Entertainment

Elevator Pitch Contest

Yesterday’s launch event for the Science and Entertainment Exchange was a smashing success. The enthusiasm of everyone in the room was palpable, especially on the Hollywood side — these folks would love to be interacting more closely with scientists on a regular basis. (Let me pause to give a plug for Eleventh Hour, a show which I haven’t actually seen yet, but whose writers were complaining that they sometimes take grief for being too scientifically accurate.) I came away from the symposium with lots of new ideas, and also a deep-seated fear of our coming robot masters.

So, in honor of the new program, we hereby announce the Cosmic Variance Elevator Pitch Contest. I don’t know about you, but many folks I know with an interest in science take great pleasure in complaining about the embarrassing lack of realism and respect for the laws of nature apparent in so many movies and TV shows. Here’s your (fictional) chance to do something about it.

Opening scene: you step into an elevator at the headquarters of CBS/Paramount Television in Hollywood. (Unclear why you are there — perhaps to have lunch with your more-successful friend from high school, who works for their legal team.) There is only one other person in the elevator with you for the journey to the top floor — and it’s Les Moonves, President and CEO of CBS! (Again, unclear why he is taking the same elevator as you — we’ll fix that in post-production.)

Here is the perfect opportunity for your elevator pitch.

You have thirty seconds — which, as this blog is still a text-based medium, we’ll approximate as strictly 100 words or less — to pitch your idea for a new TV show that is based on science. It can be an hour drama, a half-hour sitcom, a reality show, game show, documentary, science fiction, whatever you like. For example:

I have an idea for a show called Cosmic Variance. It’s about seven scientists who blog during the day, but at night they fight crime! And to do it, they used advanced notions from modern physics and astrophysics, from adaptive optics to quantum decoherence. They’re young, they’re sexy, and they break hearts as they bust heads. But their university colleagues are already suspicious of their blogging, so they have to keep the crime-fighting activities completely secret. They have a deep underground lab where they carry out cutting-edge experiments, and there’s a canine sidekick named Sparky.

Okay, that’s a fairly silly example. I’m not eligible to win the contest. But you, the reader, are! So here are some of the ideas you want to keep in mind while polishing your pitch:

Most importantly: Les Moonves’s goal in life is not to make science look good. It’s to make money. So don’t pitch that this show would make the world a better place, or make science seem interesting; convince him that it’s exciting to everyone and will attract millions of eyeballs.

Use the science. For our purposes, we’re less interested in a show idea that tacks on some science to make things sound cool, as we are in a concept that couldn’t happen without the science.

Story is paramount. As much as we love accuracy and realism, there has to be a compelling narrative. You need to convince Moonves that people will be emotionally connected to the characters and their situation.

It’s easy to mock the efforts of others, but here’s a chance to see whether you could really put together a compelling show idea. Leave your entry in the comments. They will be judged by our crack team of scientists/bloggers/crime-fighters, and the winner will get a Cosmic Variance T-shirt. (We have plans to upgrade the quality of our current swag options.) Please note that there is not some hidden plan to actually make any TV shows out of this — we have no clout along those lines, so if you are a professional scriptwriter, don’t dump your plans out in public here on our blog. But if you’re a pro you already knew that.

And then: memorize your pitch! You never know when you might find yourself trapped in an elevator with the right person, and you have to be ready.

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SEEx

My one big brush with celebrity since moving to LA came over a year ago. I was contacted by Brad Grossman, cultural attaché to Brian Grazer of Imagine Entertainment. (The position of “cultural attaché to Brian Grazer” is sufficiently interesting the search for Brad’s replacement after he eventually left became the basis for an article in The New Yorker.) Grazer is one of the biggest producers in Hollywood — he’s the partner of Ron Howard, who does the directing. Think A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13 — entertaining movies that can also make you think a bit.

Of course, they were also responsible for The Da Vinci Code, which was neither very entertaining nor especially thought-provoking. But it sure did make lots of cash. So they signed up to make a film of Angels & Demons, the sequel. This time they really wanted to do a better job, but the raw material was not great; author Dan Brown is not known for putting a lot of work into accuracy and all that nonsense. So, among other things, they were talking to physicists — one of the major characters in the book is a physicist, and the opening scenes are set at CERN, and involve antimatter and baby universes. CERN even set up a webpage dealing with some of the physics issues.

So I got to have lunch with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, and talk about what would happen if you dropped a gram of antimatter in the river, and generally had a good time. Then the writers’ strike happened, and eventually they made the movie — I didn’t have any further involvement, and have no idea how it’s going to turn out. We’ll find out this spring.

But here is the point: sure, if you are Brian Grazer or Steven Spielberg or someone at that level, you can afford to hire a person whose sole job it is to hook you up with expertise in whatever field your latest movie or TV show happens to involve. But for the overwhelming majority of Hollywood projects, neither the time nor the money nor the knowledge is available to make that happen in any reliable way. We all have seen plenty of bad science in movies and on TV. Some of it is because the creators aren’t especially interested in getting it right — but increasingly they are. Too much of the bad science is just because the writers and directors didn’t know any better, and didn’t know how to find out.

