If I ever express the desire to read a 264-page script written by the PRIMER guy, call the police, for I am the victim of identity theft.

Anyway. In general, MyPDFScripts is becoming a solid resource for reading scripts. Drew's Script-O-Rama is a classic resource, though with many of those NOT being in PDF format, format can sometimes be a bit wonky.

I also recommend lurking around Done Deal Pro -- specifically the "Writers & Scripts" area -- where they pass around hard to find and sometimes in-development scripts. I don't recommend trying to post there to substantively discuss writing, though. They'll just quote SAVE THE CAT at you.

There really aren't any legal ramifications. A lot of produced screenplays are made freely available one way or another -- as long as it's after the movie's come out, the studios don't care. One of the few benefits of the studios having no real respect for the value of a screenplay.

Spec screenplays get passed around all over town anyway -- they WANT attention, after all -- so there's no problem getting ahold of those.

It's only when a movie is currently in development that they might want to keep it under wraps and prevent leaks, lest an uproar (like the one that happened over the leaked T4 draft) force their hand and require altering the film in some way.

The easy way to deal with sharing such leaks is to simply link to someone who is hosting it. Then if the studio comes down on the leak, you wind up with a dead link rather than a C&D. And then you just use email.

But again, unless it's a big tentpole film, the studios don't usually care enough to even worry about whether or not the script's been leaked, as the percentage of a non-tentpole audience that would bother to read the script is insignificant and it's not worth their time to even check if the bell's been rung, let alone try to unring it.

Share away.

Those movies needed someone who could write a script and someone who could direct it, that's what they needed. Better casting and/or better performances would have followed naturally.

I find it amazing how after the total make-shit-up-as-he-went clusterfuck that was the prequel trilogy, there's somehow this lasting conviction that when it came to the sequel trilogy, Lucas totally had a definitive, coherent "plan."

The Secret History of Star Wars book has a chapter (rather, an appendix) on the Sequel Trilogy. It goes into great detail about how completely in flux the ST was. Basically, depending on when you asked Lucas between 1977 and 1983, the "plan" was always something different.

The "Other" mentioned by Yoda in ESB was going to essentially take over as protagonist in the ST and it was going to be essentially unrelated to the OT as we know it. When Lucas decided to just stop at ROTJ, he tied up the loose end by making Luke and Leia siblings and making her the Other, which was not at all the original plan, though he did not appear to have any plan other than to have a new trilogy, new adventures, with wholly new characters. Later, he began to claim that it would be a continuation with Luke, Leia, and Han, but much later in their lives.

For a long time he resisted doing any SW books to continue the story, but ultimately gave in and the Zahn trilogy revitalized SW in popular culture, paving the way for the prequels.

For all intents and purposes, the Zahn trilogy (and to an extent, the graphic novel DARK EMPIRE) are what the sequels were going to be, as far as Lucas ever articulated -- set against the rebuilding of the Republic, they explored the heroes' internal struggles between good and evil, and how, especially when you are given the keys to power (whether it be political, or magical), the line suddenly becomes much less clear.

The prequels, formerly only loosely related to the OT with Obi-Wan as protagonist, became about Anakin instead, and with Episodes 1-6 now charting the life story of this specific character, 7-9 were rendered superfluous and George "Orwell" Lucas began flatly denying that they had ever even been part of the equation.

You keep encouraging people to buy stuff from our Amazon link because "We get a dollar." Let's not pooh-pooh dollars.

Things we could do with the cash:

-Pay for our weekly snacks.
-Pay for the rental/purchase of the films we view.
-Pay for upgrades/repairs/replacements for the recording equipment.
-Pay for any bandwidth/website costs.
-Pay our website admin a little something for his trouble.
-Pay Vayda a little something for his trouble.
-If we wanted to do some kind of contest at some point down the road, we could buy some nice prizes.
-If we have money in the coffers and can't think of ways to spend it, the people who have to commute in some way to the Labs could get a few bucks for gas money.

I am so completely not in on this gig to make money. The way we're doing it now is fine and fun. But if we could find ways that participating in the show cost a little less money in one way or another, I don't see a downside.

But failing that, word of mouth is good too.

The sex scene was done with projection mapping on geometry. I don't know about the reflections being accurate as part of the point, and anyway using NURBS surfaces wouldn't have much in particular to do with that.

No. The MOVIE underestimates this.

So first you say "You guys bring up too many examples of different directions you think they could have taken," and then you say "I feel like you guys weren't putting in any thought to different directions the movie could have taken."

Uhhhhh....huh. That's constructive.

They were created as an advanced form of prosthesis for people with physical handicaps. They were co-opted over time by rich people, and then eventually became used by everybody (another missed story/thematic opportunity, BTW: a new form of class warfare where only poor people actually have to go about their lives as vulnerable humans). When you use something occasionally, it's a toy. When you use something all the time, it's a fundamental aspect of your life. Automobiles started as rich people toys, too.

