Archive for the ‘Features’ Category

For John Carter, Director Andrew Stanton Leaps From Animation to Live-Action Sci-Fi

Photo: Frank Connor

An intricate array of stand-ins, natural backdrops, live performers, and CG effects comes together in a shot from Disney's John Carter.
Photo: Frank Connor

There are parts of our planet so stark, so bizarre in their topography, that it’s easy to imagine they’re alien landscapes. Today Andrew Stanton is determined to exploit the unearthly vibes of just such a place. The film director is on location in Big Water, Utah, in a vast dusty wasteland surrounded by ancient-looking rust-colored cliffs. His only defenses against the harsh environment are a red baseball cap—which adds to the 44-year-old’s boyishness—and a surgical-style mask to keep the dust out of his lungs.

He may be on Earth, but for Stanton the experience is as otherworldly as if he had actually donned a space suit, climbed into a rocket, and blasted off to destinations unknown. He never had to leave the comfy cubicles of Pixar Animation Studios to have a hand in writing and directing the Oscar-winning Finding Nemo or WALL-E—or to spearhead the screenplays for Monsters, Inc., A Bug’s Life, or the first two Toy Story films. There were no sets to build, no locations to scout, no actors to position.

But now, on a gusty afternoon in May 2010, on the outdoor set of his forthcoming $250 million Disney epic, John Carter, he’s facing shooting delays due to unpredictable winds. The crew and the actors are stuck waiting. So it’s only natural that he train a lens on his most recent career move. “I couldn’t have made a more difficult transition,” he says matter-of-factly.

Stanton’s production-design team chose this high-desert spot to represent a barren stretch of the planet Barsoom—which, as readers of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original John Carter pulp novels know, is what Martians call Mars. Barsoom may not be as well known as Tatooine or Pandora (which both owe a healthy debt to the planet), but for Stanton and other Carter devotees, it’s the Planet Zero of space fantasy. “I’ve been a fan of the books my whole life,” Stanton says, “hoping to see somebody make a movie of them. If we do it right, hopefully it will kick off a series.”

Of course, that’s if this first installment works out. John Carter is a huge Lord of the Rings-style marathon mashup of CGI and live action, and at times like this, day 73 of a 100-odd-day shoot, it’s also a logistical slog. The movie’s leading man, Taylor Kitsch (best known as brooding high school football hero Tim Riggins on TV’s Friday Night Lights), has been on call playing Carter nearly every one of those days and will eventually be exhausted to the point where he catnaps on set between takes. And this is just the warm-up to another year and a half of CG animation and visual effects, which Stanton calls digital principal photography. Essentially he’s making a live-action movie, then making an equally involved animated movie after that. The parlor trick is to marry them, to make what’s virtual look as realistic as what’s not. “I want that visceral feel I had when I watched the first 20 minutes of Star Wars,” Stanton says.

Photo: Frank Connor

Stanton ran his human cast through a grueling 100-day live shoot that combined exterior locations with sounds stages like this one in London.
Photo: Frank Connor

But in his quest for verisimilitude, Stanton has to cope with real-world conditions—and right now they’re kicking his ass. Consider the director’s efforts to stage a scene of Carter talking with Tars Tarkas, a 10-foot Barsoomian leader played by Willem Dafoe—or rather, Willem Dafoe on stilts and wearing a motion-capture getup. The stilts let the camera operators correctly frame the shot in which the CG Tarkas will eventually go, and it gives Kitsch the right spot to look at. Now that the breezes have turned into honest-to-goodness gusts, the set is as compromised as Dafoe’s balance: Fusillades of grainy, sooty gray sand are flying through the air, getting into ears and noses and under fingernails. It stings so much it’s impossible to work. Stanton decides to shut down until the weather abates.

For the better part of an afternoon, the production hovers in standby mode—a nerve-jangling place to be. Through it all, Stanton remains upbeat. He never retreats to a trailer. He rarely sits. When the wind finally dies down and shooting prep resumes, the crew scrambles to make up for lost time. That’s when someone upstages the proceedings by pumping Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band’s “Against the Wind” out of the set’s PA system.

