Need Information on ILM Profitability

The LA Times published an article that said that ILM, Skywalker Sound & "other properties" made $258M in revenue in 2012.   I am trying to discover what percentage of that was ILM and how much profit was derived from the smaller, ILM only, revenue.

If you have an insight into this, please get in touch with me.

The LA Times article:
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/oct/31/business/la-fi-ct-disney-lucasfilm-20121101

Republicans and Oral Sex

Sometime near the end of the Clinton administration, I was sitting in my apartment in New York reading about current politics and the world in the New York Times.  One more time, Congress was deadlocked and could not debate or make progress on any topic, other than one. The only topic the Republicans would permit the discussion of was oral sex, presumably the oral sex between Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton, a subject which was, in my opinion, none of their fucking business.

It was oral sex this and oral sex that.  It was blow job this and blow job that.  Oral sex.  Blow job. That is what Republicans wanted to discuss.  That and nothing else.

I want to propose to you why this was a logical thing for them to do.  There is a legal aphorism that goes like this: "When you have the facts, you pound the facts. When the law is on your side, you pound the law. And when you have neither, you pound the table".

My judgment was that the Republicans had no ideas on any of the important topics and issues that faced this country.  So, having utterly failed to be useful to the nation, all they could do was pound the so-called "character issue" of Bill Clinton.  In reality, the people without character were the Republican Congressman who put the country last and their politics first.  But they felt they had to do that, perhaps, because they had no good ideas on any other topic.

They had no ideas about the economy.  They had no ideas about how to help the poor.  They had no ideas about how to bring peace to the world.   They had no ideas about how to educate people about global climate change or what to do about global climate change if we could even agree it existed.  They had no ideas about how to improve regulation of Wall Street and the banks and prevent the financial meltdown their greed and stupidity was about to cause.  They had no idea on hundreds of other issues, big and small, facing our nation at that time.   

No ideas at all on any topic.

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

All they wanted to do was to discuss oral sex, endlessly.

So, if I ever feel the need to discuss oral sex with a congressman, I know to call a Republican congressman. I would encourage you to do so as well.

But if you are concerned about any other issue facing America today, the Republicans are the last people you should call as they have nothing positive to contribute.  

Drums Must Not Stop

The other day after a memorial service for an old friend from Disney, some of the Disney people took me to a local restaurant for dinner.  Somehow this restaurant was the center of the lattice of causality that night, as various friends of ours accidentally stopped in including a mutual friend from the National Security Agency.

The establishment was a mexican restaurant and cowboy western bar and musical venue all in one.  It had some sort of mid-50s cowboy band from the valley and a height-challenged fan and amateur yodeller who performed a spirited rendition of "I wanna be a cowboy girlfriend" complete with extensive yodels.  Its very hard for me to evaluate the quality of such a performance.   But they were certainly loud.

So in the brief period between songs, when you could actually yell something and be heard, I told them my one music industry joke.

A man is in the jungle, accompanied by native guides. Off in the distance, somewhere in the jungle, a drum starts beating. The drum keeps beating, on and on it goes, day and night, over and over again, endlessly.   "What are those drums" he asks? The natives reply "Drums not stop."   The drums keep going on, hour after hour, beating, pounding, endlessly. "What are those drums?" he asks again.  The natives reply "Drums Not Stop! Drums not stop!"  Finally the man says, "I cant take this anymore, when will those drums stop?  Please tell me!"  The natives reply "DRUMS MUST NOT STOP!!!" and the man finally understands, he is in terrible danger.   Suddenly afraid, he asks desperately,  "Why? What will happen when the drums stop?"  The natives reply "BASS SOLO STARTS".

I think you might have to have attended rock concerts in the 60s and 70s to truly appreciate this joke.

Velikovsky and The Catastrophists

[I think the title of this piece would make a fabulous name of a band of some sort].

When I worked at the Hayden Planetarium, there were a few words you did not use in the presence of an astrophysicist.  Two of those words were "Immanuel Velikovsky", and if you were ever stupid enough to use those words in front of an astrophysicist, you made damn sure that they were not holding a cup of hot coffee or a knife, because out of instinct they would probably throw them at you.

Velikovsky was a "catastrophist", one of my favorite types of people.   Scientists went apeshit when they were faced with Velikovsky's ideas.

