Movie Actor Research Articles

Systemic problem of education and professional evolvement of students specializing in «Drama theatre and movie actor» in higher educational institutions

The purpose of the article — to analyze the already existing system of education and professional evolvement of drama theatre and movie actors, and to propose an effective algorithm for working with students of performing art departments in higher educational institutions.
 The methodology. The methodology of the article is determined by the research topic’s peculiar nature, relies on the authors’ practical experience and is conditioned by the purpose of the article. Among the methodological tools, an interdisciplinary approach was employed (thanks to the use of professional descriptions from such disciplines as pedagogical science, psychology, aesthetics and others) and the functional approach, which determines the scientific weight of the issues outlined in the article due to their real functioning in culture and in historical perspective. Also, the axiological method and the interpretation method were used to explain social and cultural factors of future actors’ education and to analyze additional levers and professional evolvement.
 The results. 1. The main areas of future drama theatre and movie actors’ training were analyzed in order to determine the key problems of professional evolvement of students specializing in theatre in higher educational institutions. 2. The stratum of historical course in formation of actor’s profession as an independent professional activity was studied. 3. The main levers of artistic influence and operational tools for future theatre and movie actors’ education have been defined.
 The scientific novelty. Professional artistic education directed at theatre arts should never be silent about the problems of education and professional evolvement of students specializing in drama theatre and movie in higher educational institutions, which problems have already become systemic. One of the key reasons for that lies in the inconsistency with current realities of the world’s theatre process and Ukrainian artistic space.
 The practical significance. The actor is a truly unique and universal profession, yet one should exactly define what namely its universality and uniqueness lies in. The profession of theatre and movie actor does not simply represent the knowledge of certain elements of the craft, tools and instruments that the actor must possess (voice, rhythmicity, development of imagination and fantasy, emotional and psychophysical memory), but also is complemented by in-depth analytical research into the “novel of life” — biographies of people played by actors, the ability to form his or her professional “circle of attention”. It would be highly appropriate to permanently employ physical training elements (language and visual ones, transition from one environment to another etc.). All that and many other components, which the actor deals with when operating within realistic psychological theatre training system, determine the success of professional evolvement.

Afterword: The Sociology of a Movie Actor

Afterword: The Sociology of a Movie Actor

Artists in Isolation: The Paradox of Recognition in Paul Auster’s the Book of Illusions

ABSTRACT Paul Auster’s novel The Book of Illusions presents a series of isolated, decentered artists whose identities, not merely their stories, are nested inside one another. Through a handful of textual clues, the narrator Zimmer assembles, within himself, the identity of the silent movie actor Hector Mann, and that construction, in turn, reflects back on Zimmer and secures his identity. The creative act can become a debilitating retreat or a productive form of intersubjectivity. In his quest for a stable identity, Zimmer explores what it means to be either an artist like Mann who shuts out the audience, depriving himself of the other’s gaze, or one who narrates himself into existence through a communion with absent and imaginary people. Auster complicates a simple notion of recognition and the possibility of intersubjectivity, by rejecting humanist presuppositions about the subject and by qualifying – through his depiction of desire and the quest narrative – a postmodern view of the decentered, intertextual subject. A postmodern dialectics of recognition appear not only in Zimmer’s textual relation to Mann and his flesh-and-blood relation to Alma, but also in Mann’s secret film The Inner Life of Martin Frost.

Im Hwa: colonial film criticism in Korea

ABSTRACT Two articles of Im Hwa on Korean film during colonial rule, originally published in 1941 and 1942, have been translated into English and appeared in the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema in 2019 and 2020. This article further introduces the author Im (1908–1953), who was an influential Korean socialist poet, literary and filmic critic, as well as movie actor. It illustrates Im Hwa’s itinerary as a film critic whose major interests were on the ontology of Joseon (Korean) cinema as a particular cinema that cannot be assimilated to then the Japanese state cinema. In his writings, Im advances the notions of ‘transplantation’ in order to articulate ‘artistic features of Joseon cinema’, which he sees as a key strategy for Joseon cinema to critically engage in the ‘transitional period’ of the early 1940s, during which the industrialization of Joseon film production had been longed for, but collapsed and absorbed into the state-run Joseon Motion Picture Corporation during the Greater East Asian War.

