Fun human interest story in the WSJ from many years ago. A couple decides to have a child – one child – they’re both in agreement they only want one. When they try to get pregnant it ain’t happening. Fertility tests show she’s the problem, and it’s a big problem. Doctors tell her she is very infertile. Best they can do is load her up with fertility drugs, and even then it’s a long shot. Sure enough, triplets. Then a year or so later they aren’t even bothering with birth control because the doctors told her she was so infertile. She gets pregnant again and has naturally occurring quadruplets – doctors assure them the drugs from back in the day have nothing to do with this. Thus a couple that wanted one child winds up with seven under the age of two. I had a priest once who was fond of saying, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”
Mike Plaiss
An office neighbor and friend of mine had six kids. They wanted four, but after four there was an accidental pregnancy. And that one was twins.
The universe is more amazing than you can imagine.
TommyJay, we have friends who had that same experience (though from five kids to seven). Apparently the husband was furious–as if he had nothing to do with it.
We unfortunately had the opposite experience, stuck at one, tried fertility treatments to get more (though my wife really did not want twins, so was maybe too cautious), and in the end were not successful.
Video #5 above surveys dozens of working Hollywood screenwriters aks them the question, “Who is/was the best screenwriter?” Answer: Billy Wilder.
Video #4 has this gem. Billy had 11 tips on how to write a great screenplay.
Wilder’s Tips for Writers
1. The audience is fickle.
2. Grab ’em by the throat and never let ’em go.
3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
4. Know where you are going.
5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points,
the better you are as a writer.
6. If you have a problem with your third act, the real problem is in the first act.
7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up 2+2. They’ll love you forever.
8. In doing a voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they are seeing.
9. The event that occurs in the second act triggers the end of the movie.
10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event,
and then–
11. — that’s it. Don’t hang around.
– – – – – – –
I just watched the 6th video. I think I’d seen Sabrina ages ago, but I remember very little. Rom-coms are not my favorite, though I do like a few of them. This one is now on my watch list.
The video is funny and the comparison is almost shocking. My takeaways: Yes, audiences are dumber today compared to 40 or 50 years ago. (Much less attention span too.) Quite possibly the writers and directors are too, though less likely.
While there is lots of detail in the video about the visuals and shot and montage composition, my related pet-peeve with modern film and TV making is the abundance of tight shots of actor’s faces. (I had to laugh at the video where Julia Ormond walks into a big office and says, ‘Gee, it’s BIG.’ But it’s a tight shot of her. Where is the office? Is it really big?? Who knows, ’cause IT’S A TIGHT SHOT!) Where are the “establishing shots?”
I have a theory. Making film nowadays is very expensive. Getting A-list actors eats up a lot of a big budget. That leaves less money for fancy set construction, or location shooting, plus there is the extra and expensive production time required to set these shots up. If you spend a lot of money on actor salaries you are more inclined to spend a lot of film time on their faces.
Then, of course, some successful directors do get a ton of money to do whatever they wish, and then they end up making something like Tenet. Sigh.
If one assumes the probability of having triplets – for women using IVF – is
1 in 5000, then the probability of having triplets, twice, is 1 in 25,000,000 or
.000004%
Goes to show, that even an event that, for all intents and purposes is basically zero (e.g. winning the Powerball lottery) does not mean it cannot occur.
Mike Plaiss,
There is a Yiddish saying for that, “Mann tracht un Gott lacht.”
Nice videos, AD. Not what I would have expected from you.
Neo hope your feeling better
Maybe in the future we will see anti-discrimination, hate crime, and DEI status for AI?
I have a theory. Making film nowadays is very expensive. Getting A-list actors eats up a lot of a big budget. That leaves less money for fancy set construction, or location shooting, plus there is the extra and expensive production time required to set these shots up. If you spend a lot of money on actor salaries you are more inclined to spend a lot of film time on their faces.
— Tommy Jay
There may be some truth in that.
I have another theory, though: the current staff of Hollywood movie and TV ‘creatives’ don’t know how. Literally.
