Alamo Drafthouse cinema on convincing Sony to release "The Interview"; The screenwriter of ‘The Imitation Game’ always wanted to tell the true story of Alan Turing; Celebrating 10 years of The Black List, the place where Oscar winners “Argo,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “The King’s Speech” debuted; What television to binge-watch over the holidays.
'The Interview': How art house theaters banded together to save Sony's once-doomed film
The saga of "The Interview" is one of the most fascinating and exhausting stories out there right now. It involves possible international cyberterrorism, petty Hollywood e-mail squabbling and a whole lot of leaked information.
But who would have thought that it would eventually involve art house theaters?
After the five major North American exhibitors pulled the film from their screens, a coalition of 250 art house theaters created a petition through the organization Art House Coalition to show the film. Sony uncanceled the release of the film, and now there are small theaters all over the country that will be showing "The Interview" on Christmas Day.
James Kirst, the founder of Los Angeles's Downtown Independent Theater, says originally he had no plans to screen the movie. Despite hosting a taste-maker screening of "The Interview" for Sony in October, they still "wouldn't normally book a film of this size."
In fact, Kirst has tried to bring larger movies to his theater before.
"We've asked to play 'The Hobbit' series and been denied," he said. "It's just the reality of the situation."
But "The Interview" fiasco has provided, in Kirst's words, "an interesting opportunity to let smaller theaters that are normally locked out of these films participate."
The Downtown Independent is, as the name suggests, an independent theater with just one screen, but there are larger theaters in the art house scene that will run "The Interview." One such chain is Alamo Drafthouse, a theater that started in Austin, Texas in the late 1990s.
Christian Parkes is the Chief Brand Officer for Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas, and he says that, "The conversation of civil liberties and freedom of expression was pushed right to the very front of the dialogue," surrounding "The Interview." He refers to the Art House Convergence's petition to Sony as, "a line in the sand."
Parkes continued: "We felt that if we seceded here then we would be setting a precedent, and that precedent would really extend into any type of creative space, whether it's literature, music, news outlets and media, TV shows ... any type of media that someone could be offended with, that they could then make a violent threat against, we felt would be put in jeopardy."
When asked about the Drafthouse's security, Parkes answers with a laugh, "I can definitely say our security is better than it was two weeks ago." He says Alamo Drafthouse has been in contact with both the FBI and local law enforcement officials to insure that people can safely attend their theaters.
Parkes concluded by claiming that, "This is a really good moment for the art house movement. There's a lot of people that will be going to these theaters tomorrow — there are over 300 theaters across the US that have booked this film — that won't necessarily normally go to these theaters, and they'll see trailers for films they would never normally be exposed to. From a broader level, I'm actually really proud of what we've been able to do: we stepped up and said that we're able to do something that the big exhibitors are not willing to do."
"The Interview" opens in limited theatrical release on Christmas Day.
The Black List celebrates 10 years of giving aspiring screenwriters a boost
Want to know what the best picture contenders for the Oscars might be in a couple of years? Well, take a look at something called the Black List — the 2014 version is just out.
The Black List is a roster of the best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood. Having read countless bad screenplays as a junior film executive, founder Franklin Leonard e-mailed his industry friends and asked them to send him the 10 best screenplays they had read that year.
Ninety people responded, so Leonard tallied up the votes and sent the compiled list back to those who had voted. And just like that, The Black List was born.
For the last 10 years, Franklin Leonard has aggregated the list, which has championed success stories like "Juno," "American Hustle," and "Argo," while becoming one of Hollywood's top resources for finding unfinanced screenplays. Many Black List films have gone on to win Oscars for best picture.
The idea for the list came to Leonard when he was a junior development executive at the production company of Leonardo Di Caprio. Franklin was tasked with finding quality scripts for the actor, and he couldn’t seem to find a single one.
Interview Highlights:
Hollywood loves to figure out ways to game the system and it's certainly a popular sport among agents and managers. How do you make sure no one games the system to promote their scripts?
Here's what I can say, I've never been offered a bribe and I've been gratified by that. There is certainly money to be made by having the client on the list, or having a script on the list, so you would think that at least somebody, at least one person, would call me and say, "Hey, listen, I need a favor, or hey listen, there's $50,000 in a dropbox somewhere. Never happened.
