From: nichols@math.umn.edu (Preston Nichols)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies
Subject: Re: REVIEW: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME: An Excellent Film
Date: 14 Oct 92 19:11:52 GMT
Article-I.D.: news2.1992Oct14.191152.7113
Organization: University of Minnesota

In article <1992Oct8.171011.9813@tc.fluke.COM> moriarty@tc.fluke.COM (Jeff  
Meyer) writes:
> In <1992Oct2.164110.29024@cmcl2.nyu.edu> cruz@lab.ultra.nyu.edu (Nancy Cruz)  
writes:
> 
> >Hawkings really turned me on to Physics, however the movie was to say
> >the least, dreadfully boring.  It was one of the films where you keep
> >expecting everything to lead to somthing profound, funny, anything at
> >all, but it doesnt.  The film interviews his colleagues and relatives,
> >with a dryness, I cannot begin to explain.  Undoubtedley, poor
> >editing.  The graphics were few and quite elementary.  The scientific
> >content, barely there.
> >
> >This movie was quite a dissapointment.
> >
> >Stick to the book!
> 
> Major, major disagreement.  I won't go into detail (another review in
> r.a.m.reviews did a good job of lauding this film), but it is an excellent
> film and an excellent documentary.  I think the point that you're missing is
> that this film is more about Hawking than it is about his theories -- both
> of which are interesting and unique.  Hawking is an amazing man; it's to
> Error Morris' credit that they get Hawking personality and accomplishments
> across without (ever) milking Hawking's physical condition for sympathy.
> [deletions]
> If you're looking at it as a filmed adaptation of the book, then I can see
> you being disappointed; but frankly, such a film would be an extended
> episode of NOVA -- not a bad thing in itself, but I doubt that it would
> appeal to as large an audience as this film does.  
< [more deletions]

The following is verbatim from a "program" given out when I saw A Brief History  
of Time at the University Film Society, University of Minnesota:

"Although five and a half million copies is a great success for a book, it is  
still only reaching a small paroportion of the population.  The only way to  
reach a larger audience is through films and television.  I was therefore  
receptive when Gordon Freedman approached me to make a film about six months  
after the book was first published.  I had envisaged a documentary-style film  
that would be about science, with a large munber of graphics.  However, when  
they began to make the film, it seemed it was going to be almost entirely about  
my life, with very little about science.  When I protested, I was told that the  
kind of film I had in mind would have appeal only to a fairly small number of  
people.  To reach a mass audience, it was necessary to combine the science with  
material about my life.  I was dubious.  But working with director Errol Morris  
has convinced me that he is a man of integrity.  If anyone could make a film  
that people would want to watch, but which doesn't lose sight of the purpose of  
the book, it was he."
--Stephen Hawking, Cambridge, January 1992

"I think it's necessary to make a distinction between movies that use real  
people and movies that use actors.  The movies I've made up to this point have  
all used real people talking extemporaneously.  That basis has been the  
framework for anyting else that I've constructed within the film.  That's also  
true of A Brief History of Time.  It depends very much upon the actual people  
involved in this scientific enterprise, particularly Stephen Hawking, who  
narrates the movie; it's very much about him.

"All of Stephen's work concerns certain kinds of limits -- what we can and  
cannot know.  Black holes, event horizons.  Contemporary physics is populated  
by predictors that don't make sense in any conventional way.  This becomes an  
interesting story when connected with Stephen Hawking's life. He's a heroic  
person; it's hard to spend any time with him without being immensely impressed  
by him, not simply as a scientific thinker or intellectual, but as a man who  
has never given up.   He's very much there, despite enormous handicaps and  
disadvantages -- he also has a strongly perverse and ironic sense of humor.

"So I'm telling a number of stories; Stephen Hawking and his intellectual  
development; a story about this area of physics form the 60s to the present  
time; and about the other people involved in it -- a number of colleagues from  
Russia, the United Kingdom and the U.S.  I wasn't interested in doing a pure  
science show held together by graphics about what the birth of the universe  
might look like, or what a black hole or a neutron star might look like.  It's  
a story of science seen through the eyes of the people who created it."
--Errol Morris, as quoted by Russel Lack, Sight and Sound, May 1991, pp.21-23

[I'm with Nancy.]

PN
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