A lot of them were picked, in recent years, for their politics or race or sexual orientation or whatever rather than their abilities. Decades ago, a writers’ room would be mostly white, but it would have war vets, former working class people, former professional class people, there would be a variety of backgrounds and experiences.
Now the writers’ room is very diverse racially and ethnically and sexually (in all senses of the word), but very uniform in background, outlook, and experiences.
Directors matter less than they once did, big swaths of a modern movie are controlled by various committees: the legal committee, the offensive content committee, the finance committee.
There’s a joke that’s made the rounds in Hollywood lately about ‘checkbox casting’. A director is making, say, a movie about police dealing with a crime. The studio informs him that he must include a character he had not intended to include.
Director: “What’s her background?”
Studio: “She’s a lesbian Hindu.”
Director: “What’s her motivation?”
Studio: “She’s a lesbian Hindu.”
Director: “What are her goals?”
Studio: “She’s a lesbian Hindu.”
Or whatever combination of traits the checkbox calls for that day.
If one assumes the probability of having triplets – for women using IVF – is
1 in 5000, then the probability of having triplets, twice, is 1 in 25,000,000 or
.000004%
I suspect the probability is much higher than that. With IVF you have some discretion about how many fertilized eggs are inserted (that’s my recollection at least). The more you put in, the more likely at least one will be successful, but obviously the more likely you will have multiples.
Jimmy:
Except the woman in the video only had one embryo implanted the second time. That embryo split – identical twins, And it became triplets when she (who had a fertility problem) also conceived naturally at around the same time.
I’d say the odds of that happening are very very small.
Selfy: “Maybe in the future we will see anti-discrimination, hate crime, and DEI status for AI?”
Then we will have “humans”, if I am allowed to use such an archaic term, identifying as AI.
The new Tom Cruise movie, “Digger” is getting panned.
I was looking for the Babylon Bee logo somewhere on the triplets video! (Well, the doublet of triplets, I guess, when described in the same way that one would describe an NMR graph.)
Re: Decline of writers and directors in Hollywood
I’m with HC68 on this. Checkbox DEI and the #MeToo movement decimated old-school white male creators in Hollywood, as well as old-school meritocratic standards in writing. Instead we get woke preaching, girlbosses and emasculated males.
I can’t think of a single well-written script in the last ten years. I’m sure there were some, but none come easily to my mind.
Hollywood seems to be easing off the Woke, but it’s going to take years of rebuilding to restore its former easy glory of entertaining audiences. If that’s indeed still possible.
Hail Caesar! released in 2016 just makes your cutoff, Hux.
The entire movie is witty and hilarious but the scene with the religious representative’s ‘Who’s On First?’ debate about the Trinity is genius.
Hollywood seems to be easing off the Woke, but it’s going to take years of rebuilding to restore its former easy glory of entertaining audiences. If that’s indeed still possible.
— huxley
Some of the studios do appear to be trying to de-woke. But the staff doesn’t want to. Also, and this is important, Hollywood’s utter dependence on established Intellectual Properties forces everything into that mold. So, you get writers, even sometimes potentially decent ones, who end up trying to tell their own story in someone else’s framework.
For ex, the recent Predator movie. It’s basically a coming of age buddy story, but to get it made they had to recast it as part of the Predator franchise.
Right now, there’s a show called Lanterns, supposedly a comic based show about Green Lantern, the superhero. It’s run by David Lindeloff, and it’s really a combination detective story and race-relations story, and it’s super-woke. But he had to wrap it in ‘Green Lantern’ to get it made, and he admits he has little liking for the comic, and his chief writer never even bothered to read any of the comics, since they were just using the name to get it made.
Remember Joker from 2015? That was also theoretically a comic movie about the Joker. But it really wasn’t. It started life as a story about a man undergoing a mental breakdown amid an uncaring society, it was consciously a call back to Taxi Driver, but to get it made the studio insisted they tie it to a comic character.