A "catastrophist" is someone who believes that the history of this planet has at various times been subject to dramatic events, or catastrophes, that cause a complete collapse of civilization and a restart, usually with no memory of what happened before, or very little memory.   Someone who believed in the biblical flood, for example, as a real historical event would be a catastrophist.   They might theorize that the story of Noah's Flood and of the exile from the Garden of Eden were dim memories of an earlier time and civilization,  handed down through the ages, however imperfectly.   Those who believe that Atlantis existed, but was destroyed by some disaster, would presumably also be catastrophists.   There may be a flavor of catastrophist to some of Lovecraft's work, e.g. the notion of the Elder Races.   Catastrophists can be said to write entertaining stories, in my humble opinion.  As science, that is another matter.

But when Velikovsky discussed his ideas, more formal and respectable scientists lost their minds and went nuts attacking him (so I hear).  Very undignified.   This book tries to explain what happened.

Read this review of a book on the topic.  Trust me.
http://cdn.lrb.co.uk/v34/n21/steven-shapin/catastrophism

Tron 30th Anniversary Screening

This is a report on the Tron 30th Anniversary Celebration held on Saturday, October 27.  This report will not be well-organized, I hope to rewrite it as time goes by and I think of more things to report, as well as having the patience to write it up.

1. The screening seems to have been put on by the fans without studio involvement.

2. Steve Lisberger, Bonnie MacBride, Alan Kay, Richard Taylor, Harrison Ellenshaw, Bruce Boxleitner and Frank Serafine were in attendance.

3. We also had Bill Kroyer, Art Durinsky, Chris Casady, Craig Newman, John Grower, Larry Malone, Josh Pines, Ken Perlin, and Kenny Mirman.

4. John Nelson had not even heard about the event, I think, and I only heard about it because Ken Perlin told me he was coming to town for it.

5. Bonnie MacBride told the story of how the film got into development.

6. Alan Kay told the story of the famous the Parc demonstration, the same one they gave Steve Jobs (the one where Steve got the idea for the Macintosh).

7. This was the second time I had seen the film, the first time was a cast and crew screening at the premiere.

8. When I was watching the film, I noticed odd things that I could not explain. Many lighting effects seemed to be gone, a lot of high frequency detail that usually had aliasing artifacts on it seemed to be filtered, a few scenes just seemed to be down two or three stops for no apparent reason. Many pops in the animation seemed to be fixed. The resolution of the computer world seemed weird to me, but not bad, just weird.

9. When the film was over, Josh Pines and Ray Feeney told me that this was a Blu Ray of Tron that had been projected, and that it had many "mistakes", which I kind of liked, fixed. This would explain most of the weirdnesses I saw. Apparently the studio sees no need to spend any money on this film, and there is no digital cinema master.

10. I think it is a little weird that they would project a blu ray at the 30th anniversary at the Chinese theatre, but if that is all that is available so be it. I thought it looked very good for a blu ray, and probably enjoyed it more not knowing what they were projecting.

11. However that invalidates the screening for one purpose I had for it, I wanted to compare my memory of the 70 mm original and see what held up and what did not. Seeing a stepped on Blu Ray does not permit me to do this.

12. Of the Abel work, I felt that in general it held up, some of it more than other parts of it, but overall it looked very good. I felt that Baily's abstraction portion also held up well.

13. The big mystery is why there are not more women in tight spandex to appeal to adolescent boys? What were they thinking? Cindy Morgan looks pretty good in a glowing neon jumpsuit, but she is on screen barely 20% of the film and is very chaste the whole time. A great opportunity for a neon bad woman in spandex has been lost and I am sure it cost them at the box office.

I will fill this report out as I think of more things.

Wm Jones and His Famous Paragraph

[As an aside, I wonder why I feel some responsibility to tell this story, whether in my own words, or not. Surely something as important as the Indo-European language problem is taught to all 1st and 2nd graders in elementary school as part of introductory philosophy, linguistics and dialectics?  Yet, for whatever reason I feel compelled to beat this horse into the ground, or some other mixed metaphor, maybe out of some confused ego need to try and prove that I am smart or something.  No, honestly, its just because I think its a cool story.]

