Throughout his career, Steven Spielberg has created some of the most popular films of all time, garnering him an enormous amount of respect on both a critical and financial scale. He is considered by many to be the most famous director of all time, given his track record as both director and producer of some of the most recognizable films of the past 50 years. Movie Daddy is a series by Story Screen Editor-in-chief, Mike Burdge, which aims to cover the Beard's directorial filmography in an attempt to present just why Steven Spielberg is very much that hot fire when it comes to being an American filmmaker. In this installment, the topic of discussion is the Spielberg-Kubrick hybrid from 2001, A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
====================
"None of us love our electric toothbrushes. But if you carved a face into it, and every morning it talked to you and knew you well enough to be able to sense your mood, and depending on your mood in the morning, would make you feel better, would just set you off on the right foot, would whisper in your ear, would sing you a song, then suddenly that electric toothbrush, if the dog chewed it up, that would not be a happy evening when you came home from work or from school and found your electric toothbrush, that used to challenge you and help you in the morning, chewed up by the dog.
So, it's what we project into mechanisms, into machines, that’s important. It’s not so much that the machine can love us, it’s how much love do we invest back into it in return. And that determines how far we should go in creating things that remind us of ourselves. I think that we have to be very careful about how we as a species use our genius because we are an amazing species, the human race. And every year, we create things (that) two years before would have appeared as magic to most people. Suddenly, it’s a reality, and then years later it's commonplace in our homes, like the internet.
I just think that we all have to be careful as we continue to quantumly leap ahead into the future that we create for ourselves. To take responsibility for the things we put on this planet, to take responsibility for the things we take off this planet. In a sense, you know, we need to have limiters on how far we allow ourselves to go. Ethical, moral limiters that will say, ‘Uhh, hey, this isn’t for us to mess with.’ A bit of that theme, as you know, was touched upon in 'Jurassic Park,' and a lot more of it was touched upon by Stanley Kubrick through 'A.I.'"
- Steven Spielberg
A.I. Artificial Intelligence is more than just a hard film title to type, it’s also a hard film to talk about. Layered in years and years of misconceptions and negative reactions, the film has become one of those dark spots in Spielberg’s career that can be brought up from time to time whenever the discussion of his prowess comes into debate. Now, am I gonna be the guy that sits here and writes to you, the film lover, all about how A.I. is a misunderstood masterpiece and y’all should give it another look, after having read this piece, to formulate a more removed and earnest opinion on what some have described as Spielberg’s most pretentious and god awful work? Do you really think that I would take it upon myself to even attempt to defend what some consider to be the most damning cinematographic connection to the great Stanley Kubrick, in a way that haphazardly attempts to connect pieces of context and hearsay to explore the mindset of the creators? Can we all actually assume that my intent as the writer of this article is to express my own adoration for the craft of the film in question, and to lovingly butter your mind-bread with the sweet, yet salty, cream of my researchitory efforts? Is "researchitory" even a word? The answer to all of the above (except one) is both a shocking and expected, “Yes.”
A.I. is a timeless, futuristic fairy tale wrapped in an unbelievably ambitious project for the time, and even for today. A film with an ending its own production designer, Rick Carter, describes as “Waaaaaaaaayyyyyy out there,” this Pinocchio-influenced nightmare-o-rama is bleak, depressing, aggressive, and filled with an astonishing amount of wonder and amazing fright, which is what every good fable should be all about. And just like all the best, classic fables, the more one considers its parts, the more is revealed of its true intent.
There’s no right way to kick into talking about A.I. other than to start off talking about the other big daddy in the room: Stanley Kubrick. Spielberg adored Kubrick, and, in his own way, it’s highly agreed that Kubrick adored Spielberg as well. The stories of Spielberg’s first few experiences with Kubrick’s films and Kubrick the man are notorious. Spielberg, as a young high schooler, waited in line to watch Dr. Strangelove, a movie he has preached, "immediately spoke to him." A few years later, while a college student, Spielberg again waited in line for hours to catch 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that had been described to the young man as “a drug movie.” Spielberg, who at the time and pretty much ever since, was a “straight and narrow” individual, has watching Odyssey was a life-altering experience. This brings us to their first meeting, on the set of The Shining in 1979. With bangers like Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind under his belt, (but also with the twinge of embarrassment after the flop of 1941 earlier that year), it’s understandable that Spielberg would’ve been a bit cautious around a talent like Kubrick, even though he spent most of his time rubbing elbows with the fellow new wave of Hollywood, e.g. Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and Brian DePalma. One of the wonderful anecdotes of their meeting is when Kubrick, who was visually raptured by the young filmmaker's presence on set, asked him to watch the film and tell him what he thought. Spielberg was not a fan of The Shining upon his first watch but has since claimed he’s watched it over 25 times and calls it one of the best horror movies ever made.
