Subject: need your guidence sir

To Jason,

Sir, I am sunny from India. I have grown up in
science fantasies and watching movies, but when I grew
up I learnt that I loved science and reality more. We
friends worked on some movies and projects at local
and state level, but atleast I wish to make
documentery. My vision is to make some films for
Discovery channel, and Net Geo.

Sir, can you guide me what kind of preperation do I
need? What kind of hardship will  I have to face? What
are the advantages and disadvantages of being
documentery director? How hard is it to become a
documentery director?

I have learnt all the basic skills about working on
special effects, editing, sound editing,even i direct
one short movie (ofcourse not hollywood block buster).
I am doing Msc in physics.

Ask u frank question, how is your life being a
documentry director?

Yours faithfully,
Sunny

Hello, Sunny. It’s good to hear from you.

Bear in mind that I’m not a full-time documentary filmmaker; I have a day job, a bunch of other projects not related to documentary filmmaking and I don’t have a salary related to it. So while my advice may have some amount of use to you, none of it will get you a job in an industry and it certainly won’t get you a job working for a documentary farm like Discovery or Net Geo.

I am not a big fan of working on documentaries based on assignments; while there are people with more journalistic instincts than I have in the way of “a story is a story”, I specifically want to talk about and spend time filming stories that I think nobody else was going to tell, as opposed to trying to do my own version of something that has been done many times before. This sometimes means I spend more time trying to explain what I’m working on than working on it, but I don’t mind that trade-off. Your preferences might be different.

Assuming you do not wish to have your subjects “assigned” to you, as would happen if you were working for a production firm or a documentary channel, then I say that you will know, rather soon, the sort of subjects and approach you wish to take. My films take years; other people will be able to shoot and put together a film in months. Your subjects might not want to be covered. Others will work side-by-side with you to tell their story. But even though you might get sick of your subject halfway through the production, the intensity of wanting to finish it right will pull you through.

My life making these films has been wonderful. Before I started work on my BBS documentary in 2001, I suspect that I’d not travelled more than 30,000 miles before my 30th birthday, and most of that would be a stretch of road between my parents’ homes and my current residential city. It is likely that, if you count air travel, I have travelled another 30,000 miles to places I’d never been, and only read about. It is one thing to think you know people, when all you’re doing is assembling distant sets of like-minded people to chat lightly about. It is another to drive for a hundred miles and walk into the home of someone you’ve never met who has lived an entire other existence separate from you and talk about their life with them. I am not the same person I was when I started this new hobby, and I am many times better for it.

As an example, I found that I had spent a lot of my life not listening; treating whoever came near me as a personal audience, waiting to recieve one-way communication from me. I still do this often. But as I started work on my documentary, I learned that I would have to train myself to listen, to understand what someone was trying to say and to not interrupt them when they said it. Initially, I still had this problem in some interviews, but now I have a “listening mode” I can pull into where I am in fact not trying to dominate the conversation. This is a skill worth having in life in general.

I would say that my “hardships” have been absolutely minimal, the rewards are greater than I could have dreamed of, and when all is said and done, I like to go back and play my old films and watch them anew. That’s not a bad life at all.

Lately, I’ve been concerned with some weighty issues; concerns of law, procedures of licensing, the capturing of history and the pain of network/system administration. But one question has been gnawing at my soul for the past month or so, working its way into my quiet times, and threatening to take over all my attention if not aired for the world.

Why is “The Wiz” such a bad movie?

I never saw this movie in the theater as a kid; it didn’t play in Fishkill, NY and all my movie experience before I was 12 came from either the theater in the Dutchess Mall or from the local drive-in. I read about it in a magazine about how much work was done on the production, how they used all these great locations in New York City, and what cool stuff they did with special effects. I figured it was great.

Recently, an episode of the show Family Guy obscurely referenced the song Brand New Day from The Wiz, and this caused me to track down the source of the song and acquire a copy of the movie. I watched it through, figuring I’d finally give some time to a classic.

Oh man, was I wrong. I’d go off on it for 10 paragraphs about why it was so bad, but someone scooped me and did so brilliantly, I will yield the stage to him. This review originally appeared in IMDB.

Sleaze on down the road…

17 September 2004

Author: Merwyn Grote (majikstl@aol.com) from St. Louis, Missouri

THE WIZ is a bad movie. It is a very bad movie. It is an extremely very bad movie.

To watch it is to be infuriated by just how much potential it has and how far it falls from even vaguely achieving success. A black, urban version of “The Wizard of Oz” is an intriguing idea. The musical score is okay and at least three of the songs are better than average. The budget was obviously substantial and a lot of effort was put into transforming New York City into Munchkinland, the Emerald City and points in between. But rather than being in awe of the spectacle, one is more likely to stare in disbelief and ask “What were they thinking?”

Sidney Lumet, a fine director noted for making small, dark and often depressing dramas (12 ANGRY MEN, FAIL-SAFE, THE PAWNBROKER, etc.), seems ill-prepared to make a big budget musical based on a series of children’s books — and, unfortunately, he proves it. I don’t think he makes a single intelligent directorial decision in this entire film: the lighting is gloomy, camera placement consistently ineffective and the editing clumsy. His choice of soft, grainy imagery over crisp, clear pictures makes the atmosphere oppressive. The set design, art direction and costuming, while impressive, still look numbingly cheap and tawdry. Scenes filmed on location at New York landmarks look like they take place on cramped soundstages. The film is just plain ugly to watch.

