[Tim Wilson]

[Miha Pece] “I think Apple is still king for mobile editing. I would love some real competition here, but I’m not holding my breath.”

Look, I don’t want to derail a very interesting thread, but Apple’s intentional lack of ambition for mobile computing is one of the big things that lost me. Not any gnashing of teeth or outrage on my part, as much as a shrug. “Really? That’s all ya got?” I think there’s a LOT of great non-Apple options.

What I love about my Dell XPS 15 isn’t just the years of enjoying a 4K touchscreen, DDR 4 RAM, a proper keyboard, and lots of other stuff, but Dell’s incredibly low-priced, but highly effective ON SITE repair. This is a big deal for me. I live in a remote, humid location — on an island where in the past 6 months alone, we’ve had to replace 5 ceiling fans, a TV, a washing machine, and a microwave solely because wobbly power and salt air fried the circuit boards, often in a lovely hail of sparks.

And the one time I had a problem with a logic board, I went straight to a dedicated support number for Dell mobile workstations, and they dispatched someone to my house with the part the next day. It happens that there are a number of military installations on the island, and repair people here are well-stocked….but one time, our cat knocked my wife’s laptop off the table, and it landed face down on the floor. She needed a new screen, hinge, and wireless antenna (the wifi card is where you’d expect under the keyboard, but the antenna runs behind the screen) so it took all of 3 days for the parts to be FedEx’d and the repair guy to be sitting at our dining room table making the fix.

For this, we pay the princely sum of $145 for 3 years iirc. Something very close to nothing, on top of a machine that I got with better specs and a lower price than an MBP….that they’ll service in my house within days of my call to their mobile workstation hotline.

And yes, the repair agreement covers stuff like the cat messing up the machine, pouring daquiris on the keyboard, whatever. No restrictions. (The agreement doesn’t mention cats or alcohol, but it does mention drops and liquids.) If I need help, there’s no discussion about why, or who’s fault it is, or whether it’s “acceptable” trouble.

I get that if you’re using FCPX or will only use Macs for whatever reason that this isn’t an option, but man, the LAST thing I’d say about Apple is that they’re king for mobile editing. Y’all know that I remain mightily enthusiastic for X, and strongly believe that a strong Apple hardware platform is good for the whole industry, even folks using Windows.

But even more than desktops, where the iMac Pro is dynamite imo, I feel like this is an area that they’ve really stopped trying the way they used to. I don’t use Apple stuff, but I take no pleasure from them not swinging for the fences anymore. I WANT them to do better.

[Tim Wilson]

[Nick Griffin] “FYI: Canon’s C-100, C-200, C-300, etc. are NOT DSLRs. They are real cameras with real shutters….”

Yes, the “C” stands for “Cinema”. Canon was mightily distressed by the rapid adoption of the 5D in video production. They never intended it to be used there, and they knew better than anyone that it was a bad idea in virtually every use case it was being used in outside its original intent.

Rather than chase themselves down the rabbit hole of jamming on production features to a “still camera with some video”, they started from scratch to build a PROPER digital cinema camera. The degree to which they stuck the landing is reflected by its incredibly rapid adoption in the market. In our informal surveys inside the COW forums, the EOS C series is every bit as widely used as RED and ARRI, and maybe moreso.

Not that I’d want a troubleshooting forum like the COW to be the only source for such a conclusion, which is why I’m not making a firm conclusion as much as a general observation…but this is something to be underscored at every opportunity. The C stands for Cinema. The EOS Cinema Series is straight legit.

In fact, my only issue with the C300 Mark II is that they didn’t give it a whole new name. I can see why they did this. It’s pretty much the same form factor (maybe even exactly the same), and “Mark II” really was a magic name in reference to the 5D….but it really might as well have been given a different designation. Massive, massive upgrade. They did this right.

[Al Davis] “In addition to the master line feed off the house board, I attach a lavalier to the podium mike, and secure it with black tape.”

My #1 favorite trick. I wouldn’t even dream of shooting a conference any other way, unless I could maybe put myself in a position to wire the talent directly. Certainly for a shared mike, though, taping a wireless lav to the podium is a MUST.