This meeting of the minds created a friendship between the two directors, and they kept in touch over the next few years before the initial scratch of the idea of A.I. came to Spielberg from Kubrick, who had been developing the idea for some time, based loosely on the book, “Super Toys Last All Summer Long and Other Stories of Future Time” by Brian Aldiss. After exchanging ideas for a decade, over phone calls, as well as storyboards and notes sent through fax, Kubrick asked Spielberg if he would like to direct the project, while he himself would produce, believing the young Beard would be perfect for bringing the story alive with his usual flair for genre cinema and sentimentality. While Spielberg initially accepted, this would be the first part of a very long process of making the final film, specifically because of issues in getting the script off the ground.
"I sort of learned a long time ago to be careful about detailing what motivates me to tell a story, as if it’s some tremendous thought process that takes years to figure out, first emotionally and internally and then be able to turn around and tell you the story that I worked so hard to figure out if I wanted to tell at all. And I realized that all the decisions I make about the stories I tell are intuitive decisions. I either respond to a story or I don’t. And in this case, when Stanley first told me about 'A.I.,' and let me read the treatment in 1984, I immediately said to Stanley, ‘This is the best story you’ve ever had to tell.’ I felt that in 1984. And I think that gave Stanley encouragement to pursue the project even further."
-Steven Spielberg
The script for A.I. went through nearly thirty years of changes, with six different writers, all spanning from a seed of an idea in Kubrick’s head, to the vastly expansive story you see in the finished film. Along the way, professional screenwriters from different backgrounds added and cut from it, including Sara Maitland, a short-story novelist who specialized in religion and myth. Kubrick gave all of these people, and maybe mostly Maitland, a very dastardly run for their money in his collaboration with them. Most writers who worked on the project, while respectful of Kubrick’s talents and genius say it was top-tier misery working with the director on this specific script.
Eventually (read: after over twenty years), Spielberg thought it best if he produced and Kubrick directed, with Kubrick finally agreeing. But when Kubrick passed away in 1999, his widow, Christiane Kubrick, reached out to Spielberg and said that if he didn’t direct the film, it would never come to be, essentially condemning the story to nothing forever. Not only was this because of Spielberg’s connection to and knowledge of the project, but the idea of tackling an unmade Kubrick film, especially so close to the filmmaker's death, was an intimidating challenge that few others would even consider, let alone be capable of pulling off. Kathleen Kennedy, one of the greatest producers to ever live, said: “He (Spielberg) was attracted to it because it embodied many of the things he had explored with, obviously, E.T. and Close Encounters. But I think this in many ways takes Steven several more steps because Stanley Kubrick is bringing something to the project and Steven would embrace that and pay homage to that. And so he took Stanley’s contribution and added that to his own.”
"I said ‘yes,’ first, because it was a wonderful story, and second, because it was a way for me to honor Stanley."
- Steven Spielberg
Spielberg felt that this might be a project which he would like to handle by writing the script himself. He’d been thinking about the movie for quite a bit by that point, so it only made sense for him to push the final screenplay across the finish line, especially with the number of hands that had already been involved. When trying to parse through the notes and alterations that had happened over 20+ years, Spielberg found it best to go back to his and Kubrick’s original correspondences to see where things grew from, and from what he was engaging with was really Stanley. And while it might seem strange for America’s favorite director to be tackling screenwriting this late in his game, that just wasn’t the case as far as our boy was concerned:
"I’ve done a lot of writing that I haven’t taken credit for over the years between 'Close Encounters,' 'Poltergeist' and now. I haven’t stopped writing, I don’t sit down and do entire screenplays, but I do a lot of collaborative, the stuff that directors often do in close associations with certain writers. So, this wasn’t unusual for me to write it, but the story was unusual and so personal to Stanley that I thought it would lose Stanley’s personal ideals if I had to re-communicate his ideas through me to yet another party. And I just thought it would preserve the purity that Stanley wanted to achieve and the story he wanted to tell if I just bit the bullet and wrote it myself."
