Complaint And Appeals Form: Fill & Download for Free

I'm sorry, but I see a lot of answers here that make a lot of assumptions and claims that just aren't ultimately true.The fact is there are a lot of talented people making a lot of great films. The primary reasons that there is a great deal of just average or mediocre content is that there is so much content in the first place.Look at your TV a moment and think about how many channels there are. Now think about how many hours each of those channels has to fill with content. How many shows does every channel have in a given day? And how many channels are there? And if a show doesn't quickly attract viewership, it can't sell advertising, and there are only so many viewers available, and so stations end up going through an awful lot of ideas and attempts.The numbers involved mean that the constant need to generate new shows and fight for limited viewers is going to result in throwing a lot of ideas up that don't work.And sorry, but I gotta say I've not seen anyone bother to mention the fact that we can all name a long list of great shows nobody bothered to watch, because they were all watching some lousy reality show instead. But none of the answers so far has mentioned "content is driven by where the viewers are, so any complaints need to put blame on viewers as well." When the best dramatic show ever produced for television, The Wire, was doing its best to get people to just give it a chance and watch it, audiences couldn't be bothered because hey, you gotta keep up with which star won the dance contest tonight, or which new person off the street got Simon's approval to keep singing. There's voting going on here, remember, so the voters should be mentioned if there's going to be significant complaint about the quality and everyone involved who has bad taste or is a hack or to blame etc.This goes for film as well. The fact is that there are so many films made every year, and so many different sorts of taste involved, and there's a need to try to appeal to audiences that are increasingly not bothering to even show up anyway because they can sit at home watching TV and DVDs etc. Films are made for the people who show up, and the fact is film viewing is being increasingly ceded to a few small demographics, so it's kind of hard to complain about the fact filmmakers are making films for the people bothering to show up to see them. And it's not as if audiences started to just stay home because of the films being made more and more for select demographics -- the downward trend of theater viewing has been going on a long time, and has continued apace despite the fact that the denunciation of film quality ignores a rise in high quality independent films lately, and that there have been increases in quality in several key genres that dominate box office over the years.Look at our Oscar nominations this year -- ten films nominated for Best Picture, and you could randomly pick any five of the films and have a damn solid list of films. And there are another dozen films at least that could've been nominated but weren't. When's the last time you can think of a year with that many films that were seriously high-quality Oscar contenders for Best Picture? Then there were lots of films that weren't Oscar worthy but were still great, and many more that were really enjoyable and fun, and then plenty that were average to okay. People forget this, though, and tend to perpetuate the cliche that most films are all just garbage and that viewers are just stuck with no choices, when that's honestly just a false depiction of the reality.Luckily, this past year not only saw a rise in high quality film fare, it also saw audiences rewarding such films by actually bothering to go see them for a change, and actually bothering to withhold money from several bigger budget "event" films. If you want to see better films and better TV, the easy way is to vote with your viewership, it works wonders because I guarantee you that in every studio the thing they are singularly most worried about is investing tens of millions of dollars into films that nobody bothers to see, and so they pay very close attention to what everyone does actually go see, and then they try to do that again and again.Films cost millions of dollars to make, market, and release. Like it or not, nobody is going to invest millions to make films that are financial failures but make a few people happy because it's just the sort of art house film that small group wants every film to be. I love good film, including great art house films, but the fact is that most people don't go see those kinds of films, and there's no rational reason for a studio or financiers to risk millions of their dollars on films that are unlikely to get an audience.When investing that much money, they want as many safeguards as they can get to try to stem the risks, and that includes being conscious of the films people are actually showing up to see. It also includes a desire to use "brands" that audiences already know about (because if people have bought it before, there's a better chance they might buy it again), to use faces audiences are familiar with and like already, and to make the film in a way that has appeal to as many people as possible.Those are all standard elements that make a lot of sense, actually, and none of it inherently means "bad quality." And plenty of films that fall into those categories are in fact very good or great films. The truth is that we all actually encourage it, too. Answer me this: how often have you ever said "I can't wait for the new Coen Brothers film"? or "Woody Allen film" or some other specific writer/director? That's branding, that's the familiar face. That's you, proving studios are right to care about those exact things.Yes, you say "but I like those filmmakers because their movies are good!" And guess why every single person everywhere also prefers films by this or that filmmaker or star or writer etc? Because they like them, the same reasoning you use. You happen to think your taste is better, but other people think their taste is better, and so on. The point is, studios know we all do that and so they are mindful of it, and there's not too much point in begrudging them their assumptions that are exactly right.Filmwriting is indeed hard, as one answer at least notes. But make no mistake, Hollywood wants good screenplays, it looks for them and there is always a fear that they have missed some great screenplay or that another studio will discover the next big talented writer. But what too few people realize is the sheer volume of screenplays any give producer might receive in a year. The number is in the THOUSANDS. Imagine if you had to read ten to twenty books every week for your job. Imagine instead it's maybe fifty to one hundred. Imagine they keep coming, by mail and by email and dropped off by everyone you know or the friends of your friends, by professional writers and actors and people with money and anyone who sneaked into your office. Thousands and thousands of them, every year. How would you handle that, how would you sort through it all and find the good ones?You think you know, but chances are if you've never read a screenplay you don't realize what a good or bad script necessarily even looks like. Those scripts you might see online and read, or the ones at the bookstore? That's a shooting script, meaning it's already been taken and rewritten, it's had the shot cues and direction etc added in (all of the angles and POV -- point of view -- shots and "cut to" stuff you see in a script, which is not there in the first script). The first versions of scripts just have the dialogue and the short action/description paragraphs. And if you've never seen a raw script as it usually first arrives at a studio or in someone's hands in Hollywood, you don't realize how tough it is to judge their quality.Because a film is purely visual, it's not literature and not meant to be "read" on pages. But that's the strange contradiction of screenwriting, it has to be written on a page, it has to be "literature" of a sort that is really just a mistaken depiction of a purely visual medium. What you write as a screenwriter is not the final form of your art, someone else has to take it and then turn it into what it really is supposed to be. The screenplay is a strange, in-between stage.Here, try this -- describe a great painting that I've never seen, and do it in a way that tells me if it's really a great visual artistic achievement or not. Don't use adjectives like "beautiful" or anything, I mean just describe the image and colors and use your words to give a sense of style. But use words to describe paintings, in a way that makes it clear whether this is a painting in an art gallery or a painting by your nine-year-old kid. Convey, in your