Mark Woollen

I had never heard of Mark Woollen until I read this profile, but then I realized I knew him from his work, which I love. Among the movie trailers he has cut:

A much longer list of movies whose trailers are covered with his fingerprints reveals a guy with particular taste. In what is usually a vulgar craft, Woollen is an artist. He has a trademark style: no voiceovers, an occasional expository text card (perhaps his one concession to the advertising imperative), heavy reliance on a musical track to carry the emotional through line. Watching his work, it's clear he understands that it's not just about conveying the outline of the plot but the mood of the thing.

Like Woollen’s most impressive trailers, Birdman hinges on music. Early on, editors tried scoring the trailers to David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” and “Heroes.” Both felt overfamiliar. Iñárittu suggested Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” but Woollen had the same reservations. Then someone in the office found a live version Cee Lo had recorded for British TV, singing to a drum machine. It synced beautifully with the shorter “teaser.” Still, the video “wasn’t feeling special enough,” Woollen recalls. Then he remembered a long shot, 32 seconds of Keaton stalking down a hallway. It could be the perfect introduction to a movie that feels like one continuous shot. An editor ran it for only five seconds, but “I said, ‘Let’s just put the whole thing in.’ And it clicked — the feeling we’d been looking for.”

Birdman and Gone Girl are about as commercial as Woollen gets. Summer blockbusters are neither his interest nor his strong suit. Woollen helps sell what 12 Years a Slave producer Dede Gardner calls films without an “obvious headline,” crossovers with the potential to expand the mainstream. “For movies that are elliptical or episodic, you need someone who really understands tone and mood, because the story isn’t going to help you sell tickets. Mark makes something that is not commercial seem absolutely watchable.”

Multiple testing

One of the potential pitfalls that arises now that it's easier and easier to test hundreds of variables to try to find correlations is the problem of multiple comparisons or multiple testing. 

The term "comparisons" in multiple comparisons typically refers to comparisons of two groups, such as a treatment group and a control group. "Multiple comparisons" arise when a statistical analysis encompasses a number of formal comparisons, with the presumption that attention will focus on the strongest differences among all comparisons that are made. Failure to compensate for multiple comparisons can have important real-world consequences, as illustrated by the following examples.

  • Suppose the treatment is a new way of teaching writing to students, and the control is the standard way of teaching writing. Students in the two groups can be compared in terms of grammar, spelling, organization, content, and so on. As more attributes are compared, it becomes more likely that the treatment and control groups will appear to differ on at least one attribute by random chance alone.
  • Suppose we consider the efficacy of a drug in terms of the reduction of any one of a number of disease symptoms. As more symptoms are considered, it becomes more likely that the drug will appear to be an improvement over existing drugs in terms of at least one symptom.
  • Suppose we consider the safety of a drug in terms of the occurrences of different types of side effects. As more types of side effects are considered, it becomes more likely that the new drug will appear to be less safe than existing drugs in terms of at least one side effect.

In all three examples, as the number of comparisons increases, it becomes more likely that the groups being compared will appear to differ in terms of at least one attribute. Our confidence that a result will generalize to independent data should generally be weaker if it is observed as part of an analysis that involves multiple comparisons, rather than an analysis that involves only a single comparison.

For example, if one test is performed at the 5% level, there is only a 5% chance of incorrectly rejecting the null hypothesis if the null hypothesis is true. However, for 100 tests where all null hypotheses are true, the expected number of incorrect rejections is 5. If the tests are independent, the probability of at least one incorrect rejection is 99.4%. These errors are called false positives or Type I errors.

A recent NBER paper argues that this problem invalidates most finance papers claiming to have found some formula for investing success. The abstract:

Hundreds of papers and hundreds of factors attempt to explain the cross-section of expected returns. Given this extensive data mining, it does not make any economic or statistical sense to use the usual significance criteria for a newly discovered factor, e.g., a t-ratio greater than 2.0. However, what hurdle should be used for current research? Our paper introduces a multiple testing framework and provides a time series of historical significance cutoffs from the first empirical tests in 1967 to today. Our new method allows for correlation among the tests as well as missing data. We also project forward 20 years assuming the rate of factor production remains similar to the experience of the last few years. The estimation of our model suggests that a newly discovered factor needs to clear a much higher hurdle, with a t-ratio greater than 3.0. Echoing a recent disturbing conclusion in the medical literature, we argue that most claimed research findings in financial economics are likely false.

Gaze deeply enough into the noise and you'll see some pattern.

[via Vox]

RELATED: Spurious correlations

Robots take all the jobs (composer edition)

Xhail is a new service that offers a unique, custom score for your movie.

Here's the rub: the score is written by software, using real instrument stems. Instead of talking to a composer about what you want, you simply type in keywords like “fantasy” or “melancholy” and the software returns a score which you can customize using the interface provided. Add instruments, take out sections, add percussive emphasis at key timecode to match action on screen. The demo video gives a good sense of how it works.

Lots of details are still missing, like how much does it cost? Still, it's an impressive demo. The track composed for the fantasy short at the end of the demo video and the interface for modifying the video both were much better than I expected. You'd expect nothing less from a scripted demo video, and we'll have to wait for a public release to see if it's all that, but I'm intrigued.

I suspect many will rush to dismiss this service, especially my friends in the filmmaking world, just as people tend to do with any computer-generated art, but some of that, as always, comes from either a general technophobia or reverence for human creation.