Greg, I’m going to second pretty much what the rest of these guys said. There’s not a million steps to achieve next-level production values in a conference setting, but there are a solid half-dozen. Some of those, you may not be able to control no matter what (lighting in particular), so if you can only do a couple, I think the ones to focus on are getting closer (even if it’s just a B camera to the side of the audience a LOT closer to the stage) and not relying on house sound (or worse, ROOM sound) as your only audio source.

Since you live in a place with so many conferences, I can easily imagine that this could become a lucrative sideline for you. It was certainly the case for me when I was still in production. When I had some ability to control the production, conferences were some of my favorite things to shoot. I even enjoyed what I learned from most of the speakers, even for the transportation and telecom kinds of conferences that are well outside my areas of general interest.

But man, when things get ugly, they get REALLY ugly. Hence our communal desire to keep things cool for you.

I’m obviously chiming in a couple of months late on this thread, so I wonder. Do you have an update for us?

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] “ll three major television networks would use colors to designate the states won by the presidential candidates on Election Night, though not all using the same color scheme. NBC continued to use the color scheme employed in 1976 for several years. NBC newsman David Brinkley famously referred to the 1980 election map outcome showing Republican Ronald Reagan’s 44-state landslide as resembling a “suburban swimming pool”.”

It’s funny, I’d just been thinking the other day that I could SWEAR that this had at one time been the opposite of what it is today, but I’d forgotten for a good many years that it was also more or less arbitrary. Many

I assumed that some TD somewhere decided that “red” and “Republican” both start with the letter R, and told the Chyron operator to set it up accordingly. “Blue for incumbent” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but it doesn’t have to. Once you hear “Red for Republican”, you can figure out the rest. I’m not at all shocked that this is how it was standardized. It’s the only way that makes sense.

To me, anyway. Make it easy to remember. I really do live for these kinds of shortcuts. For example, my life would be almost impossible to live without having learned “lefty loosey, righty tighty”, and would be COMPLETELY unmanageable if I hadn’t been taught that you can remember which hand is your left because it forms an “L”.

[Tim Wilson]

Thinking, thinking….

????

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] “absolutely – the “old” Mac Pro from 2006 – 2012. Companies like Other World Computing (https://www.macsales.com) were created because of computers like this. You get third party RAM, upgrade your own processors, it was easy to work on. You pulled out the old GTX-120, or old ATI card, added internal NVidia Quadro 4000’s, or GTX-680’s. You added Cubix or Magma expansion chassis, and put whatever you wanted in there (like Pro Tools I/O cards). And of course I/O cards from AJA, Blackmagic, and Matrox. And of course, the AVID HIB card that went to the Nitris DX breakout box. “

It goes further back than that, Bob. I’d say dang near almost to the Mac iici and IIfx in 1989. The idea was that you bought the equivalent of a big ol’ cavern whose sole purpose was for you to pop the top off of and fill to your hearts content with anything you wanted — the sky’s the limit.

There used to be catalogs for a dozen companies chock full of every kind of accessory that you could load into your Mac — and we all aggressively subscribed to all of them — because we wanted to know which RAM was fastest, which drives were most reliable, which cards supported the most IO, who added acceleration, on and on.

Sure, it’s nice that computers can handle a lot of this stuff natively now. I don’t miss manually configuring Token Ring networks any more than I miss blacking my tapes. But I do miss the days when Mac video creators were driving innovation across the industry — in drives, in monitors, in RAM, you name it — because we demanded the best of the best, because no matter how good the computers Apple sold us, we wanted them to be BETTER, faster, capable of more stuff than Apple or anyone else imagined. OUR imagination was the only limit to performance.

Okay, and to a lesser extent, our budgets and the technology itself, but the early days of the COW and our predecessor community going back to 1995 (June of 1995, to be exact — we crossed our 23rd anniversary last week!) was shaped by people who were pushing the tech faster than developers really wanted to go. LOL But they sold us the stuff, and stepped up when we demanded that it worked the way WE wanted it to work, even if it was something that they hadn’t intended when they designed it.

It’s sad to me that the Mac user community has become not only complacent, but actively hostile to the idea that Apple wasn’t doing enough to develop the computers we need. It’s not Moore’s Law that has slowed innovation to a crawl. It’s users who are happy to take whatever Apple gives them, and shout down anyone who wants to drive Apple to do better.

