proposition 8 comes from members. I grew up with a lot of Mormon friends, and found them singularly terrific. Even the people I spoke with today were nice as could be, considering the signs they were holding. But they clearly put themselves and their church first. When asked whether what they were doing was fair to me and my family, they could only shrug.

“Activist judges” are the new “terrorists.” Vote No on 8.

You’ve seen ads arguing that the Supreme Court ignored the will of the people by ignoring Prop 22, which was passed in 2000 with the exact same wording. But consider that nearly every major civil rights issue in our history has come as a court decision. In fact, it was the California Supreme Court that overturned the ban on inter-racial marriage, almost twenty years before Loving v. Virginia. Few reasonable Americans would argue that blacks, Latinos and women should have waited patiently until the majority of voters felt comfortable giving them rights.

Also, expect an ad about “small businesses.”

That’s one of their “Six Consequences If Proposition 8 Fails” that I haven’t seen in ad form yet. Same-sex marriage is supposed to hurt Joe the Plumber somehow. Wait for it.

For people who like endorsements

Obama says Vote No on 8.

“I oppose the divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California Constitution.” Same with Biden: “If I lived in California, I’d clearly vote against Prop. 8.”

The Democratic Party says Vote No on 8.

In fact, the Democratic-led California legislature twice voted for equality in marriage rights.

Even Governor Schwarzenegger says Vote No on 8.

And this is the guy who wouldn’t sign those marriage bills when they landed on his desk. Twice.

A lot of Republicans also say Vote No on 8.

In fact, the guy in charge of No on 8 is a Republican. Fairness is a family value. Dude, even Dick Cheney gets it: “Freedom in this country ought to mean freedom for everyone.” (He has a lesbian daughter, who is supporting No on 8.) The judges who ruled that same-sex couples need to be allowed to marry. Mostly Republicans, appointed by Republicans.

Almost every major California newspaper says Vote No on 8.

The L.A. Times says it is “a drastic step to strip people of rights.” La Opinión calls Prop 8 “an unnecessary initiative.” The San Diego Union Tribune writes that Prop 8 “offends many Californians’ sense of fairness.”

Apple, AT&T and Google say Vote No on 8.

Sergey Brin of Google: “However, while there are many objections to this proposition — further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text — it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 — we should not eliminate anyone’s fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.”

For logical people

Vote No on 8, or you’ll be seeing a lot more of these ridiculous initiatives

The exact process that got this on the ballot could be used to do anything. Anything. You could ban green kites. You could tax Irish people. You could name a cat as Emperor. Because of California’s unfortunate tradition of voter initiatives, any ridiculous thing you can imagine can and will show up on the ballot unless we Vote No on 8.

Vote No on 8, because a majority shouldn’t be able to deny minority rights

A constitution is designed to protect citizens from their mob instincts by setting the rules for how government is going to work. Fundamental to that idea is that the rules should apply equally to everyone. Except in California, where you can permanently change the constitution with just 50% of the vote. This shouldn’t even be up for a vote. So Vote No on 8.

Vote No on 8, because “domestic partnership” is not the same thing

You’ll hear, “Couldn’t they just settle for civil unions?” Or, “California already has domestic partnership.” So let me set you straight on these terms. They’re meant to be comfortable replacements for the word “marriage.” But they’re not the same thing. If they were, Bristol Palin would be getting civil unioned. The word marriage matters. If it didn’t, they wouldn’t have spent $40 million putting this ballot issue together.

The other fundamental problem is that separate-but-equal has never worked out that well, historically or now. For example, before we got married, Mike and I were domestic partners. It’s supposed to give us all the same rights as marriage, but in practice, it’s basically roommates with hospital visitation privileges. Companies can happily ignore our joint status. Mike and I get challenged on the paternity of our daughter. It sucks. So what’s meant to be a parallel system inevitably becomes a second-class system.

For emotional people

What would you do if the government tried to take your marriage away?

The Yes side seems to cheerfully ignore that we’re not talking about a hypothetical right to get married. Eleven thousand couples have gotten legally married in California since the court’s decision come down. What happens to those people? What happens to John and Mike? There’s no clear answer. If that sounds scary, it is. So Vote No on 8.

When have Americans ever taken a right away?

Could you have voted to keep inter-racial couples from getting married? Probably not. The history of America, and California in particular, is towards personal freedom and responsibility. Indeed, if you ask most people, even most religious conservatives, they think same-sex couples will be free to marry in the future. So why not now? Vote No on 8.