This is the story of a man who made a discovery about language and history and started an academic field with a single paragraph. He may not have been the first to make this discovery, but he was by far the most important in getting the ball rolling. What he discovered turned out, when you thought about it, to reveal something about the distant past of about half of the people of the world.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a man who made his living as a lawyer, was assigned to the Supreme Court of Bengal, a part of the British Empire of its time. The year was 1783. At the time, what we now call India was considered the furthest reaches of the earth, with many very alien peoples and a vast and very different history. This was in that period of history, about which I know little, that England was trying to bring order out of chaos in a part of the world that had been managed by the famous, or infamous, East India Trading Company.

Our lawyer was also an accomplished linguist, and was well known for his Persian English grammar and translations of Persian poetry. Apparently back then it was not considered unusual for someone to be accomplished in one field and yet make a living in another. Obviously our lawyer knew English, he also knew Latin and Greek as all well-educated men did back then, he remembered his childhood Welsh and he knew Persian.

The traditional and formal language of India was Sanskrit, attested to at least 1300 BC, far older than the earliest attested Greek or Latin. Indians would come to court and quote legal precedent in Sanskrit but none of the justices knew it, so it was decided that someone had to learn and our protagonist, with his linguistics background, was selected.

He found an appropriate tutor and went away to learn this ancient and very alien language.

Languages borrow words from each other all the time. The fact that two different languages may share a word may not tell us much about their history. But languages rarely borrow grammatical structures from each other, and so if they share such things in common, they may very well share a history. English borrowed "attorney general" from the French, but when we make it plural we do so in a way that is consistent with English and not with French.

Greek looks very different from Latin because of their writing systems (e.g. the Greek alphabet has some different letters which, like Cyrillic, make it look very exotic to us).   But to someone who knows both Latin and Greek it is clear that the languages are related.    How the nouns are declined, how the verbs are conjugated, irregularities in both languages that are unlikely to be accidental and so forth.

Suppose one language uses an internal vowel to determine tense: --i-, --a-, and --u-. Swim, swam, swum. Sing, sang, sung. Now suppose you came across a language that had the verb "ring" as in "to ring the bell" and it was conjugated ring, rang, rung.   You might suspect the two languages were related.  But if there were hundreds and hundreds of those similarities, far more intrinsic to a language than mere borrowed words, then you would really have to wonder if the languages were related in some more fundamental fashion.

So Sir William Jones learned Sanskrit. And he discovered something very odd.  Something he really did not expect.  Sanskrit was like the older brother of Greek and Latin. The structure of verbs, nouns, irregularities, all of it. But that was impossible. Sanskrit was far older, and on a completely different side of the world spoken by a very alien people.

And in 1786 he gave a lecture which contained that famous paragraph:

"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists."

You may wonder what that may have to do with you, or with anything else in the modern world. The answer is, everything. But that will be for another time.

Introducing the Female Lead with Visual Effects: Three Case Studies

Even though we acknowledge the central importance of conflict between giant robots, the choreography of spaceship battles, and the sheer awe inspiring triumph of the hordes of zombies at the end of humanity, it does not diminish these vitally important tasks to suggest that there are other, perhaps peripheral, roles for visual effects which nevertheless can contribute to the film.  

To that end, we will present three examples here of visual effects used to introduce the female lead.

I can just see my reader's lips curl in disgust. The female lead? A girl? In a movie with giant robots or zombie hordes?    Yes, in spite of Hollywood's best efforts to diminish the role of women in film, they do linger on, if for no other reason than to provide a cheesy lust object for the adolescent male audience, as well as other, minor dramatic roles from time to time.  Thus it is reasonable to consider how special photographic effects might be used to help facilitate such story points as introduction of the character, death of the character, and so forth.

Just as in a musical, where a song must contribute to the story, in a visual effects film we would hope that there might be a way to use the same ideas that are featured in the dramatic sections of the film to introduce major or minor characters of the narrative.    If we have a film about giant robots, then perhaps the lead female can be born from the forehead of a giant robot, perhaps Optimus Prime, as Minerva was born from the forehead of Zeus. Or in a sensitive drama about zombies, we might first meet our female lead eating brains at lunch and worried about keeping her girlish figure.

Here are three examples where the female lead is introduced to the audience in a way that is (a) spectacular, (b) tells us something about the character, and (c) communicates something to us that will be useful in developing the story, or in the third example, to the (somewhat) surprising climax of the story.

The three case studies are from Roger Rabbit (1988), The Matrix (1999) and Shaolin Soccer (2001).