No more! Tomorrow is the launch event for the Science and Entertainment Exchange, a new initiative sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. It’s a brand-new program, based in LA, to provide appropriate scientific expertise to all sectors of the entertainment industry. Not just making sure that a particular scene doesn’t violate the laws of physics too egregiously, but helping conscientious filmmakers accurately portray the culture of science — how those mysterious scientists really think and talk and dress. (I think it’s pretty obvious that the acronym for the new effort should be written as SEEx, which has the useful resonance with “seeks,” which is what a good scientist does. It also has some resonance with “sex,” which is less directly related to the scientific enterprise, but won’t hurt with the Hollywood crowd.)

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SEEx is off to a great start, as they recently hired the lovely and talented Jennifer Ouellette to be the director of the new program. Jennifer was brought in a bit late, but has big plans for bringing together both sides of the cultural divide between these two glamorous and creative fields of human endeavor. Personally, as spouse of the head honcho of the program, I’m hoping to also benefit; in particular, I’d like to get to meet Jodie Foster some day. Just because she was such a positive role model of a scientist in cinema, you understand.

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Nobel Fashion Police

Sorry for the meager posting of late. I’m in one of those phases with papers that are justthatclose to being done, and have to concentrate on pushing them out the door. So blogging might be light for a while.

By way of light diversion, here’s the LA Times’ take on grading recent Nobel Laureates on their fashion savvy (hat tip to Jennifer). The first thing to note is that physicists come out looking good, although one suspects that the grading was done on a curve. Here is Peter Gruenberg, of Giant Magnetoresistance fame.

Peter Gruenberg
On the Hit/Miss scale, the Times bestows a “Hit” on Gruenberg’s ensemble. “Here’s a guy who knows cool,” they say. Who am I to argue with the mainstream media?

But it’s not only the physicists who seem to get the benefit of the doubt. Here’s Literature laureate Doris Lessing, just after the Prize was announced.

Doris Lessing
This one is also graded a “Hit.” Admittedly, I wouldn’t want to be graded on my fashion choices as I was being surprised by photographers upon returning home from a trip to the grocery store. But still, rhapsodizing about the “curving highlight of red scarf” seems a bit much.

In other cases, the Times is unduly harsh. Here is Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Rajendra Pachauri
I’m sorry, but that is one stylin’ bureaucrat. Yet the Times gives him a “Miss,” complaining that the blue of his tie blends into the blue of his shirt. Like I said, graded on a curve, and not the same curve for everyone.

And then we have Medicine laureate Mario Capecchi.

Mario Capecchi
Again, the Times comes down hard, especially on the hat. Obviously they’ve spent too much time at Oscar parties and not enough at convocation ceremonies. The guy’s receiving an honorary degree in medical biotechnologies from the University of Bologna. This is the one yearly chance for your typical academic to go whole hog for the pomp and circumstance. Good for him.

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Physics Envy

Steven Levitt Celebrated economist, James Bates Clark Medal winner, and Freakonomics author Steven Levitt is having a good time, and doing pretty darn well, at the World Series of Poker. (Via Marginal Revolution; here’s Levitt’s own blog.) I am willing to go on record as predicting that he will not do as well as physicist Michael Binger did last year.

I’ve been reading a bit about game theory and the mathematics of poker, and have lots of great theories, including an elaborate analogy between poker and quantum mechanics. Here is one theory: physicists (and I imagine economists, too) will end up being much better poker players than mathematicians. The reasoning is that No Limit Hold’em is an incredibly complex system; not only can we not derive a dominant strategy in closed form, we can’t even prove any very useful theorems about realistic games. So game theorists and mathematicians study simplified systems about which they can actually prove theorems. They can do pretty well in figuring out strategies at a showdown (just two players), but early in the hand at a full table there’s almost nothing they can say. It becomes a question of which approximations to make and which models to choose for your opponents. That’s much more the purview of physicists and economists, who are forced to get their hands dirty in the real world. (A corollary: phenomenologists and astrophysicists will be better poker players than string theorists.)

Why am I not at the WSOP myself? Good question. I’m totally going next year.

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Knowing How to Wear Clothes

I know everyone is eagerly awaiting the cinematic event of the summer: Ocean’s Thirteen, third in a series of the lighthearted adventures of a gang of elegant rogues who like to pull off elaborate capers centered on lavish casino heists. Admittedly, the Eurocentric Ocean’s Twelve was a somewhat rambling letdown, but the latest installment promises a return to Vegas and hopefully also to form.

George and Brad

Seeing buzz about the new movie reminded me of a review I read of Ocean’s Twelve. To paraphrase, it expressed the sentiment “This isn’t by any means a very good film, but man, these people sure know how to wear clothes.” This summer’s installment adds Ellen Barkin and Al Pacino to the cast, so the knowledge of clothes-wearing should only be enhanced. (Also Noureen DeWulf, although I’m not familiar with her work.)

