Stay Free!: How did Mad Hot Ballroom survive the copyright cartel? "Answer: by limiting music that played in classrooms, haggling over clearance fees, and cutting out a scene.

Sewell: We first cleared music for two years for festival use, and then went back and negotiated for worldwide commercial use in all media, for perpetuity. It was extremely expensive. For most films, music licensing is 1 to 10 percent of the production budget; ours came in at 45 percent: $140,000.

Sewell: I thought so too. It's only six seconds! But our lawyer said we needed to clear it. So I called Sprint, which owns the ring tone master rights, and they gave it to me for free because they saw it as product placement. But then I called EMI, which owns the publishing rights and they asked for $10,000. I said no way--even the classics weren't getting that much. Luckily, we were able to get it for less.

Sewell: But "Hit the Road Jack" was special for [Ray Charles]. His lawyer said, "I don't care if you were the president and had half a million dollars, you're not going to get this song." There are two songs Ray Charles seldom granted rights to, "Hit the Road, Jack" and "God Bless America." I love that: "Hit the Road" is right there with "God Bless America."

Sewell: When we were down shooting the boys playing foosball, Ronnie yelled out, "Everybody dance now!" Just when I think we've finished the film, someone points out that we have to clear that because it's a "visual vocal cue." So I went back to the publishers, and the first publisher, Spirit, says they'll throw it in with the other things we've cleared if Warner Chappell throws it in. But Warner Chappell said, "Look, we've cut you some nice deals, we can't give this to you." They said this three-second bit would cost $5,000. And since they had Most Favored Nation status it would have raised the cost on similar uses, like the Rocky ring-tone. So I went back to lawyer and said we should keep it in because this should be a poster child for fair use. But he didn't recommend taking on the music industry. Those corporations have too much money for us to play Norma Rae our first time out." It's about control over money.

Slate: Lucas vs. Spielberg. "Rivalry may not be quite the right word for the relationship that exists between Lucas and Spielberg. What they have is far more subtle: something more like the impacted, covert, passive-aggressive version of rivalry practiced by siblings—wherein any hint of hostility is buried in a bear hug and conflict covered with a smile. Theirs is a battle fought out in box-office millions and backhanded compliments, blockbusters, and casual slights. "He's taught me a lot about creative compromise," Spielberg once said of Lucas, with a straight face. And when Spielberg repeatedly begged to direct one of the new Star Wars episodes, Lucas reported the story with the glee of a child keeping his favorite toy just out of reach.

He would later call Lucas "the best moviemaker of his generation," adding, "I was admiring and jealous of his style and proximity to audiences." But he also teased Lucas about his technique—Lucas' static camera positions, in particular, used to amuse Spielberg, whose sinuously gliding camerawork was fast becoming legendary. "George makes his visuals come to life through montage," he said. "That makes him unique in our generation, since most of us do it instead with composition and camera placement."

At the time, it was Spielberg's career that seemed checkered. Both Jaws and Close Encounters had gone wildly over budget, as did his elephantine World War II farce, 1941—Spielberg's first flop—so that by the time he got around to Raiders, if anyone resembled a man trying to outrun a giant runaway boulder, it was he. Lucas, as executive producer, had a hard time convincing studio heads that Spielberg was the right director for Raiders.

Lucas had helped curb Spielberg's tendency toward financial excess, but Spielberg would rightly take credit for Raiders' artistry. When Nazis shoot up a casket of liquor, Karen Allen stops briefly to grab a mouthful before getting on with the fight. Lucas would never have shot that, or if he did he would have cut it, but for Spielberg, such touches are, you feel, almost the reason for shooting the film; for while speed excites Lucas—precisely because it seals him off from what blurs past, like Luke Skywalker in his X-wing cockpit—it seems almost to relax Spielberg, loosening him up for dabs of characterization and his goosiest, off-the-cuff humor.

