John Lennon - World-of-Newave.info http://answers.world-of-newave.info/john-lennon.htm Latest news and articles about John Lennon en-us Copyright (c)2004-2008.§/Newave SARL. All rights reserved. webmaster@world-of-newave.com (Webmaster) Mon, 08 Sep 2008 09:40:35 GMT Mon, 08 Sep 2008 09:40:35 GMT Newave Lisa XML Engine v1.0 - http://www.world-of-newave.info/about.htm 60 http://www.world-of-newave.info/images/wi8831.gif World-of-Newave.info - Knowledge and Informational Database http://www.world-of-newave.info/ 88 31 {AUTOS > MAGAZINES AND E-ZINES} - World's Best Hypermilers Going for Another Record http://articles.world-of-newave.info/recreation/autos/magazines-and-e_zines/world-s-best-hypermilers-going-for-another-record-2008094229.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/recreation/autos/magazines-and-e_zines/world-s-best-hypermilers-going-for-another-record-2008094229.htm Sat, 06 Sep 2008 10:32:06 GMT John and Helen Taylor are the two of the world's most fuel-efficient drivers, and to prove it they've set off on an 8,000-mile drive around the United States to set a new record for fuel economy. The husband-and-wife team from Australia are the Lennon and McCartney of hypermiling, having racked up three-dozen fuel efficiency records in 26 years. They've already circumnavigated the globe on a record-setting 24 tanks of fuel and crossed Australia on just eight, getting 75 mpg along the way. Now they plan to go coast-to-coast across America using no more than 12 tanks to beat the current cross-country fuel economy record of 51.8 mpg. "It will be a great adventure to drive through the 48 U.S. mainland states," Helen Taylor says. "We want to educate the American public that by choosing the right car, using the right fuel and adopting fuel-saving techniques, everyone in the U.S. can save money, fuel and reduce carbon emissions."The pair set off from Chantilly, Virginia this morning in a new Volkswagen Jetta TDI. The EPA rates the car at 29 city/40 highway, but VW says independent tests by AMCI returned 38 city/44 highway. The Taylors believe they can improve that by avoiding sudden starts and stops, scrupulously following the speed limit, keeping their tires properly inflated and following other basic "fuel-stretch" techniques anyone can adopt. The trip will take the couple counter-clockwise around the country with stops in Vermont, Ohio, Iowa, South Dakota, Montana, Nevada, California, Colorado, Oklahoma, Illinois and Louisiana. They expect to arrive in West Virginia on Sept. 26. Topping the record should be a piece of cake. The couple averaged 75 mpg earlier this year during a 25-day, 9,060-mile trek around Australia in a Peugeot 308 diesel. Two years ago they set the Guinness world record for fuel efficiency for a 'round-the-world trip, slogging 18,467 miles through 25 countries in a Volkswagen Golf diesel that got 52.1 mpg. A hardcore hypermiler on over-inflated tires could probably pulse-and-glide their way to better numbers, but until Guinness recognizes them for it, the Taylors hold the title. You can follow their progress at FuelAcademy.org. Photo by Volkswagen. Blog.Wired.Com World's Best Hypermilers Going for Another Record {new window}   Blog.Wired.Com - John and Helen Taylor are the two of the world's most fuel-efficient drivers, and to prove it they've set off on an 8,000-mile drive around the United States to set a new record for fuel economy. The husband-and-wife team from Australia are the Lennon and McCartney of hypermiling, having racked up three-dozen fuel efficiency records in 26 years. They've already circumnavigated the globe on a record-setting 24 tanks of fuel and crossed Australia on just eight, getting 75 mpg along the way. Now they plan to go coast-to-coast across America using no more than 12 tanks to beat the current cross-country fuel economy record of 51.8 mpg. "It will be a great adventure to drive through the 48 U.S. mainland states," Helen Taylor says. "We want to educate the American public that by choosing the right car, using the right fuel and adopting fuel-saving techniques, everyone in the U.S. can save money, fuel and reduce carbon emissions."The pair set off from Chantilly, Virginia this morning in a new Volkswagen Jetta TDI. The EPA rates the car at 29 city/40 highway, but VW says independent tests by AMCI returned 38 city/44 highway. The Taylors believe they can improve that by avoiding sudden starts and stops, scrupulously following the speed limit, keeping their tires properly inflated and following other basic "fuel-stretch" techniques anyone can adopt. The trip will take the couple counter-clockwise around the country with stops in Vermont, Ohio, Iowa, South Dakota, Montana, Nevada, California, Colorado, Oklahoma, Illinois and Louisiana. They expect to arrive in West Virginia on Sept. 26. Topping the record should be a piece of cake. The couple averaged 75 mpg earlier this year during a 25-day, 9,060-mile trek around Australia in a Peugeot 308 diesel. Two years ago they set the Guinness world record for fuel efficiency for a 'round-the-world trip, slogging 18,467 miles through 25 countries in a Volkswagen Golf diesel that got 52.1 mpg. A hardcore hypermiler on over-inflated tires could probably pulse-and-glide their way to better numbers, but until Guinness recognizes them for it, the Taylors hold the title. You can follow their progress at FuelAcademy.org. Photo by Volkswagen.
World's Best Hypermilers Going for Another Record | Autopia from Wired.com {...} John and Helen Taylor are the two of the world's most fuel-efficient drivers, and to prove it they've set off on an 8,000-mile drive around the United States to set {...}
Indexed: September 6, 2008, 10:32 am - Page Size: 83KB
Category: Recreation > Autos > Magazines and E-zines

]]> Recreation > Autos > Magazines and E-zines {ENTERTAINMENT > PUBLICATIONS AND MEDIA} - Taylor-Wood 'to make Lennon film' http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/entertainment/publications-and-media/taylor-wood-to-make-lennon-film-20080840029.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/entertainment/publications-and-media/taylor-wood-to-make-lennon-film-20080840029.htm Fri, 29 Aug 2008 11:02:50 GMT Photographer and video artist Sam Taylor-Wood signs up to direct a movie about the life of former Beatle John Lennon. News.Bbc.Co.Uk Taylor-Wood 'to make Lennon film' {new window}   News.Bbc.Co.Uk - Photographer and video artist Sam Taylor-Wood signs up to direct a movie about the life of former Beatle John Lennon.
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Taylor-Wood 'to make Lennon film' {...}
Published: August 29, 2008, 11:02 am - Indexed: August 29, 2008, 2:10 pm - Page Size: 44KB
Category: Arts > Entertainment > Publications and Media

]]> Arts > Entertainment > Publications and Media {NEWS > BREAKING NEWS} - Meet Leland Chee, the Star Wars Franchise Continuity Cop http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/meet-leland-chee-the-star-wars-franchise-continuity-2008089619.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/meet-leland-chee-the-star-wars-franchise-continuity-2008089619.htm Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:55:00 GMT On the wall behind Leland Chee's desk is a portrait of an Ithorian, an alien with a hammer-shaped head that you glimpse briefly in the famous Star Wars cantina scene. In its leathery, foot-long fingers, the Ithorian holds a cube decorated with elaborate metallic tracings, a device known as a holocron. Think of it as a Force-powered hard drive, capable of storing an enormous quantity of information. "It's a piece of Jedi technology," Chee says. "It tells you ... everything." To Star Wars fans, Chee is the Keeper of the Holocron, arguably the leading expert on everything that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. His official title is continuity database administrator for the Lucas Licensing arm of Lucasfilm—which means Chee keeps meticulous track of not just the six live-action movies but also cartoons, TV specials, scores of videogames and reference books, and hundreds of novels and comics. Keepin' it canonical: Leland Chee, continuity database administrator at Lucas Licensing, maintains the Holocron — a vast FileMaker database that's consulted to make sure that any new elements added to the Star Wars franchise fit within the existing mythology. Producer: Annaliza Savage, Editor: Michael Lennon, Camera: John Ross For more, visit video.wired.com. Of course, Chee's Holocron isn't a Force-sensitive crystal. It's a FileMaker database, a searchable repository of more than 30,000 entries covering almost every character, planet, and weapon mentioned, however fleetingly, in the vast array of Star Wars titles and products. The Holocron isn't just for fun—when Lucas Licensing inks a deal with a toy company or a T-shirt designer, it vets those ancillary products to ensure they conform to the spirit and letter of the continuity that has come before and will continue afterward. In the past 31 years, Star Wars movies have grossed in excess of $4 billion worldwide. But retail sales of merchandise stand at $15 billion, and 20 percent of that has been earned since 2006, the year after the final film was released. Careful nurture of the Star Wars canon—thousands of years of story time, running through all the bits and pieces of merchandise—has kept the franchise popular for decades. So Chee spends three-quarters of his typical workday consulting or updating the Holocron. He also approves packaging designs, scans novels for errors, and creates Talmudic charts and documents addressing such issues as which Jedi were still alive during the Clone Wars and how long it takes a spaceship to get from Dagobah, where Yoda trained Luke Skywalker, to Luke's homeworld of Tatooine. The Keeper of the Holocron takes this very seriously: "Someone has to be able to say, 'Luke Skywalker would not have that color of lightsaber.'" The screening room at the Letterman Digital Arts Center, Lucasfilm's sprawling facility in San Francisco's Presidio District, is as opulent as you would expect—plush seats, wood panels, crystal-clear projection, and a perfect sound system. So when that classic John Williams fanfare begins and the Star Wars logo appears onscreen in that distinctive font, in that distinctive yellow, it quickens the pulse. It's also when Chee, sitting next to me, tells me that in an early version of what we're watching—a new LucasArts videogame called The Force Unleashed, due out in September—the logo was slightly wrong. "It was off by only a few pixels, but someone in Licensing spotted it and submitted a report." I grab an Xbox 360 controller and soon I'm striding through the corridors of a satellite that orbits the smugglers' moon of Nar Shaddaa, destroying everyone in my path. My character, Starkiller, is the secret apprentice of Darth Vader, sent here to eliminate a Jedi elder ... and leave no witnesses. I deflect laser blasts from militia troops with my lightsaber and then use the Force to hurl a chunk of metal through a window behind them. The glass shatters, and several foes are sucked into the vacuum of space before a safety wall snaps shut. I'm beginning to understand the power of the Dark Side. On the scale of badassedness, obliterating legions of good guys with the Force ranks right up there with leaping Snake River Canyon in a monster truck that can transform into a robot. And it's true that the game's sophisticated physics, combined with clever AI software for characters, means that when you Force-throw a Wookiee into a tree on its home planet, Kashyyyk, the Wookiee writhes realistically and the tree explodes in a botanically accurate cloud of splinters. But that's not what has fans most excited about The Force Unleashed. It's the stuff that happens between the interactive killing sprees: brief cinematic interludes that add new details—new plot points—to the saga. "The game is set between episodes III and IV," says Haden Blackman, who led the development