By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 14 seconds ago

The 1996 summer blockbuster Independence Day is full of iconic moments that absolutely thrilled audiences. This includes the sight of alien vessels blowing up the White House and thrilling dogfights between American fighter jets and smaller extraterrestrial ships. Arguably, though, the most iconic thing in the entire film is Bill Pullman’s rousing “Today, we celebrate our Independence Day” speech. Onscreen, his powerful words rallied the entire world together in defiance of an alien invasion; offscreen, those words cemented Independence Day as the most patriotic movie of the ‘90s. Long story short? It’s impossible to think of this movie without remembering this amazing line.

Because of this, you may be shocked to discover that the movie’s script did not originally have this legendary line. Instead, it was added at the last minute to convince 20th Century Fox that the movie should be named Independence Day; Warner Bros. owned the rights to this title, and Fox wanted to name the movie Doomsday in order to avoid paying a rival studio. Fortunately, two weeks after Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich snuck the line into the film’s dailies, Fox approved using the title Independence Day.

Sneaking In The Perfect Line

When Independence Day premiered in 1996, many fans thought it was the first film with this title. However, they were wrong: in 1984, Warner Bros. released a movie of the same name. That earlier film didn’t feature invading aliens. Instead, it focused on a small-town artist (played by Kathleen Quinlan) trying to make her dreams come true. It got mixed reviews, and very few people saw the movie because it was only available on VHS until 2015. However, its success (or lack thereof) didn’t matter. Because WB already had a movie with this title, 20th Century Fox wouldn’t be able to name their own blockbuster Independence Day without paying for the rights.  

As you might imagine, Fox didn’t want to pay if they didn’t have to. Therefore, they used ID4 as a working title during production; for the theatrical release, they wanted to name the movie Doomsday to match the disaster vibe of other ‘90s films. However, writer Dean Devlin and director Roland Emmerich really, really wanted to name this movie Independence Day, so they hatched a plan. He knew that Fox executives were regularly viewing dailies from the film to ensure that their money (it had a $75 million budget) was well spent. Because of this, he teamed up with Bill Pullman to secretly convince those execs of the need for a name change.

The original script for Independence Day did have the big Bill Pullman speech, which his character used to rally the nations of the world together against the alien threat. However, it didn’t have the iconic “Today, we celebrate our Independence Day” line. Devlin and Emmerich conspired with Pullman, pulling him aside to add this new line. Their goal was simple: they wanted the Fox executives watching the dailies to be so moved by the end of the speech that they approved naming the movie Independence Day. Incredibly, the strategy worked: two weeks after execs viewed the dailies, 20th Century Fox negotiated a deal with Warner Bros. for the rights to the name.

All of this adds a wonderfully meta dimension to the ‘90s biggest blockbuster film. In the context of Independence Day, the end of the speech is used to rally the world together in the name of a righteous cause. In the real world,  the end of the speech was used to rally studio executives into making the smartest name change in Hollywood history. It was a great call, really; like, can you imagine if this crowdpleasing movie had a name as generic as Doomsday? Fortunately, two men making a movie about out-of-this-world invaders were able to do the impossible and bring a bunch of stubborn studio executives back down to Earth. 

By Robert Scucci
| Updated 18 seconds ago

Have a crappy first draft and want to make it into a better second, third, fourth, and final one? You might want to check out 2020’s Black Bear because the film shows you the process in real time, and I think I just spoiled the entire thing for you. But did I really?

It’s a movie about a woman named Allison (Aubrey Plaza), who’s staying at a beautiful remote cabin to work on a project, either a novel or a film. I think this part is obvious. We get a look at her morning routine, complete with sitting in a red swimsuit on a dock overlooking a foggy lake. We watch her sit down at a table by the window and start writing, occasionally looking up to take in the scenery before putting pen to paper.

We then get what I believe are two “drafts” in the form of acts, and the whole thing spirals from there. While there’s a lot of discussion about what Black Bear is actually about (just check the IMDb reviews, lots of people are rightfully confused), I think the answer is simple: it’s one of those movies about a writer who’s writing something; something that would come off as extremely pretentious in almost any other context.

Because of how open-ended the whole thing is, I could be way off the mark, but you really just need to sit down with Black Bear and enjoy it for what it truly is, no matter what kind of subtext you’re picking up from it: three actors showing an incredible range and crushing every single scenario.

Part One: The Bear in the Road

Before each act in Black Bear, we see Allison go through what appears to be her writing routine. She sits alone in the wilderness, folds up her towel, walks back to the cabin, and gets to work. In the first act, “The Bear in the Road,” we’re introduced to the other characters we’ll be spending time with: the pregnant and unhappily married couple Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and Blair (Sarah Gadon).

Gabe is a former musician who owns a bed and breakfast that he runs with Blair. Allison is a film director who chose to stay at their bed and breakfast so she could find inspiration for her next project. Gabe is secretly obsessed with Allison’s work, and Blair is a problem drinker even though the baby bump is starting to show.

This act ends almost exactly how you’d expect, with Allison and Gabe growing close, and Blair absolutely losing her mind over it. When things truly heat up in “The Bear in the Road,” the screen goes black, and we once again see Allison sitting alone on the dock in a red swimsuit, folding her towel, walking back to the cabin, and opening her notebook, setting up the second part of the movie.

Part Two: The Bear by the Boat House

The second half of Black Bear introduces the same characters but in a totally different context. Here, Allison is an actress who’s married to Gabe, who’s now the filmmaker, and Blair is another actress in the movie he’s working on. The same jilted lover story plays out, but the roles are reversed, and we’re on an actual movie set.