I'm sorry, but no. I reject this argument, because it's stupid.

You're telling me that you think if people -- who, we've agreed, are largely stupid -- could jump into a completely different body, one in which they can do anything, with no long-term physical consequences or repercussions, that they're going to go work in a fucking cubicle and drink fucking coffee out of a fucking World's Greatest Dad mug? That is total horseshit. Arguably the only reason our society holds together is a sense of empathy, a sense of "we agree that I won't hurt you and you won't hurt me and that way we'll both get to not be hurt as much as possible." But if you live in a world where you can neither be hurt nor hurt others, "civilization" fucking collapses.

Or maybe I'm just cynical. Maybe you disagree with me WRT human nature. But at least a story in that world considers and involves the repercussions of the technology. Imagine someone taking the basic concept of SURROGATES and going in the direction of CHILDREN OF MEN. Tell me just that juxtaposition alone isn't INFINITELY more interesting than this fucking dreck.

SURROGATES doesn't explore the human cost of technology AT ALL. It has nothing to say about human nature, aside from the vague xenophobia of the Dreads, and the idea that the ONLY thing having Surrogates would change in our world is some of the slang is absurd. The fucking iPhone created bigger ripples in the fabric of society than the Surrogate revolution apparently did. It's a failure of fucking imagination, a lazy and superficial reading of the premise, and I don't think we went wrong to point out the missed opportunities at every turn because the film is nothing BUT a series of missed opportunities.

Not only is this not how it would go down, as I pointed out, but this isn't even what the movie was about. If the movie wanted to make some kind of a statement about the way technology isolates us from each other or whatever, okay. At least it would have something to say. But it didn't even try. It was just an action movie that happened to take place in a world where no one is human without ever really bothering to wrestle with the implications.

Augmented reality, fella. Bionic implants that take some getting used to. Stuff like that would happen (is, in fact, in the process of happening in the real world) WAY before Surrogates did.

And the concept of Surrogates is that it remotely sends sensory signals to your brain. So a feed from your Surrogate's eyes, and the feed from a security camera, registers as exactly the same kind of visual data in your neural pathways. So why the fuck would they still have screens instead of just plugging in and sending the visual signal directly? The filmmakers didn't think of it, but someone actually in that world certainly would have.

I quote this part only, because the rest is the joke just sailing merrily over your head. But to this question my answer is: HELL FUCKING YES.

The only reason people are humans is because they don't currently have a choice. You mention (because we do) The Sims, but that ain't the only MMORPG out there. You're telling me there's not a single hardcore WOW player who would pay out the ass to actually BECOME an Orc instead of just mouseclicking one around the screen? Not a single Trekkie that wants to be a Klingon? Nobody who would suffer through the cognitive restructuring of their brain in order to live their lives as Smaug the Dragon? That's bullshit and you know it.

It's not like they'd be able to run a normal human Surrogate perfectly the first time, either. The brain would have to make new connections in order to effectively communicate "Okay, I'm not moving THIS right arm, I'm moving THAT right arm." That's a real thing that people today have to do when they get prosthetic limbs -- retrain their brain. So fuck it. Might as well throw some wings on there while you're at it.

Even if it STARTS as pure human analogs, sooner or later someone is going to have the idea that hey, I don't HAVE to be a carbon copy of myself. I can have rockets in my fucking feet if I want to. And it'll take some getting used to, but I'm totally willing to do it because then I can fucking fly. And once that domino falls, all bets are off. And a decade after the technology became widely available? You'd better believe that the dominos started to fall a long time ago.

You want me to believe that nobody in the world has an ounce of goddamn imagination or the gumption to follow their dreams? That the innovation of being able to inhabit ANY body remotely has no ripple effect on ANYTHING else in civilization?

That's a second piece of magic, as far as I'm concerned.

EDIT:

See, this is what you appear not to understand. We're not dismissing the universe. We're the ones who are actually EXPLORING the universe, actually bothering to ponder the logical extensions and repercussions of the concepts that the film presents, none of which the filmmakers bothered to do.

They are the ones who summarily dismissed the universe with little more than a cursory glance. We're pointing out -- as we often do in such situations -- all the places that they could have done so much more. I don't know how you can possibly characterize this as a "dismissal."

NO U

Let me clarify that I'm all in favor of having more sophisticated ways of searching/sorting/recommending episodes. Search by commentator, tone, franchise, decade, etc. It's a great idea in general. I just dislike the color coded borders way of doing it in particular.

I forgot about how she can paper-bend. Still, reading is not enough of a plot issue to justify the title, IMO.

Hell, with all the inadvertent buildup of SURROGATES becoming practically a DIF trademark, maybe we should do it live.

Not that we're really likely to get anyone who doesn't check the boards anyway.