team. Translation: Play it and you'll learn what happened before the original Star Wars film trilogy and after the prequels, two decades that have been shrouded in mystery. Over the course of the game, players will learn the details of the internecine feud between Darth Vader and his mentor, Emperor Palpatine, and the way these two unwittingly created the very rebellion that brought them down. The game has yielded a bountiful crop of tie-ins: a book, a graphic novel, a tabletop role-playing game supplement, and several lines of toys. With no more live-action Star Wars films forthcoming (or so we are told), games from the subsidiary division LucasArts are becoming ever more important in expanding the universe—and perpetuating the story-product ecology. And with every narrative beat and plot point, Chee and his dozens of colleagues with Holocron access are there. "Licensing approves everything," he says. "Text, dialog, art ... It all comes through our office." This is where the work of hundreds of writers and artists gets woven into a vast, internally consistent continuum. The power of the Dark Side: LucasArts' Haden Blackman discusses the story and the technology behind the upcoming game Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Producer: Annaliza Savage, Editor: Michael Lennon, Camera: John Ross For more, visit video.wired.com. In his 1932 book Sherlock Holmes: Fact or Fiction, T. S. Blakeney used the term canonicity in reference to the mystery novels and short fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes enthusiasts treat Doyle's work as if the great detective inhabits a coherent and logically consistent universe. Some of the stories written by Doyle were canonical—genuine events in that alternate universe—while others had to be considered apocryphal. (It should come as no surprise that fans would appropriate theological terms. The ecstasy of true fandom can, after all, approximate religion.) Today, canon and its serial-fiction cousin, continuity, are integral to genres like mystery, fantasy, and sci-fi. The giants of the field are known as world-builders as much as writers. J. R. R. Tolkien supplemented his Lord of the Rings series with hundreds of pages of appendices, genealogical charts, even pronunciation and usage guides for the languages he invented. Yet in the multiverse of fictional realities, Holmes's London, Frodo's Middle-earth, Buffy's Sunnydale, and Batman's Gotham are mere planetary systems compared with the grand galactic enterprise of Star Trek. When the original series—known to devout fans as The Original Series—went off the air in 1969, acolytes kept the flame alive. They extended the stories with their own fiction. They created technical manuals. Eventually, the series became a movie, and then another, and then another TV series, and a few more after that. Each new iteration produced more canonical information. Spock's death, Kirk's son, Picard's adventures as a cadet ... eventually, the writers' room on a Trek show became a minefield. "Someone would tell you that a Voyager episode last year mentioned a bit of backstory with the Romulans, and now you can't do this over here," says Ron Moore, a writer and producer on several Star Trek shows who went on to create the new Battlestar Galactica. "You'd argue the validity of that, but they'd be, like, 'No, now it's established.'" Lucas Licensing oversees billions of dollars in merchandise—from pillows to Pez dispensers. Photo: Jeff Minton But the many strata of Star Trek books, games, comics, and cartoons haven't been well tended. Some events in the movies and even later TV shows contradict preexisting lore. (A backward change like that is called a retcon, short for "retroactive continuity.") Gene Roddenberry himself, creator of Star Trek, was known to second-guess his own pronouncements about what was and was not canonical. After a while, the retcons and inconsistencies can become off-putting to fans and render once-beloved universes impenetrable to newcomers. One solution: a reboot. Start from scratch, like Moore did with Galactica. Clever preservation of original story elements retains the old fans, and streamlining and modernizing lets newbies spend their hard-earned quatloos, too. To Chee, the orderliness of the Star Wars canon is what sets it apart, what makes it feel more real than all those other franchises. "Look at James Bond," he says. "What's real in the James Bond world? What year does it take place in? It's not grounded in a real timeline." The Star Wars chronology, on the other hand, marks time from the Battle of Yavin, the assault on the Death Star at the end of the original Star Wars. Luke Skywalker was born in the year 19 BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin). It says so in the Holocron. Back in his office, Chee asks his database what else it has on young Skywalker. The result contains scores of fields covering lineage, favorite vehicles, the planet he's from, how to write his name in the Aurebesh alphabet. "Oops," Chee says, blocking the screen with his body until he has minimized the window. "There are things in the Holocron that aren't public knowledge, stuff coming down the pike two or three years from now." He won't say whether those secrets relate to upcoming books, movies, games, or toys. Probably all of them. Merch and more merch: Movies, games, comics, and novels are the tip of the iceberg. Leland Chee shows off more Star Wars goods, like Yoda skateboards, Wookiee slippers, and Darth Tater. Beware the Jar Jar lollipop! Producer: Annaliza Savage, Editor: Michael Lennon, Camera: John Ross For more, visit video.wired.com. Lucasfilm has to plan ahead and think long term. "We don't reboot. We don't start from scratch," Chee says. "When Chewbacca died, he died." (Poor Chewie yowled his last yowl in 25 ABY, when he was stuck on the planet Sernpidal as it collided with its moon, Dobido, in the novel Vector Prime, the first book in the New Jedi Order series. His death is now canon.) "The thing about Star Wars is that there's one universe," Chee says. "Everyone wants to know stuff, like, where did Mace Windu get that purple lightsaber? We want to establish that there's one and only one answer." Star Wars was the number two toy brand aimed at boys last year, behind only Transformers. But toys account for less than half of the revenue for licensed merchandise. The Lucas Licensing office is positively drowning in other merch. Bedspreads, window blinds, pillowcases, wastebaskets, guitars, chairs, baseball caps, beach balls, jewelry, lunch boxes, cookie jars, and kites all added up to $3 billion in retail sales in 2006 and 2007. That figure includes big-ticket items aimed at adults. An R2-D2 DVD projector. A stormtrooper golf bag. A high-end fashion line created with superstar designer Marc Ecko, including $300 Star Wars jeans and a replica of the poncho Han Solo wore on the ice planet Hoth. There was even a $3,000 suit of Darth Vader-style samurai armor. "We realize that our fans have different levels of disposable income," says Howard Roffman, president of Lucas Licensing, who joined the company a week after the premiere of The Empire Strikes Back, in 1980. "The kids who played with the toys have grown up." Leland Chee strolls the San Francisco campus of Lucasfilm. Photo: Jeff Minton There have been some egregious missteps, like the Jar Jar lollipop. It looks like a plastic bust of the hated character, but push a button and it opens its mouth and sticks out a hideous candy tongue for children to suck on. "The tongue had bumps on it," Chee says, wrinkling his nose. Chee's sense of what is correct in the Star Wars universe has been a lifetime in development. He saw the original movie at the Coronet Theater in San Francisco at age 6. He got his first plastic Star Wars action figures—R2-D2 and that lame C-3P0 look-alike, Death Star Droid—for his seventh birthday and from there steadily enlarged his collection, storing them all in a case shaped like Darth Vader's head (which he still has). Chee even kept the cardboard they were mounted on. "The packaging had great visuals, plus, like, a paragraph of backstory on the character," he says. It's easy to forget that before Star Wars, licensed merchandise was a different, less profitable business. All the big toymakers turned down the rights to make Star Wars action figures; upstart Kenner didn't sign on until a month before the film's release. The earliest product tie-ins were novels and comics—Marvel published an adaptation of the movie a month after it hit theaters, then continued with its own stories. Soon Marvel had smugglers Solo and Chewbacca teaming up with questionable characters like Jaxxon, a furry green creature with big floppy ears who wisecracked like Bugs Bunny. "The idea of continuity was alien at the time," Roffman says. "We let Marvel Comics do the stories they wanted as long as it didn't interfere with the upcoming movies, and they went in some bizarre directions." The first Star Wars novel, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, was published in 1978, before anyone knew that sequels would be filmed, much less that Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia would later turn out to be siblings. "Luke and Leia get ... affectionate," Chee allows. "It's very wrong." The success of the movies led to more products: TV specials, a Saturday morning cartoon show, newspaper comics, a board game, a D&D-style tabletop role-playing game, simple arcade and console videogames. Young Chee bought as much as he could, including the sheet music for the iconic theme song, which he played at his first organ recital. After the release of Return of the Jedi, in 1983, Lucasfilm assumed that interest would wane. But the merch kept selling. And then, Chee remembers, the novel Heir to the Empire was published. "Wait, was it 1990?" he says, tapping a search into the Holocron. "I need to get this date right." It was actually 1991 when Hugo Award-winning writer Timothy Zahn released the novel, set five years after Return of the Jedi. The book spent 19 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and proved to Lucasfilm that even without new movies, it still had a market. "I was in college at UC Davis by then, but that book brought me back into Star Wars," Chee says. Without movies at the core, though, Lucas Licensing couldn't afford to be lackadaisical—no more Jaxxons, no more incestuous flirtations. "We set parameters," Roffman says. "It had to be an important extension of the continuity, and it had to have an internal integrity with the events portrayed in the films." Closely tending the canon was paying off with fans. Essentially, all the new comic books, novels, and games were prequels and sequels of one another. If you wanted to know the whole story, you had to buy them all. Neither Lucasfilm nor its licensees will divulge just how much money Lucasfilm gets for each item; suffice it to say the percentage is substantial. Chee applied for a job as a software tester at LucasArts shortly before Star Wars: Special Edition was rereleased in 1997. The film was an updated version of the 1977 original, with new visual effects and added scenes. (The special edition proved that the canon is vulnerable to retcons. In the most egregious example, an f/x tweak now has alien errand boy Greedo, not Han Solo, shooting first in the cantina duel. This made Solo a more simplistic character.) Chee scoffed at the fanboys who waited in line for three days outside the Coronet to see a movie they already owned on VHS. He had the self-restraint to wait until 5 am on the day of the release to queue up. When Chee got home from the movie, there was a message on his answering machine. He had the gig. "That was the last time I had to wait in line to see a Star Wars movie," he says. At first, his job entailed identifying and logging game bugs. His uncanny command of Star Wars lore and his organizational skills allowed him to rise quickly to the role of lead tester, which eventually led him