The Entertainment Gathering

What clearly set Raisin in the Sun apart was that it deals with a black American family not a white American family.

I acquired the rights for a Broadway revival and began the task of getting it started, which meant we needed a director. If you have a good director, you can get the stars, and the stars make the show happen. They also had to be African American. The problem is there were only two people in the world that fit this, first is George Wolf and the second was Mariam Clinton. We had, as they say, artistic differences. Being a producer is like being a magician, you have to create the illusion for everyone that everything is moving forward all the time. White people told me it’s a black play and black people won’t come to broadway, and black people tell me the play is dated.

There was not one other African American director who had major Broadway experience. Raisin not a performance piece, it’s very well laid out by Lorraine. Isn’t the theater where men potrayed women 400 years ago, or the color-blind casting of the 70s. At the core was that story. Wilson said, “I’m not carrying a banner for black directors, I decline a white director not on the basis of race, but on the basis of culture.” We’ve heard this story before when Spielberg directed A Color Purple. We’re seeing the same story played out in the Martin Luther King memorial in Washington D.C. Back to Raisin. It’s now four years: no star, no director, there’s a possibility I’ll lose the rights.

I took a risk on a regional director, who had exactly one minor New York credit. Sean P. Diddy Combs would be making his Broadway debut with us. Kenny led the cast both onstage and off, and sure enough the scenes that usually put audiences to sleep, were riveting. Each night when they got to those scenes got an ovation. Raisin would succeed in drawing huge numbers of African Americans to the theater, most performances wer 80% black.

Most memorable night for me was when Mohammad Ali came. I’ve never seen famous people get so excited about seeing another famous people. P. Diddy grabs a picture of him he had on his dresser to get him to sign it. I think about it and I try to figure out where that leaves us, I feel a great love for this play and a deep connection to it, and I think many do, when I was watching Milk last week I was so happy gay people had made that movie. But should only women direct movies about women, or Muslim people direct plays about Muslims? It was Kenny’s culture, not his race, that contributed to the success of the production amoung many other factors. If there was a black director that grew up in Beverly Hills, would he be as qualified as one from Chicago?

Lincoln theater will be doing the first major rivival of August Wilson’s play since his death. Ultimately in this age of ubercommunications, the theater somehow survives. The reason is that theater, like this, is ultimately about community. I want the communities to grow and evolve, and to this I think we have to tell each other stories, but sometimes to grow we need to really sit back and listen.

You can find more about Alvy Ray Smith’s website here. Known for his work in computer graphics, he now has a second life as a genealogist.

Not going to talk about Pixar.I’d like to pay homage to the theory of computability. It’s the theory of how computers work and one of the great inventions of humankind. The Turing and post research invented this theory of computation and it underlies our entire world today. But it’s recent. What I like about computability because it’s tied to what makes life tick, and what makes art tick. Everything I’ve done is tied together with living things, art, and computation.

I learned about computation theory as a graduate student at Stanford and learned it through the form of celluer atonoma theory. It turns out you can do anything in computing with it. I wrote my thesis on self-reproducing machines. These organizations of patterns, each its own computer, would over time build a copy of themselves ad infinitum. Even though I had these theories, my biggest thrill was to get the cover of Scientific American. The game of life had just come out, and it was the most popular topic that Scientific American had ever published.

I had a whole career in celluer atomona theory that most people don’t know about. I broke my leg skiing and decided I wasn’t doing anything with my art and it was time to move on. I went to Xerox PARC and talked my way into its halls at its apex, to help out with Paint. Not going to talk about it because two great books are out: Droidmaker and The Pixar Touch. Decided to go to my “old man stack” where I would put all the ideas I had but that I was too busy doing movies or starting companies. One of these was to do a mathmatical theory and have it published in a mathmatical journal. It’s a complete generation of Napoleon’s therom. It took a year.

Second thing on the stack was digital photography, spent a  year, went to Africa.

Third thing, do my Mom’s genealogy. This is a picture of New Mexico. Our version of US History was Spanish, didn’t care about back east. Our heroes were Coronado, Devargas, then there were the Pueblos along the Rio Grande. One remnant of this time is the name Pixar which is a Spanish verb meaning to make pictures, of course it’s made up. Mom was turning 80 and I decided I wanted to do something really special for her, she had given me an old notebook from a great-Aunt from New Jersrey, I deciphered it and found that it mentioned the Revolutionary War in there. I wrote up a short book and gave it to my Mom for her 80th. I sent it off to a place in Boston called the New England Genealogy Society. Lucky for me the woman who read it, one of the fellows, I wrote her saying she made a mistake, she said I didn’t make a mistake but I have a theory or your problem, and wrote it up in the scholarly way. I got a free tutorial on how to do it right. The theory is wrong, their families didn’t intersect, but you can have my Word document.

Took the 8-page document and blew it out to 583 pages. Three mentors there, one in the Great Migration which is everybody who came from England to New England between 1620 and 1640. He’s 9 volumes into what he thinks will be a 20 volume series about that period. Long story short I wrote a book for Mom, and then I noticed Dad was a little jealous so I did a book for him, over 800 pages. Now have published over 3200 pages of scholarly genealogy. Each is a footnote in each book. As one of my mentors said, “You’ll get over it, it’s not really about you.”

The Y chromosone is passed down the male chain unchanged, mitocondria is passed down the female chain unchanged. Did a DNA-enhanced descent chart, I was able to derived what the DNA of the ancestor had to be. Next thing I’m doing is going back to a paper I wrote in 1984, I generate things you can think of as genes and turn into plants, they grow, flower. That was four or five orders of computation magnitude ago, now want to see what I can do.

Scott Kim’s website is at shufflebrain.com.

For the last 20 years I’ve been designing puzzles. Have done them for books, toys, computer games, puzzle column for Discover magazine.

A puzzle is a problem that is fun to solve (as opposed to everyday problems) and has a right answer (as opposed to a toy or game).

Puzzles are an art form. It’s a small form like a joke, poem, trick, or song, and the best ones are memorable. Shows the Vase/Profile.

Ambigram, going to feature heavily in next Dan Brown movie.

Rush Hour by Nob Yoshigahara, it’s a sliding block puzzle. I saw this idea and I wanted to make a sequel, it should have its own identity. Railroad Rush Hour, new square piece that can move both ways.

Dominate form of electronic gaming is casual (Bejeweled) and interactive (Rock Band). Second trend is mental fitness, games like Brain Age, Soduku. Third trend is social media, Facebook and Youtube.

First game is called Photograb. Next game will be called Wordstream.

I use visual tools a lot to try to understand how our brain constructs reality. Shows illusion of something that appears to be a female nude but is really the underarm of a guy:

Second illusion shows the A and B squares are actually the same color:

Personal question, to find the best visual illusion. They run a contest every year.

These help reveal how our sensory systems work. Magicians use their intuitions to create the same things, and we can learn from them. Article in Scientific American this month.

How do magicians fool us? They use special effects, optical illusions, the most powerful weapon is the cognitive illusions, the manipulation, the channeling, the misdirection of attention and even memory.

[Watch it! That one blew me away.] A driver will be driving down the road looking for cars, not noticing cyclists and such. Now a Whodunnit video:

Is everything an illusion? The answer is yes. And no one has put this better than the famous philosopher, Keanu Reeves. Even after Neo picks the red pill, everything is still the result of electric impulses being transmitted and perceived by the brain. Our perception of the world is entirely illusion, everything we see is often very far from its reality.