It works like a well-timed punch line: The crew appreciates the joke, even if Stanton himself is no fan of the tune. The schedule gets back into reasonably good shape by the evening, and in the end the initial live-action shoot will come in exactly on schedule for the movie to hit screens March 9. For now Stanton stands one day closer to his goal: adapting a book series that so many before him have tried and failed to bring to the big screen. It would appear that he’s doing it. But is he doing it well? Can it meet the dauntingly high standards of his Pixar films? He’s not sure he can answer those questions right now. “I’ve always wondered,” he says, “how the hell you make a live-action movie and have it be good.”

As brain candy for very smart people, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars novels went viral a long time ago. Not today’s kind of viral—it wasn’t instantaneous. But their influence has been unstoppable and lasting. They began appearing in 1912, initially in periodicals like All-Story Magazine, as serialized chapters about a Civil War veteran and prospector named John Carter who finds a portal to Mars in an old cave. There would ultimately be 10 full-length novels (and a posthumously assembled 11th volume) of planetary romance, a bizarre amalgam of medieval and futuristic elements full of swordplay and arena fights.

Overwrought as they could be, they captured people’s imaginations. “He reached a huge pulp-magazine audience,” Burroughs biographer Richard Lupoff says. “And among that audience was most of the next generation of science fiction writers. These were the people who would dominate Astounding Stories of Super-Science and Science Wonder Stories 20 years later.” Martian Chronicles author Ray Bradbury claimed Burroughs as his chief creative totem, and Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey, among others) was also a fan. Carl Sagan once confessed to wanting a vanity license plate that read barsoom.

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The Jerusalem Syndrome: Why Some Religious Tourists Believe They Are the Messiah

Photo: Ziv Koren

Photo: Ziv Koren

Shortly after his 40th birthday, the life of a man we’ll call Ronald Hodge took a strange turn. He still looked pretty good for his age. He had a well-paying job and a devoted wife. Or so he thought. Then, one morning, Hodge’s wife told him she no longer loved him. She moved out the next day. A few weeks later, he was informed that his company was downsizing and that he would be let go. Not knowing where to turn, Hodge started going to church again.

Even though he’d been raised in an evangelical household, it had been years since Hodge had thought much about God. But now that everything seemed to be falling apart around him, he began attending services every week. Then every day. One night, while lying in bed, he opened the Bible and began reading. He’d been doing this every night since his wife left. And every time he did, he would see the same word staring back at him—the same four syllables that seemed to jump off the page as if they were printed in buzzing neon: Jerusalem. Hodge wasn’t a superstitious man, he didn’t believe in signs, but the frequency of it certainly felt like … something. A week later, he was 30,000 feet over the Atlantic on an El Al jet to Israel.

When Hodge arrived in Jerusalem, he told the taxi driver to drop him off at the entrance to the Old City. He walked through the ancient, labyrinthine streets until he found a cheap hostel near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He had a feeling that this was important. Supposedly built on top of the spot where Jesus Christ was crucified and three days later rose from the dead, the domed cathedral is the holiest site in Christendom. And Hodge knew that whatever called him to the Holy Land was emanating from there.

During his first few days in Jerusalem, Hodge rose early and headed straight to the church to pray. He got so lost in meditation that morning would slip into afternoon, afternoon into evening, until one of the bearded priests tapped him on the shoulder and told him it was time to go home. When he returned to his hostel, he would lie in bed unable to sleep. Thoughts raced through his head. Holy thoughts. That’s when Hodge first heard the Voice.

Actually, heard is the wrong word. He felt it, resonating in his chest. It was like his body had become a giant tuning fork or a dowsing rod. Taking a cue from the sign of the cross that Catholics make when they pray, Hodge decided that if the vibrations came from the right side of his chest, it was the Holy Ghost communicating with him. If he felt them farther down, near the base of his sternum, it was the voice of Jesus. And if he felt the voice humming inside his head, it was the Holy Father, God himself, calling.

Soon, the vibrations turned into words, commanding him to fast for 40 days and 40 nights. None of this scared him. If anything, he felt a warm, soothing peace wash over him because he was finally being guided.

Not eating or drinking came easily at first. But after a week or so, the other backpackers at his hostel began to grow concerned. With good reason: Hodge’s clothes were dirty and falling off of him. He had begun to emit a pungent, off-putting funk. He was acting erratically, hallucinating and singing the word Jesus over and over in a high-pitched chirp.

