Thursday, October 19, 2006

Fun with the Law

In the course of a small assignment for the Philadelphia Business Journal today, I had occasion to interview a lawyer named Tobey Oxholm, the creator of the new Drexel University law school (how cool is that - there are only a handful of people ever in human history who can say "I created a law school." That is a really excellent career aspiration). He turned out to be an interesting guy - almost had me thinking about law school again for the first time in more than a decade (I wanted to be a Supreme Court Justice, another really excellent career aspiration. Fortunately I realized that is a slightly specialized ambition and backed out before I wound up writing briefs on tax law for the rest of my miserable life).

In any event, I asked him for a headshot - one of those canned mug shots that newspapers run with profiles and so forth. So moments ago in my email, I received this:



I think I like this guy.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

How does he do it? Volume.

I see this morning in Variety that George Lucas has decided to quit making films. What's really interesting, though, is that he admits what we were all beginning to suspect about his philosophy of filmmaking.

"We don't want to make movies. We're about to get into television. As far as Lucasfilm is concerned, we've moved away from the feature film thing because it's too expensive and it's too risky ... I think the secret to the future is quantity," Lucas said.

Ah, that would explain why he spent the last four Star Wars movies pumping out crud - it doesn't matter if they aren't remotely as good as Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back so long as there are more and more of them.