to work on the 1998 title Behind the Magic. Magic wasn't so much a game as an interactive CD-ROM of Star Wars trivia, a treasure trove of data for überfans that included a timeline, a searchable glossary, scripts, and deleted scenes. Assembling it revealed inconsistencies in the canon. "There were differences in the layout of the Millennium Falcon between the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back," says Blackman, who, in addition to being project lead on The Force Unleashed, also wrote and did research for Magic. "The continuity fix is that Han Solo made some modifications to the ship's interior." Around 2000, Chee moved from LucasArts to Lucas Licensing, where he was tasked with creating an even more detailed version of Magic for internal use. "We had several game-design teams, several comic book writers, and dozens of novelists," Roffman says. "We needed a reference for everyone who was playing in our sandbox." Chee was the perfect person for the job. "I've been amassing Star Wars knowledge my whole life," he says. "My friends were always like, what the heck are you ever going to do with all of that?" Chee's answer: Create a FileMaker doc similar to the ones he had used to track game bugs. He started transferring information from Magic, from binders, and from the stream of new novels and comics. "You don't know how much you don't know until you get here," he says. "Like, I'd never heard the radio dramas." In a forum on StarWars.com, PiccoloKenobi poses a question that we've all wondered about at one time or another: Are the Low Altitude Assault Transport gunships used by the Grand Army of the Republic spaceworthy, or are they limited to traveling within a planet's atmosphere? "LAATs can be sealed to operate in the vacuum of space," Chee decrees in a response post. "But the standard LAAT is not equipped for long-distance space travel." In the world of continuity maintenance, Chee is something of an anomaly. Most geek-friendly franchises rely on volunteerism—while Chee was building the Holocron, fans of other canons were working outside official imprimatur. Babylon 5 has a fan-created database. The Buffyverse has several. In fact, the best source for Star Wars information on the older stuff that Chee hasn't logged yet is an online database created and maintained by a community of fans that Chee views with wary respect. It's called, inevitably, the Wookieepedia. Naturally, some fans chafe at the Lucasfilm pronouncement-from-on-high approach. Take Curtis Saxton, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in the UK. Beginning in 1995, he released a series of amateur technical commentaries on TheForce.net, a Star Wars omnibus site, that sent shock waves through the fan community. A fan-made video critiquing Curtis Saxton's theory of the Endor Holocaust. Video: The Endor Holocaust Saxton wasn't writing fan fiction—it was more like fan physics. He started out by estimating the size and power of various Star Wars vehicles and weapons, including the Death Star's planet-destroying superlaser (2.4 x 1032 joules to blow up the planet Alderaan). His numbers didn't jibe with those in the Lucas Licensing-approved tech manuals. But he persisted. And that's what led to the Endor Holocaust. At the climax of Return of the Jedi, Death Star II explodes while orbiting a forested moon called Endor, populated by cuddly creatures called Ewoks. Saxton considered the Death Star's orbit, the power output of its hypermatter power source, and the sheer tonnage of debris its destruction would have generated, then concluded that the climactic battle must have rained death and nuclear winter onto the teddy-bear tribe. He wrote: "The mass-extinction event at Endor is an inevitable physical consequence of the circumstances at the end of Return of the Jedi. As such, it indirectly enjoys canonical status, even though it was not clearly portrayed in the film." In other words, science says the Ewoks are dead. You can't posit the genocide of the Ewoks without igniting a backlash. In the forums, debates raged between self-described Saxtonites and their foes. This willingness of some obsessives to go deeper into the fictional world than its original creators did is a mainstay of fandom. "It goes back to Hugo Gernsback, the father of modern science fiction, who encouraged readers to dig into his stories, expand on them, and critique the science," says Henry Jenkins, a sci-fi fan and MIT media-studies professor. Despite Saxton's heretical notions, he later worked on four official technical manuals. And the notion of an Endor Holocaust has been incorporated into several comics—as foul propaganda spread by Imperial loyalists. But the fact that official Star Wars products even addressed the idea shows how influential writing like Saxton's can be. It's called fanon—fan-generated canon—and it's still a controversial notion to the priesthood at Lucasfilm. "I don't like the term," Chee says. "There's no such thing as fan continuity." Yet even within the Holocron, not all reality is created equal. Chee coded a pulldown menu that lets him categorize entries. S, for example, stands for secondary continuity—early unvetted works, such as The Star Wars Holiday Special. Sure, it introduced fan-favorite character Boba Fett to the continuity. But it also featured Princess Leia singing a carol to celebrate the Wookiee ceremony of Life Day, and Harvey Korman in drag playing a cooking instructor making Bantha Surprise. Princess Leia serenades Wookiees on their homeworld Kashyyyk. From the quasi-canonical Star Wars Holiday Special. Video: Star Wars Holiday Special - Leia sings And then there's the very top level of canon, the inviolable, infallible level of Truth, marked GWL—George Walton Lucas. It's the divine word of the Creator who stands outside his universe and is not subject to the rules that govern it. Lucas approves every important addition to the canon. The ambitious story beats contained in the new game The Force Unleashed were permitted only after he signed off—and spent hours talking to the developers about the relationship between Darth Vader and the Emperor. Yes, he'll accept outside ideas. The novel Heir to the Empire introduced the planet of Coruscant, capital of the Old Republic, which Lucas later incorporated into the prequels. But he also used those prequels to retcon the hell out of Chee's otherwise well-integrated universe. Anakin Skywalker built C-3P0? GWL. Yoda knows Chewbacca? GWL. "George's view of the universe is his view," Chee says with a slightly grudging tone. "He's not beholden to what's gone before." The careful tending of the Star Wars continuity has yielded great wealth, but the key to a productive farm is to leave some fields fallow. A complete Holocron would leave little room for fantasy—for fans who, as Jenkins says, "love unmapped nooks and crannies, the dark shadows we can fill in with our imagination." That's something that GWL understands. For instance, the origins of the Jedi master Yoda, his species, and his home planet are off-limits. The backstory isn't even in the Holocron. "It doesn't exist, except maybe in George's mind," Chee says. "He feels like, 'You don't have to explain everything all the time. Let's keep some mystery.'" But ... what about the Holocron? "We work around him," Chee says. Senior editor Chris Baker (chris_baker@wired.com) wrote about the return of Futurama in issue 15.12. Wired.Com Meet Leland Chee, the Star Wars Franchise Continuity Cop {new window}   Www.Wired.Com - On the wall behind Leland Chee's desk is a portrait of an Ithorian, an alien with a hammer-shaped head that you glimpse briefly in the famous Star Wars cantina scene. In its leathery, foot-long fingers, the Ithorian holds a cube decorated with elaborate metallic tracings, a device known as a holocron. Think of it as a Force-powered hard drive, capable of storing an enormous quantity of information. "It's a piece of Jedi technology," Chee says. "It tells you ... everything." To Star Wars fans, Chee is the Keeper of the Holocron, arguably the leading expert on everything that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. His official title is continuity database administrator for the Lucas Licensing arm of Lucasfilm—which means Chee keeps meticulous track of not just the six live-action movies but also cartoons, TV specials, scores of videogames and reference books, and hundreds of novels and comics. Keepin' it canonical: Leland Chee, continuity database administrator at Lucas Licensing, maintains the Holocron — a vast FileMaker database that's consulted to make sure that any new elements added to the Star Wars franchise fit within the existing mythology. Producer: Annaliza Savage, Editor: Michael Lennon, Camera: John Ross For more, visit video.wired.com. Of course, Chee's Holocron isn't a Force-sensitive crystal. It's a FileMaker database, a searchable repository of more than 30,000 entries covering almost every character, planet, and weapon mentioned, however fleetingly, in the vast array of Star Wars titles and products. The Holocron isn't just for fun—when Lucas Licensing inks a deal with a toy company or a T-shirt designer, it vets those ancillary products to ensure they conform to the spirit and letter of the continuity that has come before and will continue afterward. In the past 31 years, Star Wars movies have grossed in excess of $4 billion worldwide. But retail sales of merchandise stand at $15 billion, and 20 percent of that has been earned since 2006, the year after the final film was released. Careful nurture of the Star Wars canon—thousands of years of story time, running through all the bits and pieces of merchandise—has kept the franchise popular for decades. So Chee spends three-quarters of his typical workday consulting or updating the Holocron. He also approves packaging designs, scans novels for errors, and creates Talmudic charts and documents addressing such issues as which Jedi were still alive during the Clone Wars and how long it takes a spaceship to get from Dagobah, where Yoda trained Luke Skywalker, to Luke's homeworld of Tatooine. The Keeper of the Holocron takes this very seriously: "Someone has to be able to say, 'Luke Skywalker would not have that color of lightsaber.'" The screening room at the Letterman Digital Arts Center, Lucasfilm's sprawling facility in San Francisco's Presidio District, is as opulent as you would expect—plush seats, wood panels, crystal-clear projection, and a perfect sound system. So when that classic John Williams fanfare begins and the Star Wars logo appears onscreen in that distinctive font, in that distinctive yellow, it quickens the pulse. It's also when Chee, sitting next to me, tells me that in an early version of what we're watching—a new LucasArts videogame called The Force Unleashed, due out in September—the logo was slightly wrong. "It was off by only a few pixels, but someone in Licensing spotted it and submitted a report." I grab an Xbox 360 controller and soon I'm striding through the corridors of a satellite that orbits the smugglers' moon of Nar Shaddaa, destroying everyone in my path. My character, Starkiller, is the secret apprentice of Darth Vader, sent here to eliminate a Jedi elder ... and leave no witnesses. I deflect laser blasts from militia troops with my lightsaber and then use the Force to hurl a chunk of metal through a window behind them. The glass shatters, and several foes are sucked into the vacuum of space before a safety wall snaps shut. I'm beginning to understand the power of the Dark Side. On the scale of badassedness, obliterating legions of good guys with the Force ranks right up there with leaping Snake River Canyon in a monster truck that can transform into a robot. And it's true that the game's sophisticated physics, combined with clever AI software for characters, means that when you Force-throw a Wookiee into a tree on its home planet, Kashyyyk, the Wookiee writhes realistically and the tree explodes in a botanically accurate cloud of