- Steven Spielberg
Spielberg made hundreds of changes here and there to the script, but never drastically changed the overall structure, finding the moments where his sensibilities would make the most sense for the moment, and altering impressions Kubrick had left behind to be built upon. It’s actually quite endearing that Kubrick’s original reasoning for wanting to collaborate with Spielberg, (his keen sense of sentimentality), was the thing Spielberg found to be the most rewarding, and the most challenging when it came to even slightly altering the script he had worked on with his friend for so long.
Before moving on, it must be noted the wild tale of the public and critical reception A.I. received upon its release, and how that vision has changed up to today. In his initial review of the film, Roger “I Am All That Is Man” Ebert wrote, “(David) seems a real boy, but lacking a certain je ne sais quoi.” Ebert had a slight change of heart between the film's release in 2001, and its ten-year anniversary, predictably taking place in the year 2011. In his 2001 original review, he writes: "We are expert at projecting human emotions into non-human subjects, from animals to clouds to computer games, but the emotions reside only in our minds. A.I. uses its responsibility to deal rigorously with this trait and goes for an ending that wants us to cry, but had me asking questions just when I should have been finding answers."
Ten years later, Ebert reconsidered: “That is true enough on the principal level of the film, which tells David’s story. Watching it again recently, I became aware of something more: A.I. is not about humans at all. It is about the dilemma of artificial intelligence. A thinking machine cannot think. All it can do is run programs that may be sophisticated enough for it to fool us by seeming to think. A computer that passes the Turing Test is not thinking. All it is doing is passing the Turing Test.”
Now, I agree with MOST of this and certainly respect Ebert’s ability to reassess his critique on a film that is, quite frankly, a little hard to assess upon the first watch. What some may call messy delivery, I simply, and perhaps foolishly, see as mischievously layered, whether intentional or not. Does that make it a bit messy? Sure. Intriguing to parse through? Most definitely. Where Ebert keys in on the story’s fascination with artificial intelligence, he also loses the thread from his previous notes: this film is also about humanity, and its humanity being served up in multiple different ways, be it how we act, how we react, or how we do not act. He nails this point later in his ten-year anniversary review: “(A.I.) involves man’s relationship to those tools that so closely mirror our own desires that we confuse them with flesh and blood. When we lose a toy, the pain is ours, not the toy’s....”
Ebert, like many critics, (including myself), is notorious for knocking films right out of the gate, in an attempt to try and make a dent, while also working through his opinions, only to later revisit the same film and have a completely different, more positive take. He ended his original review with, “It has mastered the artificial, but not the intelligence,” concluding it was pretty and had ideas, but ultimately felt empty and overly sentimental, a wild take considering Ebert has seen and covered all of Spielberg’s previous movies up to that point, which, dude, you LOVED E.T.!! C’mon, man!
And Ebert, like most general audiences, misjudged the film's ending as happy and over-the-top sentimental, a Spielberg twist on a Kubrick-ian futuristic nightmare. Absolutely NOT. First off, that ending is full-on Kubrick, full stop. Like literally. Kubrick wrote that ending. But also, no, no, not happy at all. As much as I’d love to go into it, my buddy Damian Masterson, actually wrote a piece (Love & Loneliness: A.I. at 20) sometime back on this exact argument, so I’ll let him take it from here on that:
David doesn’t really get Monica back in any meaningful sense. He gets a simulation of her, that, no matter how literally you want to take the evolved mecha’s explanation that they’ve pulled Monica through time to live this day with him, it is still the Monica that in her own timeline will abandon David as soon as he becomes inconvenient. David does get this one perfect happy day, but when it’s over he lets himself die because this is the best he can ever hope for. (Masterson, "Love & Loneliness: A.I. at 20").
I’ve seen a lot of messed-up things in movies in my time. And while this is far from the most messed up, (it’s definitely more Kubrick than Spielberg), it’s perhaps the Spielberg of it all that makes it simultaneously confusing and more affecting.
