mitting everything you're using to the lawyers." The lawyers check the list
and then say what can be used and what cannot. "If you cannot find the
original of a piece of artwork... you cannot use it." Even if you can find it,
often permission will be denied. The lawyers thus decide what's allowed in
the film. They decide what can be in the story.

The lawyers insist upon this control because the legal system has taught
them how costly less control can be. The film _Twelve_Monkeys_ was stopped
by a court twenty-eight days after its release because an artist claimed a chair
in the movie resembled a sketch of a piece of furniture that he had de-
signed. The movie _Batman_Forever_ was threatened because the Batmobile
drove through an allegedly copyrighted courtyard and the original architect
demanded money before the film could be released. In 1998, a judge
stopped the release of _The_Devil's_Advocate_ for two days because a sculptor
claimed his art was used in the background.[1-2] Such events teach the lawyers
that they must control the filmmakers.[1-3] They convince studios that creative
control is ultimately a legal matter.

This control creates burdens, and not just expense. "The cost for me,"
Guggenheim says, "is creativity... Suddenly the world that you're trying to
create is completely generic and void of the elements that you would nor-
mally create... It's my job to conceptualize and to create a world, and to
bring people into the world that I see. That's why they pay me as a director.
And if I see this person having a certain lifestyle, having this certain art on
the wall, and living a certain way, it is essential to... the vision I am trying
to portray. Now I somehow have to justify using it. And that is wrong."

///\\\

This is not a book about filmmaking. Whatever problems filmmakers
have, they are tiny in the order of things. But I begin with this example be-
cause it points to a much more fundamental puzzle, and one that will be
with us throughout this book: What could ever lead anyone to create such a
silly and extreme rule? Why would we burden the creative process -- not
just film, but generally, and not just the arts, but innovation more broadly --
with rules that seem to have no connection to innovation and creativity?

Copyright law, law professor Jessica Litman has written, is filled with
rules that ordinary people would respond to by saying, "There can't really be
a law that says that. That would be silly."[1-4] Yet in fact there is such a law,
and it does say just that, and it is, as the ordinary person rightly thinks, silly.
So why? What is the mentality that gets us to this place where highly edu-
cated, extremely highly paid lawyers run around negotiating for the rights to

[[4]]

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