As Martin Scorsese put it: "Lucas became so powerful that he didn't have to direct. But directing is what Steven has to do." If directors' careers are essentially conversations with an audience, then Spielberg's has been ongoing, attentive, endlessly responsive, and curious—after the bold shock of Jaws, the beatifically soothing Close Encounters, after the bloat of 1941, the clean economy of Raiders. Lucas is rather more like the man at the dinner party who says one bold, brilliant thing and then shuts up—in his case for 22 years.

Their personalities began to diverge. "[Y]ou never get the feeling with Steven that it's my way or the highway," says Scott Ross, former president of Industrial Light & Magic. "It's 'what do you think, what do you think, what do you think...' and he'll go, 'Wow that's a great idea.' Unbelievable exuberance and incredibly collaborative." Lucas had become resentful, even hermitlike. "You have to remember that George is a guy who came out of school and wound up being a superstar and amassing a fortune very, very quickly," says Ross. "He is incredibly shy. He's not a very people person. He had this real distrust of lawyers, a real distrust of accountants and management executives, and one of the reasons he wound up staying in the Bay Area was to get away from all of that." Ross continues, "And also to an extent that's the reason he started Pixar"—the studio that made Toy Story—"so he could make movies with a limited amount of people—literally put himself in a dark room, and direct and edit the whole thing by himself."

A decade later, Spielberg would coax Lucas back out of his cave, for it was Jurassic Park that lit the fire beneath Lucas' tail and spurred him to direct again. When Spielberg showed Lucas Industrial Light & Magic's test reel of a computer-generated T. rex, Lucas' eyes filled with tears—he hadn't quite realized how advanced his own company's effects had become.

"He won't let me do one," Spielberg told interviewers. "I understand why—Star Wars is George's baby. It's his cottage industry and it's his fingerprints. He knows I've got Jurassic Park and Raiders of the Lost Ark. But George has Star Wars, and I don't think he feels inclined to share any of it with me."

The contest between the two men now looks very close to being a rout. Even if you put aside the Oscars that Spielberg has won for his more "adult" work, like Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, and compare the two men solely in terms of their contributions to blockbuster cinema—in terms of pure popcorn—it is clear that Lucas' much-vaunted connection to the audience, which Spielberg once so feared, looks a little rocky. Lucas' career rests precariously on a single film, directed back in 1977. Everything else of his has failed, except Raiders, which Spielberg directed. And so Lucas has been drawn back to Star Wars with an air of glum fatalism, while Spielberg puts on ever more ambidextrous displays of reach and range. Lucas may well win the box-office battle this summer, but Spielberg looks like he's won the war." Too bad the SW fans won't get anything more out of the series than Lucas will allow them, within his ability. Fortunately, there always will be fan fictions/movies.

Rolling Stone: The Force Behind Star Wars. "Right after Graffiti I was getting this fan mail from kids that said the film changed their life, and something inside me said, do a children's film. And everybody said, "Do a children's film? What are you talking about? You're crazy."

Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology-looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does. Anyway, I became very aware of the fact that the kids were really lost, the sort of heritage we built up since the war had been wiped out in the Sixties and it wasn't groovy to act that way anymore, now you just sort of sat there and got stoned. I wanted to preserve what a certain generation of Americans thought being a teenager was really about -- in a strong sense from about 1945 to 1962, that generation, several generations. There was a certain car culture, a certain mating ritual going on, and it was something that I'd lived through and really loved.

There's nothing but cop movies, and a few films like Planet of the Apes, Ray Harryhausen films, but there isn't anything that you can really dig your teeth into. I realized a more destructive element in tile culture would be a whole generation of kids growing up without that thing, because I had also done a study on, I don't know what you call it, I call it the fairy tale or the myth. It is a children's story in history and you go back to the Odyssey or the stories that are told for the kid in all of us. I can see the little kids sitting there and just being enthralled with Ulysses. Plus the myths which existed in high adventure, and an exotic far-off land which was always that place over the hill, Camelot, Robin Hood, Treasure Island. That sort of stuff that is always big adventure out there somewhere. It came all the way down through the western.