Granted, your interpretation of the film’s moments and themes, and overall thesis, land on how you perceive David as a character: boy, pet, or toy? All are given equal points throughout the film, yet this allows for confusion in the specificity of their intentions. While that might not be your bag, I love it, and so do all of your favorite writer/directors. Artificiality, like many things, is in the eye of the beholder, after all. What is a soul? What is it to be unique and appreciate that quality of being unique, or seeing something unique?
What does love even mean, really? Okay, let’s talk about David.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a philosopher and absolute baller of a Frenchman, is arguably most famous for this line: “There is a within to things,” or alternatively translated, “Things have their within.” This all stands to his point that there is a biological layer hidden beneath every aspect of the universe. Heavy shit for a Spielberg retrospective article, so I’ll tread lightly for your sake. In the most useful of understandings, Chardin’s point is this: no matter what we believe to be inferior or artificial, we will always be just as real as how we define ourselves as real. The artificiality is never-ending. Remember when Thor made that funny joke in Avengers: Infinity War (of course you do): “All words are made up.” Well, that’s also true for everything you believe about yourself, everyone, everything, ever. It’s messed up. And that’s what David’s story in this film is.
Stanley Kubrick, being the OG psychopath that we love, apparently wanted to actually build a robot boy to perform the role of David, because of course he did. Technology wasn’t ready, obviously, and continued to not be ready for many years, which ended up being one of the main things that kept Kubrick from ever launching the film into production. But once Spielberg was in the chair, human boys were up for consideration, and Haley Joel Osment was Spielberg’s “first and last choice.” Yes, Jeff Foxworthy’s sitcom-son himself was the main grab for this decades long hunt for the perfect robot boy. Granted, the young Osment had stacked up a bit of a good resume by the time the Beard came calling. Who can forget his thrilling third act portrayal of Young Forrest in Forrest Gump, his endlessly charming screen presence from the 1996 Whoopi Goldberg vehicle, Bogus, or his poignantly charged interpretation of Trevor McKinney from the film adaptation of Pay It Forward? Hold on, I’m gonna check my notes here, that seems like a wild choice… Oh yes, he was also in The Sixth Sense in 1997 and was nominated for an Oscar for that.
All joking aside, I find Haley Joel Osment to be a captivating child actor, which is something that’s not easy to do. His performance in A.I. grows more human throughout the story, which is always a sight to behold every time I rewatch it, and I’ve seen this movie a lot, y’all. He doesn’t blink throughout the whole film. Did you know that? Do you know how crazy hard that is? You do? I figured! And Osment also had a ridiculously clued in understanding of what the intentionality of the character was supposed to be: “I remember he (Spielberg) described the movie as mostly being about your responsibility to intelligence. When they (Spielberg and Kubrick) brought love into the equation, it’s not really a sentimental thing. It’s this really important philosophical thing: What’s your responsibility to that?”
The obvious Pinocchio similarities aside, David is presented in the film as simultaneously simple and complex. Sure, David is not a real boy, he’s artificial. But how are we meant to compare the “realness” between David and Martin, the comatose son of David’s adoptive parents, who is both real and not real in the sense of presence. To be here is to exist and to be there is to be elsewhere, yet still exist. But David is here in the sense of his parents, and Martin is there in that same sense. While this relationship only exists for the beginning of the film, it is the beginning of the film that I think is the most important towards the theme: What does it mean to be real and what does real mean? The film's ending really purports the question of "When does a fairy tale end and reality begin?" and really, what’s the difference, anyway? Many of David’s “emotional outbursts,” are interpretively linked to his survival coding, which we see activated multiple times before the story's ending, where he destroys the other David, which could be seen as a competition to his one major goal: being loved by Monica/Mommy, i.e. what he deems being real, being loved. But moments after that, David, who we understand to be a machine with code, tosses himself off the ledge of Cybertronics out of sorrow. What does love mean, what does it do and why is it so important? Is it the questioning of these very ideas that make us human? Why should we need to be human in the first place? Agh! Okay, talk about the movie, Michael….