Worse, Lumet seems to have directed the actors to perform in a soap opera style that is embarrassingly overwrought: the prevailing mood is of whining self-pity. Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell and Ted Ross get in a few good moments as The Scarecrow, The Tin Woodsman and The Cowardly Lion, but there is not a single honest moment to be found in the performance by Diana Ross. To accommodate Ross, six-year-old Dorothy from the book (played as 13 by 16-year-old Judy Garland in THE WIZARD OF OZ), now is a 24-year-old Harlem kindergarten teacher. At 34-years-old, Ross looks more like she is pushing 50, yet displays the emotional maturity of a three-year-old.

Ross’ miscasting is legendary, but her inappropriateness for the role pales in comparison to her actual performance. In rewriting the story for Ross, Joel Schumacher’s screenplay changes Dorothy from being a winsome, wide-eyed child to an emotionally unstable adult. In Ross’ dubious hands the character seems both mentally and emotionally retarded, yet she somehow manages to avoid making the character in any way sympathetic. Strident, always on the verge of hysterics, it is, simply put, one of the all time worst screen performances.

Richard Pryor fares little better. Instead of the lovable charlatan played by Frank Morgan in the 1939 version of the story, the Wizard is now a cowering little fraud, devoid of wit or charm. Why hire Pryor, known for his bravado and cocky attitude, then make him play against type? The filmmakers decided that this Wizard did not just have to be exposed as an illusion, but had to be humiliated and degraded as well. The scenes where Dorothy confronts and belittles The Wiz illustrate the mean-spirited cruelty that permeates the entire film.

The most curious aspect of THE WIZ is trying to decipher just who it was intended for. Obviously, the material was meant to appeal to children, thus it’s strangely inappropriate “G” rating; yet the mystical, magical land of good and evil from earlier versions is transformed into a foreboding world of terror and despair. Oz seems to be an extended slum, populated by the homeless, vandals, hookers, bookies, druggies, various street people and gangs; while the Emerald City is a superficial place for shallow, pretentious phonies. While the tone of the film is juvenile — almost infantile — it all takes place in a seedy adult world that is almost prurient.

THE WIZ doesn’t just avoid childlike innocence, it seems to hold it in contempt. Garland’s Oz was basically a beautiful place where evil could be conquered with intellect, compassion, courage and the security of family and friends. The Oz that Ross treks through is basically an evil place; the message she learns is that the world stinks, so stop your whining and get used to it. The “there’s no place like home” moral remains intact, but that has little meaning if the alternative — Oz — is seen as corrupt and evil.

In THE WIZARD OF OZ, Dorothy’s Oz is a dream world version of her own life; the Witch, the Wizard and her traveling companions all have human counterparts. This makes the 1939 film a personal story. In THE WIZ, there is no apparent correlation between Oz and Dorothy’s seemingly isolated home life, the people of Oz and Dorothy’s family have no counterparts. Garland’s Dorothy escapes to Oz, but realizes the best part of Oz is already part of her. Ross’ Dorothy fears Oz and ultimately escapes from it. The inner dream world of Oz becomes an alien world of media-generated stereotypes. THE WIZARD OF OZ is a fantasy; THE WIZ is a horror story.

Obviously reworking the basic story to accommodate an all-black cast wasn’t done just to utilize a different style of music. As such, the film becomes a showcase for a panorama of African-American stereotypes, many of them negative. But rather than debunking racist cliches, the film embraces them. Sleep inducing poppy fields are replaced with opium dens, witches become sweatshop slave drivers, flying monkeys are gang members, Munchkins are graffiti vandals and so on and so forth. As adult satire, such imagery is understandable, if lame, but the film forgets this is still a story specifically aimed at children. Just as the film was rewritten from the play to accommodate the adult Ross, the material is altered from L. Frank Baum’s books to make it adult, but not mature. It seems to be the film’s conviction that to tell the story from a black perspective it must embrace a grim urban reality, basically saying that childlike innocence cannot exist because urban living, especially for a black audience, has destroyed such a concept. A sad commentary for a children’s fantasy and an even sadder assumption about African-American life.

The irony of THE WIZ is that it is ill-conceived, cheaply melodramatic and relies on trite stereotypes; in other words, it has no brain, no heart and no courage. And ultimately it found no home, being a box office flop. And what could have been a breakthrough landmark in cinema ends up being a sad relic of political incorrectness.

Pretty much says it all, doesn’t it. I will write a little more about stuff from a film creator’s perspective.

The movie is over-packed with songs, all of them unusually long; in some cases, a character will sing two entire songs back to back, with the full length (3-4 minutes) that comes with it and accompanied by a massive production number. This wears you down, and clocking in at over 2 hours, you really feel it getting to you. The director makes excessively poor choices of framing in some cases, which leads me to believe that there were other factors involved in the choices, like street availability and time given for shots.

There are some positives, though. One is Michael Jackson’s kinetic performance. He spends the entire movie as a bumbling scarecrow, and if you watch his feet throughout the picture, he brings in a stellar display of bumbling legs, twisting feet and jerky motion. If you watch it and tune out the rest, it’s quite amazing. Another stunner is the makeup, created by Stan Winston Studios. If you pause the screen and look at the makeup for all the characters, it’s absolutely brilliant and put together well enough for these actors to dance and run around at top speed with no obvious slowdown or damage. That’s really something.

