The long-awaited movie version of "Dune" (2021) by science fiction fans has finally been released worldwide not long ago.
This magnificent epic film is based on the science fiction novel of the same name by American writer Frank Herbert, Dune. Winner of the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award, the original book is hailed as one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time and a source of inspiration for works such as Star Wars and Star Trek.
Over the decades, there have been many film adaptations of the Dune series, but these projects either ended in vain or came out with works that were widely criticized by fans... This makes Dune the hardest science fiction to film. The reason is that the previous several film and television works, fifty cent special effects, the cost is too low to produce effects, etc. are still acceptable, and the worst is that the screenwriters change randomly, hurting the feelings of the fans of the original work.
This time the "Dune" was filmed, and the main creative team directly hired Eric Roth as the screenwriter.
Ross is the screenwriter of Forrest Gump, The Wonders of Benjamin Button, and the executive producer of the Netflix version of House of Cards, and has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay five times, won once, and is known as one of the best screenwriters in Hollywood.
And this master attracted the attention of the Silicon Star people because:
His creative tools are so cool!
And, it's a unique, retro-inspired cool...
In the original Dune, the "thinking machine" was completely delegitimized after a great war ten thousand years ago. This is also why the dune world we see in the movie, although the background is a vast universe, can not see any high-tech existence at all.
In reality, As the screenwriter of this film, Ross's creative tools are also very "low-tech":
An old Win XP computer
MS-DOS environment
A DOS word processor with a history of more than 30 years
IBM Model M Keyboard:
<h2>
The Big Reveal: Rose's "Low Tech" Creative Environment
</h2>
Ross is an extremely disciplined writer, with two periods of concentrated work a day, each lasting 4-5 hours: getting up at 5:30 in the morning, eating a simple exercise and immediately devoting himself to creation until noon; continuing after dinner, until going to bed in the middle of the night.
"If I had written halfway the night before, the next day I wouldn't have waited to get up and keep writing because I knew I had found my way," he once said in an interview.
Ross's self-discipline is even more vividly reflected in his creative tools:
The computer he uses is still equipped with a Win XP system. Computers can be connected to the Internet, and AOL and Internet Explorer are also installed on them. However, when he writes, he will cut off the Internet:
As can be seen more clearly from the following figure, the wallpaper of the computer is xp classic blue sky and white clouds:
When he starts writing, Ross takes two steps back from XP and opens the MS-DOS environment installed on the computer:
Ms-DOS was developed by Microsoft and was the most installed DOS operating system in the PC era prior to Windows 95. Unlike today's graphical operating systems, MS-DOS was originally a command-line operating system, and human-computer interaction needed to be carried out through text commands, and the graphical interface was added in later versions.
Although MS-DOS is already a very old operating system, in fact, until a few years ago, some important institutions still adopted it, such as before 2011, the U.S. Navy has been using MS-DOS to manage food stocks:
Although Rose's computer has Win XP installed, every time he wants to write, he still has to turn on MS-DOS. Such a pass operation is quite troublesome. Because the last version of Windows officially supported by MS-DOS is Win 95, you have to use a virtual machine to open it on XP.
As for why MS-DOS is not possible, the reason is that Ross chose the writing software:
It's not Word, it's not the writing software that "productivity users" like Ulysses/Outline/Scrivener are familiar with, and it's not the Final Draft that claims to be "used by 95% of screenwriters."
It's Movie Master, a DOS software that's been around for more than 30 years. The first version of Movie Master was released in 1987 (Ross used v3.09), which is really antiquity software.
Rose revealed in an interview that he bought a floppy drive version of the software with the manufacturer very early. Movie Master doesn't exist today (even Hollywood Screenwriter, a follow-up screenwriting software that copied movie Master's source code and modified it, doesn't exist today).
In the 1980s, when the personal computer was rising, the software was so powerful that it was definitely an artifact of Hollywood playwrights at that time. In addition to the standard word processing features, it has built-in pop-up menus, a variety of text formats, anti-overwrite saving, text search and condition substitution, built-in dictionary spell checking, saving separate line files by role, and more.
With this 30-year-old software, Ross has written scripts for at least 30 film and television works such as Forrest Gump and Dune.
In a 2012 interview, he said: "I felt that if I were given two hours, I would learn to use Final Draft[the mainstream software in the screenwriting industry today]." But I'm a little superstitious again, and it feels silly, and I've made things more complicated myself. But in the end, I still think that if someone reads what is written with this thing, then it is safe to use it. ”
The only thing that is not cool is that Movie Master is a DOS software, so due to the limitation of system memory capacity, a file can only save up to 40 pages. Each time Rose finishes 40 pages, he saves it, prints it out, and sends it to the producer, who then scans the file and saves it to the electronic version.
He said that the software's memory-page limit forced him to tell a story in a shorter length, and if he couldn't finish a scene on 40 pages, it would mean that there was something wrong with my writing. ”
Rose's choice of typing tools makes many keyboard lovers smile:
IBM Model M keyboard
Model M, which began production in 1985, is the pioneer of today's mainstream QWERTY full keyboard standard layout. Its flexion spring shaft trigger structure allows for a unique "click" sound when tapping on the keyboard.
This keyboard, praised by the majority of mechanical keyboard enthusiasts as an "eternal classic", has countless fans around the world, and although it has long been discontinued, there are still manufacturers and die-hard fans (such as Lexmark/Unicomp, etc.) using the original mold to produce small batches of replicas.
