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Interview with Tron Creator Steven Lisberger
NeoCode writes "AintItCool has posted an interesting interview with the Tron creator Steven Lisberger. He doesn't talk much about the sequel Tron 2.0 (because of a Disney gag order) but he reflects about the original movie with nostalgia. He talks about what influenced Tron and what Tron meant (and still does) to people. Have a read."
They really should call the sequel TROFF... or perhaps I need to get back on the medications.
Why do we need a sequel?
Tron was awesome because it wowed the audience with its technical advances. In these days with the Matrix and Star Wars and the like, technology isn't as thrilling. Sure, we like to see Pixar's next film, as they continually create more stunning characters and produce each sequential film is less time. That's cool. But it's not the drop-everything-OH-MY-GOD-let's-go-see-this film that Tron was.
Of course I'll go see it. I think that's a requirement of being a registered linux user, right? my point is that there are some films that had their day, still have their day, and should just be left alone. Tron is one of them.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
"Remind me. What was the Bit? "
The author sure did his research didn't he?
Did he even watch the movie?
Sure, the bit was a minor element in the movie, but come on.
First he states the tron is the best, then later asks: "Remind me. What was the Bit? "
/. do a 10 questions?
not really much of a tron fan.
then its?: I know you can't talk about tron 2, so here is a bunch of questions about tron 2...
blech.
Can
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Eisner: What kind of consumer is he?
Ghost of Disney: He's not any kind of consumer, Eisner. He's a geek.
Eisner: A geek?!
GoD: What's the matter, Eisner? You look nervous.
Eisner: Geeks... well, I mean... geeks wrote us. A geek even wrote you!
GoD: No one geek wrote me! I'm worth millions of their geek-years!
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I thought Bill Gates created tron and troff ... OH... sorry, I'm thinking of GWBASIC again.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I could be wrong but I believe it's called Tron Killer App
What's with this Disney gag order? I mean, come on! I, for one, would be more inclined to spend the $10 to see the movie if I had been able to read more about it from this interview.
Why must they do that?
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
by the monitor's "radiation king" standards back then -- that's 5 inches of hairline you won't be getting back. we will just leave alone the effects on the cornea and skin cancer and the coughwastedtimecough...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Homer: Uh...it's like...did anyone see the movie "Tron"?
Hibbert: No.
Lisa: No.
Marge: No.
Wiggum: No.
Bart: No.
Patty: No.
Wiggum: No.
Ned: No.
Selma: No.
Frink: No.
Lovejoy: No.
Wiggum: Yes. I mean -- um, I mean, no. No, heh.
-- "Treehouse of Horror VI"
Since the interview was a bit sucky, here is the official site for Tron 2.0, its got a pretty neat flash intro....worth a peek
In fact, much of the "CG" in Tron was hand-animated by some outsourced firm in Asia. The first movie to have "realistic CGI" was The Last Starfighter, with 27 minutes of CGI. Tron, except for the "light cycle" scene, did not have significant CGI.
Read this history of the field.
It was just a bit - the increment that we could get out of computers at the time.
The computer's equivalent to an atom?
Exactly. A zero and a one. A positive or a negative.
NO! The bit in Tron wasn't a bit at all! It didn't have two states, on and off, yes and no, zero and 1... it had three states: 'yes', 'no', and 'stateless'. It would sit there until Flynn asked it a question and then it would answer yes or no. That's not two states. I don't mean to be a stick-in-the-mud, but it isn't.
Now, if they would have had the bit only say 'yes' when the answer to a question was yes (or vice versa: say nothing until the answer is no), then it would have been a bit. Nothing or yes, nothing or no: they should have picked one of those.
This is just something that's been bugging me since I was like 15 or so is all. Nothing to see, move along...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
The MCP controlled access to the I/O system, or tried to. It died when a program got direct access to I/O. While it seemed to have the potential for much more, it spent a lot of its time on games. It obliterated other programs by absorbing their functionality. At its core, when everything else was stripped away, it had a teletype interface. Without it, the system had a lot more power (think CPU cycles). What it feared most was a debugging tool and it was destroyed by source code. (This last bit is clearly prophetic =)
Of course, as it turns out, it's very funny.
... Anytime a work like this can go from one generation to the next, it means something ...