Okay! Let’s talk about some random fun stuff, quick. Teddy, the animatronic robot teddy bear, is just the purest of delights in movies, isn’t he? The prop bear weighed nearly 40 lbs, which Osment would have to carry around constantly. Teddy’s voice and tone, voiced by Jack Angel, were inspired by Eeyore, with a little wisdom tossed in there for good flavor, and I think that’s what really makes the character soar. The fact that Chris Rock and Meryl Streep show up in this movie for one scene is a bit wild and almost a bit much. But Robin Williams as Dr. Know is a just a breath of fresh air into this movie. Don’t get me wrong, I love everything in this movie both before and after Dr. Know, but by the time he arrives, I was in need of a good laugh, and Robin Williams delivering Shamwow-salesman-turned-Mother Goose-storyteller was exactly what I needed. And probably the funnest of facts: Kubrick actually directed Robin Williams’ voicework for Dr. Know before Kubrick passed away, and this is the material that’s used in the finished film. That’s a hard magic, baby.
While there are clearly a lot of visual references to classic Kubrick moments that Spielberg places in the film, (which this video pretty quickly illustrates), the tone is what’s more impressive for me. Spielberg has always had a palette that is more defined by emotionality within cinematic scope than the daring turbulence of Kubrick’s usual flair. Not to say neither has what the other is an expert in, but there are moments throughout A.I. that scream Kubrick just as much as they scream Spielberg, and as a lover of both filmmakers, it’s an enrapturing experience to find yourself in. Spielberg changes his technique in blocking that suggests an attempt to capture a kit of Kubrick’s style, while never quite being able to lose the flair that makes Spielberg who he is. The shot of David sitting at the dinner table, centered in the middle of a light fixture from above, presenting him as an alien in a UFO, is ridiculously awesome, 100% Spielberg’s shit and inarguably Kubrick-ian. In any other movie, one might not even think of the Kubrick comparison. The two filmmakers are operating symbiotically, one from the ground and one from the grave. It’s truly captivating once you watch the film with these shared ideas in mind.
Steven Spielberg is the perfect filmmaker to tell a story that visually makes us empathize with an “other” type of being. The man made E.T., for crying out loud. Just as we ensoul and enrich items we learn to care for, so too do we add our affectations, understandings and even our dreams onto fictional characters, who at first share very little similarities to our own lives. That’s the magic in the magic of the movies! Of course, Spielberg is sentimental. That’s one of his most defining attributes as an American director. But I think that’s a strength, and furthermore, I think most people’s distaste for those aspects of his films are more, albeit unknowingly, complaining about his sincerity, which is vibrant and unabashed, and a thing many people don’t like being reminded of (the lack of sincerity in their own lives). A bit presumptive, I know, but that’s psychology, dawg. It manifests and wraps and unwraps and dissolves into perceived realism and truth. A lot like trying to figure out what A.I. is talking about. Things that are profound tend to confuse some people, and people who fancy themselves smartypants and tastemakers don’t like getting confused, so the thing must just be confusing and bad! That brings us all the way back to the initial misunderstanding of the film, whether it be in the best of interests or the worst. While, yes, Spielberg has overstayed his welcome on the “buttoning up” of his movies, this one is on some different, darker shit, my dude. And I think that was something, at least upon release, that some people were not ready to look beyond, even though this guy had given them Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. It makes sense that Kubrick’s seemingly most sentimental idea would be a good fit for the seemingly most sentimental director of the past 20+ years. The coldness of Kubrick and the cuddliness of Spielberg is such a short walk that I’m surprised so many major critics fastened their horses to that wagon. Like, that’s your whole take? All of you? Lawd.
"What’s really funny about that is, all the parts of 'A.I.' that people assume were Stanley’s were mine. And all the parts of 'A.I.' that people accuse me of sweetening and softening and sentimentalizing were all Stanley’s. The teddy bear was Stanley’s. The whole last twenty minutes of the movie was completely Stanley’s. The whole first 35, 40 minutes of the film, all the stuff in the house, was word for word from Stanley’s screenplay. This was Stanley’s version."
- Steven Spielberg
"He tried to direct a Kubrick film. I would jokingly call him, ‘Steveley Kuberg” during it, because the material itself is just a crash of the two of them."
- Bonnie Curtis, Producer
Spielberg utilized in-monitor graphic composites, so he could get a good feel of how shots would look in post on the day of shooting. Much like with Tintin, this method was insanely helpful for Spielberg’s style of directing and blocking, which is very improvisational and in the moment. The dude was figuring out how to shoot mostly-composited film before that was even a thing that most films would wrap their entire productions around. Stan Winston was helping him out in all of this! LEGENDS!
