We Defy Augury: August 2026

Saturday, August 15, 2026

The $2 Million Book That Was Maybe Written (Co-Written) By AI

WSJ - "The Red-Hot Book at the Center of an AI Mystery"

WSJ - "Author Whose $2 Million Book Deal Was Derailed by AI Concerns Says He’s Innocent"

Publishers Weekly - "After the Cancellation of ‘Call Me, I'll Hide the Body,’ What Comes Next?"

NYMag Ranks The 100 Most Powerful Directors in Hollywood

New York Magazine - "The 100 Most Powerful Directors in Hollywood 10 years ago, franchise producers dominated the movies. Now, the buzziest deals belong to auteurs."

"The balance of power has shifted, Puck’s Matt Belloni told me. It used to be that a figure like Pirates of the Caribbean’s Gore Verbinski, “a big-time commercial director,” was considered far more important to the industry than any Oscar-friendly auteur. “But because of the rise of film-fan culture, the communities built around filmmakers, that has given more power to the auteurs who can deliver an audience.” Think Ryan Coogler, Greta Gerwig, or Denis Villeneuve — “butts-in-seats directors who can also get awards,” Belloni says. IP is still king: Many of our most influential directors got that way thanks to their facility with it. However, if franchise producers were the power players of the 2010s, the buzziest deals and biggest releases of the 2020s belong to filmmakers who are attractions in their own right.

In a sense, we’re living through an echo of the 1970s, when Movie Brats like Coppola and Scorsese took over Hollywood, leveraging their own talent and reputation to get studios to bankroll their projects. The movie business is more niche today, but it’s also accessible to a wider group of directors, who now have myriad ways to wield their influence. The YouTube-to-horror pipeline is a well-trodden path to success. Indie studios like A24 and Neon dangle creative freedom in exchange for tastemaker cred. A new class of Oscar voters use their platform to elevate a host of fresh and exciting filmmakers."

Christopher Nolan's Trojan Horse

Wall Street Journal - "Christopher Nolan Breaks Down the Epic Scene at the Center of ‘The Odyssey’"

"On a vast beach in Morocco last year, waves were pummeling one of humanity’s oldest plot devices.

Christopher Nolan’s version of the Trojan Horse—35 feet tall and rearing on hind legs—was half buried in sand on the Atlantic coast. In the filmmaker’s imagination, the trick of hiding Greek warriors inside a wood contraption was more believable if it looked like a waterlogged offering to a god left by a departed army.

...

On the beach, however, it wasn’t clear if the horse would survive its scenes. Nolan’s crew watched anxiously as the surf tore pieces off their colossal prop of fiberglass, wood and steel. Later it took further beatings as they worked out how the 8,000-pound horse could be dragged over dunes and log rollers by actors with ropes."