Acclaimed Canadian film and television director and producer Norman Jewison has died at the age of 97.
He first worked in television in Canada before moving to the US, where he transitioned into motion pictures.
His list of films made over 40 years is staggering:
1962 40 Pounds of Trouble
1963 The Thrill of It All
1964 Send Me No Flowers
1965 The Art of Love
1965 The Cincinnati Kid
1966 The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming
1967 In the Heat of the Night
1968 The Thomas Crown Affairs
1969 Gaily, Gaily
1971 Fiddler on the Roof
1973 Jesus Christ Superstar
1975 Rollerball
1978 F.I.S.T.
1979 …And Justice for All
1982 Best Friends
1984 A Soldier’s Story
1985 Agnes of God
1987 Moonstruck
1989 In Country
1991 Other People’s Money
1994 Only You
1995 Bogus
1999 The Hurricane
2003 The Statement
“Film Rescue has a global reach — and reputation — with a collection office in the Netherlands and another in northern Montana. Every few weeks, a batch of 200 to 400 rolls of old camera and home movie film appears at the Indian Head office, which is housed in a 125-year-old bank building on the main highway through town.”
“The film rescuers consist of Miller, Gostick and five employees…. One employee, Gerald Freyer, is a European-trained digitization expert. He was beavering away for a German museum when Miller recruited him to move to the Prairies. His latest star acquisition is Heather Harkins, who trained at the renowned Selznick School of Film Preservation in Rochester, N.Y., and was doing contract work for museums and archives throughout North America when she got a cold-call job offer.”
Jason says, “An AI-driven program called Greenlight Coverage gives instant feedback on your script. You just upload it, and the AI software spits coverage back to you. It rates different parts of the script on a scale from 1-10 and then gives a synopsis, positive comments, and notes on what would make it better. The program even creates a cast list and movie comps, allowing you to have an AI question-and-answer session to ask specific questions about the script.”
“The truth is, I could see a read like this coming from a human being. Is it the best coverage? No. But as someone who has tested many services out there, I felt it gave better coverage than some paid sites, which are hit-and-miss depending on the person who reads your script. I look at AI as a tool that some writers may decide to use. I was happy I tried this tool, and I honestly was surprised by the feedback of the coverage.”
My take: I also participated in the beta test of Greenlight Coverage and asked the creator Jack Zhang the following questions via email.
Michael Korican: For folks used to buying coverage for their scripts, what are the main features of Greenlight Coverage that set it apart? Jack Zhang: The speed, accuracy, consistency as well as reliability. Also the ability to ask follow up questions that can provide guidance on how to pitch to investors and financiers, all the way to how to further develop certain characters. In the future, we will also include data from Greenlight Essentials.
MK: Writers sometimes wait weeks if not longer for coverage. How fast is Greenlight Coverage? JZ:15 mins to 2 hours when they first upload their screenplay, depending on their subscribed package. The follow up questions are answered instantly.
MK: In your testing of Greenlight Coverage, how have produced Hollywood scripts rated? JZ: It’s a mixed bag; the universally critically acclaimed ones usually get a very high score 8.5 to 9+, like The Godfather, Shawshank, etc. The bad ones like The Room got 3/10. It really depends on the screenplay and the film.
MK: Greenlight Coverage uses a neural network expert system; the coverage section is highly structured whereas the question section is open-ended. How is this done and what LLM does Greenlight Coverage use? JZ: We are using large language models to power our back end and it is not one, but a few different ones as well as our proprietary model that was fine tuned based on industry veteran feedback.
MK: Why should those folks who hate AI give Greenlight Coverage a try for free? JZ: I totally see where they are coming from and personally I also agree that in such a creative industry, the human touch is 100% needed. This is just a tool to help give quick feedback and an unbiased opinion on the screenplay. It is useful as another input to the script, but not the end all and be all for it.
btw, not to brag but Greenlight Coverage gave my latest script, The Guerrilla Gardeners, 8/10. Wanna produce it?
He points out that this is a huge story because the “notoriously secretive Netflix has published all its streaming numbers for the public to see” for the first time.
Netflix will publish the What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report twice a year.
The report has four columns:
Title, both original and licensed
Whether the title was available globally
The premiere date for any Netflix TV series or film
Hours viewed
Some takeaways:
This six month timeframe aggregates 100 billion hours viewed.
Over 60% of the titles appeared on Netflix’s weekly Top 10 lists.
30% of all viewing was for non-English content, mainly Korean and Spanish.
My take: the industry has always wanted more transparency from Netflix and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this report comes on the heels on the writer and actor strikes. I would love to see someone take this information and cross-reference it with genres, formats and actors. Will other streamers follow with their data?
“First of all, the most important thing for me was that it felt fresh and contemporary, so we started out by recording new audio interviews with the surviving members of the band, Sean Ono Lennon and Peter Jackson. It was important to record only audio because that’s my favourite way of getting intimate and conversational interview content.”
He adds,
“I took these interviews into the edit and made a kind of podcast cut of the story, which became our foundation for the timeline…. Interviews are always a big part of my process, and are where I start because more often than not the answers that you get to questions lead you somewhere you didn’t expect and change the course of the project, so I like to do those early. It’s always useful to start with audio because it’s also the most malleable and it’s possible to go back for pick up interviews. Archive footage or access (with a camera) to the people you’re talking to actually doing what they’re talking about is much harder to acquire.”
Rosie asks him, “What is your favourite part of the finished film?”
Oliver replies: The emotional climax of the film is definitely the moment where we get to hear John’s isolated vocal for the first time. It’s quite an emotional moment to hear him emerge from that scratchy demo.
My take: this confirms that sound is more important than picture, to me. I think it would have been nice to have the dates displayed on each film clip used because there are a lot, and they bounce around in time, from now and then.
Funny, both the released camera and the prototype look an awful lot like the Logmar Humboldt S8.
Logmar’s next Super 8 camera, the Chatham S8, had a superior Latham loop mechanism that resulted in rock-steady registration, never seen before on Super 8. Check out this sample that actually looks like 16 mm footage:
Logmar’s latest C-mount Super 8 camera is the Gentoo GS8 that “uses standard Kodak 50 ft cartridges in combination with a re-usable spacer providing true pin registration.”
“Part of my job is testing AI products to find out how well they work, what they can be used for and just how good they are at different tasks. So, inspired by my mom’s favorite genre of movie I decided to ask ChatGPT to write a Christmas story in the style of Hallmark.”
His ChatGPT 4 prompt? “Can you help me come up with the plot for a Hallmark-style Christmas movie?”
The resulting basic plot? “In ‘Christmas Carousel’, a New York architect discovers love and the value of tradition when she teams up with a local carousel restorer to save a cherished holiday attraction in a small town.”
There’s a more detailed plot, characters and even dialogue.
Oops! There is a real 2020 Hallmark movie called “A Christmas Carousel” with this plot: “When Lila is hired by the Royal Family of Ancadia to repair a carousel, she must work with the Prince to complete it by Christmas.”
My take: even though it appears ChatGPT 4 came extremely close to ripping off the title of an existing Hallmark movie, I like its plot better than the real one. Go figure.
The mock-up asks you for a text prompt and then writes lyrics, music and has a voice-cloned artist sing:
YouTube is also testing Music AI Tools:
This is all possible due to Google DeepMind’s Lyria, their most advanced AI music generation model to date.
Cleo Abram also explains the real issue with AI music: When do artists get paid?
My take: AI is just a tool — I use it occasionally and will be exploring it more in 2024. What we as a society really need to figure out is what everyone’s going to do, and how they’ll get (not earn) enough money to live, when AI and Robotics make paid work redundant.