At the time, the whole millenialist rigamarole, with computers serving as the mark of the beast, had not permeated popular culture.
Then, in this silly movie there are computer programs which get died red in order to show their obsequious obedience to antichrist, I mean to the Master Control Program.
It's an amusing transposition - much more amusing than it was at the time (oh, the commie/atheist/roman computer programs are forcing the christian computer programs to fight in gladiatorial games,) since computers themselves have had a lot of PR as instruments of Satan since then.
Q: Moby's live show has a grand finale where he takes a beam of light to the head and arcs his arm in a similar fashion to the grand finale of Tron... A:
Moby was born in 1965. He's 38 years old. Come on.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
BTW, that DVD is great. The directors commentary is just flat spectacular.
Is it really too much to tell us why you think it is spectacular??? Then we could make up our own minds whether it's worth getting or not. "I own this product and I think it's just great. You should own it too. The end."
GMD
watch this
If it's from Microsoft, no one will take the leap for a buggy 2.0 release.
Yeah, they'll all wait for Tron 97.
This interview just bares this out. No interviewing skills demonstrated, meandering thought processes and the general kiss-ass attitude is just overbearing. This is hardly an endorsement for Filter Magazine. Sheesh, if this is what they call content, then I'm moving my mouse over to the X button in a hurry.
He was in that for like five minutes before he got shot.
Besides, I wasn't trying give a complete filmography, just make some sort of fairly amusing almost-trend.)
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
He doesn't talk much about the sequel Tron 2.0 (because of a Disney gag order)
Ah yes, this must be one of those "stealth" marketing jobs, where they get signed agreements and/or threaten to sue anyone who so much as mentions a prospective film before its release. That way, nobody knows a damn thing about it until it comes out. I mean, we don't want to generate any buzz, develop a fan community, or leak out info that might drive potential customers mad with lust for the sequel, right? Right. I mean, it's all just so much darn work!
Where do I go to become a corporate marketing genius like the folks at Disney?
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
I think you really missed the whole Tron vibe.
It was a visceral glimpse into cyberspace, 2 years before Neuromancer.
I don't think it looked cheesy and cheap so much as other worldly. Blade Runner probably did the noir vibe better than Tron did cyberspace, but who wants to do a sequel to that...not would most things pale in comparison to that, but no company will pay for product placement, given the curse of the first....
Yes the acting was bad...I cringe everytime I hear the delivery of "The best programmer Encom ever had, and he ends up playing Space Cowboy in some back room" but it wasn't about the plot or the acting so much as the world...
All those other films you mentioned...all of them were lacking one important thing...deadly looking lowslung sleek black battletanks.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
"Do we really want Al Gore for a vice predident?! Come on, his favorite movie is "TRON" for fucks sake!"
Hrm. Those haven't been that great either, recently... never mind.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
digital binary logic calls this the Hi-Z (high impedence) setting. It's not logic zero (voltage 0, voltage -5, etc.), its not logic one (voltage 5, etc.) it's hi-z.
It's a bitch but thats how the circuits are defined.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Well, as long as there is as much spandex as in the first one, I'm game!
Duh-huh, what?? The Matrix is like the soggy paper towel of movies: The more you watch it, the more it decomposes into little lint balls. The AIs use humans for power?? So, they store and feed billions of people, plus expend untold megajoules on the whole distribution system, instead of tapping the nuclear fusion plants directly? Or sending up solar satellites above the atmospheric inteference?
There exists on the face of a mechanized Earth a city which is simultaneously (a) utterly secret and camouflage yet (b) densely populated and technologically extravagant?
The humans know enough to bend the rules and make 5-mile jumps but not to escape agents?
The Matrix was the worst kind of psuedo-mystic comic-book cookie-cutter claptrap to come down the pike in many a year. Fun to watch, soemwhat, but hardly a great movie.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
But wait. The Black Hole deserves a sequel first because (one must conclude) it's a better film than Tron. But it is also "Disney's worst film ever", meaning that any other Disney film is better than The Black Hole.
Yet Tron was a Disney film! So it must be better than The Black Hole, even though it has been posited to be worse than The Black Hole. You, my friend, have reasoned to a contradiction. Pffft! You disappear in a puff of mis-logic.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Tron was a box office bomb.