Photo: Ziv Koren

Photo: Ziv Koren

“Jesus … Jesus … Jesus …”

Hodge camped out in the hostel’s lobby and began introducing himself to one and all as the Messiah. Eventually, the manager of the hostel couldn’t take it anymore. He didn’t think the American calling himself Jesus was dangerous, but the guy was scaring away customers. Plus, he’d seen this kind of thing before. And he knew there was a man who could help.

Herzog Hospital sits on a steep, sun-baked hill on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Its sprawling grounds are dotted with tall cedars and aromatic olive trees. Five floors below the main level is the office of Pesach Lichtenberg, head of the men’s division of psychiatry at Herzog.

Lichtenberg is 52 years old and thin, with glasses and a neatly trimmed beard. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, he moved to Israel in 1986 after graduating from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and has worked at Herzog more or less ever since. It’s here that he has become one of the world’s leading experts on the peculiar form of madness that struck Ronald Hodge—a psychiatric phenomenon known as Jerusalem syndrome.

On a bright, late summer morning, Lichtenberg greets me in the chaotic lobby of the hospital, smiling and extending his hand. “You missed it!” he says. “We had a new Chosen One brought into the ward this morning.” We go down to Lichtenberg’s office; on top of a bookcase is a giant shofar, a curved ram’s horn that religious Jews sound on the high holidays. A middle-aged British man under the doctor’s care had used it to trumpet the Messiah’s—that is to say, his own—coming. Lichtenberg explains that allowing me to meet his latest patient would violate hospital policy, and he can’t discuss ongoing cases. He’ll talk about past patients as long as I agree to de-identify them, as I did with Hodge. “But,” he adds, “that doesn’t mean we can’t try to find a messiah of our own. In a few days, we’ll take a walk around the Old City and maybe we’ll find one for you there.”

There’s a joke in psychiatry: If you talk to God, it’s called praying; if God talks to you, you’re nuts. In Jerusalem, God seems to be particularly chatty around Easter, Passover, and Christmas—the peak seasons for the syndrome. It affects an estimated 50 to 100 tourists each year, the overwhelming majority of whom are evangelical Christians. Some of these cases simply involve tourists becoming momentarily overwhelmed by the religious history of the Holy City, finding themselves discombobulated after an afternoon at the Wailing Wall or experiencing a tsunami of obsessive thoughts after walking the Stations of the Cross. But more severe cases can lead otherwise normal housewives from Dallas or healthy tool-and-die manufacturers from Toledo to hear the voices of angels or fashion the bedsheets of their hotel rooms into makeshift togas and disappear into the Old City babbling prophecy.

Lichtenberg estimates that, in two decades at Herzog, the number of false prophets and self-appointed redeemers he has treated is in the low three figures. In other words, if and when the true Messiah does return (or show up for the first time, depending on what you believe), Lichtenberg is in an ideal spot to be the guy who greets Him.

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Q&A: Hacker Historian George Dyson Sits Down With Wired’s Kevin Kelly

Photo: Joe Pugliese

Photo: Joe Pugliese

The two most powerful technologies of the 20th century—the nuclear bomb and the computer—were invented at the same time and by the same group of young people. But while the history of the Manhattan Project has been well told, the origin of the computer is relatively unknown. In his new book, Turing’s Cathedral, historian George Dyson, who grew up among these proto- hackers in Princeton, New Jersey, tells the story of how Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and a small band of other geniuses not only built the computer but foresaw the world it would create. Dyson talked to Wired about the big bang of the digital universe.

Wired: Because your father, Freeman Dyson, worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, you grew up around folks who were building one of the first computers. Was that cool?

George Dyson: The institute was a pretty boring place, full of theoreticians writing papers. But in a building far away from everyone else, some engineers were building a computer, one of the first to have a fully electronic random-access memory. For a kid in the 1950s, it was the most exciting thing around. I mean, they called it the MANIAC! The computer building was off-limits to children, but Julian Bigelow, the chief engineer, stored a lot of surplus electronic equipment in a barn, and I grew up playing there and taking things apart.

Wired: Did that experience influence how you thought about computers later?

Dyson: Yes. I tried to get as far away from them as possible.

Wired: Why?