In Roger Rabbit (1998), our protagonist, a private detective, Eddie Valiant, is hired to see if Jessica Rabbit is involved with another rabbit, or person, as the rumors suggest. As part of his investigation, Valiant goes to see Ms. Rabbit perform at a fancy nightclub where he learns she is not a cartoon rabbit, but a cartoon femme fatale. This is a famous scene so I am sure you know all about the tone mattes and optical compositing done at ILM.  One could not ask for a better introduction of this character. The song also advances the story, helping to establish Jessica as a sex goddess who breaks the hearts of both men and rabbits.

Why does Valiant keep his overcoat on in this scene?   It feels inappropriate to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy5THitqPBw

In our second example, we have everyone's favorite polyethelyne poster child, Carrie Anne Moss, known as Trinity in her landmark film The Matrix because she perfectly expresses the three values of sex, violence and shiny catsuits in women. We meet this woman typing happily on her laptop in a decrepit room of some sort, when suddenly she is the target of a police raid. There are several interesting things in this scene beyond the first use of so-called "bullet time", which is an extension of the Brigham morphing technology of years ago. First, we learn that she can take on two "units" of policemen without too much trouble (a unit is probably either 3 or 4 policemen). Second, we learn, when this is all done, that this incredible woman is terrified to hear that there are "agents" in the area, thus telling us something about the world we are in. Third, we learn that properly applying traditional analog techniques of lighting can bring out the best of Ms. Moss in a tight jumpsuit. Notice the subtle use of lighting below, which carefully accents her formidable attributes as perceived by many adolescents.

A careful use of key lights can add specular highlights to shiny contours

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPtk7mweahY

In our final scene, we have a film that is well known in the far east, but got very little distribution in North America to the best of my knowledge, Shaolin Soccer (2001). In this intellectual drama, good is pitted against evil in the form of a soccer contest, and good is enhanced through the power of the secret techniques from the Shaolin monastery of China. This movie makes extensive use of the rather obvious in retrospect idea that some of the most important things in sports can be made trivial through using CG to create the soccer balls (or whatever the sport in question uses, ping pongs, basketballs, etc) and just having the actors / players mime performing the sport. But in this scene, our hero spies his future love, the poor and acne challenged Mui making bread. If you havent seen this scene before you should watch it, it is pretty great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtBebT-rKeM\

Roger Rabbit on imdb

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096438/

Shaolin Soccer on imdb

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0286112/

The Matrix on imdb

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0286112/

Process Notes for Global Wahrman 10/30/2012

These are some notes on the process of writing Global Wahrman, and some thoughts to myself on how things are organized and where things are going. Some of you may find the meta posts more interesting than the posts themselves. But mostly this and similar "administrative posts" are written for myself, so I can recall what it was I was thinking at the time.

1. The process of creating the post online

I write these things offline, but I edit them online, that is, after they are published. Otherwise, I will never finish them, I will just rewrite them, forever.  But as I edit and reread things to check what I just published, I find mistakes and make minor changes. But one thing leads to another and the entire post may be rewritten, after it has been published, in place.   Also, I have a new anomaly in my writing style, one I have not noticed before, that of being so intent on what I am saying, that I do not notice how I spell it, and can not see the mistake until enough time has passed to be able to see it fresh.    In at least one case I think we have a situation where I made a mistake because of my own denial of the passage of time and mortality, or that is what I suspect.  I dated the release of The Bourne Identity to 1992 instead of 2002 which is the correct release year.   For all these reasons, a newly published post may be revised, sometimes in its entirety, over the first few days, then it seems to stabilize.

2. The "Selected Posts" list

This list, on the right hand side of the blog, is an index of the "best of" posts, or the posts most likely to be of interest to someone new to the blog, or the posts I want to use as writing samples. 

3. End of the first phase

We are through the first period of the blog and now enter into the second period, which I suspect will last about a year, more or less.  The first phase was to get some experience with the process.  In this upcoming phase we will introduce many of the themes of the blog.   You can already see a few of the themes emerging by seeing which labels have the most posts.   The highest count is "sarcasm" with 30 posts.

4. The easy versus the difficult topics

Some of the most interesting topics have not been posted because they have proven to be too hard to write about, and so I abandon them and do something easier to maintain some sort of rhythm of the posts to the blog (e.g. approx 1 / day).  This is one reason of many why this kind of writing is easier than the task of a professional, in many circumstances the professional can not choose the topic, but has to write to an assigned topic.