splinters. But that's not what has fans most excited about The Force Unleashed. It's the stuff that happens between the interactive killing sprees: brief cinematic interludes that add new details—new plot points—to the saga. "The game is set between episodes III and IV," says Haden Blackman, who led the development team. Translation: Play it and you'll learn what happened before the original Star Wars film trilogy and after the prequels, two decades that have been shrouded in mystery. Over the course of the game, players will learn the details of the internecine feud between Darth Vader and his mentor, Emperor Palpatine, and the way these two unwittingly created the very rebellion that brought them down. The game has yielded a bountiful crop of tie-ins: a book, a graphic novel, a tabletop role-playing game supplement, and several lines of toys. With no more live-action Star Wars films forthcoming (or so we are told), games from the subsidiary division LucasArts are becoming ever more important in expanding the universe—and perpetuating the story-product ecology. And with every narrative beat and plot point, Chee and his dozens of colleagues with Holocron access are there. "Licensing approves everything," he says. "Text, dialog, art ... It all comes through our office." This is where the work of hundreds of writers and artists gets woven into a vast, internally consistent continuum. The power of the Dark Side: LucasArts' Haden Blackman discusses the story and the technology behind the upcoming game Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Producer: Annaliza Savage, Editor: Michael Lennon, Camera: John Ross For more, visit video.wired.com. In his 1932 book Sherlock Holmes: Fact or Fiction, T. S. Blakeney used the term canonicity in reference to the mystery novels and short fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes enthusiasts treat Doyle's work as if the great detective inhabits a coherent and logically consistent universe. Some of the stories written by Doyle were canonical—genuine events in that alternate universe—while others had to be considered apocryphal. (It should come as no surprise that fans would appropriate theological terms. The ecstasy of true fandom can, after all, approximate religion.) Today, canon and its serial-fiction cousin, continuity, are integral to genres like mystery, fantasy, and sci-fi. The giants of the field are known as world-builders as much as writers. J. R. R. Tolkien supplemented his Lord of the Rings series with hundreds of pages of appendices, genealogical charts, even pronunciation and usage guides for the languages he invented. Yet in the multiverse of fictional realities, Holmes's London, Frodo's Middle-earth, Buffy's Sunnydale, and Batman's Gotham are mere planetary systems compared with the grand galactic enterprise of Star Trek. When the original series—known to devout fans as The Original Series—went off the air in 1969, acolytes kept the flame alive. They extended the stories with their own fiction. They created technical manuals. Eventually, the series became a movie, and then another, and then another TV series, and a few more after that. Each new iteration produced more canonical information. Spock's death, Kirk's son, Picard's adventures as a cadet ... eventually, the writers' room on a Trek show became a minefield. "Someone would tell you that a Voyager episode last year mentioned a bit of backstory with the Romulans, and now you can't do this over here," says Ron Moore, a writer and producer on several Star Trek shows who went on to create the new Battlestar Galactica. "You'd argue the validity of that, but they'd be, like, 'No, now it's established.'" Lucas Licensing oversees billions of dollars in merchandise—from pillows to Pez dispensers. Photo: Jeff Minton But the many strata of Star Trek books, games, comics, and cartoons haven't been well tended. Some events in the movies and even later TV shows contradict preexisting lore. (A backward change like that is called a retcon, short for "retroactive continuity.") Gene Roddenberry himself, creator of Star Trek, was known to second-guess his own pronouncements about what was and was not canonical. After a while, the retcons and inconsistencies can become off-putting to fans and render once-beloved universes impenetrable to newcomers. One solution: a reboot. Start from scratch, like Moore did with Galactica. Clever preservation of original story elements retains the old fans, and streamlining and modernizing lets newbies spend their hard-earned quatloos, too. To Chee, the orderliness of the Star Wars canon is what sets it apart, what makes it feel more real than all those other franchises. "Look at James Bond," he says. "What's real in the James Bond world? What year does it take place in? It's not grounded in a real timeline." The Star Wars chronology, on the other hand, marks time from the Battle of Yavin, the assault on the Death Star at the end of the original Star Wars. Luke Skywalker was born in the year 19 BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin). It says so in the Holocron. Back in his office, Chee asks his database what else it has on young Skywalker. The result contains scores of fields covering lineage, favorite vehicles, the planet he's from, how to write his name in the Aurebesh alphabet. "Oops," Chee says, blocking the screen with his body until he has minimized the window. "There are things in the Holocron that aren't public knowledge, stuff coming down the pike two or three years from now." He won't say whether those secrets relate to upcoming books, movies, games, or toys. Probably all of them. Merch and more merch: Movies, games, comics, and novels are the tip of the iceberg. Leland Chee shows off more Star Wars goods, like Yoda skateboards, Wookiee slippers, and Darth Tater. Beware the Jar Jar lollipop! Producer: Annaliza Savage, Editor: Michael Lennon, Camera: John Ross For more, visit video.wired.com. Lucasfilm has to plan ahead and think long term. "We don't reboot. We don't start from scratch," Chee says. "When Chewbacca died, he died." (Poor Chewie yowled his last yowl in 25 ABY, when he was stuck on the planet Sernpidal as it collided with its moon, Dobido, in the novel Vector Prime, the first book in the New Jedi Order series. His death is now canon.) "The thing about Star Wars is that there's one universe," Chee says. "Everyone wants to know stuff, like, where did Mace Windu get that purple lightsaber? We want to establish that there's one and only one answer." Star Wars was the number two toy brand aimed at boys last year, behind only Transformers. But toys account for less than half of the revenue for licensed merchandise. The Lucas Licensing office is positively drowning in other merch. Bedspreads, window blinds, pillowcases, wastebaskets, guitars, chairs, baseball caps, beach balls, jewelry, lunch boxes, cookie jars, and kites all added up to $3 billion in retail sales in 2006 and 2007. That figure includes big-ticket items aimed at adults. An R2-D2 DVD projector. A stormtrooper golf bag. A high-end fashion line created with superstar designer Marc Ecko, including $300 Star Wars jeans and a replica of the poncho Han Solo wore on the ice planet Hoth. There was even a $3,000 suit of Darth Vader-style samurai armor. "We realize that our fans have different levels of disposable income," says Howard Roffman, president of Lucas Licensing, who joined the company a week after the premiere of The Empire Strikes Back, in 1980. "The kids who played with the toys have grown up." Leland Chee strolls the San Francisco campus of Lucasfilm. Photo: Jeff Minton There have been some egregious missteps, like the Jar Jar lollipop. It looks like a plastic bust of the hated character, but push a button and it opens its mouth and sticks out a hideous candy tongue for children to suck on. "The tongue had bumps on it," Chee says, wrinkling his nose. Chee's sense of what is correct in the Star Wars universe has been a lifetime in development. He saw the original movie at the Coronet Theater in San Francisco at age 6. He got his first plastic Star Wars action figures—R2-D2 and that lame C-3P0 look-alike, Death Star Droid—for his seventh birthday and from there steadily enlarged his collection, storing them all in a case shaped like Darth Vader's head (which he still has). Chee even kept the cardboard they were mounted on. "The packaging had great visuals, plus, like, a paragraph of backstory on the character," he says. It's easy to forget that before Star Wars, licensed merchandise was a different, less profitable business. All the big toymakers turned down the rights to make Star Wars action figures; upstart Kenner didn't sign on until a month before the film's release. The earliest product tie-ins were novels and comics—Marvel published an adaptation of the movie a month after it hit theaters, then continued with its own stories. Soon Marvel had smugglers Solo and Chewbacca teaming up with questionable characters like Jaxxon, a furry green creature with big floppy ears who wisecracked like Bugs Bunny. "The idea of continuity was alien at the time," Roffman says. "We let Marvel Comics do the stories they wanted as long as it didn't interfere with the upcoming movies, and they went in some bizarre directions." The first Star Wars novel, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, was published in 1978, before anyone knew that sequels would be filmed, much less that Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia would later turn out to be siblings. "Luke and Leia get ... affectionate," Chee allows. "It's very wrong." The success of the movies led to more products: TV specials, a Saturday morning cartoon show, newspaper comics, a board game, a D&D-style tabletop role-playing game, simple arcade and console videogames. Young Chee bought as much as he could, including the sheet music for the iconic theme song, which he played at his first organ recital. After the release of Return of the Jedi, in 1983, Lucasfilm assumed that interest would wane. But the merch kept selling. And then, Chee remembers, the novel Heir to the Empire was published. "Wait, was it 1990?" he says, tapping a search into the Holocron. "I need to get this date right." It was actually 1991 when Hugo Award-winning writer Timothy Zahn released the novel, set five years after Return of the Jedi. The book spent 19 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and proved to Lucasfilm that even without new movies, it still had a market. "I was in college at UC Davis by then, but that book brought me back into Star Wars," Chee says. Without movies at the core, though, Lucas Licensing couldn't afford to be lackadaisical—no more Jaxxons, no more incestuous flirtations. "We set parameters," Roffman says. "It had to be an important extension of the continuity, and it had to have an internal integrity with the events portrayed in the films." Closely tending the canon was paying off with fans. Essentially, all the new comic books, novels, and games were prequels and sequels of one another. If you wanted to know the whole story, you had to buy them all. Neither Lucasfilm nor its licensees will divulge just how much money Lucasfilm gets for each item; suffice it to say the percentage is substantial. Chee applied for a job as a software tester at LucasArts shortly before Star Wars: Special Edition was rereleased in 1997. The film was an updated version of the 1977 original, with new visual effects and added scenes. (The special edition proved that the canon is vulnerable to retcons. In the most egregious example, an f/x tweak now has alien errand boy Greedo, not Han Solo, shooting first in the cantina duel. This made Solo a more simplistic character.) Chee scoffed at the fanboys who waited in line for three days outside the Coronet to see a movie they already owned on VHS. He had the self-restraint to wait until 5 am on the day of the release to queue up. When Chee got home from the movie, there was a message on his