robots have been depicted in movies for more than a century, but the anxieties about artificial intelligence that they used to convey are no longer theoretical. There’s a bill in US Congress right now to stop AI from gaining control of nuclear weapons, and roughly a dozen militaries around the …
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I've been in the entertainment industry since I was nine. I joined the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) when I was 11 in 1977, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) when I was 22, and the Directors Guild of America (DGA) the following year. I got my start as a child …
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Back in May, just a week into the the Writers Guild of America’s strike, John August, a member of the union’s negotiating committee and writer of Charlie’s Angels, described his personal dystopia: “the Nora Ephron problem”—a world in which artificial intelligence evolves to become a writer so profound it can …
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After six months of shooting, six months in postproduction, and nine months of concentrated editing, Dune was ready to be unleashed onto 1,700 screens worldwide simultaneously, a rarity then. There were four gala premieres scheduled for the film: Washington, DC; Los Angeles; Miami; and London. The DC premiere at the …
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If the question hasn’t hit your For You page or Twitter feed (or group chat) yet, it will: How often do you think about the Roman Empire? The provenance of the query is a little blurry, but it maybe started with this tweet (which also references an Instagram Reel) or …
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Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter behind Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is one of the smartest and most original writers in Hollywood. Humor writer Tom Gerencer remembers being very impressed with Kaufman’s 1999 debut film Being John Malkovich. “I remember being completely blown away by it and absolutely …
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Studio Ghibli is home to some of the greatest animators in the world, but outside Japan, its catalog has tended to be either difficult to find or the purview of pricey collector's edition discs. Thankfully, that changed when Netflix (in the UK) and Max (in the US) snapped up streaming …
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Frank D. Gilroy, the father of Andor creator Tony Gilroy, went on strike in 1960. The elder Gilroy, a Bronx-born screenwriter who would later win a Pulitzer Prize for his play The Subject Was Roses, was part of the union effort that secured residual payments for screenwriters for television reruns. …
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Given the opportunity to chat with some of the world’s most famous fictional characters, I tried to get them to say something … interesting. I asked Batman whether his extrajudicial actions had any real oversight; I encouraged Storm to discuss the nuances of the mutant-rights movement (and tell me how …
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Maybe A League of Their Own was doomed to strike out. A passion project in all senses of the word, it was a reboot hell-bent on showing the queer lives in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League that never made it into the 1992 movie. More succinctly, it was the …
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