Dyson: Computers were going to take over the world. So I left high school in the 1960s to live on the islands of British Columbia. I worked on boats and built a house 95 feet up in a Douglas fir tree. I wasn’t antitechnology; I loved chain saws and tools and diesel engines. But I wanted to keep my distance from computers.

Wired: What changed your mind?

Dyson: If you spend time alone in the wilderness, you get very attuned to living things. I learned to spot the trails left by life. When I looked at the digital universe, I saw the tracks of organisms coming to life. I eventually came out of the Canadian rain forest to study this stuff because it was as wild as anything in the woods.

Wired: You write about “digital organisms.” Is this what you mean?

Dyson: Digital organisms, while not necessarily any more alive than a phone book, are strings of code that replicate and evolve over time. Digital codes are strings of binary digits—bits. A Pixar movie is just a very large number, sitting idle on a disc, while Microsoft Windows is an even larger number, replicated across hundreds of millions of computers and constantly in use. Google is a fantastically large number, so large it is almost beyond comprehension, distributed and replicated across all kinds of hosts. When you click on a link, you are replicating the string of code that it links to. Replication of code sequences isn’t life, any more than replication of nucleotide sequences is, but we know that it sometimes leads to life.

Dyson: What other kinds of digital organisms can we see?

Wired: Besides obvious ones like computer viruses, we have large, slow-moving megafauna like operating systems and now millions of fast-moving apps, almost like microbes. Recently we’ve seen enormous conglomerations of code creeping up on us, these giant, multicellular, metazoan-level code-organisms like Facebook or Amazon. All these species form a digital universe.

Dyson: Are we in that digital universe right now, as we talk on the phone?

Wired: Sure. You’re recording this conversation on a digital recorder—into an empty matrix of addresses on a chip that is being filled up at 44 kilobytes per second. That address space full of numbers is the digital universe.

Wired: But haven’t we written down numbers for centuries?

Dyson: Yes, we had clay tablets, counting pebbles, the abacus, ledgers, and punch cards. Writing and retrieving numbers isn’t new. But the computer accelerated information processing to the speed of light. That velocity fundamentally changed everything.

Wired: So how did this parallel light-speed universe begin?

Dyson This vast digital world, where we can get almost anything anytime, goes back to the very first address memory in the MANIAC. Its dimensions were only 32 x 32 x 40 bits. That’s 5 kilobytes, or room to record about a fraction of a second of this conversation!

Wired: And how fast is this universe expanding?

Dyson: Like our own universe at the beginning, it’s more exploding than expanding. We’re all so immersed in it that it’s hard to perceive. Last time I checked, the digital universe was expanding at the rate of 5 trillion bits per second in storage and 2 trillion transistors per second on the processing side.

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The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever

Photo: Dwight Eschliman

Photo: Dwight Eschliman

Jeffrey Mitchell, a volunteer firefighter in the suburbs of Baltimore, came across the accident by chance: A car had smashed into a pickup truck loaded with metal pipes. Mitchell tried to help, but he saw at once that he was too late.

The car had rear-ended the truck at high speed, sending a pipe through the windshield and into the chest of the passenger—a young bride returning home from her wedding. There was blood everywhere, staining her white dress crimson.

Mitchell couldn’t get the dead woman out of his mind; the tableau was stuck before his eyes. He tried to tough it out, but after months of suffering, he couldn’t take it anymore. He finally told his brother, a fellow firefighter, about it.

Pushing to remember a traumatic event soon after it occurs doesn’t unburden us—it reinforces the fear and stress.

Miraculously, that worked. No more trauma; Mitchell felt free. This dramatic recovery, along with the experiences of fellow first responders, led Mitchell to do some research into recovery from trauma. He eventually concluded that he had stumbled upon a powerful treatment. In 1983, nearly a decade after the car accident, Mitchell wrote an influential paper in the Journal of Emergency Medical Services that transformed his experience into a seven-step practice, which he called critical incident stress debriefing, or CISD. The central idea: People who survive a painful event should express their feelings soon after so the memory isn’t “sealed over” and repressed, which could lead to post-traumatic stress disorder.

In recent years, CISD has become exceedingly popular, used by the US Department of Defense, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Israeli army, the United Nations, and the American Red Cross. Each year, more than 30,000 people are trained in the technique. (After the September 11 attacks, 2,000 facilitators descended on New York City.)