words, the actual inherent quality of the painting, so that anyone reading it who is not themselves a painter can tell "this is a great painting they are describing" or "this would look terrible!"How hard do you think that will be? Now you have some idea of what screenwriting is like, except we aren't describing an existing painting we already saw, we invent the images in our minds and then have to purely compose the visuals with black ink on a plain white page. And then other people have to look at it and tell if we came up with an idea for a really great painting or not. And sometimes you don't know until you see it.I assure you, if I showed you the original draft screenplays for several great films, you'd be surprised. I just read the purchased draft of a screenplay for a terrific comedy that I loved last year, that many people loved and that in fact got very good reviews. Except the original script reads... not quite great, to put it politely.Likewise, did you love the film Alien? Go read the original screenplay. Seriously, you can find it online, and most people who've never seen it before are stunned when they read it. I won't spoil it for you, because it's one of the most unexpected experiences you can have reading a screenplay, but suffice to say, it will perhaps change your perspective on how easy it is to tell a screenplay that will result in a great film or not.And I've seen really great screenplays that resulted in bad films, too. Sometimes it just looks better on the page, or other times it indeed gets rewritten and watered down and changed until it's a mess.But there's a reason studios use what's called "coverage" on scripts, with readers paid to look over scripts and then assess their quality in several areas before making recommendations on whether a screenplay should be considered or not. These readers, like the producers and studios, get thousands to read every year, so there are things that tell them if a writer is serious or not, if a writer should be trusted with their time or not, and if it's worth moving past the first page. This is honestly why you will find a lot of seemingly odd rules about how scripts must "look" or be bound etc to be accepted -- and rest assured, deviating from those rules, for first time writers, can mean your script is never read. Why? Because the rules are so easy to find online, in books, or by just calling a studio to ask, that if you still don't bother to follow them, it means either you were too lazy to bother or too lazy to care. Or it means that from day one you don't respect the readers and their rules. Regardless, it will get your script filed in the special can for such things, and promptly recycled at a paper plant.The sheer volume of scripts coming in is such that they need ways to weed out the weakest ones at the start, to deflect the ones from people who haven't honed their skills enough or who don't understand the process and the rules. This can seem cold and cruel when it happens to you, but there is a reason behind it and there's no way they'd ever even get through a fraction of the scripts if they accepted them all. You may think "it's just a minute of their time, if they'd just look at the first page!" but multiply that times all of the people every day seeking "just a minute" for that first page, and they'd run out of "just a minutes" very quickly.This isn't to deny the fact that a lot of bad choices get made, or that a lot of people get by on little talent, or that it's common for ulterior motives or reasons etc to weigh more on decisions than concern for a quality screenplay. The desire to find out "what's hot right now" and then replicate that as fast as possible can and does result in some regurgitation of premises and the flood of sequels and remakes and reboots and adaptations and spin-offs that seem to dominate theaters (it's a myth, though, that "most" films are those sort, if you actually simply count how many of those kinds of films come out in a year -- they are just often the most high-profile). But again, this is because they are listening to audiences votes, and if you go look at the top grossing films year after year, what are the films that people turn out to see in droves? Yep.But again, there's so much constant focus on the claims that ideas are dead and originality isn't appreciated and studios just make nothing but bad films etc, and I think it's a refrain that drowns out the real truths at the heart of these matters, ignores the role of audiences in driving content, ignores the truth about how much good writing and filmmaking takes place, and ignores the truth about how hard it is to even write really good screenplays or to read one and tell if it's good or not. So I hope I've provided an alternative voice to the majority of opinion that films and TV are just dominated by garbage and that it's the fault of an industry controlled by untalented, money-grabbing hacks who know what quality is but refuse to provide it or who just can't tell crap from gold. Because while some people definitely fit into the caricatures and pigeonholing, most in fact don't, and the whole process is a lot more complicated and a lot harder than I think people realize sometimes.And I hope some of you will try thinking up a painting and then describing it with just words (and no technical directions of brush type or style etc, you must convey it all through the writing itself without overt technical references) and see if you think it's easy to write that way, but more importantly see if you think it would be easy to read it and tell if it would make a great painting or not. The latter is the equivalent of taking original drafts of screenplays and deciding to invest millions of dollars of other people's money into making it, and hoping it has the things it needs to attract enough audience to make back the money and turn at least some profit.Hollywood is filled with talented people in every field. And it's full of producers and studios who want to find good screenplays and good ideas, and who want to give audiences what they want, and who would spend the rest of their lives producing low-budget independent high-quality Oscar-caliber films if audiences regularly showed up to make such films hundreds of millions of dollars every year. This past year was a good start, there were several lower-budget films that performed quite well. If this year shows a repeat of that kind of business for such films, you can be sure Hollywood will start thinking up new plans to invest in those kinds of films because that's what brings people to the movies. But also know that all of those superhero films and sci-fi action blockbusters are probably going to make hundreds of millions of dollars, and some will make a billion bucks, so Hollywood won't abandon them because audiences certainly aren't.EDIT: Just wanted to add that I don't mean offense by saying some of the claims etc being made aren't true -- it's a matter of mistaken perceptions, the widespread assumptions and beliefs people have about Hollywood and the quality of film/TV etc, so I'm really talking about how those assumptions and perceptions are wrong and that the stereotypes are perpetuated and that's why people tend to assume those things are true. Hopefully nobody mistook my comments as meant to chastise or insult anyone here, it definitely isn't meant that way.EDIT #2: I've seen the GQ article The Day the Movies Died referenced or quoted etc a lot lately, and so I'd like to respond to some of it. It's a very nice, well-written article, but I think it ultimately relies on the same problem of stereotyping and oversimplification, and a lot of mistaken assumptions that everyone tends to just accept as "truisms."My biggest complaint is that such articles make the typical listing of offending films, namely sequels and reboots and prequels and adaptations etc, without putting it into perspective. The article lists 14 upcoming films that fit into those categories, to make a point about how prevalent such films have become. Let's try something, though -- let's assume the article only bothered naming half of such films, bumping the actual number up to 28. Then let's round that up to 30. And now let's also just heap on the assumption that there are another 15 films (adding 50% to our total) that are so strongly inspired by or rip off etc actual other franchises or books or TV shows etc that they deserve to be included in our accounting.Okay, this gives us 45 films now. Right? And that overtly inflated number represents about 22.5% of all films released in a given year. Meaning 78% of the rest of the films won't be anything in that broad category. In other words, after counting them up and then rounding them up and then tacking on another half again, that STILL leaves more than three-fourths of all films as things other than