Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Does It Matter That the CIA Script-Doctored ‘Zero Dark Thirty’?

May 7, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Much ado today about Gawker's Freedom of Information Act-driven look at how the Zero Dark Thirty script got written. The Gawker item argues, persuasively, that the CIA script-doctored the movie. We're interested in this because, back in January, former CIA targeting officer (and recent David Letterman sparring partner) Nada Bakos gave Pacific Standard readers her assessment of whether the movie, and its version of post-9/11 intelligence work, differed from the reality. It did, an awful lot, she said. A first-person article like Nada's, and a Hollywood movie have different goals, of course. ... Read More

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The Formula for a Hollywood Blockbuster

May 6, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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There is a relatively uninteresting story in The New York Times today. Or, at least, it's a story that's been told before. Long-standing people in an industry are getting annoyed by an outsider who's trying to change the way they do things with a scary new tool: statistics. It's seemingly happening everywhere, and that it's now happening in Hollywood—a place where "making money" is pretty high on the list of priorities—isn't all that surprising. This is how it works: A chain-smoking former statistics professor named Vinny Bruzzese—“the reigning mad scientist of Hollywood,” in ... Read More

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Scholars and The Big Lebowski: Deconstructing The Dude

July 11, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

A bowling alley. A severed toe sporting a neatly polished nail. An aging hippie and his best friend, a Vietnam War veteran with a hair-trigger temper. If those images don't add up to anything for you, feel free to flip the page. If they do, it means you're familiar — perhaps intimately so — with one of the most analyzed, deconstructed and eclectically interpreted films of recent decades: The Big Lebowski. Joel and Ethan Coen's subversive comedy, in which a slovenly slacker (Jeff Bridges) in modern-day L.A. gets caught up in a convoluted kidnapping case, was neither a critical nor a ... Read More

More like this: July-August 2011, Media, Research in Summary
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Hollywood’s Sigh of Relief

March 5, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Despite a record-breaking 2009, Hollywood is still roiling from shaky DVD revenues, a global recession, increased piracy, intense foreign competition and lingering questions about the dollar value of the medium. Although hope has now been pinned on resurgent 3-D revenues (and ever-rising ticket prices), insiders are still questioning whether the industry can remain a dominant force in worldwide movie distribution. Perhaps a few of these fears can be put to rest. A new study, headed by researchers at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, finds that despite the challenges mounted ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, CAROUSEL, Culture, Culture & Society, Findings, Media
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International Adoptions Struggle for Hollywood Endings

January 3, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment

When the topic of enforcing international adoption laws comes up, people usually assume it involves irregularities in the adoption process, including kidnapping and coercing birth parents to give up their babies. This is what has happened in Guatemala, where an estimated 1 percent of the country's total babies born in 2006 landed in American homes as a result of lenient regulations and a lack of government oversight. In the African country of Chad, six members of a French charity received stiff prison sentences in December for allegedly stealing children who had parents with the intent of ... Read More

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