The Wiz’s shadow movie is Little Shop of Horrors, an example of taking a Broadway Musical, playing to the strengths of the cinematic medium, and producing something greater than the original. Played back to back, the differences in how to work with similar material are striking.

….uh, I do not actually recommend this.

Over time, I’ve tried to move textfiles.com sites out of my house. My connection can’t take it and it slows down my 24/7 leeching. The big one was CD.TEXTFIILES.COM, which is extremely popular among the “I will now bear down with the awesome power of this fully functioning T-3″ crowd.

Finally, tonight, my hosting provider Tranquil Hosting assisted me in installing a 750gb drive into the main textfiles.com machine, and after just a little downtime, the system is back up running CD.TEXTFILES.COM at a much greater speed and availability than before.

Shortly, I’ll port up the scripts that notice untoward amounts of downloads and that lock out said leechers. You may be surprised that I do this, but I’m not kidding when I say I’ve watched people initiate 30 or more high-speed connections simultaneously and saturate whatever network the machine is on. That ain’t cool, and unless anyone’s not gotten the memo, textfiles.com has no advertising. So if you want a copy of the whole site, do what a bunch of people have done and e-mail me about sending over a hard drive for me to copy it onto. I honestly do it.

Before we shut the machine down, we checked the uptime. 665 solid days of textfiles.com. Not bad, not bad at all. Thanks to Mark Price and TQ Hosting for that; it’s nice to be able to focus on the important stuff, like copyrightable dances and text-adventure-referencing rap videos.

Now fire up your browser; we got some history to share at modern speeds.

Travel for the Text Adventure Documentary put me in Pittsburgh for a little of the Memorial Day weekend; I headed down on Saturday, did a great interview on Sunday, and got back into town on Sunday night.

But of course I’m doing two documentaries, and when I don’t have extra text-adventury stuff to do, I see what I can do about the Arcade documentary. To that end, I ended up doing a quick web search on Friday for “pinball” and “Pittsburgh”, figuring I’d get something or other.

And I did. I got a site called Pinball Perfection, which said it was a museum and “gamer’s club” for video and pinball games. I figured hey, looks OK, a little over-active on the web side of things, but so be it. I called and got Dan, the owner and operator. We talked a short bit, and I mentioned I was doing a documentary, and I could stop by the next day, would that be OK. Dan said I was certainly welcome to stop by.

Now, let’s let drop a little bit of hard-won knowledge I’ve gotten in 6 years of doing documentary interviewing: it is very, very bad to try and arrange interviews based on cold calls within the span of a week. You are not giving people enough time to mull over what you are doing, who you are, what the project is about, and so on. If you do it within a few days, you can go from very very bad to absolute disaster if you don’t watch it. Trust me. This is hard-won knowledge culled from multiple tearful, screaming, wish-I-could-use-a-modified-bug-zapper-and-remove-from-my-brain episodes. And I knew this, talking to Dan on the phone and preparing to stop by.

I found Pinball Perfection with not much effort at all; located a few miles north of Pittsburgh, it’s in a hilly, laid-back area full of small shops and industrial-looking buildings. It’s actually quite industrial itself, spanning multiple floors and entrances.

Inside, it was basically astounding.

That is, astounding if you’re the same kind of person I am, and that’s a bit of a leap. A lot of times people say “this is really important/incredible/amazing” and what they forget to say is “if you find that sort of stuff at all interesting, and you’re like me”.

So let me say: if you like pinball machines, and by pinball machines I mean the idea of them, not just “The Addams Family and The Simpsons and nothing else”, then this place is a critical junction in your life’s path. It’s so good, so amazing, I would suggest a flight or drive to Westview, PA just to see it. Yes, that good.

Imagine a warehouse, a multi-floor warehouse. In the front are rows of restored, working machines, with notes on them indicating age or facts. Beyond these rows are more rows, of stacked, waiting-for-repair pinball machines. Beyond them are even more stacks, this time of machines waiting to be sorted. You realize very quickly that pinball machines come in two pieces, because you are looking at literally tons of these pairings. 100 machines are playable, ranging from some of the earliest examples to very recent productions. Hundreds, literally hundreds more are standing in rows, waiting to be repaired or fixed, many of them rare or even one of a kind. You can walk the rows like a true museum patron, standing inches from historical pinball machines designed and assembled by people long gone, with art that follows its own unique spectrum throughout the decades.

Dan showed me games that he believes are one of a kind, some of which he had to spend countless hours restoring from flood damage or the ravages of time. He gave me two pennies to play a game of pinball on machines from the 1920s and 1933, before they’d invented flippers. We sat and talked about pinball history, about where one finds old pinballs, the love of the art and the craftsmanship, and the motivations for having such a huge collection.

I took neither a photo or a frame of video.

Now, the reason for this is important; bad experiences are in the past with Dan and people coming in hauling cameras and recording equipment and promising the moon or demanding access by dint of their ability to film. And the goal I have always shot for since I started doing this thing seriously is to never have someone regret having been interviewed or filmed by me. I could not guarantee that with 24 hours of warning and no time spent getting to know Dan or his museum, so filming will wait.

This is another reason I’d be doomed working in “the industry”.

One day I will return, and I will film this place. Until then, I implore you, if you are a fan of pinball machines, a person who considers himself a student of history, to consider a trip this summer to Pinball Perfection to see a unique and amazing place.