If you can afford a real composer, this isn't a service targeted at you. Facetious title of my post aside, I suspect this is a less a case of replacing our existing composer supply than adding supply at the low end of the market.

That Lebron ad

Nike just released a black and white spot titled Together, starring Lebron James. Many people forwarded it to me, and it was posted a lot in my Facebook and Twitter streams, to almost universal adoration. In it, thousands of citizens of Cleveland join Lebron and his teammates in the pre-game huddle, infusing their team's upcoming season with an almost spiritual civic calling.

Maybe I'm a cold-hearted cynic, but it struck me as simply the slickest of propaganda, a bit like the recent Derek Jeter Gatorade ad. The Jeter ad was also grandiose, black and whtie footage showing him mixing with the people of New York on his way to the stadium, but at least it was a retrospective, and Yankees fans mythologize him in a way that probably makes it feel as if he's a man of the people, someone who belongs to them, even if he isn't, not any more than most celebrity stars (the most honest part of the ad was when some bar owner says to Jeter “We've been waiting for you to come into here since 98 at least” and Jeter retorts, “You never invited me.”).

It's understandable, Nike and Lebron have been trying to couch his entire return to Cleveland as motivated purely by his loyalty to his home city. It began with the letter he wrote announcing his resigning with the Cavaliers (emphasis mine):

Before anyone ever cared where I would play basketball, I was a kid from Northeast Ohio. It’s where I walked. It’s where I ran. It’s where I cried. It’s where I bled. It holds a special place in my heart. People there have seen me grow up. I sometimes feel like I’m their son. Their passion can be overwhelming. But it drives me. I want to give them hope when I can. I want to inspire them when I can. My relationship with Northeast Ohio is bigger than basketball. I didn’t realize that four years ago. I do now.

...

When I left Cleveland, I was on a mission. I was seeking championships, and we won two. But Miami already knew that feeling. Our city hasn’t had that feeling in a long, long, long time. My goal is still to win as many titles as possible, no question. But what’s most important for me is bringing one trophy back to Northeast Ohio.

I always believed that I’d return to Cleveland and finish my career there. I just didn’t know when. After the season, free agency wasn’t even a thought. But I have two boys and my wife, Savannah, is pregnant with a girl. I started thinking about what it would be like to raise my family in my hometown. I looked at other teams, but I wasn’t going to leave Miami for anywhere except Cleveland. The more time passed, the more it felt right. This is what makes me happy.

...

But this is not about the roster or the organization. I feel my calling here goes above basketball. I have a responsibility to lead, in more ways than one, and I take that very seriously. My presence can make a difference in Miami, but I think it can mean more where I’m from. I want kids in Northeast Ohio, like the hundreds of Akron third-graders I sponsor through my foundation, to realize that there’s no better place to grow up. Maybe some of them will come home after college and start a family or open a business. That would make me smile. Our community, which has struggled so much, needs all the talent it can get.

Really? Lebron always knew he was going to go back to Cleveland? He wants to lift up the local economy?

Would Lebron have gone back to Cleveland if they didn't have Kyrie Irving and back-to-back first overall draft picks in Anthony Bennett and Andrew Wiggins, who they parlayed into Kevin Love? Let's look back at the two previous times Lebron has been on rosters in decline and see what he did. He left both times.

I'm sure going back home was one checkmark in the plus column for him, and given fans were burning his jersey the last time he left, I don't blame Nike and Lebron for trying to flip the narrative on his return to try to win back the Cleveland fans. I didn't watch his first home game last night against the Knicks, but I saw a highlight of him in the tunnel with his teammates, gathering them in a huddle, telling them this was one of the most important games in history.

Why would it be one of the most important games in history? There's only one reason, because he was playing back in Cleveland. Either he buys into this vision of him as an economic messiah for Ohio, or he's playing the part as scripted in the Nike ad, but either way it's a comical level of self-importance.

No argument here, he's been the best player in the NBA for several years, he's one of the all-time greats. I also don't think players owe their teams a lifetime commitment of employment, especially since they don't have much choice in who drafts them. I don't hold it against players when they sign where they can get the most money, it's the same thing most people in any profession would do. Frankly, a player like Lebron is grossly underpaid, as are star young athletes in most sports given artificial salary restrictions in the years after they're drafted up until they become free agents.

This is also Nike's brand, they're famous for trying to transform a mundane pair of sneakers into a golden ticket into the community of elite go-getters. Growing up in Chicago a Bulls fan, I can recall many of Michael Jordan's Nike ads by heart. But almost all of them were centered around his mastery of the craft of basketball, and the transference of that skill to his shoes in the typical halo of excellence that all brands dream of for their products. They didn't show Jordan hanging out with people on the streets of Chicago, they didn't pretend he was accessible or normal in any way. From all accounts, he's a competitive sociopath, and the greatest basketball player of all time, and lots of people idolized him. His Nike spots never tried to deny that, they worked with it.

An honest reading of Lebron's return to Cleveland is that it ended up meshing with his own self-interest in being with a roster on the upswing, with two young All-Star talents and room to maneuver at the trade deadline. That wouldn't make for a great commercial, though, and so we post his new spot to social media with captions like “Chills!” I can't even blame the fans of Cleveland if they've bought into this new narrative. It's more fun than holding a grudge.

And hey, cool kicks.