1. Make first CG movie
2. Lose Money
3. Make Sequel
4. ????
5. Profit!
Table-ized A.I.
The movie was rendered on a PDP-10 (well, a clone actually, but that doesn't matter) which had an instruction called TRON. I always thought the anti-christ-like character in the movie was so named because TRON's opcode expressed in octal, which was the convention for the PDP-10, is 666.
Anobody know if it was just a coincidence?
My main point about Tron was that many of the effects in Tron which today look like "obvious CG", weren't. All those nifty glow effects in scenes with live characters were hand animated.
I was surprised at the time that Burroughs didn't sue them for the use of the term "Master Control Program" in a derogatory way. The Burroughs MCP was a real, and quite good, operating system.
The Last Starfighter was the "Final Fantasy" of its day - good CG, miserable plot. But it was the movie that made it clear that minatures and matte paintings were on the way out. Tron was sort of "gee whiz, we can show the inside of a computer, but what else would we do this way?". The Last Starfighter was "this stuff is going to be a mainstream production tool."
A current graphics milestone: "Britney's Dance Beat" for PS2. The game sucks, but the character rendering is perhaps the best ever seen in a game.
Wha'?? No mention of Wendy Carlos and the wonderful Tron soundtrack??
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Did you notice that they talk about the technical travails in making it, they mention little incidents that happened along the way, and so forth - but they don't comment on the story itself, the plot, or anything like that?
Even they recognize that the movie was all about the technology used in making it, and the story was entirely secondary.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Trinary exists. It's even common, in the case of "high impedance."
What's this Submit thingy do?
(* The Last Starfighter was the "Final Fantasy" of its day - good CG, miserable plot. But it was the movie that made it clear that minatures and matte paintings were on the way out. *)
My reading suggests that CG was looked down on in Holywood after Tron until Terminator II made big bucks. This seems to be the turning point. Before that, it seemed to doom films WRT profits. If GC did not equal profits, then directors avoided it. James Cameron was happy with small-scale CG from Abyss, so was willing to use more for later films such as T2, and of course Titanic. He is known for his risk-taking in general. (Titanic was considered a huge gamble and he risked his own future returns on it.)
The Last Starfighter was pretty much a break-even film, wasn't it?
Table-ized A.I.
(* Read this history of the field. [siggraph.org] *)
I read this and have been poking around on Google.
It seems the first movie to use "3D" computer graphics was FutureWorld in 1976 where a human head was allegedly shown digitized into polygons. (It was the sequel to WestWorld, where android cowboys in a theme-park turn murderous. The original used some computer processing, but not 3D renderings.)
I have never seen FutureWorld, nor could find any screenshots of the CG in it. Has anybody here seen it and have comments?
Another oddity is about CG in the original Star Wars. Some accounts said they showed wire-frame "navigation" renderings of the Death Star tunnel on some of the ship equipment, but other accounts say that such was later added and that the original had zilch computer graphics whatsoever. IOW, the accounts seem to conflict.
Table-ized A.I.
2 should feature a cyber battle between a kid and the likes of Microsoft and DMCA who want to control his computer and content.
Table-ized A.I.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree. I loved Babylon 5, but one of my few misgivings about the show was that they let Bruce Boxleitner anywhere near it.
I consider Ralph Fiennes, Dame Judi Dench, Pete Postlethwaite, Jeremy Irons, Cate Blanchett, and Dame Maggie Smith to be good actors.
I consider Tom Hanks, Jackie Chan, Harrison Ford, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and (the late) John Wayne to be non-actors, but rather familiar, reassuring presences.
I consider Bruce Boxleitner, David Hasselhoff, Patrick Wayne, (the late) Doug McClure, Lindsay Wagner, Steven Seagal, Cheryl Ladd, Chuck Norris, and Jean-Claude Van Damme to be bad actors who have inexplicably (to me) ingratiated themselves with the film-going public.
I know, it might be unfair to include the action heroes in my list, who largely have no pretension of being actors, but I include them for one simple reason: too many people fail to distinguish between an actor and a star, and the difference is relevant to this discussion.
Note that I am not claiming that actors are never stars, or vice-versa, but that the two are not necessarily (or even often) connected.
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