I was a real fan of Flash Gordon and that kind of stuff, a very strong advocate of the exploration of outer space and I said, this is something, this is a natural. One, it will give kids a fantasy life and two, maybe it will make someone a young Einstein and people will say, "Why?" What we really need to do is to colonize the next galaxy, get away from the hard facts of 2001 and get on the romantic side of it. Nobody is going to colonize Mars because of the technology, they are going to go because they think maybe they will be able . . . well, it is romantic, it is the romantic aspect of it that needs to be looked at for a second, which nobody had ever looked at before. I mean, everybody had looked at the hardware end of it.

Stanley Kubrick made the ultimate science-fiction movie and it is going to be very hard for somebody to come along and make a better movie, as far as I'm concerned. I didn't want to make a 2001, 1 wanted to make a space fantasy that was more in the genre of Edgar Rice Burroughs; that whole other end of space fantasy that was there before science took it over in the Fifties. Once the atomic bomb came, everybody got into monsters and science and what would happen with this and what would happen with that. I think speculative fiction is very valid but they forgot the fairy tales and the dragons and Tolkien and all the real heroes.

I had done sociological research on what makes hit films -- it is part of the sociological bent in me; I can't help it.

Everybody has points, but the key is to make them pay off. I figured I was never going to see any money on my points, so what the heck. I also had a chance to give away a lot of my points, which I had done with Graffiti. Part of the success is the fault of the actors, composer and crew and they should share in the rewards as well, so I got my points carved down much less than what my contemporaries have. But I never expected Star Wars to... I expected to break even on it, I still can't understand it...I struggled through this movie. I had a terrible time; it was very unpleasant. American Graffiti was unpleasant because of the fact that there was no money, no time and I was compromising myself to death. But I could rationalize it because of the fact that, well, it is just a $700,000 picture -- it's Roger Corman -- and what do you expect, you can't expect everything to be right for making a little cheesy, low-budget movie. But this was a big expensive movie and the money was getting wasted and things weren't coming out right. I was running the corporation. I wasn't making movies like I'm used to doing. American Graffiti had like forty people on the payroll, that counts everybody but the cast. I think THX had about the same. You can control a situation like that. On Star Wars we had over 950 people working for us and I would tell a department head and he would tell another assistant department head, he'd tell some guy, and by the time it got down the line it was not there. I spent all my time yelling and screaming at people, and I have never had to do that before... I got rid of some people here and there but it is a very frustrating and an unhappy experience doing that. I realized why directors are such horrible people -- in a way -- because you want things to be right, and people will just not listen to you and there is no time to be nice to people, no time to be delicate.

A film is sort of binary -- it either works or it doesn't work. It has nothing to do with how good a job you do. If you bring it up to an adequate level where the audience goes with the movie then it works, that is all. It is a fusion thing and then everything else, all of the mistakes don't count anymore.

If a film does not work, then you can do an impeccable job with making the movie. People still see the mistakes, and they get bored and it just doesn't work. And so what can you say? THX was about 70% of what I wanted it to be. I don't think you ever get to the point where it is 100%. Graffiti was about 50% of what I wanted it to be but I realized that the other 50% would have been there, if I just had a little more time and a little more money. Star Wars is about 25% of what I wanted it to be. It's really still a good movie, but it fell short of what I wanted it to be.

Yeah. Star Wars is designed with the international market in mind. The French are very much into this genre. They understand it more than Americans do, and it is the same with the Japanese. I own a comic gallery, an art gallery in New York that sells comic art and stuff; the guy that runs the art gallery also runs a comic store and we do a lot of business in France. They understand Alex Raymond, they understand that he was a great artist, they understand Hal Foster and they understand comic art as real art and as a sort of interesting, goofy thing. And I am very much into comic art, and its place in society as a real art, because it is something that expresses the culture as strongly as any other art. What Uncle Scrooge McDuck says about America, about me when I was a kid, is phenomenal. It is one of the greatest explorations of capitalism in the American mystique that has ever been written or done anywhere. Uncle Scrooge swimming around in that money bin is a key to our culture. [Laughs] Hal Foster was a huge influence in comic art and, I think, art in general. Some of the Prince Valiants are as beautiful and expressive as anything you are going to find anywhere. It is a form of narrative art but because it is in comic it has never been looked at as art. I look at art, all of art, as graffiti. That's how the Italians describe the hieroglyphics on the Egyptian tombs, they were just pictures of a past culture. That is all art is, a way of expressing emotions that come out of a certain culture at a certain time. That's what cartoons are, and that's what comics are. They are expressing a certain cultural manifestation on a vaguely adolescent level but because of it, it is much more pure because it is dealing with real basic human drives that more sophisticated art sometimes obscures.