this type of stuff the article is trying to convince us has become rampant and dominant.So that's my first complaint -- these notions that movies have "died" and are being overrun by sequels and remakes and no originality etc depends on accounting that would get you an F on a final exam.My next complaint is that the article makes a great deal of the supposed problem of demographics and target audiences, denouncing the "quadrant" as marketing-obsession and how unfair and film/originality killing it is to engage in dividing people up into such groupings and relying on such generalizations to divide the marketplace.I'd at least take the sincerity of those complaints more seriously, if it were not wrapped in an assertion that this has happened after a previous, more acceptable situation in which... the year was split up into generalized groupings for targeting certain kinds of films at certain kinds of audiences, and in this "good old days" the summer was a short period for the acceptable dumping of wham-bang spandex and action entertainment that is (according to an article bemoaning generalizations and demographics) merely a bunch of easily pigeonholed film genres made for -- and I quote -- "ADD-addled, short-term-memory-lacking, easily excitable testosterone junkie[s]."The article goes on to assert that these types of films are essentially junk food for emotionally and mentally stunted adults, as part of a studio trend toward promotion of arrested development in the population so that everyone becomes one big target demographic based on the stereotype of the young adult male. Hence, everything becomes comic book sequels that "blow things up real good."But I submit that the entire above paragraph's concept is itself just one big demographics-crunching cliched outlook that is founded on belief in generalizations, demographics, marketplace groupings, and in short everything the article purports to be complaining about in the first place. And to boot, most of the assumptions there are wrong, too.The fact is that most films are not those types, as already noted. The fact is that the "endless summer" notion the article hypothesizes is actually the END of summer because traditional stereotyped notions of seasonal breakdowns of film performance are blurring as different film "seasons" overlap one another because viewer habits are no longer confined to those traditional stereotypes. That's why the release of "Oscar films" is no longer primarily limited to a few months at the end of one year and the start of another. Four of this year's Best Picture nominees came out in the summer. Several other potential and (at the time of their release) expected nominees also came out much earlier in the year as well.One of the primary reasons that we are seeing the so-called expansion of the summer film season (meaning films traditionally released in the summer are being released all year round now) is that the focus of certain kinds of films toward more narrow target audiences is less controlling. This is because, among other causes, young females (and females in general) are asserting themselves as a profitable audience; because foreign profits have come to dominate box office receipts; because audiences are starting to attend films outside of their typical pigeonholed "genres;" and because many of those reasons (but especially the last one) are taking place due to a cycle in which smarter, better-made films of certain genres are being made, which lures older and more diverse audiences, which in turn drives studios to try to broaden the appeal of other types of films, which expands audiences again, and so on.With home entertainment and other economic factors causing a steady decline in theater attendance, studios know that films need to reach out and pull in broader audiences than before, and appeal to previously ignored audiences, and to mix and match viewers to remain competitive. Just to take the whipping boy used in the article, compare modern films in the superhero genre to such films from the past. It used to be that the higher quality films of this genre were the exceptions, but nowadays the exceptions are the bad ones. The films are being written in a way that means any of the supposedly stupid, immature, teenage audience are now being exposed to much smarter and better quality films of that genre, while people who used to ignore such films now get exposed to them because the genre has improved to the point that serious minded people watch them and think they are legitimate artistic achievements.Yes, comedies are raunchier as our tastes and standards have changed over time, but I submit that there is in fact a lot of smart humor being produced nowadays, witty and mature humor that also pushes boundaries and makes us think. I think there's evidence that even sillier, immature humor has seen more examples lately of a better quality of low quality, if that makes sense.I think the articles' notion that the average "good" film has decreased in quality is mistaken -- I think what the article is noticing, but misidentifying, is that the average for "bad" has improved. Typically throw-away films have achieved at least certain basic levels of technical skill that sometimes they fool us into thinking they are better than they are. Meanwhile, I submit that the average "good" films are in fact getting better, and that there are a lot more "good" to "great" films being made.As I noted previously, just look at the nominees for Best Picture last year, then the contenders that were strong but didn't get a nomination, and we're talking about around two dozen films -- a number of potentially Oscar-worthy Best Picture contenders. People can point all day at the 1970s and say how great the classic films of that decade were, but the truth is that we are wearing rose-colored glasses when we act as if it was a period of unmatched filmmaking quality. Yes, many great films were made, there's no question of that. But pick any given year and try to name two dozen films that could be Best Picture, and then count what percentage of films were lousy.The truth is that people forget this was an era of lots of exploitation films, of a lot of bad drive-in fare, of cheap horror and sci-fi with terrible production values, and that a look at films of the 1970s reveals every bit as high a percentage of average or "less" films. The problem is that nowadays, there are just so many more films released and modern media marketing means you are more likely to hear about and even possibly see a larger percentage of those average or "less" films.The article is honestly just a rehash of a lot of claims and complaints that have been circulating for decades now, it relies on a series of pigeonholing and stereotypes and cliches to denounce the very same supposed things in filmmaking, and it makes sweeping assumptions based on a few examples that are treated as a dominant trend or norm when in fact it's just a small portion of films being given disproportionate attention. I think that twenty years from now, some new article will be bemoaning what it will assert is the actual Day the Movies Died, and twenty years after that someone else will still be making the claim. And probably all of them will still rely on the same stereotyping and misreading of what's been going on, and blinded by rose-colored glasses they use to look back at the cinema of long gone days.

Nolan As Auteur(Note that the discussion of Nolan’s films in this answer is spoiler-free at the level of plot (it does reveal structure). Like a Nolan film, it makes fine sense if you’re in the dark but even better sense if you’re in the know.)I believe that Christopher Nolan is immensely underrated by my fellow cinephiles. I think he’s the smartest and perhaps the most important contemporary director, very likely the only one who has added to the vocabulary of film meaning. There are many great directors who have shown us something new by taking existing film vocabulary and pushing it to dizzying and dazzling new extremes, e.g., Wong Kar-Wai in In the Mood for Love and Shane Carruth in Upstream Color, or, less obviously—because it’s done largely with the screenplay rather than the camera—Asgar Farhadi in A Separation (those are my choices for the three best films of the millennium, BTW). But Nolan is our most important innovator, and that’s why he’s underrated. Cinephiles are not looking for what he’s doing; it’s not part of how they judge films.An analogy: imagine that jazz guitar was once as popular as great cinema is, and that you took the best of Jimi Hendrix back in time and played it for a group of aficionados who regarded Django Reinhardt the way cinephiles regard Kubrick. They’d like the opening riff of “Purple Haze” because of its harmonic complexity, but “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” would