answering machine. He had the gig. "That was the last time I had to wait in line to see a Star Wars movie," he says. At first, his job entailed identifying and logging game bugs. His uncanny command of Star Wars lore and his organizational skills allowed him to rise quickly to the role of lead tester, which eventually led him to work on the 1998 title Behind the Magic. Magic wasn't so much a game as an interactive CD-ROM of Star Wars trivia, a treasure trove of data for überfans that included a timeline, a searchable glossary, scripts, and deleted scenes. Assembling it revealed inconsistencies in the canon. "There were differences in the layout of the Millennium Falcon between the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back," says Blackman, who, in addition to being project lead on The Force Unleashed, also wrote and did research for Magic. "The continuity fix is that Han Solo made some modifications to the ship's interior." Around 2000, Chee moved from LucasArts to Lucas Licensing, where he was tasked with creating an even more detailed version of Magic for internal use. "We had several game-design teams, several comic book writers, and dozens of novelists," Roffman says. "We needed a reference for everyone who was playing in our sandbox." Chee was the perfect person for the job. "I've been amassing Star Wars knowledge my whole life," he says. "My friends were always like, what the heck are you ever going to do with all of that?" Chee's answer: Create a FileMaker doc similar to the ones he had used to track game bugs. He started transferring information from Magic, from binders, and from the stream of new novels and comics. "You don't know how much you don't know until you get here," he says. "Like, I'd never heard the radio dramas." In a forum on StarWars.com, PiccoloKenobi poses a question that we've all wondered about at one time or another: Are the Low Altitude Assault Transport gunships used by the Grand Army of the Republic spaceworthy, or are they limited to traveling within a planet's atmosphere? "LAATs can be sealed to operate in the vacuum of space," Chee decrees in a response post. "But the standard LAAT is not equipped for long-distance space travel." In the world of continuity maintenance, Chee is something of an anomaly. Most geek-friendly franchises rely on volunteerism—while Chee was building the Holocron, fans of other canons were working outside official imprimatur. Babylon 5 has a fan-created database. The Buffyverse has several. In fact, the best source for Star Wars information on the older stuff that Chee hasn't logged yet is an online database created and maintained by a community of fans that Chee views with wary respect. It's called, inevitably, the Wookieepedia. Naturally, some fans chafe at the Lucasfilm pronouncement-from-on-high approach. Take Curtis Saxton, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in the UK. Beginning in 1995, he released a series of amateur technical commentaries on TheForce.net, a Star Wars omnibus site, that sent shock waves through the fan community. A fan-made video critiquing Curtis Saxton's theory of the Endor Holocaust. Video: The Endor Holocaust Saxton wasn't writing fan fiction—it was more like fan physics. He started out by estimating the size and power of various Star Wars vehicles and weapons, including the Death Star's planet-destroying superlaser (2.4 x 1032 joules to blow up the planet Alderaan). His numbers didn't jibe with those in the Lucas Licensing-approved tech manuals. But he persisted. And that's what led to the Endor Holocaust. At the climax of Return of the Jedi, Death Star II explodes while orbiting a forested moon called Endor, populated by cuddly creatures called Ewoks. Saxton considered the Death Star's orbit, the power output of its hypermatter power source, and the sheer tonnage of debris its destruction would have generated, then concluded that the climactic battle must have rained death and nuclear winter onto the teddy-bear tribe. He wrote: "The mass-extinction event at Endor is an inevitable physical consequence of the circumstances at the end of Return of the Jedi. As such, it indirectly enjoys canonical status, even though it was not clearly portrayed in the film." In other words, science says the Ewoks are dead. You can't posit the genocide of the Ewoks without igniting a backlash. In the forums, debates raged between self-described Saxtonites and their foes. This willingness of some obsessives to go deeper into the fictional world than its original creators did is a mainstay of fandom. "It goes back to Hugo Gernsback, the father of modern science fiction, who encouraged readers to dig into his stories, expand on them, and critique the science," says Henry Jenkins, a sci-fi fan and MIT media-studies professor. Despite Saxton's heretical notions, he later worked on four official technical manuals. And the notion of an Endor Holocaust has been incorporated into several comics—as foul propaganda spread by Imperial loyalists. But the fact that official Star Wars products even addressed the idea shows how influential writing like Saxton's can be. It's called fanon—fan-generated canon—and it's still a controversial notion to the priesthood at Lucasfilm. "I don't like the term," Chee says. "There's no such thing as fan continuity." Yet even within the Holocron, not all reality is created equal. Chee coded a pulldown menu that lets him categorize entries. S, for example, stands for secondary continuity—early unvetted works, such as The Star Wars Holiday Special. Sure, it introduced fan-favorite character Boba Fett to the continuity. But it also featured Princess Leia singing a carol to celebrate the Wookiee ceremony of Life Day, and Harvey Korman in drag playing a cooking instructor making Bantha Surprise. Princess Leia serenades Wookiees on their homeworld Kashyyyk. From the quasi-canonical Star Wars Holiday Special. Video: Star Wars Holiday Special - Leia sings And then there's the very top level of canon, the inviolable, infallible level of Truth, marked GWL—George Walton Lucas. It's the divine word of the Creator who stands outside his universe and is not subject to the rules that govern it. Lucas approves every important addition to the canon. The ambitious story beats contained in the new game The Force Unleashed were permitted only after he signed off—and spent hours talking to the developers about the relationship between Darth Vader and the Emperor. Yes, he'll accept outside ideas. The novel Heir to the Empire introduced the planet of Coruscant, capital of the Old Republic, which Lucas later incorporated into the prequels. But he also used those prequels to retcon the hell out of Chee's otherwise well-integrated universe. Anakin Skywalker built C-3P0? GWL. Yoda knows Chewbacca? GWL. "George's view of the universe is his view," Chee says with a slightly grudging tone. "He's not beholden to what's gone before." The careful tending of the Star Wars continuity has yielded great wealth, but the key to a productive farm is to leave some fields fallow. A complete Holocron would leave little room for fantasy—for fans who, as Jenkins says, "love unmapped nooks and crannies, the dark shadows we can fill in with our imagination." That's something that GWL understands. For instance, the origins of the Jedi master Yoda, his species, and his home planet are off-limits. The backstory isn't even in the Holocron. "It doesn't exist, except maybe in George's mind," Chee says. "He feels like, 'You don't have to explain everything all the time. Let's keep some mystery.'" But ... what about the Holocron? "We work around him," Chee says. Senior editor Chris Baker (chris_baker@wired.com) wrote about the return of Futurama in issue 15.12.
Read about the latest Entertainment News on Wired.com, including art, technology, films, animation, music, web video, tv, podcasts, and blogs. {...}
Published: August 21, 2008, 9:55 pm - Indexed: August 24, 2008, 10:10 am - Page Size: 53KB
Category: News > Breaking News

]]> News > Breaking News {EUROPE > NEWSPAPERS} - John Lennon 'back in Liverpool' http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/newspapers/john-lennon-back-in-liverpool-20080889519.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/newspapers/john-lennon-back-in-liverpool-20080889519.htm Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:33:22 GMT John Lennon lookalike auditions for part in new biopic Nowhere Boy. Telegraph.Co.Uk John Lennon 'back in Liverpool' {new window}   Www.Telegraph.Co.Uk - John Lennon lookalike auditions for part in new biopic Nowhere Boy.
John Lennon 'back in Liverpool' - Telegraph {...} The producers of a new John Lennon biopic must have done a double take when this individual walked through the door. {...}
Published: August 19, 2008, 6:33 pm - Indexed: August 20, 2008, 9:45 am - Page Size: 36KB
Category: Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > News and Media > Newspapers

]]> Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > News and Media > Newspapers {MARKETING AND ADVERTISING > NEWS AND MEDIA} - World Peace Finally Gets Just Desserts http://articles.world-of-newave.info/business/marketing-and-advertising/advertising/news-and-media/world-peace-finally-gets-just-desserts-20080866519.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/business/marketing-and-advertising/advertising/news-and-media/world-peace-finally-gets-just-desserts-20080866519.htm Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:49:00 GMT To honor the legacy of John Lennon, Ben & Jerry's have launched Imagine Whirled Peace, an ice cream flavor loaded with toffee cookies and fudge peace signs. Adrants.Com World Peace Finally Gets Just Desserts {new window}   Www.Adrants.Com - To honor the legacy of John Lennon, Ben & Jerry's have launched Imagine Whirled Peace, an ice cream flavor loaded with toffee cookies and fudge peace signs.
World Peace Finally Gets Just Desserts » Adrants {...}
Published: August 15, 2008, 7:49 pm - Indexed: August 16, 2008, 12:05 pm - Page Size: 40KB
Category: Business > Marketing and Advertising > Advertising > News and Media

]]> Business > Marketing and Advertising > Advertising > News and Media {ENTERTAINMENT > PUBLICATIONS AND MEDIA} - Lennon killer denied parole again http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/entertainment/publications-and-media/lennon-killer-denied-parole-again-20080833011.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/entertainment/publications-and-media/lennon-killer-denied-parole-again-20080833011.htm Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:17:07 GMT John Lennon's killer is denied parole for a fifth time because of "concern for the public safety and welfare". News.Bbc.Co.Uk Lennon killer denied parole again {new window}   News.Bbc.Co.Uk - John Lennon's killer is denied parole for a fifth time because of "concern for the public safety and welfare".
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Lennon killer denied parole again {...} John Lennon's killer is denied parole for a fifth time because of "concern for the public safety and welfare". {...}
Published: August 13, 2008, 9:17 am - Indexed: August 14, 2008, 9:05 pm - Page Size: 42KB
Category: Arts > Entertainment > Publications and Media

]]> Arts > Entertainment > Publications and Media {ENTERTAINMENT > PUBLICATIONS AND MEDIA} - Giggling Beatles tape auctioned http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/entertainment/publications-and-media/giggling-beatles-tape-auctioned-2008085642.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/entertainment/publications-and-media/giggling-beatles-tape-auctioned-2008085642.htm Tue, 05 Aug 2008 22:33:53 GMT A tape of a Beatles recording session in which John Lennon and Paul McCartney are heard cracking jokes sells for £9,800. News.Bbc.Co.Uk Giggling Beatles tape auctioned {new window}   News.Bbc.Co.Uk - A tape of a Beatles recording session in which John Lennon and Paul McCartney are heard cracking jokes sells for £9,800.