The dogfight sequence was extremely hard to cut and edit. We had storyboards that we had taken from old movies and we used the black and white footage of old World War II movies intercut with pilots talking and stuff, so you could edit the whole sequence in real time. My wife, Marcia, can normally cut a whole reel -- all ten minutes of the film -- in one week. I think it took her eight weeks to cut that battle. It was extremely complex and we had 40,000 feet of dialogue footage of pilots saying this and that. And she had to cull through all that, and put in all the fighting as well. Nobody really has ever tried to interweave an actual plot story into a dogfight, and we were trying to do that, however successful or unsuccessful we were.

I was walking that thin line between making something that I thought was vaguely a nonviolent kind of movie but at the same time I was having all the fun of people getting shot. And I was very careful that most of the people that are shot in the film were the monsters or those storm-troopers in armored suits. Anyway, I was rewriting, I was struggling with that plot problem when my wife suggested that I kill off Ben, which she thought was a pretty outrageous idea, and I said, "Well, that is an interesting idea, and I had been thinking about it." Her first idea was to have Threepio get shot, and I said impossible because I wanted to start and end the film with the robots, I wanted the film to really be about the robots and have the theme be framework for the rest of the movie. But then the more I thought about Ben getting killed the more I liked the idea because, one, it made the threat of Vader greater and that tied in with The Force and the fact that he could use the dark side. Both Alec Guinness and I came up with the thing of having Ben go on afterward as part of The Force. There was a thematic idea that was even stronger about The Force in the earliest scripts. It was really about The Force, a Castaneda Tales of Power thing.

Yes, it was one of the original ideas of doing a sequel that if I put enough people in it and it was designed carefully enough I could make a sequel about anything. Or if any of the actors gave me lot of trouble or didn't want to do it, or didn't want to be in the sequel, I could always make a sequel without one.

One of my motivating factors for doing the film, along with all the other ones, was that I love toys and games. And so I figured, gee, I could start a kind of a store that sold comic art, and sold sevety -eight records, or old rock 'n' roll records that I like, and antique toys and a lot of things that I am really into; stuff that you can't buy in regular stores. I also like to create games and things, so that was part of the movie, to be able to generate toys and things. Also, I figured the merchandising along with the sequels would give me enough income over a period of time so that I could retire from professional filmmaking and go into making my own kind of movies, my own sort of abstract, weird, experimental stuff.

I have never been like Francis and some of my other friends who are building giant empires and are constantly in debt and have to keep working to keep up their empires. But he is trying to create an independence that we are all trying to create, an independence from having tile studios dictate what kind of films are made." Mr. Lucas before he became a CEO/director from a filmmaker. The transition is complete, so that I doubt Lucas can make a little movie that he wants to make after the prequel trilogy.

I've reformatted and reinstalled both of my PC and Powerbook over the weekend. Yeah, it was like going to a dentist, but I triumphed. (On that note, I DO need to get a dental checkup.) Windows needed serious clean install after running for 2 years non-stop-I used to reinstall every 6 months!! But Mac... DVD Studio Pro kept crashing on me and had to reinstall Mac OS X. Went better than Windows which still fails to burn with my 2x CD burner and other small problems that creeps up time to time. (Oh well, I'm buying new PC next month, hopefully.)

So I install every program for Mac except for my Avid Express 3.5. It turns out that it cannot support 10.3.9 which is just below new Tiger. No Avid don't support Tiger yet, but their 3.5, forget it. I had this program for barely two years and it's already outdated. Talk about serious hurting! On my wallet. I'm not giving in and buying upgrade, which is what's left for good. I got it to get familiar with Avid interface, but I no longer face that needs. With upcoming Final Cut Pro 5 and new host of programs, I am more firmly entrenched toward FCP camp.

