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☆ Long-lost 'Star Wars' X-wing model up for auction with $400,000 starting price
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-11 | by ( Issy Ronald | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +3 min

CNN —A long-lost model of an X-wing fighter used in the original 1977 “Star Wars” movie is up for auction, with a starting price of $400,000. Used in the filming of the final battle in “Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope” as the Rebel Alliance fight the Empire above the Death Star, the model “represents the pinnacle of Star Wars artifacts to ever reach the market,” Dallas-based auction house Heritage Auctions said. Long known as “the missing X-wing,” it was discovered by a team of visual effects experts, including Gene Kozicki (“Face/Off” and “Flight of the Phoenix”), as they helped Jein’s family sift through his collection, Kozicki told the Hollywood Reporter. “This model has not been displayed or modified since it left ILM (visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic),” Kozicki said. “(Steven Spielberg’s) ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ and ‘Star Wars’ were being made at roughly the same time, and with an overlapping group of people,” Kozicki said.

Persons: ”, Greg Jein, Long, Gene Kozicki, Kozicki, ” Kozicki, Oscar, George Lucas, Jein, “, Steven Spielberg’s, Steven Spielberg Organizations: CNN, “ Star, Rebel Alliance, Heritage, “, Hollywood, ILM, Maltese Falcon, Industrial, Hollywood Reporter, ‘ Locations: ” Dallas

☆ Long-lost ‘Star Wars’ X-wing model fetches over $3.1 million at auction
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-11 | by ( Issy Ronald | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +3 min

Editor’s Note: This article was updated with the final sale price and other details following the auction’s conclusion. CNN —A long-lost model of an X-wing fighter used in the original 1977 “Star Wars” movie sold at auction for over $3.13 million on Sunday. Used in the filming of the final battle in “Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope” as the Rebel Alliance fight the Empire above the Death Star, the model represented “the pinnacle of Star Wars artifacts to ever reach the market,” Dallas-based auction house Heritage Auctions said ahead of the sale. “This model has not been displayed or modified since it left ILM (visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic),” Kozicki said. “(Steven Spielberg’s) ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ and ‘Star Wars’ were being made at roughly the same time, and with an overlapping group of people,” Kozicki said.

Persons: ”, Greg Jein, ” Long, Gene Kozicki, Kozicki, ” Kozicki, Oscar, George Lucas, Jein, “, Steven Spielberg’s, Steven Spielberg Organizations: CNN, “ Star, Rebel Alliance, Heritage, “, Hollywood, ILM, Maltese Falcon, Industrial, Hollywood Reporter, ‘ Locations: ” Dallas

☆ How ‘Nimona’ Helped Its Creator Explore His Emerging Identity
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-30 | by ( Robert Ito | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The film had its beginnings in 2015, the same year the book was published, and is that rarest of Hollywood literary makeovers. For Stevenson, much of the book spoke to his own upbringing and experiences. Stevenson, 31, was born and raised in Columbia, S.C., the middle child of five siblings. After years of home-schooling and two more at the local high school, he went to the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he began posting Nimona comics online in 2012, a project that became his senior thesis. “When I first started making the comic, I didn’t consider myself a writer,” he said.

Persons: Nimona, Stevenson, ”, “, Nimona ”, Eisner, ” Stevenson, Ra Organizations: Hollywood, Netflix, Maryland Institute College of Art, ”, Fox Animation, Blue Sky Studios, DreamWorks, Media Locations: Hollywood, Burbank, Sur Monterey County, Columbia

☆ ChatGPT Secret Training Data: the Top 50 Books AI Bots Are Reading
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-30 | by ( Adam Rogers | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +13 min

To figure out what GPT-4 has read, they quizzed it on its knowledge of various books, as if it were a high-school English student. One way to answer the question is to look for information that could have come from only one place. Genre — sci-fi, mystery, romance, horror — is, broadly speaking, more interesting, partially because these books have plots where things actually happen. Bamman's GPT-4 list is a Borgesian library of episodic connections, cliffhangers, third-act complications, and characters taking arms against seas of troubles (and whales). See what a bot makes of Gene Wolfe's "The Book of the New Sun," maybe, or Sheri Tepper's "Grass."

☆ The Conversations That Entertain Us
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-25 | by ( Paula Marantz Cohen | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Conversation, when it is performed for an audience, has a structure and order that is impossible in real life. When my daughter was growing up, we watched the TV show “Gilmore Girls” together, and I was taken with the highly articulate and probing conversations of the characters, Lorelai and Rory, mother and daughter. “Let’s talk like Lorelai and Rory,” I would say to my daughter who, at 14 or 15, merely rolled her eyes and walked away. In most movies and TV shows, the talk between and among characters serves only to drive the action forward. When the characters played by Sydney Greenstreet and Humphrey Bogart in “The Maltese Falcon” say that they “like to talk,” the statement seems an ironic commentary on their cat-and-mouse interaction, which bears no resemblance to the undirected back-and-forth that constitutes good talk.

So You Want to Turn an Office Building Into a Home? There’s an appealing simplicity to the idea of converting office buildings into housing. Basically, they did this:How to Turn a 26-story Office Building Into a 30-story Apartment Building Cut a hole through 23 floors of the building. How to Turn a 26-story Office Building Into a 30-story Apartment Building Cut a hole through 23 floors of the building. That could change with tax abatements and subsidy programs, or if outdated office buildings lose so much value that the cost of acquiring them plummets.

☆ Bernard Kalb, longtime foreign affairs newsman, dies at 100
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-09 | by ( The Associated Press | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +4 min

“You have a historical memory to call upon and you see the trust of American foreign policy and other foreign policy,” he said. “Anything that hurts America’s credibility, hurts America.”New York Times columnist William Safire praised the resignation. “In his final official act, Bernard Kalb rose above ‘State Department spokesman’ to become the spokesman for all Americans who respect and demand the truth,” Safire wrote. At CBS Marvin and Bernard were known as “The Kalbs,” but Bernard lived somewhat in the shadow of his younger brother. One widely circulated, but apocryphal, story had their mother calling the CBS foreign desk in New York and saying: “Hello, this is Marvin Kalb’s mother.

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