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Giggling Beatles tape auctioned {...} A tape of a Beatles recording session in which John Lennon and Paul McCartney are heard cracking jokes sells for £9,800. {...}
Published: August 5, 2008, 10:33 pm - Indexed: August 6, 2008, 11:22 pm - Page Size: 44KB
Category: Arts > Entertainment > Publications and Media

]]> Arts > Entertainment > Publications and Media {ENTERTAINMENT > PUBLICATIONS AND MEDIA} - WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/entertainment/publications-and-media/wargames-a-look-back-at-the-film-that-turned-geeks-20080728738.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/entertainment/publications-and-media/wargames-a-look-back-at-the-film-that-turned-geeks-20080728738.htm Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT It was the year Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire"; the year the United Nations implored the Russians to withdraw from Afghanistan; the year ABC aired The Day After, a TV movie about the wake of a nuclear attack on the US. In the midst of all this came WarGames, a fizzy little thriller about looming Armageddon. It's a deceptively simple story: High schooler David Lightman (played by 21-year-old Matthew Broderick) is a digitally proficient goofball who wants to play an unreleased computer game — and impress a pretty girl (Ally Sheedy). So he does something most Americans didn't have a word for back then: He starts hacking. Little does he know, the "computer company" he's infiltrated is actually a military installation running a missile-command supercomputer called the WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), and the game — Global Thermonuclear War — is real. Naturally, only David can stop it from setting off World War III. Over the years, WarGames has written itself into the cult lore of Silicon Valley. Google hosted a 25th-anniversary screening in May, where keyboard jockeys cheered Broderick's DOS acrobatics. (Imagine Rocky Horror, but picture the audience in Hawaiian shirts and mandals.) "Many of us grew up with this movie," Google cofounder Sergey Brin told the packed house. "It was a key movie of a generation, especially for those of us who got into computing." The original WarGames theatrical trailer. For more, visit video.wired.com. WarGames: The Dead Code attempts a reboot. For more, visit video.wired.com. How did WarGames become the geek-geist classic that legitimized hacker culture, minted the nerd hero — and maybe even changed American defense policy? Related question: Shall we play a game? In 1979, Walter Parkes, the future head of DreamWorks Pictures, was a young screenwriter with the outlines of an idea he'd developed with Lawrence Lasker, a script reader at Orion Pictures. Called The Genius,it was a character film about a dying scientist and the only person in the world who understands him — a rebellious kid who's too smart for his own good. The idea of featuring computers and computer networks would come later. Walter Parkes, Screenwriter: WarGames is looked upon as technologically prescient, but we actually started off with a concept that had nothing to do with technology. Lawrence Lasker, Screenwriter: We were complete newbies. In 1979, we didn't even know that home computers could hook up to other computers. Peter Schwartz, Futurist and creative consultant: I spent 10 years at the Stanford Research Institute, from 1972 to the end of 1981. That's where all this began. Walter and Larry came to SRI with a script idea called The Genius. And it was about a boy and a relationship he had with a great scientist named Falken, who was basically Stephen Hawking. Lasker: For me, the inspiration for the project was a TV special Peter Ustinov did on several geniuses, including Hawking. I found the predicament Hawking was in fascinating — that he might one day figure out the unified field theory and not be able to tell anyone, because of his progressive ALS. So there was this idea that he'd need a successor. And who would that be? Maybe this kid, a juvenile delinquent whose problem was that nobody realized he was too smart for his environment. That resonated with Walter. So I said, let's actually go talk to people about how a kid could get in trouble and get discovered by a brainy scientist and take it from there. Parkes: Before our conversation, the Falken character was just a way to access the adult side of the movie. It wasn't even much about computers yet. Schwartz made the connection between youth, computers, gaming, and the military — and The Genius began its long morph into WarGames. Schwartz: There was a new subculture of extremely bright kids developing into what would become known as hackers. SRI was in Palo Alto, and all the computer nerds were around: Xerox PARC, Apple just starting — it was all happening right there. SRI was node number two of the Internet. We talked about the fact that the kinds of computer games that were being played were blow-up-the-world games. Space war games. Military simulations. Things like Global Thermonuclear War. SRI was one of the main players in this. SRI was, in fact, running computerized war games for the military. Screenshot: Courtesy MGM In the summer of 1980, Parkes and Lasker went looking for inspiration for their war room set. They found it when they pestered their way onto a tour of the North American Aerospace Defense Command's central nerve center — 2,000 feet under Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. From here, American and Canadian military officials could detect an incoming Soviet nuke from hundreds of miles away. Lasker: As we're walking back to the bus that's going to take us to the hotel, James Hartinger [then commander in chief of Norad] walks up between me and Walter and plants a hand on the back of our necks: "I understand you boys are writing a movie about me!" he says. "Let's go to the bar." Walter says: "Well, we have to get on the bus to go back to our hotel." And Hartinger replies: "Are you insane? I've got 50,000 men under my command. You think I can't get you back to your hotel? Plus, I can't drink off the base. So c'mon." He was all for the message in our script. We kind of simplified it to "machines are taking over." He said, "God damn, you're right! I sleep well at night knowing I'm in charge." So we based General Beringer, played by Barry Corbin, on the real commander at Cheyenne Mountain. Parkes: We came up with a number of different military-themed plotlines prior to the final story. In one version, this kid was connected via computer to someone known as Uncle Ollie, or OLI. Later on, it's revealed that OLI stands for Omnipresent Laser Interceptor, a space-based defensive laser, and it's got this intelligent program running it. This was another version of what the WOPR became. We could never make it work, but I remember doing quite a lot of research into space- and Earth-based laser systems. It turned out to be too speculative, not as specific as what we decided on. David Scott Lewis, Solar-tech entrepreneur and model for David Lightman: Hacking was easy back then. There were few if any security measures. It was mostly hackers versus auditing types. The Computer Security Institute comes to mind. I would read all of their materials and could easily find ways around their countermeasures. The part in the movie showing David Lightman perusing the library to find Falken's backdoor password, "Joshua," is clearly a reference to many of my antics. Lasker: David Lewis wasn't exactly the inspiration. But he was a model. You could call him up in the middle of the night and ask, "Can you get a computer to play games with itself?" And he'd say, "Yes! Number of players: zero." Screenshot: Courtesy MGM Parkes: There was a guy named "Captain Crunch," John Draper. He was the famous phone phreak, one of the first telephone hackers. He was called Captain Crunch because he used a toy whistle given away in the cereal to activate a telephone trunk line, enabling him to make unlimited free calls. John "Captain Crunch" Draper, Early hacker and reformed phone phreak: I talked to them about how phone phreaks did it: The use of a dialer scanner program came from me repeatedly dialing up numbers until I found a computer modem. It's called wardialing now because David Lightman used it in the movie to make contact with the Norad computer. I called it scanning. Kevin "The Condor" Mitnick, Early hacker who served five years in prison for computer-related crimes: Scanning was a common hacking technique. But it seemed like something from a James Bond movie. In early '82 , the script grew so ambitious that the filmmakers needed to build the Hollywood version of Norad's Crystal Palace command center. Universal Pictures began to balk at the prospect of shooting a tech-heavy movie its executives didn't fully understand. The project stalled and ended up at United Artists, where director Martin Brest was hired. He began making changes in the script, starting with the key character, Falken. Lasker: I still wish we'd been able to stick with the original dying-astrophysicist character. It was Marty Brest who didn't like the idea of a man in a wheelchair in a war room, because it was too much like Dr. Strangelove. Parkes We always pictured John Lennon, because he was kind of a spiritual cousin to Stephen Hawking. Lasker: We had communicated with Hawking — not directly. And through David Geffen, we'd communicated with John Lennon, and he was interested in the role. I was writing the first scene where we meet Hawking — Falken — in the movie. He was an astrophysicist in our second draft. I was staring at the cover of the November '80 issue of Esquire, with Lennon on the cover, and describing his face, when a friend of mine — a bit of a jerk — called and said, "You're gonna have to find a new Falken." They had to find a new director, too; UA wasn't happy with the footage Brest had produced. The studio fired him and called in John Badham, the acclaimed director of Saturday Night Fever. Geek Goddess Those eyes. That laugh. Those khakis. For a legion of young WarGames fans, 20-year-old Ally Sheedy was a lust object second only to the Imsai 8080. A quarter century later, Wired caught up with hacker culture's first crush. — Scott Brown Wired: So it wasn't a love for microprocessors that drew you to this role. Sheedy: I couldn't make heads or tails of the script. It was easy for me to do the part where she's asking questions. Wired: What about now? Sheedy: To be honest, I haven't seen the movie since it came out. It's probably kind of quaint. Wired: Nowadays, cybercrime might outrank nuclear warfare as a source of collective anxiety. I sometimes feel really at sea with technology. I love email. Sheedy: All this communicating has created a world where no one's accountable. And I have a 14-year-old daughter, so I worry. Wired: Wow. You have a 14-year-old daughter. That just set off a wave of cognitive dissonance among the hackers who'd like to hit on you ... Do hackers hit on you? Sheedy: No, I don't hear so much from hackers. No. No, no, no. I don't. Thankfully. No. Wired: Just one no would've been fine. John Badham, Director Leonard Goldberg, the producer, shows me some footage they'd shot — it was a scene with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy going into his bedroom, early in the movie, and he shows her how he can change her grades on his computer. She freaks out and leaves. And I'm looking at this and thinking, "What's wrong here?" Driving home that night, I realized what it was. I stopped the car, found a phone booth, and called Leonard. "I know what the problem is!" I said. "They're not having any fun!" These kids were treating this as if they're involved in some dark and evil terrorist conspiracy. If I could change somebody's grades on the computer, I'd be peeing in my pants with excitement to show it to some girl. And the girl would be excited about it! I wasn't taking the point of view that there was something wrong with this guy. Parkes: There was such a myth that we were all subject to, that personal computing would lead to a generation of disconnected loners who stayed in their rooms. But it actually led to social networking of a kind we've never seen before. The David Lightman character we first wrote was an edgier character than the one that Matthew portrayed. The final version was edgy enough but in a slightly more playful way. Schwartz: The first thing on his mind was impressing the girl: "I'm changing your biology grade!" He was more about that than the art of hacking. The two computer nerds he goes