Ellen, Al, and Noureen

So my question is, what does it mean to “know how to wear clothes”? We might at first guess that it refers to the ability of a person to choose clothes that are right for their style, their body type, and the occasion. But in a major motion picture, one presumes that there are professionals whose job it is to do the clothes-choosing, so (respecting the reviewer enough to imagine that they meant exactly what they said) that can’t be it. It could also mean “is wearing nice clothes” or simply “is pretty hot,” but neither of those talents would accurately be characterized as knowing how to wear clothes.

So is there a specific kind of knowledge that refers to the ability to wear clothes? Is it not just a matter of picking out a good outfit, but a particular method of wearing them, adapting one’s demeanor and bearing to the clothes one wears? Or are we just faced with a sloppy deployment of language in an attempt to convey “Boy, that George Clooney would look yummy in a burlap kilt” in an imaginative way? Help me out here, people.

(p.s. Apparently we don’t have a “fashion” category on this blog. Yet.)

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I Always Thought Martin Sheen Was a Bit Two-Dimensional

From Angela Gunn comes news of Flatland: the Movie. And also, unconnectedly, Flatland: the Film. So, two different animated versions of Edwin A. Abbott’s classic “Romance of Many Dimensions” available for your DVD player. The Movie has the bonus that Martin Sheen is voicing the protagonist, but the Film has the advantage that it’s already available.

the Movie

Flatland the Film

Of course, as Angela points out, you could just read the original. It’s a favorite among physicists, especially those who work on extra dimensions. What they never seem to remember is how the book ends — protagonist A. Square, who has claimed to have proof that extra dimensions exist, is imprisoned for life on charges of heresy. Hmmm.

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Mystery Solved?

Apparently New Zealanders are more naturally curious about things than Americans are — they also noticed the puzzling absence of God in The Queen on airline flights, and actually started asking around about it. (Thanks to Richard Easther for pointing this out.) And they found an answer!

The story is that the version that was shown on Air New Zealand, and presumably also on United, was actually meant for Middle Eastern airlines. Flight Productions, the company that distributed the bowlderized version, suggested that some airline had requested that “God” be bleeped out. This raises another question, of course: why? There isn’t any traditional prescription against saying “God” that anyone could think of.

Hassan Hosseini, an Iranian community spokesman in Auckland, said he could not see why it would have been a problem with Muslims, as Allah was God.

“We believe in God, we would not be offended. We use the word God.”

And then, of course, if you’re going to start bleeping out words, there are better choices.

The Anglican Dean of Auckland, Richard Randerson, said he had seen The Queen at the cinema and could not recall much use of the word God.

“There were plenty of other words. I think the Queen said ‘bugger’ when her four-wheel-drive vehicle got stuck in a Highland creek.”

This would be the appropriate thread in which to debate whether the Queen was referring to the commonplace, literal, interventionist “bugger,” or whether she had in mind a more sophisticated, ineffable notion of “bugger.”

Update: There’s now an alternative explanation (thanks to several people for pointing it out). CNN claims it’s just an overzealous editor. One way or another, it’s not standard operating procedure, apparently.

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*** Save the Queen

The QueenA couple of days ago, flying from Washington to LA, I was happy to discover that the in-flight entertainment was actually a decent movie: The Queen, featuring a fantastic performance by Helen Mirren. (Not that Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights, which I managed to see on more than one flight in December, wasn’t a piece of cinematic magic in its own right.)

At one point in the film there was a strange moment of silence, as if the soundtrack had momentarily cut out. Airplane movie technology being what it is, this hardly registered as unusual. But then it happened again, and later on it happened yet again — and every time, when one of the characters was clearly about to say a particular word. The word was “God.”

So, like, anyone know what’s going on here? This is clearly an intentional feature of the “edited for content” version of the film that was being shown by United. I checked with others (same airline, different flights) who confirmed the phenomenon — the word “God” has been censored out of United Airlines’s version of The Queen. As far as I could tell, the word wasn’t being used in any especially problematic context, whatever that might be — basically it was people saying “God only knows” or “for God’s sake” or something equally mild. Someone apparently thought that somebody should be shielded from hearing the word “God,” but I honestly don’t know if it was for fear of having the Lord’s name taken in vain, or dislike for heavy-handed religiosity. Neither one of which would have fit the circumstances at all. (Could Richard Dawkins be succeeding in his nefarious campaign to criminalize all forms of religious speech?)

According to the World Airline Entertainment Association, the edited-for-airlines versions of films are provided by the film distributors themselves. But I couldn’t find anything from Miramax, who distribute The Queen, about this particular phenomenon. I simply refuse to believe that someone is going around deleting the word “God” from movies, for whatever reason, without stirring up enormous resistance (or at least argument) from someone else, for whatever other reason.

Worst of all, the Internets are failing me. I’ve googled around, searching for any chitchat about film distributors expurgating the word “God” from airline movies, only to come up short. Can I really be the only one to have noticed this? I feel lost without the internet to guide me.

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