Future of Ideas (eBook)

Davis Guggenheim is a film director. He has produced a range of movies, some commercial, some not. His passion, like his father's before, is documentaries, and his most recent, and perhaps best, film, The First Year, is about public school teachers in their first year of teaching--a Hoop Dreams for public education.In the process of making a film, a director must 'clear rights.' A film based on a copyrighted novel must get the permission of the copyright holder. A song in the opening credits requires the rights of the artist performing the song. These are ordinary and reasonable limits on the creative process, made necessary by a system of copyright law. Without such a system, we would not have anything close to the creativity that directors such as Guggenheim have produced. But what about the stuff that appears in the film incidentally? Posters on a wall in a dorm room, a can of Coke held by the 'smoking man,' an advertisement on a truck driving by in the background? These too are creative works. Does a director need permission to have these in his or her film? 'Ten years ago,' Guggenheim explains, 'if incidental artwork . . . was recognized by a common person,' then you would have to clear its copyright. Today, things are very different. Now 'if any piece of artwork is recognizable by anybody . . . then you have to clear the rights of that and pay' to use the work. '[A]lmost every piece of artwork, any piece of furniture, or sculpture, has to be cleared before you can use it.' Okay, so picture just what this means: As Guggenheim describes it, '[B]efore you shoot, you have this set of people on the payroll who are submitting everything you're using to the lawyers.' The lawyers check the list and then say what can be used and what cannot. 'If you cannot find the original of a piece of artwork . . . you cannot use it.' Even if you can find it, often permission will be denied. The lawyers thus decide what's allowed in the film. They decide what can be in the story. The lawyers insist upon this control because the legal system has taught them how costly less control can be. The film Twelve Monkeys was stopped by a court twenty-eight days after its release because an artist claimed a chair in the movie resembled a sketch of a piece of furniture that he had designed. The movie Batman Forever was threatened because the Batmobile drove through an allegedly copyrighted courtyard and the original architect demanded money before the film could be released. In 1998, a judge stopped the release of The Devil's Advocate for two days because a sculptor claimed his art was used in the background. These events teach the lawyers that they must control the filmmakers. They convince studios that creative control is ultimately a legal matter. This control creates burdens, and not just expense. 'The cost for me,' Guggenheim says, 'is creativity. . . . Suddenly the world that you're trying to create is completely generic and void of the elements that you would normally create. . . . It's my job to conceptualize and to create a world, and to bring people into the world that I see. That's why they pay me as a director. And if I see this person having a certain lifestyle, having this certain art on the wall, and living a certain way, it is essential to . . . the vision I am trying to portray. Now I somehow have to justify using it. And that is wrong.' This is not a book about filmmaking. Whatever problems filmmakers have, they are tiny in the order of things. But I begin with this example because it points to a much more fundamental puzzle, and one that will be with us throughout this book: What could ever lead anyone to create...