When I was about 9 or 10, my parents were living in separate homes, newly divorced, and both took on new hobbies to try and reboot parts of their lives. In the case of my father, it was Wok cooking. That is, he was engaged in the hobby of cooking various meat and vegetable dishes in a huge bowl that had oil in it, using wooden tools.

This meant that he had the bowl, the oil, the tools, and the cookbooks, and the fridge had a bunch of meat intended for cooking.

I was supposed to be in bed, and wasn’t. It was something like 1-2 in the morning. Hungry, I looked around the fridge for something, and found a big ol’ bunch of meat under cellophane, and ate a bunch of it raw. Well, probably a handful. I noticed it was pork. It was pretty good, although I didn’t feel entirely well.

Looking for something to read, I leafed through some programming books and, more importantly, one of the wok cookbooks.

Somewhere in the beginning of the book was a warning about the handling of raw meat for the purpose of cooking. It explained how pork, raw or not cooked right, could contain diseases or parasites or a host of other bad things, and that eating such unprepared food could result in extreme sickness or death.

Bear in mind I was 10.

I concluded I was now going to die.

I was quite positive too, that sort of cold realization when you’re out of fuel or faced with a thing hurling towards you or flipping over in your car; you just know you zigged when you should have zagged, game over, man. I didn’t understand things with full clarity, but the book was pretty clear that this eating uncooked pork thing was almost certain death, and so, even though I didn’t feel particularly sick or dying, I obviously was never going to wake up again.

Death’s kind of an odd thing to a 10 year old; at the time I just considered it a lost chance, a kind of ended trip; whereas later I would just have panic attacks. At my young age, I thought I’d just really messed up and felt bad about that, disappointed I didn’t do the right thing.

I didn’t want to wake my dad, because he was generally cranky if it wasn’t something really important. I didn’t think this was important.

I knew I wasn’t going to see any of the house again, so I went around saying goodbye to all the stuff.

Goodbye, favorite radio on the little cart. Goodbye, cool fireplace with the air-blower that could blow heat into the room. Goodbye, really cool hutch with little doors I liked opening and closing and trying to understand all the weird silver serving utensils in it.

Stuff has always meant a lot to me; still does, if I think about it. Stuff I collected, stuff I was near, stuff I did other stuff with. I read recently about people having stronger emotional connection to objects rather than people, but that wasn’t the case with me. Although, I should note, there was a lamp fixture that absolutely fucking terrified me and caused me never to go to one part of my home, and there was a specific sink I thought disapproved of me.

I knew I was going to miss the stuff, and I was going to miss my dad, and all over eating the wrong thing. A real shame.

I went to bed, sorry for screwing up, hoping my dad wouldn’t be mad, waiting to die.

Since then, I’ve been trying to make the most of my second chance.

Jason Schultz, attorney for the EFF, was kind enough to post a comment in my weblog regarding my opinions and commentary in yesterday’s entry. Here’s his comment, unbroken and verbatim, with my response below.

Jason,

While I appreciate your interest in the lawsuit and the passion for your legal position, I wish you had reached out to us here at EFF before speculating on the good or bad of the settlement. I get emails all the time from folks who are curious why we do what we do at EFF and I would have been happy to answer your concerns if you had written me. I’ll do it now, but just for future reference, don’t hesitate to drop us a line if you want to engage in this sort of debate.

As to the merits of your critique, I think you might have misunderstood the terms of the settlement. No where in this resolution do we concede that Ric Silver has any copyright in The Electric Slide. And as you correctly point out, one leading commentator (and several additional cases that we’d uncovered that I’d be happy to share with you) suggest that social dance steps that are not part of a dramatic storytelling are not copyrightable subject matter. As such, we were more than eager to prove in court that Mr. Silver had no copyright to the dance, and we would have done so if we had been given the chance.

The “problem” arose after we filed our suit when Mr. Silver quickly and immediately capitulated from his earlier threat against Mr. Machulis. He made it clear that he no longer thought our client’s video was infringing and was willing to withdraw any allegations of infringement regarding its use. When a copyright owner does this in litigation, it can potentially kill the case. Cases in Federal Court require under Article III of the Constitution that there be a “case or controversy” between the parties — an actual dispute for resolution. Since Mr. Silver had withdrawn his accusations of infringement, his attorney could have argued that the issue of copyright infringement (and thus copyrightability of the dance itself) was no longer present. Moreover, his willingness to then promise the world (via the Creative Commons license) that he would no longer threaten any non-commercial user for performing it essentially guaranteed that he would never again abuse the copyright system against our client or anyone else under these facts.

So what about commercial use? Well, as I mentioned, we would have been more than happy to take Mr. Silver to court over this issue and challenge his copyright. However, courts do not take kindly to parties who manufacture disputes in order to seek court rulings when there is no real dispute between them. In this case, there is no indication that Mr. Silver will be sending any more take-down notices or threatening folks like yourself for performing the dance, even commercially. To have pushed on that issue in front of the judge when there was no clear and actual threat to our client or to any other identifiable individual would have posed a serious risk to the credibility of both our client and EFF. At best, it would have encouraged the court to dismiss our case out of hand (with no settlement and no CC license) and at worst, it could have lead the court to find some way to rule against us to teach us a lesson for wasting its time and judicial resources. As Officers of the Court and public interest advocates, that’s just not a risk we’re willing to take, either on our own behalf or that of our clients.