Model M collector Brandon Ermita once said, "I like to use the iPad, it's cool to hold in my hand, I also like to read with the Kindle, it's really convenient." But they are not comparable to the Model M in terms of text input... Whenever I want to write an article or work, this product is my most trusted partner. ”
This keyboard is a classic of the year and one of the hallmarks of today's retro tech trend. Ross chose the Model M keyboard as his writing tool because it stayed with him for decades and, if well maintained, is almost impossible to break.
These tools, Ross has been using for decades. Except for a few devices (such as computer hardware, display screens, etc.) that have to be replaced because of aging, the entire creative environment has not changed much in the past 40 years.
You may wonder how the people you work with Ross can stand his backward, old-fashioned, inefficient way of working.
First of all, in Hollywood, although the hardware used for shooting, post-production special effects and other technologies have advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years, some conventional businesses in the industry do not have high technology content. For example, many of the communication between the scripts in the stage of creation and revision is carried out on paper, and even many of the film and television works we see are filmed on the scripts that have been altered on the spot.
In addition, the way many Hollywood bigwigs work is also very "low-tech". For example, one of the Jeffrey Katzenbergs (former chairman of Disney Pictures, co-founder of DreamWorks, and founder of Quibi) that we wrote about before rarely uses digital devices, and even e-mails have to be printed out for him.
Old computers, old software, did limit Rose's speed to some extent. However, he and the producers he works with are not particularly careful about the speed of his writing.
In the interview, he said: It is okay to drag the manuscript, and in the end, the delivery must still be delivered, and the things that are handed over must be able to shoot.
<h2>Why do big writers love "retro writing tools"? </h2>
Ross is not alone in his love of ancient writing tools.
In fact, in the Hollywood screenwriting industry, as well as in the larger community of European and American literary writers, the masters who have the same preferences as Ross can simply form a "DOS writing school".
The most famous of these people is probably George W. Bush, the author of A Song of Ice and Fire. R· R. Martin did.
Perhaps, there are more people in this world who have seen the divine drama "Game of Thrones" than those who have not seen it. However, people who know how the original author, Mr. Martin, wrote the original novel, are definitely a minority.
The computer used to write "A Song of Ice and Fire" is also equipped with a DOS system! As for what software to use, the old man mentioned it on the TV show before, called WordStar:
Specifically, he is using the WordStar 4.0 version.
The old man once said that he didn't use those high-tech document processing software, mainly because he didn't like the "smart" functions that were stupid, such as automatic capitalization, spell checking, and so on.
"I like (WordStar) the software, I want it all, nothing else. I don't need any help, and some software does you a favor all the time, such as having to turn this lowercase letter into an uppercase letter. If I needed to capitalize, I would capitalize myself! I'm not going to be able to press the shift key! ”
In daily work and life, the old man actually has two computers, one for returning mail on the Internet, and the other is this computer with DOS and WordStar, completely disconnected from the Internet and only used for writing.
(However, the old man has not filled in the pit in recent years, is it because he has been using the Internet that can access the Internet, resulting in unintentional creation?) ）
Another example is Robert E. Lee. J. Sawyer (Robert J. Sawyer), winner of the Hugo Award and nebula Award, has twice won the "Aurora Award", the highest award in Canadian science fiction, and created excellent works such as "The Ultimate Experiment" and "Brain Scan", known as the Godfather of Canadian Science Fiction.
The science fiction guru published an article back in 1990 about why WordStar is the best writing software for creators. The article was also re-submitted to the well-known technology and media Ars Technica in 2017, and the content of the article has remained largely unchanged.
Sawyer mentioned that many well-known science fiction authors are loyal users of doS version of WordStar, such as:
Arthur C. Clarke (one of the three sci-fi giants and author of the Space Odyssey series);
David Gerrold (Nebula, Hugo Award winner, co-writer of Star Trek);
James Gunn (writer and director of marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy series)
Why are these masters passionate about WordStar?
Sawyer believes that once familiar, writers can operate WordStar very fluently and can easily achieve blind typing.
WordStar was released in 1979. At that time, the computer keyboard had not yet been standardized, many of the keys necessary on today's keyboard were not, and this software made macros/shortcuts/menus for the key functions that many writers needed, and the shortcut design of some important functions also took into account the differences in the different finger strengths of the typists.
At the time, many early word-processing software mimicked the logic of typewriters, i.e., that text entry was irreversible. If you're already writing a line of text, it's best to finish it, because it's extremely tedious to move the cursor over and over again to the previous line or even to the previous page.
WordStar, on the other hand, has shortcuts for various cursor operations, making it easier to repeatedly modify documents. Unlike other competitors at the time, on WordStar, whether typing or editing after typing, the fingers did not have to leave the commonly used letter area.
Writing on WordStar (and Movie Master) brings the overall feel closer to "Longhand Writing", the way a manuscript is written with a pen and a hand-written complete sentence on paper (as opposed to the logic of a typewriter). In the contemporary era when science and technology are more developed and computers are inseparable, some well-known writers such as Haruki Murakami, J· K. Rowling, Susan Sontag, and others have adhered to this way of writing.
Although WordStar and Movie Master are old software. But these masters used them to write, pursuing the same thing as many writers today: a non-disturbing writing environment.
Those who chase the latest technology are destined to be in the minority. The mainstream community's acceptance of the new technology ultimately depends on whether it is really useful, whether it can be organically combined with their current work lifestyle, and improve efficiency.
For writers, tools are only tools after all, and they are the carriers of creative expression. The entire writing process, including the use of tools, ultimately serves the idea itself. No matter how technological the tool is, if you don't adapt to it, it won't serve you and help you.
Today, when everything seems to be explained by a 140-word or a 15-second short video, these ancient operating systems and writing software will continue to survive as long as there are people who stick to traditional writing.
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