On one hand it seems ridiculous to say that here, among some of the most dissatisfied people on the internet. LOL At the same time, I think back to 1999, when Apple created a computer so powerful that they were forbidden to export it to some countries. This message was playfully exaggerated, but it was true. Can you even imagine Apple trying to pretend that theirs are the most powerful computers on the market? It simply doesn’t come up any more.

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.

And the remarkable thing is that we took that computer, and made it even MORE powerful. Why? Because we demanded that capability from our computers. We DEMANDED the ability to customize them, to make them vastly more powerful, because we understood, yes, we’re a niche. You can’t make money selling a computer to us that does everything we need. We get it. Just stay out of our way, and everything will be fine. ????

[Bob Zelin] “WHY do they care what a third party company does to enhance their product, and why do they make it so difficult for these third party companies ?”

I swear I think a lot of it is because we let them get away with it. There’s a reason why the key images for the early days of marketing FCP was on a laptop with FireWire. That wasn’t as big a deal here in the COW, where we were early adopters of Cinewave, Decklink, Kona, Aurora Igniter, and so many more. We used Final Cut Pro as the foundation of a heavy-iron suite that could run circles around anything out there once we finished shaping it to our needs.

But now, people who insist that an iMac Pro still isn’t enough for the work they’re doing, or the work they want to do, are treated as deviants, liars, ignoramuses, or trolls. Yeah, it’s a niche, like it’s always been. But now Apple and a significant part of its user base are new sets of obstacles, instead of the foundation we build on to reach newer heights.

That’s all I’d like to see a return to. An Apple that enables its customers to drive technology further, faster, and in previously unimaginable directions through creative third-party partnerships, and a user base centered around encouraging each other to think bigger, and pointing the way to the specifics of making it happen.

Less about me and what I need. Less about either/or. Less about how much more I can do with less. More about making the entire industry bigger, better, bolder. More about what’s possible with MORE. More about demanding more from our vendors, enabling each other to do more.

And yes, it was that way for the vast majority of our tiny little life cycle. In the context of the COW, I’d say something like 18-20 of our 23 years. This today? This is NOT how it was. And talking about how it was is anything but ancient history.

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] “And for the three youngsters reading this thread written by old men – that free Davinci Resolve that you are now using – that was made in Coral Springs Florida, a Davinci Resolve system (with SGI computer) cost $400,000.
Today – free (ok, 35 grand if you get the full control panel). And the Teranex (made right here on Sand Lake Road in Orlando Florida) was between $60,000 and $80,000 – now $1695 new. “

This is of course the absolutely true flipside of what I was just saying, that you can still spend bigger money on systems in order to MAKE bigger money….

….but if you’re in a position with limited upside, my goodness gracious, why spend more than this??? The prices are shockingly low to me, but equally shocking that the stuff itself is terrific at that price. Not only did Blackmagic drop the price of of Teranex by north of $70,000 in some cases, they made them smaller, lighter, quieter, and dramatically increased IO and format support. Astonishing.

When we spoke to Grant in 2009 following the DaVinci acquisition, he said, “You know what, there’s almost no margin in the control panel. That’s how much it costs to make a control panel that good, so I’m not going to be able to reduce the price of that in any major way. I don’t know for sure yet, and I’ll keep digging, but maybe none at all.” And he’s right. People who spend even a tiny bit of time on those things understand exactly why the big control surface costs what it does.

DaVinci’s model was always to charge as little as they could for THAT, and as much as possible for all the rest — software, support, etc. — which of course Grant is interested in charging as LITTLE as possible for. If 4K is good enough for you, then you downloading it for free is good enough for Grant. Or heck, buy a camera for crazy short money and get the “expensive” version free, too. That’ll work.

The additional miracle to me is that Grant has made compelling smaller versions of the control surfaces for prices that really do strike me as nutso compared to similarly-scaled products.

But I’ll bring it back to Quantel again and note that Grant is free to run his company on the business model that works for him — which I can briefly summarize in words he wouldn’t use to say, “Profit to enable anything more than paying people well and funding future development is theft” ???? — and Quantel is free to develop the products their customers need, no more and no less, because they’re not on the hamster wheel of public trading.

