May 6
“Nobody knows anything,” said Oscar-winning screenwriter writer William Goldman. Of course, he was referring to all the great minds of Hollywood and their various airtight theories for movie success. But what if you replaced all those great minds with a really great algorithm? The New York Times’ profile of former SUNY statistics prof Vinny Bruzzese suggests that day is coming.
Mar 10
Like many people, I wasn’t crazy about the ending of “Lincoln.” It felt tacked on. But the screenplay is otherwise a masterwork, and as a friend said online during the Academy Awards, “Kushner got robbed.” I have to agree.
And somehow, I missed this wonderful Moyers interview with playwright Tony Kushner back in December. I’ve seen the movie twice, but now that I’ve watched this, I’m ready to view the movie a third time.
Actually, it really isn’t much of a surprise today that authors and/or their publicists play games with advance orders. This Wall Street Journal story tells how easy it really is.
But I remember 10 years ago when the Pulitzer-winning author David A. Vise ordered 20,000 books from Barnes & Noble (enjoying discounts and free shipping, of course) and then promptly returned all but 2,500 of them, angering the now-struggling bookseller. As the New York Times reported in 2002, “Publishers said yesterday that they had never heard of an author who bought so many copies of his own book.”
Turns out that Vise might have been ahead of his time.
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