‘영화황제’ 김염(金焰)의 항일영화인 형상*

‘영화황제’ 김염(金焰)의 항일영화인 형상*

Leaving the Building: Elvis, Celebrity, Biography, and the Limits of Psychological Autopsy

Elvis was unhappy. He’d failed in his ambition to become a serious movie actor. His Las Vegas appearances, after just a year, were already boring him. He was isolated, not going anywhere without his bodyguards. And relations were strained with his wife. Not that I ever knew Elvis. I just knew this from reading some books. Edwin Newman in Elvis and Nixon In the mockumentary Elvis and Nixon, long-time NBC newsman Edwin Newman makes a cameo appearance billed as a “legendary TV journalist.” With ...

Симбіоз літератури і кінематографа у творчості українського митця М. С. Вінграновського

In this article investigational symbiosis of literature (poetries and proses) and cinema (future and documentary cinema) creative activity of the of genius Ukrainian poet, writer, fi lm director, movie actor, scenario writer, Honoured Worker of Arts of Ukraine, Laureate of the Taras Shevchenko’s National Premium of Ukraine Mykola S. Vingranovskуі, 2016 year there would be eighty years was born.Autor brought the list over of poetic and prosaic works of Mykola S. Vingranovskyi; told about feature and documentary fi lms, made by Mykola S. Vingranovskyi in Ukraine

‘Friending’ Jet Li on Facebook: The Chinese celebrity persona in online social networks

Abstract In recent years, well-known martial arts movie actor Jet Li has attained phenomenal success through star-powered philanthropy, even establishing his own worldwide humanitarian charity, One Foundation. With the advent of participatory Web-based culture, cyberspace becomes an emergent locus of constructing and reinventing Li’s star image. This article investigates Li’s celebrity-philanthropist image in cyberspace and its signification. The analysis focuses on Facebook Pages, an organized virtual space displaying content including user interactions and microblogging known as a timeline. This article argues that Facebook presents a new and promising venue for users to negotiate Li’s ‘polysemic’ personae as martial arts master and philanthropist juxtapose, parallel and contradict each other in a decidedly nationalist vs cosmopolitan manner. Li’s national-yet-cosmopolitan personality not only yields an image of a viable global player in the entertainment arena but also serves as a text of linked significations opened up for users’ relentless (re)making, revisiting and interrogating, complicating the meaning of Chinese celebrities in the milieu of globalcyber culture.

Someone Else

Someone Else Chris Offutt (bio) By the time I was fourteen, my family was accustomed to my absences—wandering the woods, sleeping in town, eating at other people's homes. What mattered to my parents were academic grades. I maintained all A's, an easy task in Appalachia during the sixties and seventies. Of equal importance was granting utter obedience to Dad, and never causing my mother public embarrassment. With this veneer of civility thus attended to, I was free. I don't remember how I met the fatman. I assume he approached me. He lived in town on the second floor of a small building, where he rented a single room with a bathroom in the hall. He was nice. He bought me candy bars and bottles of pop, which my parents never allowed me to have. I told him about my life and girls I liked. At four feet eleven inches, I was the shortest kid in high school with the longest hair, reputed to be the smartest but lousy at sports. The fatman listened to me. He offered a kind of sympathy and attentiveness that I needed. He accepted that I wanted to be an actor or a comic book artist when I grew up, and he believed such aspirations weren't ridiculous. He didn't talk about himself but implied that he'd experienced life beyond the [End Page 41] confines of Rowan County, and that I would like it out there when I finally left. I was vulnerable, I suppose, although not a dire misfit. I was open and friendly, having gone through eight years of grade school with the same small group of kids, then riding the bus ten miles to high school. One by one, my classmates began losing the habit of attending school. It was not expected but certainly accepted, and of little concern. After all, we were from Haldeman, the community farthest from town, site of the main bootlegger, weekly drag strips, occasional shootings and arson. We were at the bottom of a pecking order that didn't start very high. Bussed into town, we became aware of our status. Some of us responded by staying at home, changing our style of dress, or becoming withdrawn. I explored town. The fatman's room was small, with no chair, and we both had to sit on the bed. The whole time I pretended it was happening to someone else. Afterwards, the fatman said he liked me. He gave me money. I left the room and walked to the drugstore, where my mother picked me up after shopping for groceries. I bought a lot of comic books at the drugstore. She didn't ask where I got the money. I don't remember his name or what he looked like. I don't recall the print on the wallpaper or the color of the bedspread. What I do remember is the overhead light fixture, a plain bisected globe in a ceramic setting that emitted a dim yellowish light. Surrounding the globe and painted over many times were plaster rosettes with narrow leaves. I remember the light because I spent all my time staring at it and waiting until I could leave. When I returned, I climbed the steps very slowly, trying not to make any noise because I didn't want to get the fatman in trouble. A clot of tension rose along my spine, vibrating like an embedded blade. I felt hollow—my heart pounding, sweat trickling down my sides, mouth dry, my stomach congealed to stone. The fatman opened the door and ushered me in. The bed sagged when he sat down. The money lay in sight on the bedside table. Time stopped as I slid away from my body to rove the air, imagining a life beyond the hills. I would be a movie actor. Beautiful women would throw themselves at me as I [End Page 42] left French cafés. I was the mayor's son, the governor's nephew. I was secretly adopted. I inherited a Lexington horse farm. I was anyone but a lonely kid feeling the dampness of fat fingers. Click for larger view View full...

