QUOTES: J.J. Abrams and Bret Easton Ellis.
Cheating is humiliating. No matter what form it takes. Skipping ahead—even without the help of someone in Underoos—lessens the experience. Diminishes the joy. Makes the accomplishment that much duller.
Perhaps that’s why mystery, now more than ever, has special meaning. Because it’s the anomaly, the glaring affirmation that the Age of Immediacy has a meaningful downside. Mystery demands that you stop and consider—or, at the very least, slow down and discover. It’s a challenge to get there yourself, on its terms, not yours.
It turns out the 7-year-old was right. His tip finally worked, and Greg and I finished the game that day. But I’d traded any true satisfaction for a cheat. I can’t even remember seeing that end screen.
The point is, we should never underestimate process. The experience of the doing really is everything. The ending should be the end of that experience, not the experience itself.
So, if you’re still reading, I say please:
Dig.
J.J. Abrams is the creator of Alias, cocreator of Lost and Fringe, and director of the new Star Trek movie.
From the latest issue of Wired.
Yesterday, after a really shitty discussion that really made me buckle down, and feel my own shame as a person, I went for a walk, in search of this issue. I can’t remember the last time I bought a copy of Wired, but from all the stuff that I had been gathering that week on the issue–it seemed really cool. A Paul Pope short comic on Star Trek, and some other cool things that I’m blanking on. I’ve always been a big fan of J.J.’s work, starting with Felicity which came out my senior year of high school, and I took it a bit literally, thinking of it as a reality show for what next year was going to be like for me. Was it? No. Then Alias was exactly what I wanted in an action show and was one of only two shows I watched in college. The other was The West Wing. So, its safe to say that I’m a Abrams fanboy.
Along with Abrams the other writer I was really into during my undergrad days at St. Bonaventure was Bret Easton Ellis. In my sophomore year, I went crazy and read American Psycho, Rules of Attraction and Less Than Zero. In a recent interview with the A.V. Club, Ellis talked about movie adaptations of his work, and the most recent one The Informers.
AVC: How much does the finished film resemble the script?
BEE: Very little. [Laughs] Gregor would have to admit that too, and so would Marco. This is not me complaining. That’s the fact. The 95-minute version of The Informers is very different from this sprawling, epic movie that Nick and I had in mind when we wrote the script. For some people, that probably sounds like its own kind of hell, but there’s a lot more resolution in our script, and it was also kind of lighter, funnier, more Altman-esque. This is a very different creature. I like the movie. It is very different in terms of tone and style from the movie we were thinking of when we were writing the script. There’s also literally 40 or 50 minutes missing from it in terms of stories being resolved, and…
The Informers stars Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger, Winona Ryder, Mickey Rourke and features Brad Renfro in his final performance. It looks terrible, but comes out this weekend around the corner from my apartment and is probably worth seeing. I’ve been going through movie withdrawal.