Other things to consider

The polls are kind of useless…

The pollsters honestly admit they have no way of getting an accurate fix on how people are going to vote on this issue. Every day, you see a new one, and the numbers vary by 20% based on how the question is asked. So in some polls, No on 8 is up by double digits. In others, we’re down by the same amount.

…but their fear-based ads are working

Since you can’t measure an exact figure, it’s more helpful to look at trends in the polling. And the supporters of Prop 8 made a lot of headway when they started airing their TV and radio ads. No on 8 has new ads that have leveled it out, but it’s clear that there’s a big pool of swayable voters who could go either way.

Young women and church-going minorities especially important audiences

There are people who will absolutely vote for Prop 8, and folks who will absolutely Vote No on Prop 8. But there’s a squishy middle ground which includes a lot of voters who are traditionally Democratic but may be uncomfortable with the idea of same-sex marriage. Rather than challenge their feelings and beliefs, make sure to appeal to their sense of fairness and justice. Help them understand it as a form of discrimination, and listen to hear any talking points from the Yes side, which are pretty easy to address.

The ask

• Obviously, please Vote No on 8.

• This week, please talk to at least eight California friends about the election. Even if they are planning to Vote No on 8, please double-check that they actually understand how urgent it is. One of Mike’s friends has refused to vote in California for 20 years, but registered six weeks ago specifically to Vote No on 8.

• Email this — or better, your version of it — to folks you think will find it helpful.

As friends, a lot of you have already donated to the cause at NoOnProp8.com. But if any part of this email has made you nervous or angry, please donate more. Unfortunately, this has come down to a money race for TV ads, and they keep pulling ahead.

Thanks,

– John

I’d really like you to comment on these thoughts by David Mamet:

“People have tried for centuries to use drama to change people’s lives, to influence, to comment, to express themselves. It doesn’t work. It might be nice if it worked for those things, but it doesn’t. The only thing the dramatic form is good for is telling a story.”

I haven’t read Mamet’s full essay on “Countercultural Architecture and Dramatic Structure,”¹ but through the wonders of Google Book Search, I was able to look at the quote in context. It’s part of a meandering rant, and not the key thesis of his essay. So I feel safe disassembling it without challenging the authority of a revered playwright.

He doesn’t detail his logic behind why drama doesn’t work for those four specific purposes, but it’s part of a larger criticism of how filmmakers spend too much energy making “statements” and too little effort on making movies. And fair enough.

I don’t have evidence to argue that drama can change people’s lives. I know it can affect them; I’ve got a folder full of emails about Big Fish. But “changing someone’s life” implies a marked and permanent alteration, and given my limited sample size (myself), I haven’t found that any drama has necessarily done that.

Can drama influence or comment? Certainly. We often think of comedy as the preferred means of making a social or political observation (Bulworth, 9 to 5, Borat), but there’s a long history of issue-oriented dramas, many of them top-tier (Reds, Traffic, Hotel Rwanda).

Can writers use drama to express themselves? Well, yes, obviously. Most artistic works, from graffiti to haiku, can be considered self-expression — though to my thinking, anyone who defends his work as self-expression is very likely a hack.

There’s no question that you can write a movie about how shitty your parents were. Mamet isn’t really denying that. He’s saying drama isn’t good for this purpose, the same way you can pound a nail in with a wrench, but it’s not the ideal tool. Maybe drama, with its demands of plot and tension and resolution, is not particularly well-suited to a lot of the tasks put before it.

Ultimately, I agree with his point if not his conviction. The foremost purpose of a movie should be the story itself. If a secondary purpose (such as social commentary, or “telling my journey”) weakens the story, you’ve weakened the movie.

I know this is high talk coming from a guy who co-wrote Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. But that trainwreck is actually a perfect example of how a movie collapses when nearly every element (wardrobe, choreography, wire-fu) is allowed to trump story.²

(Repeat 149 times.)

What Mamet is arguing is that even high-minded goals like social commentary ultimately become Cameron Diaz’s swirling ass — attractive distractions that ultimately lessen a movie. And he’s got a point.

1. It’s apparently also in On Directing Film.
2. If you’re bored and curious, the DVD commentary between me and The Wibberleys is an amusing dissection of how Full Throttle got so messed up.