Troisième humanité by Bernard Werber

be a long time in coming. In the long soliloquy that constitutes this novel, the narrator alternates between speaking to “tu” directly about their present situation and telling her personal story. We do not know if he is listening to her, but we certainly are, and with growing curiosity. While the device feels somewhat forced, the flow of information is not devoid of verisimilitude. We learn that our narrator is a wife, a mother, and a film journalist with a long series of movie star interviews to her credit. The offhand manner in which she talks of her family and her job makes it clear that, in fact, her life is of absolutely no interest to her (which, ironically, makes it more interesting to us). And then a certain someone spills a Diet Coke on her sweater, apologizes and the die is cast:“Le mal n’avait plus qu’à incuber”(60). Her obsession begins like a bolt of lightning. It develops over time, and she recounts its evolution within her, again interspersed with flashes of the present situation.And it is thus that we come to understand ; the“tu”is a not-so-handsome movie actor being held captive by our outwardly rational journalist.A few innocuous encounters between the two of them have sufficed to break the pattern of her universe where, as she puts it: “J’ai commencé à vivre à l’infinitif, un temps mort vivant. Vider la poubelle. Étendre le linge. Trouver le livre. Voir le film. Faire l’interview. Sourire. Parler. Faire rire” (75). One day, after an interview , he hugs her, innocently enough, but it pushes the obsession along.After another encounter, again professional, he suggests that she call him to go out for coffee and gives her his number. She calls; he does not call back:“En ne partageant pas ce café avec moi, tu ne m’as pas déçue. Tu m’as trahie. Et c’est pour cela que tu es ici” (146). The rest of the novel is made up of the kidnapping, the captivity, and eventual release of the poor unsuspecting actor, all of which underline the narrator’s insanity. Madness is difficult to portray but the obsessed woman in Brioche makes perfect sense. How could she be anything but what she is? This is the mark of successful character development , if not necessarily the guarantee of an excellent novel. Metropolitan State University of Denver (CO) Ann Williams Werber, Bernard. Troisième humanité. Paris: Albin Michel, 2012. ISBN 978-222624422 -2. Pp. 587. 22,90 a. Werber’s first trilogy, Les fourmis, put him on the literary map twenty years ago. In Troisième humanité, he reconnects with the Wells family, in this first part of an equally ambitious multi-part saga,taking place in relative time: ”Elle se passe précisément dix ans, jour pour jour, après l’instant où vous (le lecteur) ouvrirez ce roman et commencerez à le lire” (avertissement). This time, however, he blends the past, present, and potential future in a roller coaster ride of urgency.Gone“homo gigantis”discovered in the opening by Charles Wells, Edmond’s descendant, “homo sapiens” is about to follow suit as David Wells, his colleague Aurore and his scientific team race against time to create“homo metamorphosis,”a mini-human population, the third humanity, 286 FRENCH REVIEW 87.1 Reviews 287 more feminized, resistant, and unified, to combat extremism, and to stop harm to the earth. Each time the earth feels threatened—it is a living, breathing, verbal entity in this novel—whether being “drained” of its oil or incessantly overpopulated—the earth in turn strikes back with plague, tornadoes, or nuclear reactor meltdowns, just to name a few. Werber tries to create a delicate balance between the earth and its inhabitants, making use of “L’Encyclopédie du Savoir Relatif et Absolu”that he so successfully used in Les fourmis, and giving voice to a planet exhausted by man’s tendency towards violence, waste, and ruin. How original to“hear”the earth complain about drilling its surface, to wonder how it will combat the meteor bits hurling at it, to sense its loneliness vis-à-vis the lack of...