leave them baffled. Hendrix isn’t doing anything they’re listening for: he’s not merely neglecting all the complex jazz scales, he’s concentrating on the pentatonic! Going from 12 notes to 7 and often just 5: that’s unsubtle and too on-the-nose. And he’s playing too few notes and holding each one too long!It’s not a perfect analogy, because I suspect that Hendrix could have done a pretty good job of playing like Reinhardt had he wanted, while Nolan doesn’t quite have the chops to make a Kubrickian film. But the key point is that he’s not trying. He’s doing something else entirely.What is he doing? In a nutshell, Nolan is the first film auteur to realize that plot twists and ambiguous plot puzzles can and should be more than entertainments. When we are forced to entirely reinterpret what has happened in a narrative (The Prestige), or puzzle out an ambiguous one (Memento, Inception), that process is not just a diversion, but a deep reflection of one of the most fundamental aspects of being human. That aspect has scarcely been addressed previously in narrative art of any sort, because it is fundamentally resistant to treatment within conventional story structures (the only prior exemplar that comes to my mind is the great genius of literary science fiction, Gene Wolfe). And Nolan has discovered that when you explore this in film, you also directly address the question of how films acquire meaning. My fellow cinephiles think he’s shallow. I think I can demonstrate that he’s profound.To do that, I have to first explain the nature of stories.(Yes, this is enormously long; but I hope that many will find it revelatory. The story-specific cognitive psychology here, BTW, is wholly original, but the central importance of stories to the brain and behavior is well established, and I’d be shocked if I haven’t largely re-invented previous work on them.)About StoriesOur brains organize all of our experience in two ways. First and most obviously, there is knowledge: who’s running for President, where I keep my car keys. But most of our experience is stored in the form of stories. A story is a meaningful sequence of causally related events. Any causal sequence where something unexpected happens is potentially meaningful, so the brain creates an emotional response to make it memorable; that’s the origin of humor. But funny stories are the exception. Most stories, ordinary stories, are tales of motivated human action.A potential story of this sort begins when the self or (in told stories) a character perceives a lack and as a result has a desire which leads to a goal (these are usually but not always conscious at the time) and maybe even a plan. (Some stories omit the lack, and are of special interest for that very reason. Think of the man who is happily married yet nevertheless becomes obsessed with the femme fatale.) Usually the desire ceases because it has been satisfied without any difficulty—in which case it proves not to have been the germ of a story after all. But if the desire ceases in any other way—if it is achieved after overcoming difficulties, or is thwarted and abandoned, or is realized to be inappropriate and maladaptive, and is hence supplanted by one that better addresses the lack—then we have a story. And when stories happen to us—or when we hear or read or see them, and find them relevant, consciously or otherwise—we remember them. We use them.Here’s a simple example. I perceive I’m thirsty (lack) and decide I want a Coke (desire), and decide to go downstairs and get one out of the fridge (goal / plan). If my Coke is there right on the shelf, then my desire has been satisfied without difficulty; this is not a story, and I won’t remember this specific sequence of events, which of course has happened many times already and will happen many more times.But suppose there’s no Coke in the fridge, even though I could swear that I saw one there this morning. And I become convinced that my roommate drank it, and I’m furious, and I’m about to go pound on his door and chew him out, when (because of previous stories I remember, about how bad I am at looking for things) I decide to look one more time in the fridge, and there it is, behind the milk. Which I put back myself this morning.Now, that’s a story. I’ll probably tell it to my roommate, where it becomes a story in his brain about how I’m getting better at not blaming him for things he didn’t do. And it’s now a story in both our brains about a host of other, more general things: how we need to recognize our own cognitive weaknesses, how we should not be too quick to blame others, how people can learn to do both of those things, and so on.It’s crucial to realize that the stories in our brains—which is to say, our memories—are not a record of what actually happened to us. They have been edited and turned into better, more useful stories. Extraneous information is trimmed, and events are rearranged to make causal relationships clearer.Most importantly, new stories often disagree with old ones, and so the brain is continually modifying all of our stories, from the brand-new to the very old, to eliminate contradictions. Our capacity to change the knowledge in our brains is severely limited, but the capacity to change our stories is limitless, and fundamental. We couldn’t follow a plot twist without it.Stories, Film, Geekdom, and The Plot TwistThe stories in our brains are connected to one another, in wonderful and complicated ways. And fiction and film have represented and explored that complexity very satisfyingly. Movies have an endless variety of plot styles and structures, and I believe that our different reactions to this diversity are reflections of the different ways our brains like or need to link our stories together. For instance, while I think it’s possible to learn to appreciate a movie without an over-arcing plot (this year’s great example is American Honey), whether you naturally get a movie like that depends on hard-wired brain traits. In this case, I theorize that people with high cognitive flexibility (a fundamental personality trait in my neurochemically-based Deep Six system) often leave their stories weakly linked, and relink them on the fly as needed, while people low on this trait need to link their stories strongly and permanently. So a succession of very loosely linked stories plays much better to the former brain than to the latter, because it more closely resembles the brain that is watching it.There is however, one type of story structure that has universal appeal. We may head off together to the Great Imaginary Repertory Cineplex, and you might choose to see Die Hard and I might choose to see The Turin Horse (whose first scene proper is four and a half minutes of a horse and carriage riding in the wind, and whose most memorable plot sequence concerns the eating of a potato), but afterwards we can go and see The Sting or The Usual Suspects together and agree that it was Way Cool. Everybody likes a good plot twist. And just about everybody enjoys the work of making new sense of everything they thought they already knew, once the twist is revealed. It’s fun to figure it out, for just about everyone.And this is remarkable. Most people take no special pleasure in hard thought; for them, thinking is how you figure out what to do. Only a minority find thinking to be inherently pleasurable, an end in itself rather than a means, something to do in your spare time instead of dancing, bowling, or skiing. We call them “geeks.”In my Deep Six system, this is the single most fundamental trait. The reason why it has gone unrecognized is that it’s the trait that most determines who our friends are and hence what sort of behavior in others we consider typical. It’s tough for geeks to see, but most people would find it astonishing that anyone would choose to spend their free time seeking out thought-provoking conversations about books and movies (e.g., at science fiction conventions), or reading and answering questions on Quora. They spend all their time at work thinking; the last thing they want to do in their free time is think some more.This trait has a surprisingly weak correlation to intelligence. Every geek can recall meeting a potential new friend who was clearly brilliant and who shared their values, and then being disappointed to discover that their taste in fiction or movies ran to mere entertainments, such as relatively formulaic mystery novels. Even people who are supremely good at hard thought don’t necessarily enjoy it.But the plot twist makes geeks out of all of us. Sorting it out is never work and always play. Why is that? Here’s where the much-maligned discipline of evolutionary psychology comes to the rescue, despite its notorious inability to make testable predictions.The Plot Twist: More Than Narrative VertigoIf we are hard-wired to find the expansion