The assumption is that there is a creative meritocracy among screenplays in Hollywood, that the cream will rise to the top. The list clearly suggests that isn't the case. Does getting a script on the list, in your mind, create a better opportunity for that film to get produced?
If you've written a great script, eventually it will probably fall into the right hands, but that eventually could be literally decades. I hope that what the Black List does is create a far more efficient marketplace for that material. There's a distinction for me between causation and correlation, and I think that the correlation between scripts that are on the list and their success every year means there's more attention to the scripts that are on the list and we've created a virtuous cycle, where we have a catalyzing effect, but we're certainly not getting the movies made. We wanted to create something where the gap between being a working writer and being an aspiring writer was simply being a good writer.
The intention and the approach of the Black List has remained pretty consistent over the years, you poll what would be known as creative executives, generally, about what they think are the best unproduced screenplays. How has it evolved over those 10 years and how would you say it has changed the most materially?
The annual list remains very much the same as it was when it began. Beyond that, though, I think we've built a large number of things underneath that with the goal of being a tide that raises all boats in the industry, and most especially the boats of writers and ... the boats of good writers. Among those things is our website, which functions as a searchable database of any screenplay that anybody could want to make. We also invite writers from all over the world to upload their scripts to our site, have them evaluated and if they're good, we tell the entire industry. There are a number of initiatives focused on film and focused, in our case, on screenwriters.
There are people who have done what you have done before, in terms of script evaluation services, and they prey on people who don't have a molecule of talent. Will you tell people who clearly have no writing talent whatsoever to not quit their day jobs?
Absolutely. What I will say is two things, the first is that when we first launched the website there was a sort of an outcry that was sort of in the online screenwriting community saying we were rating scripts too highly because we wanted people to continue giving us money. There was a larger outcry, which was that our readers didn't know what they were talking about because they never gave any high scores. Obviously both things can't be true, and the fact of the matter is that no, our readers are incredibly tough, we give very, very high scores, fewer than three percent of the scripts that are submitted to us get a rating of eight or better, which actually merits them getting recommended to industry professionals. We're very transparent about the fact that you at any time as a member of our site, you can go online and see how many people have looked at your script page, how many people have downloaded your script. I've said hundreds of times and I'll say it again, if we're not getting traction for your script on the website, please stop giving us your money.
Screenwriter Graham Moore risks 'career suicide' to write 'The Imitation Game'
If you're a fledgling screenwriter in Hollywood, you might be tempted to play it safe with your first movie. Or you could go to your talent agent and tell them that you want to tackle the story of Alan Turing, the genius mathematician who helped crack Nazi Germany's Enigma Code and was later persecuted by the British government for his homosexuality.
Despite being told by his agents at CAA that it would be "career suicide," Graham Moore decided to pursue the Turing story. And things have worked out pretty well for Moore: His movie's been nominated for five Golden Globe awards, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay and the movie is very much in the Oscar conversation.
When Moore came by The Frame recently, we asked him about the challenge of pulling the varied elements of Turing's life into one script and the impact of Turing's personal life on his mathematical theories.
Interview Highlights:
When did you decide that this was a story that you wanted to tell?
I was this tremendous and monumental computer nerd when I was a teenager. I went to Space Camp, I went to computer programming camp, but you go to computer camp and Alan Turing's legend looms quite large. He'd be talked about in this secret, queer history of computer science, like, "Did you know that's the guy who secretly invented the computer? Only no one knows that because he was rubbed out of the historical record when he was persecuted by the government for his homosexuality after the second World War."
It was this amazing true story that not that many people knew about, and he was always such a tremendous inspiration to awkward, dorky kids everywhere; I'd always wanted to write about him for my whole life.
And what did your talent agent say when you said, "The thing I really want to do is make a World War II movie about a gay mathematician"?
Oh, yeah, no, I promise you, when the agents at CAA hear the phrase "gay mathematician," dollar signs flash before their eyes. "Man, that's going to be a huge hit movie." No, that's not what they say when they hear that. [laughs] They told me it was career suicide.
They were like, "Please don't write this movie, no one will ever make this movie, no one will ever buy this movie, no one will ever see this movie. It would be career suicide to write this." And I was like, "But I don't even really have a career. How can I ruin something I don't really even have?" We can joke about that now, because we have this movie and we really love it.