to visit, Malvin and Jim (played by Eddie Deezen and Maury Chaykin), are much more in the mold of the conventional hacker. Eddie Deezen, Actor [New Yorker film critic] Pauline Kael said that I was the first computer nerd of film, and since then nobody has ever challenged me. To ensure accuracy, Badham invited a small army of computer whizzes on set. Badham: You could get all the hacker geekiness you wanted just by standing on the set. We were dealing with things like when Matthew sits at the computer, we've got an actor who can't even type. I'd say, "No, I just really want him to type in 'David' and have him get on." They said, "No! You can't do that! You have to go through all these elaborate sequences!" I said, "No, we're not doing that. Audiences will have left the theater by the time he logs into the computer one time." Draper: I was taken down to the set as a technical assistant. I don't really believe that there were any technical glitches — the fact that you can find a game company by scanning for phone numbers was real. That military computer, the WOPR, on the other hand, was a stupid, crazy thing. That was crazy. That was silly. Made for $12 million, the movie was released on June 6, 1983. It was a hit, nabbing $80 million at the box office (the fifth-highest total of the year) and three Oscar nominations (for original screenplay, sound, and cinematography). Film critic Roger Ebert described it as "an amazingly entertaining thriller" and "one of the best films so far this year." When the WOPR spoke the movie's penultimate line ("A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"), audiences, unnerved by years of US-Soviet nuclear brinkmanship, spontaneously applauded. And Ronald Reagan did not find the WOPR crazy or silly when he saw the movie at a special Camp David screening during its opening weekend. Lasker: I arranged that screening. Reagan was a family friend. My parents were in the movie business, and I grew up in Brentwood. We had Saturday night parties, and much the same people came. The Reagans — you could set your watch by them. At 7 o'clock, there they would be — ding-dong! Days after the screening, wrote Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon, Reagan held a closed-door briefing with some moderate members of Congress, wherein he sidetracked discussion of the MX ballistic missile program by bringing upWarGames. Had any of them seen the film? he asked, then launched into an animated account of the plot. "Don't tell the ending," cautioned one of the lawmakers. Parkes: I remember the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock was at three minutes to midnight. The timing of it all was really interesting. William Lord, Commander, Air Force Cyberspace Command: It was a great movie! A few years later, I was an executive officer with the Air Force Space Command stationed at Norad near Cheyenne Mountain. And I'm wondering, "Gee, where can we get such cool-looking displays?" It was a good forcing function. It required us to all of a sudden say, "If it really can look like this, why doesn't it?" Poster art: Courtesy MGM WarGames had its most indelible influence on hacker culture, not defense policy. The Cold War was ending, but the cyberwar was just getting started. The year after the movie's release saw the debut of 2600 magazine — a hacker zine named after the 2600-Hz tone Draper used to phreak phones. In 1993, the first hacker convention opened its doors. It was (and is) called Defcon, an affectionate nod to the movie that helped popularize the term. But WarGames' legacy isn't all smileys and Sunday wardrives. This was Silicon Valley's Jaws, doing for the digital demimonde what Spielberg's thriller had done for sharks: It introduced the world to the peril posed by hackers. Mitnick: That movie had a significant effect on my treatment by the federal government. I was held in solitary confinement for nearly a year because a prosecutor told a judge that if I got near a phone, I could dial up Norad and launch a nuclear missile. I never hacked into Norad. And when the prosecutor said that, I laughed — in open court. I thought, "This guy just burned all his credibility." But the court believed it. I think the movie convinced people that this stuff was real. They tried to make me into a fictional character. Parkes: Between John's instinct and Matthew's interpretation, Lightman ended up being a more accessible, real kid. We didn't know it at the time — we went into this researching hackers — but we probably drew a picture of a gamer. I mean, look at the line "I wanna play those games." Lewis: In those days, there were no blackhats or whitehats. I didn't do anything too serious. Just wanted to see what I could get away with. Just like in the movie. Parkes: If there's something naive about the movie, it's that we didn't anticipate the power of hackers. For the handful of people who ended up doing things like unleashing viruses, well, most of those guys got arrested and then worked for the computer security business. So I guess it's all worked out. Mitnick: It was a cool script, and Lightman becomes the hero. He was just doing it for fun. Today people aren't doing it for the fun. I was an old-school hacker, doing it for intellectual curiosity. It was more innocent. Trying to find a cool game to play and accidentally stumbling across a game that was for real. Contributing editor Scott Brown (scott_brown@wired.com) wrote about the new Batman movie in issue 16.07. Additional reporting by David Downs. Wired.Com WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars {new window}   Www.Wired.Com - It was the year Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire"; the year the United Nations implored the Russians to withdraw from Afghanistan; the year ABC aired The Day After, a TV movie about the wake of a nuclear attack on the US. In the midst of all this came WarGames, a fizzy little thriller about looming Armageddon. It's a deceptively simple story: High schooler David Lightman (played by 21-year-old Matthew Broderick) is a digitally proficient goofball who wants to play an unreleased computer game — and impress a pretty girl (Ally Sheedy). So he does something most Americans didn't have a word for back then: He starts hacking. Little does he know, the "computer company" he's infiltrated is actually a military installation running a missile-command supercomputer called the WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), and the game — Global Thermonuclear War — is real. Naturally, only David can stop it from setting off World War III. Over the years, WarGames has written itself into the cult lore of Silicon Valley. Google hosted a 25th-anniversary screening in May, where keyboard jockeys cheered Broderick's DOS acrobatics. (Imagine Rocky Horror, but picture the audience in Hawaiian shirts and mandals.) "Many of us grew up with this movie," Google cofounder Sergey Brin told the packed house. "It was a key movie of a generation, especially for those of us who got into computing." The original WarGames theatrical trailer. For more, visit video.wired.com. WarGames: The Dead Code attempts a reboot. For more, visit video.wired.com. How did WarGames become the geek-geist classic that legitimized hacker culture, minted the nerd hero — and maybe even changed American defense policy? Related question: Shall we play a game? In 1979, Walter Parkes, the future head of DreamWorks Pictures, was a young screenwriter with the outlines of an idea he'd developed with Lawrence Lasker, a script reader at Orion Pictures. Called The Genius,it was a character film about a dying scientist and the only person in the world who understands him — a rebellious kid who's too smart for his own good. The idea of featuring computers and computer networks would come later. Walter Parkes, Screenwriter: WarGames is looked upon as technologically prescient, but we actually started off with a concept that had nothing to do with technology. Lawrence Lasker, Screenwriter: We were complete newbies. In 1979, we didn't even know that home computers could hook up to other computers. Peter Schwartz, Futurist and creative consultant: I spent 10 years at the Stanford Research Institute, from 1972 to the end of 1981. That's where all this began. Walter and Larry came to SRI with a script idea called The Genius. And it was about a boy and a relationship he had with a great scientist named Falken, who was basically Stephen Hawking. Lasker: For me, the inspiration for the project was a TV special Peter Ustinov did on several geniuses, including Hawking. I found the predicament Hawking was in fascinating — that he might one day figure out the unified field theory and not be able to tell anyone, because of his progressive ALS. So there was this idea that he'd need a successor. And who would that be? Maybe this kid, a juvenile delinquent whose problem was that nobody realized he was too smart for his environment. That resonated with Walter. So I said, let's actually go talk to people about how a kid could get in trouble and get discovered by a brainy scientist and take it from there. Parkes: Before our conversation, the Falken character was just a way to access the adult side of the movie. It wasn't even much about computers yet. Schwartz made the connection between youth, computers, gaming, and the military — and The Genius began its long morph into WarGames. Schwartz: There was a new subculture of extremely bright kids developing into what would become known as hackers. SRI was in Palo Alto, and all the computer nerds were around: Xerox PARC, Apple just starting — it was all happening right there. SRI was node number two of the Internet. We talked about the fact that the kinds of computer games that were being played were blow-up-the-world games. Space war games. Military simulations. Things like Global Thermonuclear War. SRI was one of the main players in this. SRI was, in fact, running computerized war games for the military. Screenshot: Courtesy MGM In the summer of 1980, Parkes and Lasker went looking for inspiration for their war room set. They found it when they pestered their way onto a tour of the North American Aerospace Defense Command's central nerve center — 2,000 feet under Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. From here, American and Canadian military officials could detect an incoming Soviet nuke from hundreds of miles away. Lasker: As we're walking back to the bus that's going to take us to the hotel, James Hartinger [then commander in chief of Norad] walks up between me and Walter and plants a hand on the back of our necks: "I understand you boys are writing a movie about me!" he says. "Let's go to the bar." Walter says: "Well, we have to get on the bus to go back to our hotel." And Hartinger replies: "Are you insane? I've got 50,000 men under my command. You think I can't get you back to your hotel? Plus, I can't drink off the base. So c'mon." He was all for the message in our script. We kind of simplified it to "machines are taking over." He said, "God damn, you're right! I sleep well at night knowing I'm in charge." So we based General Beringer, played by Barry Corbin, on the real commander at Cheyenne Mountain. Parkes: We came up with a number of different military-themed plotlines prior to the final story. In one version, this kid was connected via computer to someone known as Uncle Ollie, or OLI. Later on, it's revealed that OLI stands for Omnipresent Laser Interceptor, a space-based defensive laser, and it's got this intelligent program running it. This was another version of what the WOPR became. We could never make it work, but I remember doing quite a lot of research into space- and Earth-based laser systems. It turned out to be too speculative, not as specific as what we decided on. David Scott Lewis, Solar-tech entrepreneur and model for David Lightman: Hacking was easy back then. There were few if any security measures. It was mostly hackers versus auditing types. The Computer Security Institute comes to mind. I would read all of their materials and could easily find ways around their countermeasures. The part in the movie showing David Lightman perusing the library to find Falken's backdoor password, "Joshua," is clearly a reference to many of my antics. Lasker: David Lewis wasn't exactly the inspiration. But he was a model. You could call him up in the middle of the night and ask, "Can you get a computer to play games with itself?" And he'd say, "Yes! Number of players: zero." Screenshot: Courtesy MGM Parkes: There was a guy named "Captain Crunch," John Draper. He was the