I rather spend some money getting a DV deck. Sony DSR-11 seems to be the choice for budget conscious digital editors. For $1600 or less on eBay-Thank god for eBay!, less than 2k on retail.

Now that I'm more or less relieved of my writing, I am gearing more toward getting some post-production action. So, now I bid good night and prepare for the next day. Bon nuit!

Avid, FCP, Video Editing News. Great tips and lessons for a budding digital editor like me.

Why the BBS Documentary is Creative Commons. "Creative Commons is a group of rock and roll lawyers who basically looked at the currently draconian copyright law and decided to back-hack in an alternative copyright that would allow various uses of content and material in a way that was clear and distinct for all parties. Whereas current copyright law in the United States basically says that if a child touches a CD without paying for it ahead of time, that child may be shot in the head.... creative commons says that the kid can go and play with the CD and make strange sounds with its content or add some beats or sample it or whatever, depending on the license. Oh, and you can't shoot the child in the head.

Here is my secret 11 herbs and spices recipe for how I approached creating the documentary and then Creative Commons licensing the final work.

• Create a really good movie.
• Create some kick-ass packaging. Find out what your printing company offers, then ask for a custom version. Take enormous insane risks in the creation of the packaging so that it has a unique feel. Use full color. Use photos. Get a professional cover artist to make you some custom artwork that catches the eye like a fishhook. Embed little messages into the artwork. Get artists from around the world to contribute little pieces. Find out what's required to make the package look unique, and then exceed it.
• Make it easy to order and ask questions. Use Paypal, Kagi, Amazon, whoever wants to sell it. Allow yourself to be contacted for questions and inquiries. Be responsive. Treat people who want to buy your work with respect and honor, do not cheat them or claim your work is something it is not. Allow them to see previews, to see what they're getting. Be upfront and honest if there are delays and explain carefully what is going on so people who give you money are not in the dark and feeling like they were had. Share your pain and your happiness as the person working on your project.
• Be available for autographs and discussions. Go to places where people who buy your works are around, and answer questions/show them you're a real person.
• Realize that some people simply do not buy media anymore. Instead, assume that if you've actually made a unique, interesting product and put your heart into it and made something that can't truly be duplicated, people will pay. And if you treat them like they're human beings, they'll ask other people to pay too.

Just because I have Creative Commons licensed this documentary does not mean I don't like getting paid for it... In one of my world-famous metaphors, it's like buying bread. You don't feel ripped off buying bread; you don't go "holy nails, why is this bread twenty dollars? In fact, it's stale! It's not even BREAD. It's some sort of "best of bread" with a couple pieces of other loaves of bread stitched together!" Yet people feel this way about media and other products all the time. I've tried to make a decent, good, solid loaf of bread here, which tastes good, is what it says it is, and doesn't cheat you."

I have registed my script, Princess and Seven Assassins with WGA East and they sent me this:

They used to send just a letter but I guess they felt bad just taking my hard-earned $22. I felt like I graduated a school with a degree or something. I should frame it, but I think this would do just fine.

Next stop, Final Draft Big Break! Competition and Inktip.

No, my next stop is Trigger Digits, my next feature script effort.

New York Asian Film Festival 2005. Good mix of Asian flicks to see at the theaters this summer instead of downloaded versions on my dinky computer monitors. (Even though I have the 20" widescreen, nothing compare to the theater experience.) Yeah, don't forget your shrimp chips.

My picks:

• Godzilla Final War
• Tetsujin-28
• One Night in Mongkok
• Marebito

I left out the rest of the good Korean flicks since I already saw them with my DVDs, etc. The offering is better than this year's Hollywood summer blockbusters. (Fantastic Four? A trainwreck!)

V FOR VENDETTA Script Review... And It Ain't Pretty!! "He indicates his mask

V

"This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is it vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished, as the once vital voice of the verisimilitude now venerates what they once vilified. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vangquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.

The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose vis-à-vis an introduction, and so it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V." They must used up all the v words in a dictionary. Or not.