and reinterpretation of the stories in our brains unusually pleasurable, then this narrative reframing must have survival value. It’s thus a fundamental part of our mental apparatus, one that goes back to our days as hunter-gatherers.And this is because the most important stories in our brains, unlike told stories, are often or even usually incomplete. (Why did she leave me for another man? Ten years later, I still don’t fully understand.) We are continually discovering new information that fills in the gaps in these incomplete stories. Sometimes the new information is so surprising that it forces us to rewrite the story thoroughly, to reinterpret a great deal of information we thought we understood. (She left me for another woman.) That the plot twist is so universally liked—that we have evolved to enjoy doing that much thinking—tells us that this degree of narrative reframing is not uncommon, and has been a part of our lives for a very long time.Cinephiles have always regarded the plot twist as mere entertainment. The first time I saw Vertigo, my initial thought was that it was a very solid and satisfying Hitchcock film. Of course, there were 42 minutes left, and most of what I believed to be true was false. This supreme feat of narrative reframing still strikes me as the most remarkable thing about the film, just edging out the portrait of Scotty’s obsession, from which it cannot really be separated.And yet Vertigo has risen to the top of the cinephilic admiration pile almost solely on the strength of its character arc (and that arc’s thematic resonances). Almost no online criticism says anything about the twist, or the contribution of the deception to Scotty’s obsession. In most cases, everything they say about the film would be just as true if Madeline had been dead and Judy Barton had merely closely resembled her, just as Scotty initially believes. There is no realization that what Scotty has had to do, rethink everything he thought he believed about his life’s most meaningful events, is a version of what every one of us must do, only written (like much great narrative art) in boldface and capitals to drive home the point. Plot twists, like all the other important elements of great narrative art, remind us of something that defines our human lives. That’s why we like them so much.What We Know For Certain About AmbiguityThere is one aspect of the stories in our brains that is almost impossible to capture in a satisfying told story. The incomplete stories in our brains are not just sitting there, waiting until we stumble on information to make better sense of them. Their presence causes us distress, and to minimize that distress, we are motivated to actively seek out the missing information. We call this distress “lack of closure,” and it goes to the core of our beings. And it is the one thing that told stories almost never have.If we see a movie or read a book that leaves a fundamental plot question potentially answerable but nevertheless unanswered, we feel cheated. Told stories are satisfying precisely because they answer all the important questions, and because in real life that is so often not the case.When a told story leaves an important question unanswered, we call that ambiguity. Ambiguous endings are not uncommon in told stories, but the teller must eliminate all possible sources of resolution to the mystery. Many ambiguous stories are therefore about a character who takes a secret to the grave. But even that may not be enough.Imagine the double agent whose true loyalties may have been with the Americans or the Russians, and whose story therefore has two separate and conflicting interpretations. Of course, he’s jumped off a bridge. That’s an ending that can be very satisfying, because it mirrors all the stories in our brains that we have had to give up on, the ones we’ve stamped “I can never know,” the ones we’ve let go of emotionally. Finally admitting that there can never be closure is itself a form of closure. Sometimes it’s all we can manage.But now imagine that the double agent’s boss at the C.I.A. knows the truth. The storyteller has to kill him, too. If you simply, for instance, remove him to Nepal, the audience will absolutely expect the agent’s partner (or other P.O.V. character) to go to Nepal to find the answer. Of course, I’m joking somewhat; a good storyteller will construct a compelling reason that he can never go to Nepal, and why he cannot ask the agent’s wife the one question that might solve the riddle, and so on. When we need to let go of a desire to know, that letting go can be complex. The best ambiguous endings give us multiple paths to the answer. But what’s fundamental is that they must all be closed.(It’s important to distinguish an ambiguous ending from an open one, where the story simply stops and leaves things unresolved. Our entire lives are open stories. We have no hard-wiring to want to see what happens next, because it happens anyway. While the open ending doesn’t give us the closure of a finished story, it beautifully mirrors where we are in the ongoing stories of our lives. We don’t naturally like open endings, since the feeling of being there is fundamentally neutral, but it’s not difficult to learn to like them. And it’s easy to hide a form of ambiguity in an open ending, as in The Graduate. Thinking that things will go one way, and then realizing a moment later that they might go the other, is once again something we’re familiar with. We wait to find out.)Understanding Memento, Backwards and ForwardsAbove all, Memento is a portrait of the nature and purpose of memory. We use short-term memory, our ongoing story, to make sense of the world at the most basic level. But we are ordinarily oblivious to this. Leonard is acutely aware of it, and we learn this truth by experiencing the world as he does, living out each extended moment without the context that short-term memory provides.The resulting narrative structure is radically unconventional. Each scene is a mystery, because neither Leonard nor the audience fully understands what’s going on. Each scene also contains information that explains the chronologically later scene we have just seen, but only to the audience; Leonard remains unaware. This is actually the defining device of a suspense story, but it’s backwards. In suspense, the storyteller reveals something to the audience that the character doesn’t know, creating apprehension in the audience over what might happen to the character next. In Memento, the revelation of information unknown to the character creates understanding in the audience over what has already happened to the character. That many of these revelations are in the form of twists drives home the point: context is everything. Memory is everything. And of course, it creates a thrilling narrative.If that’s all that Memento did, it would still be a remarkable film. But at the end, it does the impossible. Teddy gives Leonard information which, if true, constitutes an immense twist for Leonard and the audience. However, Teddy is a liar who has clearly been manipulating Leonard for his own purposes. Which version of the story is true: the version Leonard has always believed, or the version Teddy now puts forth? The entire meaning of the story hinges on this question, right down to what we should think of Leonard. It’s completely ambiguous, but it is also completely answerable; if either character wanted to, they could do research and discover or confirm the truth. Neither wants to, however; one is deservedly sure of the truth, and the other is lying to themselves (Teddy explicitly says it’s Leonard, but the great irony is that it may well be himself.) They each believe what they want to believe.This answerable ambiguity ought to be anathema to audiences, but because it has been introduced by a twist, we don’t mind it, and many people love it. As much as answerable ambiguity bothers us, we love the twist even more. We dive into the narrative, and discover that Nolan has created the most complex and carefully, completely ambiguous narrative in the history of cinema. (It’s hard to imagine the complexity of the hidden backstory, with its multiple possible versions, until you attack it. I had seen the film ten times and thought I understood it fairly thoroughly, but I’m now sitting on 5000+ words of notes, almost all about angles and insights that hadn’t previously occurred to me, and I don’t think I’m close to finished.)The facts themselves rather strongly support Leonard’s version of the truth, so Nolan has inserted cinematic clues that argue the opposite. All of those clues can be explained away, but the explanation does not lie within the story, but in interpretations of cinematic technique. Leonard has a flash of memory that supports Teddy’s version of the story … but maybe that was not memory, but