Lights, Camera, Action!

Well I can tell you right now, that this trailer will be the hardest thing I do all semester.  Mainly because my brother received all of the computer-literate genes and I got only the basics.  Although I had a Journalism class that introduced me to iMovie, that was 3 years ago, and I have a PC at home, so I won't be using iMovie.  I probably don't remember how anyway.

I think my biggest problem with this assignment is that I am not sure how to approach a trailer for my topic.  I am researching restaurants in Morgantown and hopefully doing something resembling being a food critic, a job that I think would be really fun.  I am going to try to pick different types of foods like best steak, best wings, best pizza, best pasta, best Chinese, etc, and rate them on things including taste, pricing for college kids, wait time on the weekends, service, and whatever else I can come up with.  Doing this within the Morgantown area is exciting to me because I think that I would enjoy reading a blog like this.  College kids come to town and sometimes stick to the basic, familiar places to eat.  By having a blog like this to read, they will be able to have an idea of new places to try, if they at all value my opinion, which is hard to say yet.

But how do you put this into a trailer?  I have no idea!  Hopefully I will have some sort of epiphany on how to do this before it is due, or perhaps, I'll just ask some questions in class today to gain a better idea of what exactly my trailer needs to include.  To those of you struggling like me, good luck.  If you aren't struggling, give me some advice!  I'd love it!

The Ecstasy of Influence-Lethem

Lethem has an interesting opinion of plagiarism, especially for a writer.  He says that "the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances--is plagiarism," because all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously, drawn from sources everywhere.  

I think that he is correct to say that the film maker in Iran should have been allowed to develop his own adaptation of Salinger's story.  He makes a valid point asking what would it have hurt Salinger for Mehrjui to show his adaptation to an audience.  Salinger should have been glad that someone enjoyed his story so much and was touched so deeply by it that they would want to develop their own adaptation.  Doing this does not destroy the story as Salinger wrote it.  There are many adaptations of stories out there.  

Lethem says that "authors and their heirs should consider the subsequent parodies, refractions, quotations, and revisions an honor, or at least the price of rare success."  By threatening a lawsuit on the Film Society, Mehrjui is not given the opportunity to "build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work,"as copyright encourages others to do.