We see this pattern all over the place, once you’re sensitized to it it’s glaring.
I’m pretty sure part of what went wrong with the Disney Star Wars sequels was that the Disney PTB wanted to tell their own story about their own characters and detested the originals, and it showed through in what they produced.
Years ago Hollywood tried to make a movie of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and gave control to Paul Verhoeven. He detested the source material and made a movie that was basically the opposite of it.
“Rand Paul: Candidates Need to Oppose Iran War, Canada Trade War”
Way to give aid and comfort to our enemies ya shithead. How about being on Americas side for once.
“Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders Sparks Massive Conservative Uproar After Releasing This Politically Correct Anti-Welfare Ad “
Thought she was the only female governor that wasn’t a shithead. Turns out nope, just another dope.
“ Sen. John Kennedy Criticizes Trump’s Kennedy Center Naming Campaign”
Nothing important going on in the world so spend time on this. Another shithead.
We might just be too stupid for self rule.
Near disater averted —
IsraelNews7:
“One pilot stabbed the other and tried to carry out a 9/11 – either to hijack the plane to Israel or crash it,” a senior Israeli official told Channel 12 News.
“The plane began to dive, and a team of pilots who were there took control of the attacker and the aircraft. A dramatic disaster was averted.”
Passengers and crew members who realized what was happening reportedly managed to break into the cockpit and overpower the suspected attacker.
Israeli officials were informed that an additional flight crew happened to be aboard the aircraft as part of a routine procedure. The pilots were traveling as passengers and were able to take control of the aircraft and stabilize it.
“The great fortune of this flight was those pilots,” a senior Israeli official said. “Otherwise, we would have been dealing with an incident straight out of September 2001 or July 1976.”
Let’s talk about that missing rudder of Flydubai 1073 B737 MAX 8.
The aerodynamic forces involved may have been large enough to cause rudder failure through aerodynamic flutter during the extreme overspeed.
The aircraft descended more than 14,000 ft in under 30 seconds.
Even without significant rudder deflection, the loads could potentially damage or tear apart the control surface.
Massive overspeed + an extremely high descent rate could generate side loads far exceeding the tail’s structural design limits.
And the fact that the aircraft apparently did not lose the entire vertical stabilizer is a miracle. The rudder is attached to the trailing edge of the vertical stabilizer and moves left or right to control yaw.
In normal operation, the pilot controls the rudder using the rudder pedals or rudder trim control. The yaw damper and wheel-to-rudder interconnect system also automatically control rudder movement.
The authority limiter reduces maximum rudder movement. At specified airspeeds, the FSEU opens the main rudder PCU authority-limiter solenoid valve, limiting the hydraulic force produced by the PCU and therefore limiting rudder authority.
So, when we look at the missing rudder, the key question is: what loads was that rudder subjected to during the extreme descent and overspeed?
The exact failure mechanism still needs to be established by investigators.
Fun human interest story in the WSJ from many years ago. A couple decides to have a child – one child – they’re both in agreement they only want one. When they try to get pregnant it ain’t happening. Fertility tests show she’s the problem, and it’s a big problem. Doctors tell her she is very infertile. Best they can do is load her up with fertility drugs, and even then it’s a long shot. Sure enough, triplets. Then a year or so later they aren’t even bothering with birth control because the doctors told her she was so infertile. She gets pregnant again and has naturally occurring quadruplets – doctors assure them the drugs from back in the day have nothing to do with this. Thus a couple that wanted one child winds up with seven under the age of two. I had a priest once who was fond of saying, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”
Mike Plaiss
An office neighbor and friend of mine had six kids. They wanted four, but after four there was an accidental pregnancy. And that one was twins.
The universe is more amazing than you can imagine.
TommyJay, we have friends who had that same experience (though from five kids to seven). Apparently the husband was furious–as if he had nothing to do with it.