imagination. How do we tell the difference between them, while watching a film? It’s the point of view established by the director, isn’t it? So what’s your opinion about P.O.V. consistency? Other arguments come down to the use of cinematic plot conventions, or the nature of film editing—if the director fails to show us something, does that mean it didn’t happen?Memento About the TruthSo Memento is a deep lesson in the nature and reliability of memory, and its crucial role in forming identity. It’s a uniquely structured thriller whose continual twists underscore the human truth that we must often revise our own stories and revise or even reverse our character judgments. It’s a master class in film interpretation. Most importantly, by creating a story that is both ambiguous and acceptable to us, it demolishes the distinction between objective and subjective truth. The objective truth that we cherish so much is revealed to be an unattainable abstraction.Nolan is therefore adamant that the story has no “correct” solution; he admits that he strongly prefers one, but he has gone out of his way to keep it secret. (The annotated final shooting script that is a treasured bonus feature of the limited edition DVD includes numerous severe criticisms by his brother Jonathan—the note that Natalie hands Leonard is, according to Jonah, “Please rescue me from this script. Chris Nolan is a sick f*ck”—but in the final pages, all clues about interpreting the ending, by both brothers, have been redacted.) Even though Nolan is the author, his belief—his preference— has no more authority than ours.What might be most fascinating about Memento is that audiences, to Nolan’s surprise, were very quick to believe Teddy, even though the previous scene (the next chronologically) had established that he’s a rather profoundly amazing liar. The clues that Nolan inserted to balance the story, because Teddy’s version makes less sense when you think it through, are now widely taken as evidence that his version is the correct version. Nolan has discussed this in interviews, with seeming dismay; of course such a reading destroys the chief point of the movie. But that reaction itself reveals the depth and importance of Nolan’s argument, by showing just how strong our need is to cling to a single truth. As he later complained in a somewhat different context, “You don't really want to work it out. You want to be fooled.”The Prestige: The PledgeThere is no better source of insight into the psychology of film viewing than negative reviews of great movies. A quarter of the critics who saw The Prestige disliked it, and at least as many were guarded in their praise. In their reviews, three complaints occur again and again. The characters are hard to like, the film switches genre unexpectedly and unnecessarily, and the big twist is telegraphed and hence a letdown. The first two complaints are easy to understand, and point us at two of the movie’s great accomplishments. The third will lead us to a new insight into the plot twist.The characters are supposed to be somewhat hard to like on the first viewing. (They are, of course, not meant to be so hard to like as to destroy audience engagement, a complaint made by most of the dismissive critics but very few audience members. What went wrong here is interesting but off-topic; I’ll explain it in the comments if anyone is curious.) On subsequent viewings, once the twist is learned, one of the principles emerges as entirely sympathetic, to the point where the film’s notorious chill evaporates and the ending can move the viewer to tears. This is of course a boldface version of what happens in our own stories as they are reframed by later knowledge. The ex-wife who left us for no good apparent reason can become entirely sympathetic if we later learn of her gender confusion. (Those who know the nature of the twist will see a further boldface parallel to the way we perceive others and their fundamental character, one that may have no peer in narrative art of any kind.)The Prestige: The TurnThe film begins with a voice-over asking us, “Are you watching closely?” This is, of course, another of the movie’s great themes, how the acuity of our attention and perception shapes our view of reality. The film argues that we don’t, as a rule, watch closely enough; the less closely you watch, the easier it is to see what you want to see (wanting to be fooled is just a subset of this). Sarah is the one character in the film who ends up watching closely.Twenty-two minutes into the film, Michael Caine’s character makes a claim that, if true, clearly establishes the film as science fiction. He very clearly believes it to be true, so the only trapdoor out of the promised genre shift is if he’s mistaken for some reason. Many viewers seem to miss this entirely. It’s worth attending to, because the film will use science fiction not just as a plot device but to make another major thematic argument.The film’s surface argument is that no one wants to know how a magic trick works. Most viewers understand this as a metaphor for the way good storytelling works, and in fact Christopher Priest says that the parallel between stage and story magic was the germ of his novel. Any story where the audience is missing information employs an arsenal of techniques and tricks to hide not just the information, but the very fact that it’s missing. There is concealment, disguise, and misdirection, and each of these techniques will ordinarily fail if the audience becomes aware of its existence. The storyteller and the stage magician thus have the same task, but they are abetted by a contract with the audience. We want to be fooled.Is this true just of storytelling, however? On repeated viewings, it becomes increasingly clear that the movie is making the same argument (a much more important one) about science. We want to enjoy the surfaces of scientific innovations, the shiny toy aspect, but we do not want to look under the hood and consider the implications of the actual machinery. Angier must in the end willfully ignore the implications of science, and this is true even though he has been paradoxically led to science by an obsessive thirst for knowledge. One of the first issues the film raises about stage magic is that the magician must be willing to “get his hands dirty” in order to achieve greatness, must be able to live with the awful underpinnings of the tricks, the ones the audience never sees. The film suggests that everyone who uses science is doing the same thing; Angier is just our boldface version of this universal reality.[The last six paragraphs of this section are expanded from the original three.]But amazingly, neither storytelling nor science is magic’s chief metaphoric target. The overriding metaphor of The Prestige is so non-obvious that I didn’t stumble on it until I wrote the original version of this section, and its primacy and jaw-dropping brilliance didn’t hit me until I saw the film twice in succession with it in mind.It’s often noted that Angier is a mediocre magician but a consummate showman, while Borden is the opposite. That’s an easy distinction to grasp, so it’s surprising that when looked at (almost certainly too) closely, it stops making sense. A magic trick is already all show. There are two discrete levels of show at work in a magic act, one overt and one covert.What we choose to show others of ourselves, the self we present, is not at all what we believe ourselves to be, our true self. But is our true self also a show? Is it a magic trick? Cognitive neuroscience says “yes”. Daniel Dennett has described the self as a narrative center of gravity [1]. An engineer uses the center of gravity of an object in certain calculations, and it produces perfect results, yet by doing so they can ignore all of the complexities and detail of the actual weight distribution. In the same way, we construct a “self” from all of the stories about ourselves in our brains, and it allows us to function effectively and yet, like the center of gravity, it doesn’t actually exist.So like Memento, The Prestige is an exploration of the nature of personal identity. Angier can also ask himself who he really is, and while this seems on a first viewing to be plot driven, and on later viewings to be merely one of the screenplay’s myriad examples of mirroring and doubling, it is ultimately thematically central.Watching the film from the beginning with the notion that it uses magic as a metaphor for the fundamentally artificial and constructed self is an absolutely revelatory experience. Like all of the best deeply hidden things, it seems ubiquitous and necessary once recognized. Borden shows a magic trick to a young boy, and then reveals its secret. His advice? “Never. Show. Anyone. They’ll beg you and flatter you for the secret—but as soon as you give it up you’ll be