Moreover, it is important to remember that we are a non-profit with limited resources. The Machulis v. Silver case is hardly the only case we’re fighting at the moment. We have also been heavily engaged in copyright battles with Viacom, UMG Music and Uri Geller, battles over warrantless surveillance with AT&T and the DOJ, Patent Busting, FOIA work, etc. Thus, given the unlikelihood that a court would have ruled on the copyrightability issue (let alone issued a precedental ruling in our favor) and the high cost of litigating such issues, we felt we could do much more to help our clients and the public via the settlement, which ensured victory for our client, 100% litigation-free use of the dance for all non-commercial users, and strong support for Creative Commons, an organization in which we believe strongly, and at the same time freed up our legal team to focus on other cases and issues which deserve just as much attention.

That said, I can completely understand your frustration with the thought that Mr. Silver might come back and threaten someone who performs the dance for commercial purposes or lacks attribution. However, I honestly think we’ve seen the last of Mr. Silver and his campaign to go after any kind of individual who performs his dance, even for commercial purposes. If he does, though, please do not hesitate to give us at EFF a call or shoot us an email. We’d like nothing more than to finish the job.

Sincerely,
Jason Schultz
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Thank you for the extended and informative response, Mr. Schullz.

My opinion, which I will maintain, is that it was a major mistake to go from “he has dropped the lawsuit” to “he has agreed to license his work under Creative Commons”. I still maintain that Creative Commons is an absolutely dysfunctional tool for this situation, that the copyright law’s stated ability to license choreography is still rather unclear and untested for anything useful, and that bringing CC into the mix just confuses the issue terminally.

I do not accept “we have limited resources” as an excuse under any situation. Don’t offer to carry water if you don’t have enough buckets. I entirely understand “we found what we thought was a good resolution with minimal damage for all parties involved”, which makes total sense; you file a complaint, Silver immediately capitulates, everyone waves happy flags and Machulis goes back to making Teledildonics. All well and good.

I question whether Mr. Silver, who was happily issuing DMCA takedown notices against YouTube and against a number of dance websites for any mention of his Electric Slide, truly understands Creative Commons and what exactly he’s done here. I would think that he would be under an impression, bolstered by this action, that he is the generous “owner” of the Electric Slide, allowing “his” dance to be used. I think that postings and articles about this case using terms like “public domain” show exactly how confusing the situation is to people not intimately scouring through essays and case law like I had to for the last 48 hours.

In other words, I think Silver still thinks he owns the Electric Slide. And I think that this was not handled well.

Like all good high-energy activist organizations, you step into a lot of situations and defuse or engage them as needed, making decisions that are both what you perceive to be what is the common good and what is good for your chosen clients. Sometimes those two goals are at odds. I think this is one of those cases.

You did right as far as Machulis is concerned. You did not do right as far as Creative Commons or the overarching situation is concerned.

- Jason Scott

P.S. I’m sending you guys $100 for the time taken to write a public response to my weblog entry.

Update: Here is a fairly incredible post about the disagreement Jason and I have. (archive)

Yesterday, I wrote a relatively angry, rambling weblog entry about the whole Electric Slide situation, and the EFF’s handling of it, and where I believed they were wrong. I wanted to back away from that entry.

Now, I know they were wrong. They totally messed this one up and it brings up a really bad way things can go south when important issues are being discussed or handled.

To recap:

A guy named Ric Silver created a dance move he called the “Electric Slide” in 1976, and in 2004 he copyrighted this “dance”, or so he claims. He has then gone after many appearances of this “dance” on the web, ranging from home videos attempting the dance, music videos, or even folks talking about how to do this dance. The “blogosphere”, which easily slips into the role of whiny court jester, made fun of this and complained about it. Things started to heat up earlier this year, specifically.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation then mounted a lawsuit against Ric Silver regarding his “takedown” of a video that had ten seconds of an Electric Slide-like dance on it. In it, they made a lot of arguments and said he was doing a bad thing.

Then, a breakthrough! There was an announced “settlement” between the EFF and Ric Silver over the status of the “Electric Slide”, and it was announced that Ric Silver would be licensing his dance Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 3.0. All parties rejoiced and the jesters jingled their bells and the world was bright and happy again.

Except over here. I contend this entire thing was a farce, and that by doing this “settlement” the EFF has made things worse, not better. I know, I know, I must have left my jester hat at home. But the fact stands: this settlement should never have happened.

I said that I was considering doing this dance, calling it the “Jason Scott Slide” and selling it for a dollar. Current signs are pointing to me doing this very thing, releasing my new product either tomorrow or the day after. I’m pleased to announce I already have some pre-orders, in fact, from people who believed I’d be in the right to do so.

Here comes some law!

It turns out I was partially wrong yesterday. You can copyright choreography. This provision was added in 1976. Here’s the current statement by the US Copyright Office about this specific copyright:

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl119.html (archive)

The salient lines, from that page, are here:

Choreography and pantomimes are also copyrightable dramatic works. Choreography is the composition and arrangement of dance movements and patterns usually intended to be accompanied by music. As distinct from choreography, pantomime is the art of imitating or acting out situations, characters, or other events. To be protected by copyright, pantomimes and choreography need not tell a story or be presented before an audience. Each work, however, must be fixed in a tangible medium of expression from which the work can be performed…. For choreography, the work may be embodied in a film or video recording or be precisely described on any phonorecord or in written text or in any dance notation system such as Labanotation, Sutton Movement Shorthand, or Benesh Notation.