Not that there’s not room for both kinds of companies in my own product portfolio (there absolutely is), but I’ve enjoyed spending less time watching the stock price of the companies whose products I might consider using, and paying more attention to the companies who are smart enough not to play that game.

[Tim Wilson]

[Scott Witthaus] “[Bob Zelin] “It’s hard to believe that a Quantel Painbox was $250,000.”

….Hell, $15,000 + [to wine/dine/golf us] was small change for the amount of gear we were buying. “

It’s not hard to believe at all. It has always been the case that rigorously-compliant gear that could quickly move enormous amounts of data always cost plenty. That said, Paintbox’s price was considered a shocking breakthrough, because one person could now do in more or less real time what had taken a team weeks to do — if it could be done at all. Let’s not forget that the REAL revolution of Paintbox is that it allowed people to do what had previously not been practical at any scale of time and money otherwise. That’s why everybody HAD to have one.

And billing at $1000/hr or more as was common well into the 21st century for rooms like this, you were in pure profit mode in a matter of months, . There’d never been an ROI even vaguely like it — not just because of what it cost, but because of how much you could MAKE with it.

Here’s a great launch video for the 1990 iteration of Paintbox. It’s 5 minutes long, and worth every second of your time. The first 2 minutes or so takes you through the 80s, and what a breakthrough it was, and how ubiquitous it was.

You can look at this and laugh now (as indeed I did just now), but don’t forget that as late as 1998, After Effects still had one undo, no editable text, pretty much every operation was destructive, no 3D space, no paint, no roto, on and on and on. People could do miracles with it, yes, but it wasn’t necessarily easy. (Easy to start? Yes. Easy to master? No.) And at the end of it, miracle in hand, you couldn’t charge more than a fraction for it as something similar but even less sophisticated that someone completed in a fraction of the time with a Paintbox.

Where the math started to change was when you could do things in AE that were impossible in hardware, similar to what Paintbox had done 20 years earlier.

Anyway, this is a trip. Watch it all. You’ll dig it.

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.

It’s worth remembering that Quantel is still around, albeit under the SAM banner, but they’re still getting high-five figures into six figures for boxes for the same reason they always have: you can do cool stuff fast. We don’t hear about ’em much because they wisely got out of the stock market so nobody would yap about irrelevant nonsense like how many of ’em were sold. Wall St. doesn’t know what to do with a company that only sells a couple of hundred (or less) really expensive things, so they wisely stopped trying to teach Wall St. the basics of business. You only need to make more than you spend and have happy customers.

That’s not enough for the market anymore, so Quantel / SAM wisely walked away to focus on doing what they do. Very quietly serving their mature niche market, selling to people who are still billing enough to make this stuff a bargain.

Another observation about price along these lines. I spent 2003-2006 at Avid sitting next to the product manager for Avid DS. I’d say 10% of his calls were from people who wanted Avid to get on the stick with development (we need more features! we need more marketing support!), but 90% of his calls were people SCREAMING that $145,000 (including storage) was TOO LOW A PRICE. When I say “screaming”, I’m not kidding. “Our clients read trade magazines, they go to NAB, they know how much this stuff costs, and I’m having to cut my prices by two-thirds because you want to come in so much cheaper than Flame — it’s KILLING us.”

THAT’s why that product failed. I saw how much development and marketing effort it got. PLENTY. But it got eaten from below by After Effects and DaVinci Resolve, got eaten from above by Discreet (who’s also doing just fine, thanks), and its target customer couldn’t monetize a product that cost so little.

That’s always going to be the yin and yang of graphics hardware market dynamics. Buy something cheap, make a little. Buy something expensive, make a lot.

[Tim Wilson]

[Rich Rubasch] “I loved the paper COW magazine…..oh the nostalgia.”

We loved it too! We talk about it all the time. We were wondering just yesterday about how we might revisit it at some point.

When Ronald had to step down for a few years for health reasons back in 2012, we pulled the plug on it. Our way of working together was too intimate and idiosyncratic for me to want to rebuild with someone else, and a 64-page magazine (plus regular 16-page supplements) is not a one-person operation — heck, I’m stupefied that we could do it with just TWO of us.

