Mehan Jayasuriya

On a rainy Wednesday afternoon, the Apple store on North Michigan has attracted a standing-room-only crowd.

Today's talk is being given by movie critic Roger Ebert, on the topic of the "everyman" filmmaker. "People always ask me `How do I become a filmmaker?'" Ebert announces. "The answer is, you have to start being a filmmaker."

To demonstrate how this is done, he shows the crowd a series of clips from recent and upcoming films, all produced using Macs. One of the films he presents is Jonathan Caouette's "Tarnation," a documentary of the director's life with his schizophrenic mother. The film is essentially an assemblage of old home movies, audio, photographs and digital video, edited using Apple's iMovie software for a reported total cost of $218. It went on to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival where John Cameron Mitchell and Gus Van Sant signed on as executive producers. "It's amazing," gushes one of iMovie's original programmers who is on hand for the event. "This is why I wrote the program."

Ebert is quick to praise iMovie and attests to its ease of use, "I looked at it and I figured out how it works." Towards the end of his talk, he makes an admission: "I know this sounds like a commercial but I'm just a Mac guy. I got my first Mac in 1987 and it changed my life." He closes by quoting Marx, claiming that Apple has "put the means of production into the hands of the workers." Could even the great social critic Karl Marx resist the allure of a shiny new PowerBook?

(2004-07-27)

Also by Mehan Jayasuriya

Edwards bound
A man jokes, "I'm with the Secret Service, that's why I'm sitting here," while a real Secret Service agent shoots him a disapproving glance
(2004-07-21)

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