This is, in fact, what Jason Schultz of the EFF referred to in a news.com story (archive) about this subject. Here’s his salient lines:

Some may find it odd that a dance could be copyrightable, of course. But according to Jason Schultz, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, dance moves can definitely be protected under copyright law. “You can copyright the choreography for dances,” said Schultz, “and then enforce the copyright against anyone who publicly performs the dance.” Does that mean that everyone who giggles their way through the Electric Slide with the wedding videographer shooting away is violating copyright? No, but the videographer could be at risk. But Schultz said he believes Silver’s claims against Machulis and others who have posted videos on YouTube may be questionable. “Someone who performs it noncommercially or adds their own artistic flair to the dance has a pretty good fair-use argument that their performance is noninfringing,” Schultz said.

Wow, so open and shut and no Jason Scott Slide, right? Wrong.

There is such a marked dearth of actual case law involving copyrighting choreography as to be nearly imperceptible; specifically, it appears there are a total of two cases, one of which was settled out of court, and neither of which really apply to this situation.

The definitive essay which researched the very subject of copyrighting choreography and lamenting the dearth of solid case law/directive in this field was written by Julie Van Camp in 1994. Called Copyright of Choreographic Works, she gives a well-researched history of the institution of a choreography copyright, the implications, and the specific and distinct accompanying documentation where congress intended to not include “social and recreational dances”!

Let’s make that nice and big:

Choreography Copyright was not intended to cover social and recreational dances.

Here are some additional excellent discussions/coverage of the whole idea of choreography and copyright, and this electric slide case, a lot of which was discussed well before the EFF got involved:

• The Strange Case of Edward Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions by Nancy McClernan which gives a (one-sided) overview of the 2005 lawsuit. (archive)
• The other side, Edward Einhorn, wrote his own essay, A Case for the Stage Director’s Copyright (archive). In this and the previous case, the issue at hand is the blocking of stage directions across an entire play, and not a specific, multi-step dance move.
• Choreography and Alternatives to Copyright by William Patry. Mostly talks about how choreographers tend to sort these problems out internally in tight-knit communities. (archive)

But why listen to me? The EFF itself, a month after Schultz indicated that Silver had a case, registered a complaint on March 1st in which they claimed he had no case:

15. Upon information and belief, the Sublevel 3 Video does not infringe any copyright
owned by Silver due to Silver’s failure to properly register his copyright, the uncopyrightability of
the “Electric Slide” dance steps, the lack of similarity between the Silver Video and the Sublevel 3
Video, and/or the fact that any similarity between the two videos would be non-infringing selfevident
fair use under 17 U.S.C. – 107.

I happen to agree with this, strongly. The Electric Slide is a social dance, a small set of dance moves, composed of smaller obvious dance steps pushed together. The fact that you can execute the entire move in less than 10 seconds falls under not just fair use, but well beneath any standard of “choreography” as intended in the law. This was an uncopyrightable dance, being used improperly in a takedown notification to YouTube and a bunch of other websites.

So what happened?

Creative Commons happened, as far as I could tell.

I don’t know who initiated settlement talks, but the fact that the request was then to put the dance into Creative Commons, likely (I’m guessing) portraying it as “You can still protect your dance, but people doing it for no commercial gain can still have fun”, tells me the EFF probably retorted after a mea culpa from Silver. I could be entirely wrong on this.

But for all the dearth of real case law surrounding the copyright of choreography, Creative Commons has even less. It’s rather untested in court, and certainly not as a methodology for copyrighting movement. I question whether it’s even possible to license any choreography under Creative Commons, let alone a 10 second dance.

So no, EFF, you messed up this one. You do good work, but you shoved this one through the door and came to an “amicable” solution which in fact implies a lot of bad ideas about copyright are valid. And they are not.

Therefore, unless I get the most amazing e-mail or communication ever that convinces me otherwise, I have to start practicing the Jason Scott Slide, pick out the right silly hat from my collection, and set up a sales page. I’ll let you know when that’s ready.

I’ve also decided which charity will get any cash that comes in from my Jason Scott Slide video sales: Childs’ Play, which provides books, toys and games for hospital-bound children around the world.

At least some good can come of this.

I can’t help but feel, thinking back to the last 400 weblog entries I’ve done, that I made some promises regarding this weblog. One of them was that I would refrain from being a mere link weblog, using some other event to be a sort of pithy Empathy Tourst before moving on with nary a consideration. I don’t know if loading on a bunch of paragraphs along with the links entitles me to some sort of “out”, but let’s try it anyway. I promise to add content. In fact, I’m threatening to add content.

This “thing” happened recently. Basically, a guy named Ric Silver, who created a dance move called the “Electric Slide” in 1976, copyrighted the “dance”. He then has gone after anyone showing videos of the “dance”, whether they be home videos, music videos, people talking about how to do the dance, you name it. He’s done this under the DMCA, which is its own level of Satan’s Tool.

So this was going on, and the EFF, our guardians of freedom and justice, sued the guy back on the behalf of one of the takedown “victims”. As a result of this snap-back, Silver and the EFF negotiated a “settlement”, in which Silver agreed to license his “copyrighted” dance Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0. This has been hailed as a victory and wonder for all involved, a dashing collision of web 2.0 thinking and backwards dance-hall misguidedness.

I just don’t agree, on two levels.