nothing to them. Understand? Nothing. The secret impresses no one—the trick you use it for is everything.”The prop used in the magic trick is a coin with heads on both sides. This has obvious meaning to Borden, and we get that on a second viewing. But it has an entirely different meaning in the film’s metaphoric structure. There’s no other side to show.The Prestige: The PrestigeAnd at last we come to the last common complaint of the dismissive critics. Liking this movie seems highly dependent on being fooled by the big twist. (I’m referring here to the twist in Borden’s story. The final reveal in Angier’s story is not actually a twist, as it reveals information that is easy to extrapolate—in fact, it continues a scene that was cut away from earlier—and that has not been contradicted in any way. It doesn’t cause any narrative reframing; it simply fills in a blank for those who hadn’t yet thought things through.) I think that perhaps one viewer in five figures it out, and some or many of those are disappointed and feel let down. They wanted something more extraordinary. (Does that complaint sound familiar?)What makes this rather astounding is that the film plays exceptionally well once you know the twist. Like many twist films, it invites a second viewing (Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers’ “You want to see it again the second it’s over” appears on the DVD and Blu-Ray covers), and it literally doesn’t begin to fully make sense until you see it twice. Critics don’t have time to see films twice, but audiences do, and that’s why The Prestige, roughly the 100th best film of the year based on its reviews, vaulted immediately into the IMDB Top 250 of all time, placing 88th a couple of years after its release. It’s now 49th (44th excluding films more recent), and that rise in the rankings essentially never happens. (Since writing that a year or two ago, it’s passed three more films that were ahead of it. And since writing that; it’s gone up to 46th, and 40th excluding newer films. The six films more recent with a higher rating include three by Nolan himself and the two films directly ahead in the rankings, which combined have just 2.2% more votes. The sixth film, the only non-Nolan film in the last fourteen years that has a chance to end up higher in the rankings? Parasite.) Some films can maintain their IMDB ranking as their audience expands beyond those most interested in it, but most suffer a decline (in the same time frame, Pan’s Labyrinth went from 51 to 130). I originally proposed here that people are seeing the film a second or third time and upping their ratings, in order to offset the lower rankings from newcomers; I’m now quite sure of that.Twist movies exist on a continuum defined by what might well be the two greatest: The Prestige at one end and The Sixth Sense at the other. Almost nobody figures out The Sixth Sense. Harlan Ellison was so distraught that he’d been fooled that he called up his colleague Connie Willis to verify that she’d missed it, too (Connie tells this story, so it actually did happen; Harlan is notorious for turning the stories in his brain into way better stories). There aren’t any obvious clues, and there’s just one initially puzzling scene that the twist explains. Less than a handful of other scenes make different sense on a second viewing. The film has been designed to fool you, and part of that design is to minimize the amount of time it needs to work at doing so.Although the twist deepens some of the film’s emotions, it adds no thematic depth. The film is still about what it was about. That story, by the way, is hugely underrated; one of the reasons the twist is so effective is that it’s revealed after a devastating emotional scene between Cole and his mother, one so good it seems to be film’s very satisfying ending. And then, there’s a twist, the point of which is almost entirely … there’s a twist.In contrast, The Prestige is full of clues that are obvious in retrospect, which is why it’s relatively easy to figure out. There are 17 sequences (some constituting several consecutive scenes) that make different sense on a repeat viewing, where they thoroughly change the film’s meaning. This appears to be a fundamental tradeoff in the twist structure: the more important the twist is to the film’s meaning, the easier it will be to get.One might think that a viewer who had figured out the twist before the end would begin to view the movie as if they had seen it already, and take the typical delight in the double layers of meaning (e.g., Olivia’s response to Borden in the restaurant), and begin to grasp the thematic implications that the twist was designed to explore. It seems, however, that most are still assuming that the twist will be an end in itself, as with The Sixth Sense. They don’t want to think, they want … well, by now you know what they want. As with Memento, folks who don’t get the ending are making its point.Beginning to Parse InceptionBy now, I hope it’s clear that Nolan is an auteur worth attending to. I expected each of the discussion of the individual films here to be three paragraphs long, but the more I explained about them, the more I found to explain. Let’s see if I can actually keep my take on Inception to less than an essay in itself. (You, the audience, can glance ahead and see to what extent I’ve succeeded, but I, the character, am still in the dark. While that’s the structure of suspense, it’s also the structure of comic apprehension.)Memento is an example of what I call objective ambiguity, where there are two different readings of what actually happened. But there is a long tradition in narrative art (going back at least to Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw”) of subjective ambiguity, where the question is whether something happened at all, or was just in the mind of a character. Usually the character is aware of the ambiguity themselves; occasionally the ambiguity is entirely in the audience’s mind. A great recent example of the latter is The Babadook, which reads equally well as actual horror or psychotic hallucination.Inception does for subjective ambiguity what Memento did for its objective twin. Is Dom asleep and dreaming throughout the film, or does the surface of the film represent an objective reality? As with Memento, the evidence for both readings is remarkably dense, and perfectly balanced. Even more so than with Memento, which side you come down on ultimately depends on what you make of film technique.The chief argument against the film’s surface reality being real is that it’s full of barely credible plot points. Such plot points, however, routinely populate big blockbuster films (like The Dark Knight); we accept them out of convention, because we want to be entertained. In other words, if what you wanted out of Nolan was the third film in his thematic trilogy about identity and meaning in film, it’s right there: just believe that Dom is asleep the whole time, and is in denial of this awful truth. If you wanted a blockbuster followup to the first two films of his Batman trilogy, it’s right there: just regard the surface of the film as really happening.What makes this work is that the film draws a brilliant parallel between films and dreaming. The film points out that dreams are edited the way films are. Critics have noted that the team that Dom assembles for his caper can be mapped to the team a director hires to make a film. Most interestingly, it turns out that the credulity of dreams, where we fail to question the most absurd things, is, at the level of neurochemistry a boldface version of the willing suspension of disbelief that we experience automatically when we watch a film. Both involve elevated levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. That’s a topic for its own essay, no?An Ending (Without a Twist!)Cinephiles are correctly consumed with the question of how a film’s technique gives it meaning. They are focused almost entirely on the things that only film can do.But at this point in film history, no one’s going to invent a new way of moving the camera or editing a film. The only unexplored avenues for technique are strictly technological; it’s no accident that Martin Scorsese has made what many regard as the best-ever use of 3D in film, or that Ang Lee has just tried (and by early reports failed) to top him.There’s only one dimension along which film can continue to grow, and that’s the storytelling itself, the pure content rather than the technique. (That in the hands of a master the technique can become one with the content will, thankfully, never cease to astound, amaze, delight, and move us). The complexities of film technique are large, but the complexities of story dwarf it. There’s room left to explore there.It’s perfectly understandable that many cinephiles not only dismiss Nolan but regard him as the death knell for cinephilia. His technique is excellent but not extraordinary; he is a master craftsman rather than an artist. He has made his mark by the complexity of his stories, something that written fiction does as well as film does. And yet he is wildly popular. I mentioned previously that there were five films that have been released subsequently to The Prestige that rank ahead of it at IMDB; Nolan directed three. That Nolan is the author of four of the six best-loved films of the last decade might fill any cinephile with despair. Is that all great films are, now, better stories?But Nolan alone is pushing film in a new direction, and he alone is exploring deep human truths that have barely been explored even in fiction. And while he is neither inventing nor mastering film technique, he is making us think about it as few directors ever have. Paradoxically, his films are intensely cinematic after all.Think. And watch closely. (Yes, that’s backwards!)