We unfortunately had the opposite experience, stuck at one, tried fertility treatments to get more (though my wife really did not want twins, so was maybe too cautious), and in the end were not successful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW9_mhNRmdo
This is for cinema junkies only:
Again, on Billy Wilder and The Apartment. I found some fascinating video discussion.
The Apartment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8EE7q0j2Qg&t=26s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZtKE3dwyAg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5BtvEBU7yg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImF4-YbPh8g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHQuR885yMQ
Wilder’s Sabrina versus the remake
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpC-XrpL39w&t=13s
________
Video #5 above surveys dozens of working Hollywood screenwriters aks them the question, “Who is/was the best screenwriter?” Answer: Billy Wilder.
Video #4 has this gem. Billy had 11 tips on how to write a great screenplay.
Wilder’s Tips for Writers
1. The audience is fickle.
2. Grab ’em by the throat and never let ’em go.
3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
4. Know where you are going.
5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points,
the better you are as a writer.
6. If you have a problem with your third act, the real problem is in the first act.
7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up 2+2. They’ll love you forever.
8. In doing a voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they are seeing.
9. The event that occurs in the second act triggers the end of the movie.
10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event,
and then–
11. — that’s it. Don’t hang around.
– – – – – – –
I just watched the 6th video. I think I’d seen Sabrina ages ago, but I remember very little. Rom-coms are not my favorite, though I do like a few of them. This one is now on my watch list.
The video is funny and the comparison is almost shocking. My takeaways: Yes, audiences are dumber today compared to 40 or 50 years ago. (Much less attention span too.) Quite possibly the writers and directors are too, though less likely.
While there is lots of detail in the video about the visuals and shot and montage composition, my related pet-peeve with modern film and TV making is the abundance of tight shots of actor’s faces. (I had to laugh at the video where Julia Ormond walks into a big office and says, ‘Gee, it’s BIG.’ But it’s a tight shot of her. Where is the office? Is it really big?? Who knows, ’cause IT’S A TIGHT SHOT!) Where are the “establishing shots?”
I have a theory. Making film nowadays is very expensive. Getting A-list actors eats up a lot of a big budget. That leaves less money for fancy set construction, or location shooting, plus there is the extra and expensive production time required to set these shots up. If you spend a lot of money on actor salaries you are more inclined to spend a lot of film time on their faces.
Then, of course, some successful directors do get a ton of money to do whatever they wish, and then they end up making something like Tenet. Sigh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N__U73IZXn4
If one assumes the probability of having triplets – for women using IVF – is
1 in 5000, then the probability of having triplets, twice, is 1 in 25,000,000 or
.000004%
Goes to show, that even an event that, for all intents and purposes is basically zero (e.g. winning the Powerball lottery) does not mean it cannot occur.
Mike Plaiss,
There is a Yiddish saying for that, “Mann tracht un Gott lacht.”
Nice videos, AD. Not what I would have expected from you.
Neo hope your feeling better
Maybe in the future we will see anti-discrimination, hate crime, and DEI status for AI?
— Tommy Jay
There may be some truth in that.
I have another theory, though: the current staff of Hollywood movie and TV ‘creatives’ don’t know how. Literally.
A lot of them were picked, in recent years, for their politics or race or sexual orientation or whatever rather than their abilities. Decades ago, a writers’ room would be mostly white, but it would have war vets, former working class people, former professional class people, there would be a variety of backgrounds and experiences.
Now the writers’ room is very diverse racially and ethnically and sexually (in all senses of the word), but very uniform in background, outlook, and experiences.
Directors matter less than they once did, big swaths of a modern movie are controlled by various committees: the legal committee, the offensive content committee, the finance committee.
There’s a joke that’s made the rounds in Hollywood lately about ‘checkbox casting’. A director is making, say, a movie about police dealing with a crime. The studio informs him that he must include a character he had not intended to include.
Director: “What’s her background?”
Studio: “She’s a lesbian Hindu.”
Director: “What’s her motivation?”
Studio: “She’s a lesbian Hindu.”
Director: “What are her goals?”
Studio: “She’s a lesbian Hindu.”