The first is that this somehow legitimizes the entire idiocy that you can “copyright” a dance. I understand that you can copyright your tapes showing how to do the dance. I understand you can copyright your movie in which your dance appears. I understand that someone could ask you to be the choreographer for your movie, and that you sign a contract, and if they go use your choreography and don’t pay you, you can sue their Stealy-McStealerson asses. I also understand that you can “trademark” a name that represents a product. That is, if you have a dance tape business and you sell a product called “The Electric Slide”, you can then go ahead and sue someone who comes out with a dance tape called “The Electric Slide”. That is, if you have a trademark. If you have a copyright for the “Electric Slide” video, and someone comes out with an “Electric Slide”, you can maybe, possibly, assuming you have a good lawyer, convince a judge somewhere that the “Electric Slide” video being sold is being made to be confused with your Electric Slide Product. But again, you’re going to rely on your trademark. This is, as I understand it, how the whole thing works. You can’t copyright a fucking dance move.

Second of all, the EFF license makes no sense because after submitting a legal brief in which they claim the copyright is entirely, completely unapplicable to people just fucking dancing in a video, they then tacitly agree that they do agree by agreeing to settle with it being licensed under Creative Commons. But that makes no sense; how the fuck do you Creative Commons license a dance move? Again, I understand you can CC license a video of you doing the dance move, CC license your description of how to do the dance move, and CC license photographs of yourself doing the dance move. But the dance move itself? If I weave a basket, and every few loops I cut a nick into the wicker in a distinctive pattern, can I copyright or CC Licence my hot-rockin’ Wicker-Nick move? Can I “allow” people the right to remix, share, and attribute to me the Wickernick maneuver? Is that even sane?

One of the initial complaints with regards to the Creative Commons was the creation of a “Creative Commons Public Domain” license; which said, basically, it was in the public domain. You can understand the argument of the Creative Commons, which basically was “Well, this way it’s very clear and legally sound when a person makes the declaration.” But on the other hand, maybe you can also see the issue where other people went “Why the fuck are you branding your own form of “Public Domain” and using that exact term for your contract?” They could called it the “Absolutely Free” license or something else, and it would have effectively been Public Domain, but they had to go ahead and use a generic term and brand it, even ever so slightly, for themselves. And that blows.

And again, this is not a release of this idiotically un-copyrightable thing into the “public domain”. As a CC-SA-NC 3.0 licensed item, you can now “remix” it. (So I guess you can do it “wrong” or add some moves to it or totally mess with it) You can now “share” it. (So besides being able to freely share it to people, you can also share… the moves?) And it’s “Non-commercial” meaning you can’t sell it, so you better not have any adword ads, banners, or anything else on your webpage with it! Actually, to be honest, this last part has, to my knowledge, never really been worked out. If you click on a banner and it’s near a CC-NC work being shared… are the people hosting the CC-NC work violating the license?

Naturally, people are praising all this shit because it has the words “Creative Commons” and “Settlement” in it. But it is, as far as I can tell, Grade A Bullshit.

As an example, Wired Blogs gets it wrong, claiming that the dance is now “in the public domain”. No, it really isn’t, if you believe the claim; it’s merely licensed for non-commercial use along the substantial license language in Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License. I fear a lot of people are going to make this mistake. And, of course, fail to “attribute” Ric Silver in all their videos of the Electric Slide as per the license. Fail to do that… and he can sue you!

So, here’s where you come in, faithful readers (there’s a couple thousand of you, by the way). Talk me into or out of the following thing:

• I put up a video of myself doing a very “Electric-Slide-Like” dance, wearing a very silly hat.
• I do not call it “The Electric Slide” because I heard some asshole has the copyright on the name.
• I will copyright it.
• I will charge you $1 for it.

I’m mulling over my plan, looking for the positives and the negatives. I see the massive advantages in the rainfall of electronic dollar bills coming to me from around the world as the Jason Scott Slide makes its ways into entertainment centers and movie-olas. I see the upturned hands of a million new fans, all taking an interest in computer history because if that area of study can produce such amazing dancers, surely it’s worth a closer look. I see, in a nutshell, global domination.

I will donate the money to a charity other than the EFF because as far as I can tell, they’re being tards about this today. I donate money to them regularly; I consider it a retainer.

Tell me your thoughts. In two days I make a decision.

Go.

I’ve had a mind to do a podcast/audio show for some time. The reason there isn’t one yet is because I want it to be good.

This minor hurdle doesn’t stop a lot of people; they’re doing it for themselves and for the people they think are like themselves and so they kind of go for it. In some cases, they’ve already had audio/radio experience… in fact, some podcasts are simply syndicated collections of already-extant radio shows. I’m not sure if those “count” by some standards.

Mine will not be live, it will be edited. It will have interviews, music, and a bunch of stuff, but hopefully be about a solid hour. I would be unlikely to do it more than once a month. I would be shooting to make it a sort of timeless work, which would still be listenable for years afterwards.

Obviously, I have a lot of priorities ahead of it. But I do think it over occasionally.

Here’s some of my promises of stuff my podcast wouldn’t/won’t do. Maybe it should be a pod-listeners’ Bill of Rights.