Allison is the unstable woman whose husband is having an affair, and she’s being manipulated by the crew into delivering a powerhouse performance during the final shoot. Blair and Gabe flirt and stage an affair between scenes, pushing Allison over the edge. The whole thing plays like a behind-the-scenes reel of a more developed version of “The Bear in the Road,” as if the first act we witnessed was the rough draft, and what happens here is the result of further refinement.

You see kernels of the original idea play out in “The Bear by the Boat House,” but it has a distinctly different flavor, which all clicks again when the whole thing eventually transitions back to Allison sitting on the dock in her red swimsuit, folding her towel, heading back to the cabin, and starting to write.

A Deconstruction Of The Creative Process

Most of the time, I try to keep my reviews spoiler free. I like to talk about the vibe, the talent, and the themes a film talks about, but breaking down Black Bear without first laying out its mechanics, which effectively spoils the movie, is impossible.

Or, I’ll ask again, is it?

My read on the film is that we’re watching a writer at work, and their ideas coming to life through the vignettes we get to see. The characters across both acts are the same but different in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Each act starts with crappy dialogue that eventually becomes more nuanced and intricate. The same can be said for the acting. Both vignettes feel like working drafts where the writer doesn’t quite yet know what story they’re trying to tell, and they’re working through the first few passages so they can figure it out.

I could be completely off base here, but that’s what Black Bear feels like. It’s a moment in the creative process when the creator is still trying to find their voice on a new project.

That said, I can’t say for certain that my assessment is correct here, and I can absolutely see why this film could be frustrating to some. At face value, it’s disjointed, its characters are all over the place, and aside from their names and the setting they occupy, they’re not really the same people. But that’s the point. We’re watching these characters get sketched out in real time by Allison, and we’re just seeing snippets of personality here.

That’s why the characters transition from one-dimensional to complex, with conflicting motives and alliances without any real rhyme or reason. It’s also a testament to everybody’s performance here, because they basically have to act like bad actors when the script is bad, and then up their game every single time (writer) Allison has a creative epiphany that allows the story to improve.

If there’s any reason to watch Black Bear, it’s for everybody’s range. I’m sure there are dozens of other ways to read this film, but I’m satisfied believing what I choose to believe. Maybe the film is actually about a girl named Allison who has amnesia, who returns to a location where she was traumatized, and she’s trying to remember what happened to her. Maybe the Black Bear is the friends we made along the way. Or maybe, just maybe, we’re watching somebody write a novel, or a play, or a movie, and we’re getting to see what happens when an incomplete story gets a full production to show you how important it is to always work past the first draft.

As of this writing, you can stream Black Bear for free on Tubi.

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 1 hour ago

As a society, we’ve been able to agree on only a handful of things over the years. One of them is that summer blockbusters are going to have plot holes and other weird inconsistencies. That’s just the price of the game, really: when a movie’s main selling point is cool explosions and cheesy one-liners, we can forgive it for having some dodging plotting. That doesn’t keep us from joking about the bad writing, of course. Case in point? Independence Day fans have spent decades dunking on the plot point about Jeff Goldblum’s tech geek hacking advanced alien technology using a mid-90s Apple PowerBook.  

The idea is wonderfully absurd on the face of it. Like, the aliens have technology advanced enough to help them conquer the stars and travel faster-than-light across the galaxy. How the heck were they beaten by an IT nerd whose people had only recently invented the internet? As it turns out, though, this plot point isn’t as stupid as everyone thought. That’s because one of the deleted scenes in Independence Day revealed something crucial: namely, that all of Earth’s modern technology was derived from an alien spaceship that was captured back in the ‘90s! 

WelcomeToEarth.exe

In Independence Day, all the superpowers of the world are attacked by alien invaders who don’t hesitate to blow up power centers like the White House. In the film’s climactic final battle, America helps lead a two-pronged counterattack against these extraterrestrial enemies. Jeff Goldblum’s brilliant tech whips up a virus on his trusty Apple PowerBook. Once Will Smith’s hotshot pilot gets them close enough, they upload the virus into the alien mothership’s operating system. This lowers the shields on the ships attacking the Earth, allowing humanity to fight back and ultimately recapture their world from these nasty space invaders.

Even in the ‘90s, the idea of whipping up an anti-alien computer virus seemed laughable. The technology of the two races should be much different, and the aliens’ tech is presumably much more advanced than our own. However, a deleted scene on the 20th Anniversary DVD of Independence Day revealed that all of Earth’s modern computer technology was derived from the alien ship that crash-landed at Roswell and had been studied at Area 51. In this universe, that’s where we got our silicone-based microchips and binary programming language. Therefore, Goldblum whipping up a computer virus is much more believable because he’s using (more or less) the same technology and programming as the aliens.

Hack The World(s)

Obviously, this plot point is still a little iffy. Having similar technology is one thing, but the aliens should still be too advanced to make this possible. Like, this is the programming equivalent of taking down the most advanced computer security systems in the world using only your Atari 2600. However, the deleted scene still adds some welcome context, and it’s like I was saying at the beginning: blockbusters aren’t always going to make a lot of sense. Plus, “the internet came from aliens” is still more believable than Transformers: The Dark Side Of The Moon, which claimed that Buzz Aldrin secretly went to the moon to check out a robot’s UFO.

At any rate, you’ve now got some Independence Day trivia as bright and shiny as any firework. Next time you show the family this movie and your kid points out how dumb the virus plotline is, you can just tell them about the deleted scene. Will this impress your child? Of course not: he’s just going to roll his eyes and look down at his phone, but there’s nothing we can really do about that yet. PowerBooks might be able to hack alien motherships, but no force on Earth or in space can help you hack into the mind of a surly teenager!