[1] This is the lucky chapter 13 of Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (1991), lucky for Dennett because the remainder of the book is a contender for the least correct body of argument in the history of human thought. It can be read as a separate essay if you ignore everything in the chapter about the relationship of the self to consciousness.

Wade Robson: ‘’ My story of abuse will make me relevant/ relatable again. It is time to get mine’’.Not at all. Robson is a court proven liar. Under US law he is not acknowledged as a victim but as a perjurer. Wade Robson and his wife Amanda hit rock bottom in 2011. They fixated on film scripts instead of jobs. Wade auctioned off MJ items for cash and he begged the MJ Estate for a gig. They had a new child , more expenses , no income , panick attacks and a lack of creativity and talent to finish any of the film projects they started. By 2012 Wade ‘s former entertainment career was in shambles. Jobs were given to his rivals , including Jamie King for MJ ONE , who is represented by same agency as Wade. Wade could not fulfill role as big time director having resigned from directing the music film Step Up because he could not handle the pressure. Marital arguments and freak outs ensued. Rather than taking medicine that Wade’s doctors prescribed to treat his mostly financially related anxieties and depression Wade Robson narcissistically refused while he was desperately trying to find another way to blame others for his failures and misfortunes , even using his own kid as a cause. After more ‘’ doctor’’ shopping , TED talk watching and brainstorming ideas to dig himself out of financial ruin without having to file for bankruptcy or pursue a more ordinary career , Wade had his ah-ha moment. Get revenge on Estate for not hiring him and dip into their pockets. Wade internally reasoned that all of his voluntarily wasted years chasing filmmaking and scriptwriting dreams were the result of generic words of wisdom MJ offered him in the early 90’s. It was MJ who prophesied Wade would be bigger than Spielberg and yet now he was NOTHING at all. But Wade rationalized it would look foolish to go after the Estate based only on MJ ‘s encouraging words decades ago. Nobody would take that seriously and it lacked any headline generating or Estate humiliating elements . Wade needed something more drastic to make fast cash.The choice soon became obvious for Wade. He would randomly claim MJ molested him along with the whole prophecy bit. This would turn Wade from the cash strapped father without a job to the victim.‘’ I spend most of my time saying no to jobs , probably to my own demise’’ ,Robson said at some point. This sudden pivot by Wade to claim years of continual abuse as part of his new hatched idea to get rich did not sit well with those who knew him. Amanda, his wife, disagreed so much with the prospect that talks of divorce occurred. Wade didn ’t care , he decided to pen a new sensational book. Wade clearly thought his sudden claims of abuse would be a hot topic that any publisher would snatch up with huge advance payments and bonuses to purchase the rights. He could already see himself as the next James Frey who made millions on his book initially presented as fact ( though it was later proven bogus ), notably by Oprah Winfrey. Instead all three publishers Wade secretly shopped his book declined his request. Not only had Wade wasted another half year of potential work time obsessing over the latest iteration of his fictional script writing in the form of MJ accusations but nobody was interested. Realizing Wade’s get rich quick scheme of book publishing diminished and any plans to become relatable/relevant again via imagined victimization fizzled 2013 approached and he was more financially perilous than ever. So desperate in April the Robsons put their luxurious home on the market. The same month Wade put up his house up for sale Wade and a new attorney worked frantically on Plan B: A civil lawsuit against the Estate with actual allegations under seal in hopes the Estate would opt for quickly to settle it to prevent media uproar and public scrutiny , akin to the Chandlers. Wade finished his original affidavit in April 2013 and made the first court filing on May 1, 2013. The Estate refused any out of court settlement. On May 8 Wade and Amanda’s beloved home sold the same day TMZ announced the claims publicly. A week later Wade gave NBC interview. Still, nobody care about Wade ‘s claims of sex abuse and even anti Michael Jackson audiences like those on TMZ overwhelmingly saw Wade as a fraud. The urgent payday Wade expected from book publishers and then from the Estate to save his financial free fall never happened. He wasted years and years losing jobs and years on this scam.Meanwhile , the Robsons downsized relocating back to Amanda’s native region in Hawaii. Wade made a new business in 2014 , which went defunct this spring, and his wife established one in 2015. The duo would primarily make obscure commercials for local businesses. Not quite Steven Spielberg level. Wade realized that his desperate cash grab from the Estate without having to work had failed , quietly announced he was returning to dance work in 2016–17. Yet in his lawsuit he would claim the ‘’traumas’’ made him ‘’ permanently leave ‘’ the field as a way to maximize his punitive damages. After shifting lawyers to a tabloid darling by the name Vince Finaldi , who often sues for 9- digits, attempts continued to gain legal ground or pressure the Estate into settling. This included relentless bullying on MJ ‘s friends including Spence , who wasted time and money on fighting Finaldi ‘s ( Robson ‘s lawyer ) ‘’fishing expedition’’. Spence called Robson abominable and demanded Robson compensated his legal fees. James Safechuck was the only one Robson found to jump on the bandwagon because Safechuck was also desperate financially at the time.Then , the dangerous Metoo movement came where anyone could make blind accusations against another and be instantly championed as a hero by the masses without a shred of corroborrative facts. The ‘’ believe all the accusers ‘’ hysteria aligned perfectly for the production of LN in 2017–18. After Wade ‘s and James’ cases were dismissed in court - now with a sizeable amount of debt owed to MJ ‘s estate in fees- they pursued appeals to postpone the inevitable. Simultaneously they seized the Metoo crowd and media conglomerates who helped fund their agenda and push it to maximum. In anticipation of the global premiere of their grotesque CSA fantasies after 1,5 months of 24/7 news coverage and an aggressive marketing film pushing all of the disturbing talking points Wade tidied up his website and the ‘’Robson Family FUND’’ to solicit financial donations.Donations to Wade’s fund were arranged through a foundation so that he never has to disclose or report any donations on public filings. Wade added that his wife Amanda was a child abuse survivor for maximum impact on the donate page, before quietly deleting that clause and changing the name. In the end Leaving Neverland was a ratings bust despite having more media attention than any other documentary this decade. This included a two channel Oprah Special , media blitz by the stars, and 1000s of ‘’ influencers’’ who were dined and wined to spread word of the film to their followers.Seven years, four amended complaints, endless falsified tabloid stories pushed out as part of the trial by media attempts , James Safechuck joining the agenda with a short cameo by ‘’Jane Doe’’, a woman Michael Jackson allegedly raped in the 80’s who dismissed her own bogus lawsuit , MeToo fandom, HBO, Oprah, Sundance, Emmys …. Yet, still Wade , James, Finaldi and Reed have failed.Wade Robson testify for Michael Jackson in 2005. He clearly looks very intimidated , coerced and pressured to testify.