Even though PTSD is triggered by a stressful incident, it is really a disease of memory. The problem isn’t the trauma—it’s that the trauma can’t be forgotten. Most memories, and their associated emotions, fade with time. But PTSD memories remain horribly intense, bleeding into the present and ruining the future. So, in theory, the act of sharing those memories is an act of forgetting them.

A typical CISD session lasts about three hours and involves a trained facilitator who encourages people involved to describe the event from their perspective in as much detail as possible. Facilitators are trained to probe deeply and directly, asking questions such as, what was the worst part of the incident for you personally? The underlying assumption is that a way to ease a traumatic memory is to express it.

The problem is, CISD rarely helps—and recent studies show it often makes things worse. In one, burn victims were randomly assigned to receive either CISD or no treatment at all. A year later, those who went through a debriefing were more anxious and depressed and nearly three times as likely to suffer from PTSD. Another trial showed CISD was ineffective at preventing post-traumatic stress in victims of violent crime, and a US Army study of 952 Kosovo peacekeepers found that debriefing did not hasten recovery and led to more alcohol abuse. Psychologists have begun to recommend that the practice be discontinued for disaster survivors. (Mitchell now says that he doesn’t think CISD necessarily helps post-traumatic stress at all, but his early papers on the subject seem clear on the link.)

Mitchell was right about one thing, though. Traumatic, persistent memories are indeed a case of recall gone awry. But as a treatment, CISD misapprehends how memory works. It suggests that the way to get rid of a bad memory, or at a minimum denude it of its negative emotional connotations, is to talk it out. That’s where Mitchell went wrong. It wasn’t his fault, really; this mistaken notion has been around for thousands of years. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, people have imagined memories to be a stable form of information that persists reliably. The metaphors for this persistence have changed over time—Plato compared our recollections to impressions in a wax tablet, and the idea of a biological hard drive is popular today—but the basic model has not. Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.

None of this is true. In the past decade, scientists have come to realize that our memories are not inert packets of data and they don’t remain constant. Even though every memory feels like an honest representation, that sense of authenticity is the biggest lie of all.

When CISD fails, it fails because, as scientists have recently learned, the very act of remembering changes the memory itself. New research is showing that every time we recall an event, the structure of that memory in the brain is altered in light of the present moment, warped by our current feelings and knowledge. That’s why pushing to remember a traumatic event so soon after it occurs doesn’t unburden us; it reinforces the fear and stress that are part of the recollection.

This new model of memory isn’t just a theory—neuroscientists actually have a molecular explanation of how and why memories change. In fact, their definition of memory has broadened to encompass not only the cliché cinematic scenes from childhood but also the persisting mental loops of illnesses like PTSD and addiction—and even pain disorders like neuropathy. Unlike most brain research, the field of memory has actually developed simpler explanations. Whenever the brain wants to retain something, it relies on just a handful of chemicals. Even more startling, an equally small family of compounds could turn out to be a universal eraser of history, a pill that we could take whenever we wanted to forget anything.

And researchers have found one of these compounds.

In the very near future, the act of remembering will become a choice.

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Who the Hell Is Bob Lefsetz?

Illustration: Boneface

Illustration: Boneface

A lot of the time, the hate mail Bob Lefsetz receives is simple and succinct, stuff like “You are a fucking shithead” or “You are an amazing douche.” But once in a while, the put-downs get more elaborate, as was the case when Kid Rock lashed out at Lefsetz in a 2007 email. “Your a failed musician with a big mouth,” wrote the rapper-singer, his typing fingers undoubtedly damaged by years of devil-horn gesticulations. “You do NOTHING but talk. See you on the streets you punk ass mother fucker!!”

Lefsetz is the author of the Lefsetz Letter, an online record-biz op-ed that mixes analysis, rants, boomer-rock reveries, and the odd bit of futurism. Like most music bloggers, Lefsetz posts frequently and verbosely; unlike most music bloggers, he has actually gained the interest of the music industry, so much so that even Lefsetz’s most casually tossed-off missives get noticed. The line that irked Rock: A simple “Fuck Kid Rock”—just the sort of low-grade blogenspiel that a star of Rock’s stature would normally shrug off.

