# Talk:David Fincher

Didn't Fincher first direct the Smoking Fetus Commercial BEFORE helming the concert "documentary" The Beat of the Live Drum?
Verify please. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.218.189.135 (talk • contribs) 16:12, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

I corrected the chronology based on the book "Dark Eye - The Films of David Fincher" by James Swallow, an unofficial biography and look at his films. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.218.189.135 (talk • contribs) 16:23, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

who even added that? there's no info about it anywhere. i'm guessing the person who added it was the guy mentioned and it's not even true. i've never heard anything about this, theres no source noted, and theres no info online.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.69.65.3 (talk) 12:55, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

The gratuitous praise ('He is widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation") does not belong in this kind of article. Please keep it out. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.31.137.119 (talk • contribs) 

I agree that this hyperbole was not appropriate, and your removal was correct. However, you are misrepresenting the case of this further removal made by you, which is not that Fincher himself is considered great but that his films are highly rated by Rolling Stone and the BBC. I think these important third party assessments should be returned to the article. Binksternet (talk) 02:50, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
I've semi-protected the article for a week. Please discuss the issue here and try to find a consensus on whether to include or exclude the information. Anarchyte (work | talk) 14:24, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
I'll concede that the BBC "Greatest Films of the 21st Century" list may be appropriate, since it has been referenced in other articles. However, vague mentions of how certain films are considered 'the greatest' of a specific decade aren't common in the opening paragraphs of articles about directors.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.31.137.119 (talk) 23:08, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
We need to address this hagiographic WP:PEACOCKing, which appeared to begin when an anon IP made this edit on March 29, and it has gone in and out since — meaning there is no consensus on it to stay. Moreover, the simple fact that it is clearly the same editor sock-puppeteering with multiple anon IPs means this needs to stay out, since we do not reward sock-puppeteering. --Tenebrae (talk) 22:14, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

In the “Fight Club” section of the article, a citation is needed about how it is considered to be one of the best films of the 1990’s and Fincher’s career.  This is a biased statement, you could have just said that, “Fight Club is often ranked as one of the best films of the 1990’s and Fincher’s career” and then provided some sort of source ranking his movies. A citation is also needed at the end of “The Game” paragraph, I have no idea where this information  is coming from. Your "Alien 3" section should be more developed. There is a lot more to that story that shaped Fincher as a filmmaker. This experience is why he has such a distaste for studio films and why his films are so unique. There are plenty of articles on this topic and I feel like you could have used them to your advantage. 
A lot of the citations were proper and they made sense.  I checked out a bunch of the references and they seemed reliable and unbiased (outside of Fincher’s own bias in interviews). However, there is one very biased source. When talking about Fincher’s directing style, I noticed that you used a Youtube video as the citation. This video used sources, but I would have looked for those interviews directly instead of relying on somebodies biased video. Videos are great tools for learning but I found these interviews myself, and there is a lot more information then what was in the Youtube video. You could developed this section a lot more if you used more direct quotes from the director himself. 
Other then that, the information is up to date and it is showing his latest work. Some questions I have for you, are where did you locate your sources? Also, why didn’t you talk about his personal background more? This area also seemed a bit lacking in my opinion.Samuelrmartin (talk) 16:51, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

This review is transcluded from Talk:David Fincher/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.
Reviewer: Jburlinson (talk · contribs) 04:34, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
I'll be glad to review this article. I'm sorry you've had to wait so long for a response to your nomination. Comments to follow in the next 1-5 days. Thanks in advance for all your work!--Jburlinson (talk) 04:34, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, but I've had trouble finding the time to get started.  I'll need another few days.  --Jburlinson (talk) 08:53, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
OK.  Here's my initial review.  I've made several minor changes to wording and grammar in the article.  If any of these are objectionable to any editor, please let me know.  Otherwise, I think the article is very close to GA -- it's really well done and very interesting.
Hi Jburlinson, thank you for your review and contributions. Much appreciated! I've added my comments below. I've added citations where needed and/or distributed them about (eg. for some of the quotes, they often came from the same source, but I just didn't over-cite).
Thanks for addressing all the points listed above.  And thanks to you and everyone else who has contributed to this article.  It contains some interesting material and is an asset to the film project on WP.--Jburlinson (talk) 07:59, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

Chrisahn, So, first of all, there’s a number of pages edited the same way I did (see Spike Lee, David Lynch). Take a look at late and great Mr. Lynch whose work spanned and inspired different forms of art, including cinema, music, literature. And it doesn't prevent anyone from adding all of the aforementioned things as well his unrealized projects to the Short description section.
Another argument why I think it'd be reasonable to add Fincher's unrealized projects to the Short description is because there are simply three pages dedicated to him: the main one, his accolades and his work which include the see also section (no discography or videography or bibliography credits or anything like that) — don't you think it'd be better to leave it there as it is with the exception of adding it to the short description section of the main page?
And it seems to me that you also kind of approved my idea of completely getting rid of See also section on Fincher's original page which actually means that we can have two mentions of unrealized projects on his page: filmography section and short description. 2A00:1370:819A:46:D0E6:4851:B2C4:7675 (talk) 15:53, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for your message.
You wrote "short description", but you meant the MOS:INFOBOX. No big deal, it's just confusing, since "short description" usually refers to the {{Short description}} template.
In the Spike Lee article, his unrealized works were also recently added to the infobox. I just removed them. As in the case of Fincher, they're mostly projects where he was in talks to direct but ultimately didn't. This happens to pretty much all directors (and actors etc.). Usually this means that the person was in negotiations with the producers, but creative input was rather limited. That's why these "works" aren't relevant for the infobox: the person didn't do any actual work on most of these projects.
It's different in Lynch's case. If you read David Lynch's unrealized projects, you'll find that almost all of them were based on his ideas, and in many cases he actually wrote a screenplay. In other words, he actually did some creative work, but couldn't produce a film for some reason. That kind of work is relevant enough for the infobox.
I think "see also" links to pages about unrealized works are fine in "see also" or "filmography" sections.
In summary: For most directors, such unrealized works are not really part of their creative work and thus are not very relevant. Relevant enough for a "see also" link, not relevant enough for a prominent place like the infobox.
— Chrisahn (talk) 16:29, 7 March 2025 (UTC)