Comments on “A Hirsch-type index of co-author partnership ability”

In a recent contribution to this journal Andras Schubert proposed the partnership ability index, denoted as u (Schubert 2012). He pointed out that his idea fits into the framework introduced in (Zhao et al. 2011). Indeed, Zhao et al. defined the h-degree of node n in a weighted network as the number dh(n) if dh(n) is the largest natural number such that n has at least dh(n) links each with strength at least equal to dh(n). In this context weights are assumed to be natural numbers. Applying this definition to a partnership, e.g., a coauthorship, network, this number becomes the largest natural number P such that an actor has at least P partners with whom he/she had at least P joint actions. Replacing P with u gives exactly Schubert’s partnership ability index. This shows that u is a special case of the h-degree. The application of u to co-authorship networks, movie actor networks and sexual encounter networks can all be considered as special cases of the h-degree. Schubert (2012) notes that u is equal to one if—in a co-authorship network—the author has an arbitrary number of double-authored papers with the same co-author; or if the author has an arbitrary number of co-authored papers with no co-author occurring more than once. Yet, there is a third case, namely when the author has an arbitrary number of doubleauthored papers with the same co-author and an arbitrary number of co-authored papers with other authors such that no co-author occurs more than once. I would like to take this opportunity to correct a mistake in (Zhao et al. 2011). In Table 1 the w-lobby index of node C is 2 and not 3 as printed. In conclusion I would like to say that, as suggested by Schubert, the partnership ability index and its generalizations have a lot of potential not only in the field of informetrics, but certainly also in sociological studies.

네트워크 기반 2000년대 한국영화의 관객 동원력 분석

Movie network as a social network shows power-law distribution that is one of distinct properties in scale-free network. We constructed movie network from 799 Korea movies that screened from 2000 to 2009 and analyzed structural properties of the network. The 799 movies was classified three groups as a spectator mobilizing power. One million spectators mobilizing power movie was denoted the first class. The best 10 movie directors who produced at least three movies for ten years and had 70% the first class movie of them were selected. We also preferred the best 20 movie actors who played at least five movies for ten years and had 70% the first class movie of them. We re-constructed core movie network that composed the best 10 directors, the best 20 movie stars, and 157 movies that were produced by the directors or were played by the movie stars. We predict a possible combination of the director and movie actor as a category of the movie that has highly spectator mobilizing power. Here, we provide insight and method for producing high spectators mobilizing power movies

Evolution of weighted scale-free networks in empirical data

Weighted scale-free networks exhibit two types of degree-strength relationship: linear and nonlinear relationships between them. To understand the mechanism underlying such empirical relationships, theoretical evolution models for weighted scale-free networks have been introduced for each case. However, those models have not yet been tested with empirical data. In this study, we collect temporal records of several online bulletin board systems and a movie actor network. We measure the growth rates of degree and strength of each vertex and weight of each edge within the framework of preferential attachment (PA). We also measure the probability of creating new edges between unconnected pairs of vertices. Then, based on the measured rates, linear and nonlinear growth models are constructed. We find that indeed the dynamics of creating new edges and adding weight to existing edges in a nonlocal manner is essential to reproduce the nonlinear degree-strength relationship. We also find that the degree-driven PA rule is more appropriate to real systems rather than the strength-driven one used for the linear model.

Statistical properties of sampled networks by random walks

We study the statistical properties of the sampled networks by a random walker. We compare topological properties of the sampled networks such as degree distribution, degree-degree correlation, and clustering coefficient with those of the original networks. From the numerical results, we find that most of topological properties of the sampled networks are almost the same as those of the original networks for gamma les approximately <3. In contrast, we find that the degree distribution exponent of the sampled networks for gamma>3 somewhat deviates from that of the original networks when the ratio of the sampled network size to the original network size becomes smaller. We also apply the sampling method to various real networks such as collaboration of movie actor, Worldwide Web, and peer-to-peer networks. All topological properties of the sampled networks are essentially the same as those of the original real networks.