But Rock was compelled to respond, as are many of the musicians, managers, and producers Lefsetz calls out (or, on occasion, praises effusively) in his Letter. It’s tough for them to ignore his latest proclamation, because even if they try, they’ll probably just wind up hearing about it from somebody else. “At every label,” says Scott Rodger, manager for Paul McCartney and Arcade Fire, “from the mail room to the A&R department to the chairman’s office, I guarantee they all read him.”

Which is strange, given that many of Lefsetz’s readers would have a hard time naming a single achievement from his pre-Letter career. Though one of his online bios refers to him as an “industry legend,” Lefsetz, 58, was actually fired from his midlevel record-biz gig two decades ago. A former lawyer, he has never produced a Top 40 song or signed a hit band, and unlike other members of the web’s pop-culture commentariat—Nikki Finke, Harry Knowles, the solemn-honky cabal at Pitchfork—Lefsetz doesn’t get scoops or launch careers.

Instead, he sits in the Santa Monica, California, apartment he shares with his girlfriend and writes lengthy, sporadically caps-locked screeds about everything from overpaid executives to kowtowing artists. He’s become a sort of digital-era pamphleteer, working alone at all hours of the night, nailing manifestos to the church door—manifestos that call for revolt, for sanity, and for a deeper appreciation of Jackson Browne. And, in an industry whose few survivors still strive for a certain on-the-record chumminess, Lefsetz always names names. “Bob’s not beholden to anybody,” says music manager (and longtime friend) Jake Gold. “So he can afford to say whatever’s on his mind.”

That’s why, in addition to containing the occasional threat of bodily harm, Lefsetz’s inbox also surges with fan mail. There might be a note of support from Quincy Jones or an invitation to dine with a major-label head. Even Kid Rock came around, and the two are now occasional email buddies. Lefsetz’s followers are a lot like him: music-biz lifers who’ve watched the record industry become downgraded from a pop culture superpower to a desperate banana republic. And, like him, they miss the glory days.

Lefsetz won’t reveal the size of his audience, except to say that it’s “much, much bigger” than hundreds of thousands. He now makes a living the same way many artists do: by giving away his work for free online and then hitting the road—in his case as a paid speaker at music conferences.

Still, for all of Lefsetz’s ever-increasing visibility, he remains a bit of a mystery. During a 2009 Canadian music conference, after Lefsetz blasted Kiss frontman Gene Simmons for his keynote speech, the two had a public showdown. It was an awkward exchange, and halfway through, the towering, gargoylish Simmons turned to the impishly belligerent Lefsetz and posited a question many in the industry have been wondering for years: “Who the fuck are you?”

As readers of his letter can attest, Lefsetz occasionally indulges in broad, far-reaching analogies that don’t so much digress as loop through some distant metaphorical cosmos, stopping off at several far-off planets along the way. Over brunch in Beverly Hills, he lays out one prime example, which we’ll call the Aniston Axiom.

“Let’s say you’re a unionized worker on the line,” Lefsetz says. “You’re working some overtime, you’re making some pay. You have a house, and you have a boat, and you’re sitting there having sexual fantasies about somebody on Friends. You say, ‘If I moved to Hollywood, I could fuck Jennifer Aniston.’ And you truly believe it. To get from there to actually fucking Jennifer Aniston is not impossible, but it’s an unbelievably long journey.”

We’re at a corner table on the patio of a restaurant at the Four Seasons, where Lefsetz occasionally meets with record-biz pals. He’s dressed like a dad touring a college campus on parents’ weekend: jeans, sneakers, long-sleeve polo with the collar popped. Lefsetz’s resemblance to Wallace Shawn (Vizzini in The Princess Bride, himself in My Dinner With Andre) has been invoked before, and while it’s an apt comparison, what’s most jarring is how, at moments of heightened emphasis, he also conjures the actor’s pinched voice (“Inconceivable!”).

The point of the Aniston story, which goes on for a while, is that while millions of people dream of making it in the music business, only a few have the talent and hubris to actually do so. It’s an obvious observation, perhaps, but one Lefsetz says is lost on the countless musicians who email him every day, looking for a shortcut to fame. “The wannabes,” Lefsetz says, using one of his favorite put-downs, “have no idea how sophisticated the game is.”

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