Speaking of Stan Winston, that goddamn Moon Ship is one of the best special effects AND best moments in a movie I’ve seen in the 21st century. Even if you don’t like this movie (which, if you’re still reading this and don’t: Sup, dude? Love you!), you can’t deny that’s a baller scene in cinema CGI history. The Teddy robot and FX are also incredibly well done and impressive even by today’s standards. I highly recommend finding videos showing how they practically pulled off the bulk of this, but this one on how they made Teddy interact with Osment's David is pretty wild.
The entire designs of the different Mechas are also crazy, utilizing combinations of varying degrees each of practical effects, special effects, human players and puppeteers. There’s a tactileness to even the most CGI’d characters, something that makes it feel both real and otherworldly at the same time. This is important, since a big hook of emotionality to the film is caring about the robotic characters, whether they be smaller parts or our main lead. From metaphors of Civil War approaching, working class people losing jobs being given to newer models and, of course, the Flesh Fair, which is a wild set piece that both feels totally Spielberg but also very out of line with how he usually treats scenes like this. There’s just so much dread packed into this 10 minute moment in the movie that is also brimming with character design, world building, and of course, shot beautifully by Janusz Kaminski.
Kaminski describes his evolution of the staging and lighting throughout the film as starting very sterile and clinical, and the second act becomes more action/adventure oriented in its approach and style. The third act, which he described as “extremely emotional,” was given a much more dramatic and artistic approach to its feel. It’s stuff like this that makes him the boss, and in A.I. in particular, he seems to have really leaned in on the visual partnership to the story being told:
"A story always dictates its own look and its own approach in the way it's supposed to be photographed and blocked. I firmly believe in reading the screenplay and studying the screenplay and trying to figure out what is the writer saying, so you really reflect that through photography and lighting."
-Janusz Kaminski
The cinematographer also mentions his and Spielberg’s affinity for utilizing blocking and framing with a very particular device in this movie:
"Steven likes smoke. I like smoke. Y’know, umm, I probably like smoke a little bit more than he does. But y’know, I like ambience, I like rain, smoke, mist, y’know, I like looking through things. I like having the frame be obscured by other things, not to just have a clean frame. If the story allows for it, you do it."
-Janusz Kaminski
It really seems A.I. turned into a real labor of love from everyone working on it, including Spielberg’s most recurring collaborators. John Williams, once again composing for Spielberg, described the movie as being “about very wonderful things to conjure and to ruminate on,” calling the tone and variety of the score “schizophrenic.” It should be noted that, while unsurprising, John Williams composing electronic music is very, very, very, very cool. Williams is in top notch collaborative mode throughout A.I., much in the same way Kaminski was lending a perfectly articulated visual style to help the story communicate, so too does Williams' score help to maintain the specific lyricism for the emotional palette Spielberg is trying to conjure. While the presence of music can sometimes feel manipulative or distracting, here the visuals and audios dance perfectly in sync. When talking about the very special experience of scoring A.I., Williams said, “These are subjects that are abstract and spiritual and very personal. And they go right to where music can speak to. Music is really about this kind of thing, at its core. I think the thing that’s unique about A.I., for me at least, is the essential spiritual aspects of what it was examining. The idea that to be able to love someone is the thing that defines humanity in the end.”
With all this in mind, A.I. presents much more than a Spielberg/Kubrick curiosity to be reassessed, again and again, as time marches forward. In the grand scheme of Spielberg’s filmography alone it is a huge standout in terms of look and tone, slightly hinting at the director's more dramatic focused turn he would take in his later career. But his clever love of fun and adventure is also present there, be it buried underneath a dreadful world of loss and love, highlighted by Blade Runner-esque neon lights. For me, what’s so special about A.I. is its script, its story, one told from the mind of Kubrick, but also the heart of Spielberg, using his genius talents to present a multi-million dollar, studio blockbuster as a farewell gift to his good friend, a gift that both of these men were fully capable of giving. The story is all about the human condition. What we believe. What we trust. What we understand, or at least think we understand. How we affect others and allow them to affect us. And all this coming from the mind of one of the most famously affecting directors of all time, that’s something very, very special to consider.
Mike Burdge
Editor-in-Chief
Founder of and programmer for Story Screen. Lover of stories and pizza in the dark. When he isn't watching movies, you can find him reading things about people watching movies. He currently resides in Poughkeepsie, NY, and most assuredly is going through a French Connection phase.