The Old Friend

The Old Friend Laura Furman (bio) The audience was moving down front, people like herself with nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon. Nothing was better than Chekhov, though much was preferable to a panel discussion. That said, Irene was grateful to be included. The time wasn't far off when those who did the inviting would assume she was dead, deaf, or otherwise difficult, and there would be no more invitations. Once the long table and chairs were arranged up on stage, Irene gathered her things, climbed the steps, and took a place at the far end. She draped her shawl over the back of the metal chair and arranged her long skirt about herself. Behind Irene, the set was still up: Uncle Vanya's private room as a ranch office, with Western saddles and Mexican horse blankets writing the shorthand of atmosphere. Only moments before, Vanya had spoken, almost shouted: "I'm forty-seven; suppose I live to be sixty—that means thirteen more years! It's too much! What am I supposed to do for the next thirteen years?" Irene recalled feeling just like Vanya. Now she was almost eighty and she knew that things could get much worse: Vanya felt entirely alone but he still had his Sonya. Points of brilliance flashed, quick movement at the end of the second row, a woman arranging a white cardigan over her shoulders. She had the face of an actress, deep eyes and bland features that would surrender to artifice. The woman looked familiar. The phrase terribly familiar came to mind, but why terror? The rest of the panel trudged onstage, the moderator last of all, balding, with the stooped posture of an adolescent unused to his body. He took his sweet time introducing the panel members—Irene, our retired wonder; the director of today's production; the handsome actor in town to shoot an independent film; the Chekhov scholar from the Slavic Department; himself the distinguished [End Page 131] drama professor. He treated the audience to a plot summary of the play they'd just seen, then announced that each panelist would make a brief opening statement. Irene was signaled to begin; she'd prepared a brief statement, including praise of the production. When she finished, the other panelists spoke in turn, extemporaneously and for far too long; the allotted time for the panel was half over when an argument broke out between the director and the film actor. Irene listened politely as long as she could, then, for the audience's sake, she took the high road: Uncle Vanya was as generous a play as Hamlet, as she herself had learned when she directed it on her retirement from the university. Her colleague who'd played Vanya in her production would have made a better Sonya, but that was beside the point. The play had the capacity to take on any amount of tinkering, and outstanding productions came to mind, local, New York, London— "Then there's today. Wyatt Earp meets Anton Chekhov," the movie actor interrupted, getting a nervous laugh from the audience. Rising above the strife, Irene announced, "The play's the thing," which got her the last laugh, and was true. At the reception afterward, wine in plastic glasses, coffee in paper cups, Irene decided that no one would notice her immediate exit. Just as she reached the door, the woman with the sparkling sweater caught her. "Irene," the woman said, and her voice brought everything back. "You," Irene said. "Yes, it's me, after all this time." "How long has it been?" Irene asked. She took a step back to absorb the fact of her old friend. The decades since they'd met had been kind to Carolina, the last thing Time was to most blondes. "I can't remember, but— Oh, Irene. It's good to see you." Carolina's clothes were expensive versions of the thrift-store rags she once favored; though the white cardigan might be mistaken for any a matron might wear, it was of the highest quality. Irene didn't recall if Carolina was literally a matron—married, divorced, widowed—if her old friend...

“THEY WANT TO DESTROY ME”: HOW CALIFORNIA'S FISCAL CRISIS BECAME A WAR ON “BIG GOVERNMENT UNIONS”

In 2003, California voters recalled their governor and elected movie actor Arnold Schwarzenegger in his place. Two crises triggered this event: large ongoing state budget deficits and a failed electricity deregulation plan. In his first year, Governor Schwarzenegger dealt with the budget through large‐scale borrowing and had a reasonably cooperative relationship with the legislature. But in 2005, with the budget still in deficit, he threatened to go to the voters with a budget solution. That decision somehow morphed into a gubernatorial campaign against “big government unions.” Ultimately, after vast sums were spent on a November 2005 special election, all the governor's initiatives lost, including one offering “paycheck protection” to public union members. The decision to antagonize unions seemed to result from excess delegation of authority by the governor to outsiders and lack of control of his own staff.

Growing networks with mixed attachment mechanisms

Networks grow and evolve when new nodes and links are added in. There are two methods to add the links: uniform attachment and preferential attachment. We take account of the addition of links with mixed attachment between uniform attachment and preferential attachment in proportion. By using numerical simulations and analysis based on a continuum theory, we obtain that the degree distribution P(k) has an extended power-law form P(k) ~ (k + k0)−γ. When the number of edges k of a node is much larger than a certain value k0, the degree distribution reduces to the power-law form P(k) ~ k−γ; and when k is much smaller than k0, the degree distribution degenerates into the exponential form . It has been found that degree distribution possesses this extended power-law form for many real networks, such as the movie actor network, the citation network of scientific papers and diverse protein interaction networks.

From Sidekick to Sideshow— Celebrity, Entertainment, and the Politics of Distraction

In America, entertainment celebrities have entered politics, and the news media have become part of the entertainment industry. At the same time, political figures cultivate their role as celebrities, with image handlers and engineered media campaigns that treat voters like fans. President Bush has modeled himself on Ronald Reagan—the “western” movie actor as much as the president. The role bears little relation to reality, but it has become commonly accepted by a politically obsequious press and amovie-loving public. The persona is actively promoted by the White House as part of the politics of distraction—a strategy designed to keep the public from learning about what is being done in its name and with its tax dollars. The politics of distraction can explain why the public has failed to perceive the global climate crisis, but Americans will need to awake soon from this dream state if they wish to survive.