We were still moving upward in subscriptions and ad revenue at the time, and were days away from shipping our biggest issue yet when Ron hit the wall. I strongly, strongly encouraged him to stop, too, but we’d still be going today if Ron hadn’t gotten sick, no doubt in my mind whatsoever.

Creative COW Magazine is what took the other magazines out of print (we took out 5 competitors in the first year alone!), NOT the COW dot net. Vendors typically have completely separate budgets for print and web, and they’re often not even managed by the same person, sometimes not even the same department or ad agency. Nothing happening on the web was ever going to shake those print budgets.

And when I say “we took out”, I want to underscore that we mapped this out on a whiteboard. We picked our targets, planned our approach, and set dates by which we wanted them gone. We just had no idea how easy it would be, or how thoroughly we’d wipe some of these guys out. Many of them (DV, Millimeter, etc.) don’t even have web presences anymore.

Along the way, Ronald had a compelling, unique vision for how to build print magazines on the foundation of web communities, rather than having the web erode the print business. It was startling enough that Folio Magazine, the trade magazine of print publishers, named him to their Folio 40 Visionaries. The magazine that came out of this vision really, truly was special.

But that’s a story for another day.

Here’s the story for today, and really, to me, the only point of the story:

[Andrew Kimery] “The McBride’s aren’t being sued by former interns. They are being sued by a former employee that claims his termination was retaliatory because he reported the McBride’s illegally run internship program to the Department of Labor.”

This is so important that ima quote it again:

[Andrew Kimery] “The McBride’s aren’t being sued by former interns. They are being sued by a former employee that claims his termination was retaliatory because he reported the McBride’s illegally run internship program to the Department of Labor.”

What the McBrides were purportedly doing was ILLEGAL, both the theft of labor (which they’re trying to euphemize as “unpaid internships”) and the retaliatory firing.

I don’t care that it’s how we came up back in the day. I don’t care that that’s how they did it at Sound City. The way we came up was stupid, venal, exploitative, should never have happened, and IS NOW ILLEGAL.

Oh for the good old days when capitalists could steal labor from children! Eff that.

And 10 million EFFs to Billy Joel. He’s proud of stealing from Jimi Hendrix by sneaking into shows? Jimi worked himself literally to death(forget the stupid heroin stories — never happened) because his record deal gave him 1.5 cents per dollar (that’s right — one and a half pennies per dollar; the band split 3 cents on the dollar, so the other 2 guys got three quarters of a cent each) while his management was taking 40%. He got kidnapped by the mob and threatened with his life when he tried to open a recording studio in Harlem (remember that? didn’t think so) that would have allowed him to control his own revenue streams, so what he was left with was shows (including a “benefit” concert for those mob promoters that was basically playing for his own ransom).

And Billy Joel stole even THAT, and not just from Jimi. I’m glad to hear the story, though. Billy’s never getting another cent from me, and he’s gotten plenty over the years. But I’m not going to STEAL anything from him in the future, ffs. He’s dead to me, and that’s that.

That’s the thing. Nothing about his story is ennobling. It’s sickening, and I bet that’s not how he’s teaching his kids to come up, either. Sneaking into shows? You think he’s giving jobs to people that try to sneak into his shows? I bet his security has orders to tase them, if not dump them in the East River.

[Kylee Peña] “You can find the article in the COW library because it’s an important topic and the COW knows it’s important.”

Effin’ A. An Oral History of My Illegal Internships

(And yes, I’m hoppin’ mad and cussin’ up a storm.)

Here’s my favorite quote from it, my addition of boldface in the middle.

And I would really really hope that those people in the industry that benefitted from internships, either from gaining skills or getting a job, would recognize that no matter how well they managed to do, it would have been a better, more equal educational experience if they hadn’t been taken advantage of for free work. And by extension, that they would advocate for better, more equal educational opportunities for those coming up behind them instead of enforcing the status quo as a matter of paying ones’ dues.

THAT’s the point.

That Irish family in Hell’s Kitchen you heard about with 7 kids and 2 grownups in a tenement with a hotplate and one bathroom down the hall that 10 similar families shared? That was my father’s family, and his goal was for me to share my bathroom with many, many fewer people. LOL Maybe even have one inside my actual apartment.