famous phone phreak, one of the first telephone hackers. He was called Captain Crunch because he used a toy whistle given away in the cereal to activate a telephone trunk line, enabling him to make unlimited free calls. John "Captain Crunch" Draper, Early hacker and reformed phone phreak: I talked to them about how phone phreaks did it: The use of a dialer scanner program came from me repeatedly dialing up numbers until I found a computer modem. It's called wardialing now because David Lightman used it in the movie to make contact with the Norad computer. I called it scanning. Kevin "The Condor" Mitnick, Early hacker who served five years in prison for computer-related crimes: Scanning was a common hacking technique. But it seemed like something from a James Bond movie. In early '82 , the script grew so ambitious that the filmmakers needed to build the Hollywood version of Norad's Crystal Palace command center. Universal Pictures began to balk at the prospect of shooting a tech-heavy movie its executives didn't fully understand. The project stalled and ended up at United Artists, where director Martin Brest was hired. He began making changes in the script, starting with the key character, Falken. Lasker: I still wish we'd been able to stick with the original dying-astrophysicist character. It was Marty Brest who didn't like the idea of a man in a wheelchair in a war room, because it was too much like Dr. Strangelove. Parkes We always pictured John Lennon, because he was kind of a spiritual cousin to Stephen Hawking. Lasker: We had communicated with Hawking — not directly. And through David Geffen, we'd communicated with John Lennon, and he was interested in the role. I was writing the first scene where we meet Hawking — Falken — in the movie. He was an astrophysicist in our second draft. I was staring at the cover of the November '80 issue of Esquire, with Lennon on the cover, and describing his face, when a friend of mine — a bit of a jerk — called and said, "You're gonna have to find a new Falken." They had to find a new director, too; UA wasn't happy with the footage Brest had produced. The studio fired him and called in John Badham, the acclaimed director of Saturday Night Fever. Geek Goddess Those eyes. That laugh. Those khakis. For a legion of young WarGames fans, 20-year-old Ally Sheedy was a lust object second only to the Imsai 8080. A quarter century later, Wired caught up with hacker culture's first crush. — Scott Brown Wired: So it wasn't a love for microprocessors that drew you to this role. Sheedy: I couldn't make heads or tails of the script. It was easy for me to do the part where she's asking questions. Wired: What about now? Sheedy: To be honest, I haven't seen the movie since it came out. It's probably kind of quaint. Wired: Nowadays, cybercrime might outrank nuclear warfare as a source of collective anxiety. I sometimes feel really at sea with technology. I love email. Sheedy: All this communicating has created a world where no one's accountable. And I have a 14-year-old daughter, so I worry. Wired: Wow. You have a 14-year-old daughter. That just set off a wave of cognitive dissonance among the hackers who'd like to hit on you ... Do hackers hit on you? Sheedy: No, I don't hear so much from hackers. No. No, no, no. I don't. Thankfully. No. Wired: Just one no would've been fine. John Badham, Director Leonard Goldberg, the producer, shows me some footage they'd shot — it was a scene with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy going into his bedroom, early in the movie, and he shows her how he can change her grades on his computer. She freaks out and leaves. And I'm looking at this and thinking, "What's wrong here?" Driving home that night, I realized what it was. I stopped the car, found a phone booth, and called Leonard. "I know what the problem is!" I said. "They're not having any fun!" These kids were treating this as if they're involved in some dark and evil terrorist conspiracy. If I could change somebody's grades on the computer, I'd be peeing in my pants with excitement to show it to some girl. And the girl would be excited about it! I wasn't taking the point of view that there was something wrong with this guy. Parkes: There was such a myth that we were all subject to, that personal computing would lead to a generation of disconnected loners who stayed in their rooms. But it actually led to social networking of a kind we've never seen before. The David Lightman character we first wrote was an edgier character than the one that Matthew portrayed. The final version was edgy enough but in a slightly more playful way. Schwartz: The first thing on his mind was impressing the girl: "I'm changing your biology grade!" He was more about that than the art of hacking. The two computer nerds he goes to visit, Malvin and Jim (played by Eddie Deezen and Maury Chaykin), are much more in the mold of the conventional hacker. Eddie Deezen, Actor [New Yorker film critic] Pauline Kael said that I was the first computer nerd of film, and since then nobody has ever challenged me. To ensure accuracy, Badham invited a small army of computer whizzes on set. Badham: You could get all the hacker geekiness you wanted just by standing on the set. We were dealing with things like when Matthew sits at the computer, we've got an actor who can't even type. I'd say, "No, I just really want him to type in 'David' and have him get on." They said, "No! You can't do that! You have to go through all these elaborate sequences!" I said, "No, we're not doing that. Audiences will have left the theater by the time he logs into the computer one time." Draper: I was taken down to the set as a technical assistant. I don't really believe that there were any technical glitches — the fact that you can find a game company by scanning for phone numbers was real. That military computer, the WOPR, on the other hand, was a stupid, crazy thing. That was crazy. That was silly. Made for $12 million, the movie was released on June 6, 1983. It was a hit, nabbing $80 million at the box office (the fifth-highest total of the year) and three Oscar nominations (for original screenplay, sound, and cinematography). Film critic Roger Ebert described it as "an amazingly entertaining thriller" and "one of the best films so far this year." When the WOPR spoke the movie's penultimate line ("A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"), audiences, unnerved by years of US-Soviet nuclear brinkmanship, spontaneously applauded. And Ronald Reagan did not find the WOPR crazy or silly when he saw the movie at a special Camp David screening during its opening weekend. Lasker: I arranged that screening. Reagan was a family friend. My parents were in the movie business, and I grew up in Brentwood. We had Saturday night parties, and much the same people came. The Reagans — you could set your watch by them. At 7 o'clock, there they would be — ding-dong! Days after the screening, wrote Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon, Reagan held a closed-door briefing with some moderate members of Congress, wherein he sidetracked discussion of the MX ballistic missile program by bringing upWarGames. Had any of them seen the film? he asked, then launched into an animated account of the plot. "Don't tell the ending," cautioned one of the lawmakers. Parkes: I remember the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock was at three minutes to midnight. The timing of it all was really interesting. William Lord, Commander, Air Force Cyberspace Command: It was a great movie! A few years later, I was an executive officer with the Air Force Space Command stationed at Norad near Cheyenne Mountain. And I'm wondering, "Gee, where can we get such cool-looking displays?" It was a good forcing function. It required us to all of a sudden say, "If it really can look like this, why doesn't it?" Poster art: Courtesy MGM WarGames had its most indelible influence on hacker culture, not defense policy. The Cold War was ending, but the cyberwar was just getting started. The year after the movie's release saw the debut of 2600 magazine — a hacker zine named after the 2600-Hz tone Draper used to phreak phones. In 1993, the first hacker convention opened its doors. It was (and is) called Defcon, an affectionate nod to the movie that helped popularize the term. But WarGames' legacy isn't all smileys and Sunday wardrives. This was Silicon Valley's Jaws, doing for the digital demimonde what Spielberg's thriller had done for sharks: It introduced the world to the peril posed by hackers. Mitnick: That movie had a significant effect on my treatment by the federal government. I was held in solitary confinement for nearly a year because a prosecutor told a judge that if I got near a phone, I could dial up Norad and launch a nuclear missile. I never hacked into Norad. And when the prosecutor said that, I laughed — in open court. I thought, "This guy just burned all his credibility." But the court believed it. I think the movie convinced people that this stuff was real. They tried to make me into a fictional character. Parkes: Between John's instinct and Matthew's interpretation, Lightman ended up being a more accessible, real kid. We didn't know it at the time — we went into this researching hackers — but we probably drew a picture of a gamer. I mean, look at the line "I wanna play those games." Lewis: In those days, there were no blackhats or whitehats. I didn't do anything too serious. Just wanted to see what I could get away with. Just like in the movie. Parkes: If there's something naive about the movie, it's that we didn't anticipate the power of hackers. For the handful of people who ended up doing things like unleashing viruses, well, most of those guys got arrested and then worked for the computer security business. So I guess it's all worked out. Mitnick: It was a cool script, and Lightman becomes the hero. He was just doing it for fun. Today people aren't doing it for the fun. I was an old-school hacker, doing it for intellectual curiosity. It was more innocent. Trying to find a cool game to play and accidentally stumbling across a game that was for real. Contributing editor Scott Brown (scott_brown@wired.com) wrote about the new Batman movie in issue 16.07. Additional reporting by David Downs.
Read about the latest Entertainment News on Wired.com, including art, technology, films, animation, music, web video, tv, podcasts, and blogs. {...}
Published: July 23, 2008, 2:00 pm - Indexed: July 25, 2008, 11:04 am - Page Size: 50KB
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]]> Arts > Entertainment > Publications and Media {ENTERTAINMENT > PUBLICATIONS AND MEDIA} - Lennon childhood film gets grant http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/entertainment/publications-and-media/lennon-childhood-film-gets-grant-20080747117.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/entertainment/publications-and-media/lennon-childhood-film-gets-grant-20080747117.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:49:34 GMT A film about John Lennon's early life is among seven projects to be given lottery-funded grants by the UK Film Council. News.Bbc.Co.Uk Lennon childhood film gets grant {new window}   News.Bbc.Co.Uk - A film about John Lennon's early life is among seven projects to be given lottery-funded grants by the UK Film Council.
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Lennon childhood film gets grant {...}
Published: July 18, 2008, 12:49 pm - Indexed: July 19, 2008, 1:10 am - Page Size: 45KB
Category: Arts > Entertainment > Publications and Media

]]> Arts > Entertainment > Publications and Media {EUROPE > NEWSPAPERS} - John Lennon life story to be told in film http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/newspapers/john-lennon-life-story-to-be-told-in-film-20080751115.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/newspapers/john-lennon-life-story-to-be-told-in-film-20080751115.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:34:22 GMT A controversial retelling of John Lennon's upbringing is to be made into a film. Telegraph.Co.Uk John Lennon life story to be told in film {new window}   Www.Telegraph.Co.Uk - A controversial retelling of John Lennon's upbringing is to be made into a film.
John Lennon life story to be told in film - Telegraph {...}
Published: July 18, 2008, 10:34 am - Indexed: July 18, 2008, 11:55 pm - Page Size: 35KB
Category: Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > News and Media > Newspapers

]]> Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > News and Media > Newspapers