Ammo for Luddites
Having just read three Ian Fleming novels, one Henry James and one Jonathan Franzen on my new Kindle over the holidays, I found myself vaguely troubled by the feeling that I hadn’t really read them… that their plots and characters might slip out of my memory as easily as they slipped into the Kindle’s.
I told myself this was old-style thinking, that just because I don’t have the actual physical, dog-eared, tea-stained books to shove onto a bookshelf as souvenirs doesn’t mean their contents have engraved themselves any less deeply into my brain.
Now along comes this post by my scarily intelligent friend Jonah Lehrer (and his previous post foreshadowing it), citing a new Princeton study hinting that, maybe, the inchoate unease we bibliophiles have been feeling is more than just sentimental:
This study demonstrated that student retention of material across a wide range of subjects and difficulty levels can be significantly improved in naturalistic settings by presenting reading material in a format that is slightly harder to read.
It reminds me of another study I read a while back, suggesting that elementary school kids who squirm and fidget in their seats actually retain and process information better than if they sat still like they’re supposed to.
I just wish I could remember where I read it.
PoP Original Screenplay
Regarding Prince of Persia’s recent journey from video game to movie, I’m sometimes asked how closely the final film follows my original story.
Now that the movie is out on DVD/Blu-Ray, I figure the easy way to satisfy curiosity is to simply post my screenplay from June 2005.
Quick history: This was the last draft I wrote, starting from the story John August and I pitched to Disney/Bruckheimer in 2004. A series of other writers took it from there: Jeff Nachmanoff, Boaz Yakin, Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard, in that order, resulting in the shooting script that went into production in summer 2008.
The making of the movie is well documented in Michael Singer’s coffee-table-worthy book and the movie DVD/Blu-Ray extras. Now, you can see how it started.
Update: If you’re curious about the game-into-movie adaptation process, I’ve also posted the original game script of Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which I wrote in 2002-03, and an accompanying article about how that game story was developed. As these materials illustrate, writing for games and movies are two very different crafts.
Toronto
Just got back from my first-ever visit to Toronto, a city I’ve long wished to visit for many reasons, yet somehow, amazingly and despite being from New York, never did until this weekend.
It was a whirlwind, too-short 36 hours including
- Ubisoft’s Toronto studio launch party Sunday night
- giving the keynote Monday morning for Interactive Ontario (talking about one of my favorite subjects, Prince of Persia)
- doing a TIFF “Film and Games” panel later that afternoon with Jade Raymond and Jon Landau (a really nice, down to earth guy who produced two small yet profitable indie films, Titanic and Avatar)
- standing ovation for Catherine Deneuve after the premiere of “Potiche” (her 109th movie according to IMDB)
The Toronto International Film Festival felt welcoming, spiffy and well organized, like Toronto itself. I left the city by an airport on an island in the middle of downtown that you take a ferry to get to. Now that’s cool.
Sketching in cafés and airports
Some more sketchbook pages for no particular reason. This was in NY a few months ago:
and this was the week Alice in Wonderland opened at El Capitan:
and this was last week at Dorval airport:
Weirdly, I spotted the guy with the mustache again a few days later, at a bar in LA. Sketching people makes you pay close attention to them; I doubt I’d have recognized him otherwise. I wonder how many of the strangers I pass by every day are people I’ve seen before, maybe many times before, but I just don’t notice.