Or whatever combination of traits the checkbox calls for that day.
If one assumes the probability of having triplets – for women using IVF – is
1 in 5000, then the probability of having triplets, twice, is 1 in 25,000,000 or
.000004%
I suspect the probability is much higher than that. With IVF you have some discretion about how many fertilized eggs are inserted (that’s my recollection at least). The more you put in, the more likely at least one will be successful, but obviously the more likely you will have multiples.
Jimmy:
Except the woman in the video only had one embryo implanted the second time. That embryo split – identical twins, And it became triplets when she (who had a fertility problem) also conceived naturally at around the same time.
I’d say the odds of that happening are very very small.
Selfy: “Maybe in the future we will see anti-discrimination, hate crime, and DEI status for AI?”
Then we will have “humans”, if I am allowed to use such an archaic term, identifying as AI.
The new Tom Cruise movie, “Digger” is getting panned.
I was looking for the Babylon Bee logo somewhere on the triplets video! (Well, the doublet of triplets, I guess, when described in the same way that one would describe an NMR graph.)
Re: Decline of writers and directors in Hollywood
I’m with HC68 on this. Checkbox DEI and the #MeToo movement decimated old-school white male creators in Hollywood, as well as old-school meritocratic standards in writing. Instead we get woke preaching, girlbosses and emasculated males.
I can’t think of a single well-written script in the last ten years. I’m sure there were some, but none come easily to my mind.
Hollywood seems to be easing off the Woke, but it’s going to take years of rebuilding to restore its former easy glory of entertaining audiences. If that’s indeed still possible.
Hail Caesar! released in 2016 just makes your cutoff, Hux.
The entire movie is witty and hilarious but the scene with the religious representative’s ‘Who’s On First?’ debate about the Trinity is genius.
— huxley
Some of the studios do appear to be trying to de-woke. But the staff doesn’t want to. Also, and this is important, Hollywood’s utter dependence on established Intellectual Properties forces everything into that mold. So, you get writers, even sometimes potentially decent ones, who end up trying to tell their own story in someone else’s framework.
For ex, the recent Predator movie. It’s basically a coming of age buddy story, but to get it made they had to recast it as part of the Predator franchise.
Right now, there’s a show called Lanterns, supposedly a comic based show about Green Lantern, the superhero. It’s run by David Lindeloff, and it’s really a combination detective story and race-relations story, and it’s super-woke. But he had to wrap it in ‘Green Lantern’ to get it made, and he admits he has little liking for the comic, and his chief writer never even bothered to read any of the comics, since they were just using the name to get it made.
Remember Joker from 2015? That was also theoretically a comic movie about the Joker. But it really wasn’t. It started life as a story about a man undergoing a mental breakdown amid an uncaring society, it was consciously a call back to Taxi Driver, but to get it made the studio insisted they tie it to a comic character.
We see this pattern all over the place, once you’re sensitized to it it’s glaring.
I’m pretty sure part of what went wrong with the Disney Star Wars sequels was that the Disney PTB wanted to tell their own story about their own characters and detested the originals, and it showed through in what they produced.
Years ago Hollywood tried to make a movie of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and gave control to Paul Verhoeven. He detested the source material and made a movie that was basically the opposite of it.
“Rand Paul: Candidates Need to Oppose Iran War, Canada Trade War”
Way to give aid and comfort to our enemies ya shithead. How about being on Americas side for once.
“Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders Sparks Massive Conservative Uproar After Releasing This Politically Correct Anti-Welfare Ad “
Thought she was the only female governor that wasn’t a shithead. Turns out nope, just another dope.
“ Sen. John Kennedy Criticizes Trump’s Kennedy Center Naming Campaign”
Nothing important going on in the world so spend time on this. Another shithead.
We might just be too stupid for self rule.
Near disater averted —
IsraelNews7:
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/433892
And about the missing rudder (photo at link):
Turbinetraveler —
https://x.com/Turbinetraveler/status/2105256047208264114