So when you're looking to adapt this into a movie, there are at least three different spheres of his life. One is obviously that he was a gay man in a time when being a gay man in Britain and a lot of other places around the world was a crime. Two, he was a brilliant mathematician who invented one of the first computers. And three, he was at Bletchley Park trying to break the Enigma Code. So you have these three interlocking storylines, but as you start to figure out how to write it as a script, how do you juggle those three different, and sometimes competing, narratives?
I think we had this idea going into the film that Alan Turing was obsessed with puzzles. He loved codes, he loved games, and so we were going to present the movie as a puzzle. The movie focuses on three periods of his life: His formative teenage years and his first love with another boy in boarding school in the 1920s, his code-breaking work for the British government during the second World War in the 40s, and then what happened to him after the war with his eventual arrest and persecution for being a gay man in the 1950s.
And so I was going to take these three periods of his life and present them to you out of order, achronologically cut them up, so the periods can ask questions of each other, scenes in different times can answer questions asked by scenes in other periods, and so in this achronological way the movie would become a puzzle in and of itself, the answer to the puzzle being the mind of Alan Turing. The audience would hopefully be trying to solve the movie in the way that Turing was trying to solve one of his own puzzles.
How did you go about writing Turing's love life, and how he felt about other people and how he expressed his sexuality to other people?
Early on in this process, when the movie really clicked together and I felt I knew how to write it, was when it seemed to me that Turing's highly technical, theoretical, mathematical work was so deeply inspired and influenced by his experience as a closeted gay man in Britain in the 30s and 40s.
If you look at Alan Turing's paper in which he proposes the imitation game, for instance: as he proposed it, the imitation game is this concept that we are only what we can convince others that we are. We are human to the degree that we can convince someone else that we are human.
I think that for a philosophical statement like that to come from a closeted gay man in the 30s is remarkable, this man who is, in some sense, pretending to be someone who he is not every day. He's imitating someone who he is not every single day, and so he defines imitation as the very heart of human experience and human intelligence.
3 TV shows to binge on during the holiday break
Now that you've crossed everything off your Christmas shopping list, it's time to relax and get to some TV shows you haven't been able to watch over the past year.
Here with some advice on what’s worth spending hours on your couch is Margaret Lyons. She covers TV for our partners at Vulture.com where she writes “Stay Tuned,” a weekly column about how TV plays into our lives:
Transparent (Amazon Prime)
The show has become the first breakout hit for the online streaming service, Amazon Prime, and has received some of the best reviews for any new TV show this season. "Transparent" was created by Jill Soloway, who was inspired to make this show after her parent came out as trans.
There are only 10 half-hour episodes so it's not a huge commitment. Here's Margaret's take:
It's dreamy and beautiful but also really humane and it covers everything about sex, gender identity and family politics. It has this very warm style and I was just completely blown away by that show this year.
You can watch the first season on Amazon Prime.
Orphan Black (BBC America)
"If you're looking for something more in the sci-fi genre, 'Orphan Black' returns for its third season at the beginning of next year, and it's a fantastic, exciting, different style of show," say Lyons. Tatiana Maslany -- who was recently nominated for a SAG award -- stars as a woman who discovers she's a clone and plays over a dozen characters with a wide spectrum of nationalities and character traits.
Here's what Margaret has to say:
It kind of reminds me of some of my favorite episodes of 'The X-Files,' in that it's dark but also very funny and the characters are really sharply drawn. And there's people who are very paranoid and people who are very blasé and everyone's just trying to figure out how to exist in this world where things you thought were true really aren't.
You can watch seasons 1 & 2 on Amazon Prime.
Mad Men (AMC)
"Mad Men" has been hailed as one of the greatest shows on television right now by TV critics and fans alike, but after seven seasons, the show comes to end next week. If you haven't watched a single episode, now is the time to do so.
Here's Margaret's take:
'Mad Men' is this sort of definitive show of our era. It predates Breaking Bad and embodies that anti-hero style that's been popular in the past few years, but it also pushes things forward with really developed female characters, ideas that talk about consumerism and American ideals and what it means to be a person. I think it's a show that has a lot to say and I'm always excited to bring people on board.
You can catch up on "Mad Men" on Netflix.
If you have a question for "Stay Tuned," you can ask Margaret on twitter ( ).