5. The genre of the self-published journal

It is not a surprise to those who helped create the Internet and related technologies that the genre of the self-published journal, a genre which is many centuries old, has been enhanced and given new life. It is a surprise to me however that I find the process of creating such a journal so useful. How many of these journals will survive the great destruction and "end of history" as Ken Perlin and others put it, is not clear.

6. The labels will change

The labels are a mess today and will be restructured. The labels will be one of the tools to structure the topics of the blog in a non-obvious fashion. We may need some other tools as well, as yet unwritten, to help put together the twisty logic of topics being assembled.

7. Existential Crisis

See the post on "Shakespeare in Doubt" for one major existential crisis.  See the post on the death of Elizabeth McKenney for another.

8. "Analytics"

"Analytics" is the term used for the statistics provided about who is reading the blog.  I have my doubts about the accuracy of these numbers, for a variety of reasons.    We are slowly building a daily audience it seems. It may not be coincidence that the two posts with the highest read count (e.g. the count that each post gets when someone goes directly to that post rather than just reading the blog in general from front to back) are the TRW / Robert Abel post and the Josh Pines Job Interview post. Both of these were "marketed" by mentioning them on Facebook which seems to have increased the audience to the right people as well as generating good comments (on Facebook, comments will have to be moved over by hand, I think).

Just Got Back from Los Angeles and Boy are My Arms Tired

I have been in LA for the Bob Lambert memorial service at Disney, the 30 year Tron Anniversary at the Chinese, a visit with Ken Perlin who was in town from NYC, a fabulous sail boat ride in the marina on a friends's new yacht, and my fabulous and exciting encounter with the LAPD who decided to release me rather than throwing me in jail.  It must be the red hair; it really seems to provoke some people   More about all this in the next few days.  Things are really heating up here at Global Wahrman.

Visual Effects and Subjective Reality in Barton Fink (1991)

This is a spoiler alert for the Coen Brothers film, Barton Fink (1991).

Visual effects are usually used in a very simple way conceptually, to show the audience something that would be hard to film, or expensive to film, or impossible to film, or just inconvenient to film. But generally the idea that is intended for the audience is that what you see is what you get, e.g. what you see is supposedly what happened.

If the story is simple, by definition the visual effects are almost certainly simple.  If the story has many levels or ambiguity or an "unreliable narrator", then there is an opportunity for visual effects to contribute to the film in a more interesting, at least conceptually, fashion.

Visual effects could, for example, show us what the character is feeling, or if the character is insane, what he is seeing.     It is not "photo realism", that hated and evil term of art, but maybe it is "subjective realism".

The best example I know of this, and one of my favorite uses of effects in any project, is the climax of the film Barton Fink (1991). This is a spoiler alert, read no further if you don't want to know.

It is a plot point of the film Barton Fink that whenever Charlie the insurance salesman (John Goodman) is around, it is very hot. The temperature is hot, so hot that the wallpaper peels off the hotel room walls. When Charlie is not around, the temperature returns to normal.   The heat and Charlie are in some way associated with each other.

Charlie, who is portrayed in the film as a prototypical "every man" is,  it turns out, a psychopath as well as an insurance salesman, whose trademark signature is to cut off the victim's head and leave the body.

The climax of the film occurs when two police detectives arrest Fink at his hotel because they believe that he is an accomplice and handcuff him to the metal frame bed in his hotel room. Charlie (aka Mad Man Mundt) has returned to "save the day" in a manner of speaking, and we know this because the temperature at the hotel starts rising.

Put down the policy case, Mundt, and put your mitts in the air.

The police detectives go out into the hallway to confront Mundt but when Mundt appears this time we can see what he sees: and what we see is that Charlie is in hell. And it is hot because wherever Charlie is there are flames burning all around him, in this case from the walls, even though the flames do not consume anything, e.g. the hotel does not burn down.

This is one of John Goodman's best performances.  This scene, and the one that follows, in which he explains his actions to Bart is spectacular.

One of the structural problems with visual effects in filmmaking is almost a tautology: visual effects are there to serve the story, but if the story is banal then the effects are banal as well, generally speaking. This is one of the best uses I know where visual effects are used to illustrate the subjective world of the character in a way that is spectacular and yet completely appropriate.

Its dramatic, its poetic, its intelligent,  and it is really well thought out.  How unusual.   

Now we return to the world of giant robots beating each other up and things exploding, the normal world of visual effects.

Barton Fink at IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101410/