Winners don't take all: Characterizing the competition for links on the web.

As a whole, the World Wide Web displays a striking "rich get richer" behavior, with a relatively small number of sites receiving a disproportionately large share of hyperlink references and traffic. However, hidden in this skewed global distribution, we discover a qualitatively different and considerably less biased link distribution among subcategories of pages-for example, among all university homepages or all newspaper homepages. Although the connectivity distribution over the entire web is close to a pure power law, we find that the distribution within specific categories is typically unimodal on a log scale, with the location of the mode, and thus the extent of the rich get richer phenomenon, varying across different categories. Similar distributions occur in many other naturally occurring networks, including research paper citations, movie actor collaborations, and United States power grid connections. A simple generative model, incorporating a mixture of preferential and uniform attachment, quantifies the degree to which the rich nodes grow richer, and how new (and poorly connected) nodes can compete. The model accurately accounts for the true connectivity distributions of category-specific web pages, the web as a whole, and other social networks.

Star Wars All Over Again

ASIANPERSPECTIVE, Vol. 25, No. 2, 2001, pp. 227-238 Book Review STAR WARS ALL OVER AGAIN Peter Van Ness Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There In the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 592 pages. Two years ago, when Lee Teng-hui was still president of the government of Taiwan, I was invited with academic colleagues for what promised to be a delicious Chinese luncheon hosted by an official of the Taiwan government. Seated around a circular table heavy with beautifully-arranged dishes, we sat poised to begin. But before anyone could raise a chopstick, our host had a message for us. That moment of salivating anticipation has made my recollection of his speech especially sharp—presum­ ably, just as he intended! Think back, our host suggested, to the 1980s, during the early years of the Reagan administration, and to how the world at that time seemed to be locked into a coldwar nuclear stalemate. But then, he continued, just a few months after Reagan left office, the Soviet empire, and later the Soviet Union itself, began to fall apart. What was the key to Reagan's design that produced an end of the cold war and the victory over the Soviet Union? "Star Wars!" he exclaimed. Today, he went on, the main threat to peace in East Asia is 228 Peter Van Ness China, and the Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, are committed to building missile defenses. By this time, all of us knew precisely where his invocation was headed. He had China and missile defense on his mind. Some members of the Bush administration today appear to have similar thoughts on their minds. Frances Fitzgerald has written Way Out There in the Blue to refute my Taiwan host's understanding and what she sees to be other misconceptions about Ronald Reagan and the "strategic defense initiative," or SDI. One of the main conclusions of her research on Reagan's plan to build a shield to protect the United States from missile attack is that, contrary to much conservative opinion in the United States, it was not the U.S. commitment to build ballistic missile defenses that caused the collapse of com­ munism in the Soviet Union, but rather the incapacity of the Soviet command economy to compete and the unintended con­ sequences of the radical changes initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev that brought the Soviet system down. The Soviets never chose to try to compete with SDI because their scientists had told Gor­ bachev that they would only have to spend one-tenth of what the Americans spent to build a capacity to either neutralize or destroy a U.S. missile defense system (pp. 408 and 473-75). The story Fitzgerald tells is of Ronald Reagan, movie actor as president, proclaiming utopian proposals to shield the Ameri­ can public from ballistic missile attack, often described in heroic images drawn from his favorite films like A Wing and a Prayer, when in fact there was no existing technological means, then or now, to construct and deploy such a leakproof defense. Hardline conservative supporters pushed for SDI for their own ideologi­ cal purposes, even as the threat from the Soviet Union declined and the "evil empire" broke apart. Now, once again, a conserva­ tive Republican president of the United States, George W. Bush, has committed his administration to building missile defenses. On May 1, in a speech to the National Defense University, President Bush spelled out his "vision" of global politics and what he saw as the need for missile defense.1 He remarked in his opening comment on the presence of the administration's three top foreign and defense aides (Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Special Assistant Condoleezza Rice), presumably to convey the Star Wars All Over Again 229 impression that what he would say was supported enthusiasti­ cally and in unison by all of them. The President then painted a picture of a dangerous world, populated by tyrants "gripped by an implacable hatred of the United States of America." "They hate our friends," argued the President. "They hate our values. They hate...