That’s what we’re supposed to do, too — make sure that the next kid in line doesn’t get screwed like we did.

I don’t care if some kid is gonna wind up “softer” than me or whatever nonsense because she got paid minimum wage for her internship. PAY HER.

The gubmint has gone out of its way to protect moguls who want to keep stealing labor from kids. As Andrew points out, the guidelines are nice and crisp, and easier to follow than ever. So if you’re too lazy or greedy to color within the lines of the laws that protect outright theft, you really do need to get slapped.

Bob, I’m really glad that you’ve spent a career kicking down the walls that have kept knowledge locked away from customers, or that companies just haven’t had enough interest to care about sharing where people will actually see it. You helped me in my own business back in the day, and I appreciate you still banging away all these years later.

But man, I really do see the villains here being anyone who expects anyone else to work for them for free, NOT the people who are advocating for people getting paid (again noting that it’s not the interns themselves suing, but the guy who got fired for turning in the McBrides for breaking the law). Bosses can say all day long, “Yeah, but look what the kids are getting out of it,” and I guarantee that the kids wouldn’t be getting any less out of the experience if the employer was also following the law.

We at the COW may look like giants, but there’s only 3 of us, and there really were just 2 of us doing the magazine. We’ve spent our lives fighting much bigger, deeper-pocketed competitors, and we’re never going to be happy to hear about someone having to go through what we did. We’re hoping they can do better with their careers. We’re hoping we can help them do better.

And yes, by the way, if I’d seen this earlier, I’d have probably turned it off, but you’ve raised some interesting questions, and sparked some interesting insights so I’m provisionally leaving it on. Provisionally. ????

????

[Tim Wilson]

[Rich Rubasch] “I’ve been 100% successful getting permission to use a clip. Even in regional TV spots. I used a go pro ski jump clip from a Canadian ski jumper and it was perfect.

I’d go for the permission and you have a win-win. Permission and you pulled it off for your client!”

Rick, I love everything about this advice.

My experience has NOT been 100% success, but you know what? That’s PERFECT.

Greg, suppose you have to say, “Hey man, I checked with that dude on YouTube, and he wants $[amount] to use the clip.” Your client will either say “Great, pay the man” or “No way, let’s find something else”, but either way, you’ll be off the hook, and your client will have been served notice that creative choices have dollar signs attached to them.

And if the client says, “That’s ridiculous, use it anyway, he’ll never know” or something similar, and is generally not amenable to being gently schooled by you on how this stuff is supposed to work, you should definitely be asking yourself a whole bunch of other questions before taking the job at all.

[Tim Wilson]

One of the things I’ve been amused to observe is that she’d worked as many movies that were nominated for Razzies (7!) as were nominated for Oscars. That’s no reflection on the quality of her work, of course, which serves as a reminder that most bad movies are made by a lot of people doing a lot of excellent work.

So I don’t think it’s at all disrespectful to suggest that, while we celebrate her work on classics of varying degrees including Lawrence, Becket, and Out of Sight (not kidding, btw — she was nominated for Oscar, BAFTA, and ACE awards for her work on this), that we also remember that a legendary career can also include these:

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.

I actually enjoyed that one quite a bit, and saw it twice in its initial release, plus a few more times on TV. This one, not so much.

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.

Have some fun digging deep into her IMDb profile. I think you’ll be amazed by both the peaks and the valleys.

I have this conversation a lot with VFX artists in particular, since there’s often a strong correlation between a lot of VFX and a movie that has a lot of ways of going wrong. They invest a lot of effort, and sometimes multiple years of their lives, doing great work on movies that they themselves don’t enjoy. It’s why, other than the gentle fun here in the service of a larger point, I try not to say anything bad about any movie (outside the house that is!). I don’t want even strangers in a theater thinking that I don’t understand the extraordinary amount of effort that goes into movies that wind up falling short of the mark. If anything, I’d want to tell THEM about the work we and our peers do.

Honestly, it’s kind of a miracle that ANY movies wind up any good, all the more reason to celebrate a career like Anne’s that had so many great ones in it.