• I promise that my podcast won’t start and stop with a complete song, as if I’ve got some sort of syndication deal and the music is providing a buffer for all my syndicate stations (which is why most syndicated shows do this). There’s a number of words I feel go by in my mind when a 40 minute podcast has a 4 minute song at the beginning and a 4 minute song at the end; those words include unnecessary, bloat and wasteful. Do people who do this seriously think the listeners are queuing up for the show while the music plays?
• I promise to never ever ever read directly off a newswire or weblog posting. I realize that by doing this, I end up being mildly annoying to the people who play podcasts at double speed, and actually sucking the life out of others who don’t. I realize that if all I do is tell you the day’s top headline, I am foolishly hoping my voice training is better than a syndicated radio announcer’s and inevitably failing at such, meaning now I’m just some guy in your headphones reading the paper over your shoulder, out loud.
• I promise that if you hear the microphone “pop”, hear rushes of wind as I move stuff around in front of the mic, or hear papers being shuffled around, you can have one of my lungs as a cat toy. I took many classes in audio production. I would use what I learned.
• I assure you that I will take advantage of the medium and not set myself up to be easily replaced with a text-to-speech converter. It will be in stereo and need stereo, and have multiple tracks and need them.
• I promise not to use commercial music, making it needlessly sketchy to store copies of my podcast and demonstrating to my audience that I can’t even talk a good game about using ‘free culture” material with my own stuff
• Holy shit I would never use Skype ever. Or interview people over the phone. Or interview people over skype. The intense irony of people lauding the future and the wonders of technology and then having their interview subjects sound like their aircraft carrier is under attack wears off after a few minutes. In its place it leaves a sort of entertainment black hole.
• I promise I will have fun.

And yes, this comes from listening to the hundreds of podcasts and “shows” I’ve listened to over the years. A few were simply amazing. Others have literally caused my hearts to dwindle down, like a Zelda game.

I’ll keep you updated as to this side project’s progress.

On Saturday I saw Zoo, which is the gentle, artistic documentary about a guy who died having sex with a horse.

The guy dying was all over the place when it happened in 2005, and this film takes the approach of making such a lyrical, prettifying movie around the subject that you will at least listen to the side of the members of his community, even if one might find the whole circumstance abhorrent.

I saw it on video, basically, in the video theatre at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. This movie shouldn’t be seen on video, or at least, it should be seen in high definition video if film isn’t available. It was obviously shot to be really, really, pretty. I wanted to see it in a theatre because that way some amount of “voting” came back to the distributors that I appreciated the film being made. I happened to speak to one of the staff about the showing being on video when the movie was obviously shot on film, and he said the distributor simply didn’t forsee crowds justifying the cost of a print being made. And he was right, in a way, since our Friday evening showing was less than a dozen people. The “minimax” theatre that shows video holds less than 15, anyway. So there we go.

I hadn’t been to the Coolidge Corner in a while; holy crap did they do amazing work on it! I used to be very annoyed with how they gave their lobby over to a pizza parlor years and years ago; you could see, obviously, where they’d just closed the inner doors, put a refreshment stand in front of it, and then drilled a hole in the side of the building for a new lame entrance and ticket window. I went, of course, because the main theater was great-looking and they had great lineups and all the rest of the “real” reasons one goes to a revival/art-house location. But since I was there last, they’ve totally redone the place so beautifully that you would be absolutely pressed to think it wasn’t always this way, that it always looked this beautiful and open and art-deco and the rest. I mean, I’m not being superlative when I tell you it went from banged-up showgirl to stunning world-class diva in terms of presentation and layout. I’ll be going there quite a bit this summer when I have time.

So, two reviews, related and not related.

Zoo, itself, pushes the envelope for me as to what a documentary is; as a radio, “This American Life” episode, it would have had the real voices of the people involved (it only has roughly 4 people who were “there” in various ways) without having to resort to the legion of actors completely re-creating the entire event from the ground up, which is what happens. The film, in other words, serves as “illustration” for what is essentially an audio collage. Now, make no mistake, it’s fuckin’ beautiful and there’s amazing shots, setups, and music there. (It’s also paced a little too slow for the audience I was with and was pushing it for me.) But in the end, you really can’t tell what was there and what was real and what was not “real” and so on. Even if based in reality, doing shots anywhere but at the event as it happens means a lot of artistic license can be taken, and so it’s barely a documentary on that front. I think the distinction can be made between a pleasant cinematic experience and an accurate/realistic film. I think that distinction is harder to make when the whole production is called a “documentary”.

The second review is a thousand times more petty: the red-haired guy working the ticketing/lobby was a dick. I’ve dealt with this guy before; he’s bitter, nasty, and he makes up rules. Tonight’s made up rule was “Jason can’t stay in the lobby marveling at the improvements to the lobby but has to immediately go wait outside in the rain, even though Jason’s buddy was waiting for 15 minutes in the lobby for Jason to arrive.” It’s a tough but fair rule, I guess, inside the guy’s head; but if the issue was that I was talking too loud, it’s not without precedent to ask a patron to keep it down during showtimes, even as they’re heaping accolades to his movie buddies about how great this theater has been renovated. Especially if, as was my case, hundreds of dollars were donated by that person into the Coolidge’s renovation fund over the last 4-5 years. My name is etched on a seat, actually.

My buddy who was going with me was in the process of buying tickets to a charity event at the theater being held in June, and he later confided to me he nearly stopped the sale watching the guy’s attitude and treatment of me. That’s not a good situation for such an amazing theater, but it does show an important lesson: it doesn’t matter how nice the car is, if the chauffeur’s a jerk.