Leave it to Johnny Depp to re-ignite the controversy over what made the Mad Hatter mad. As reported by Pat Ryan in the New York Times (3/7/10), Johnny, who plays the Hatter in a new film (trailer), told a news conference that he thought the Hatter was mad because of mercury poisoning from hats, saying he's "this guy who literally is damaged goods." But while it's true that some hats contained mercury back in Lewis Carroll's day, the symptoms of mercury poisoning -- including "excessive shyness ... and a desire to remain unobserved and unobtrusive" hardly fit the Mad Hatter.

Another theory holds that the Hatter was inspired by a French phrase, "il raisonne comme une huitre," or "he reasons like an oyster." The idea is that "huitre" sounds like "hatter." Seems unlikely. Logicians, noting that Lewis Carroll "was well known as a mathematician, think the Mad Hatter is really the Mad Adder. They cite this Hatter quote: "If you knew Time as well as I do ... you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him." In the Hatter's defense, physicist Robert A. Millikan wrote that the Hatter wasn't mad "when he gave to Time changeable, undependable, capricious qualities which we assign to personality."

The Hatter is concerned with time "since the Queen of Hearts has accused him of being a time-murderer." This adds heft to the theory that the Mad Hatter was based on "a top-hat wearing inventor, Theophilus Carter," who, in 1851, exhibited an "Alarm-Clock Bed" that tipped "the sleeper out of bed at the correct time." But the best "Mad as a Hatter" explanation comes from Lewis Carroll himself. Why a Mad Hatter, not a Mad Tailor or Shoemaker? (viaduct, why not a goose?) Carroll wrote, "I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense! Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them."

Disney Stores president Jim Fielding casts magic on retail as media. An exclusive Q&A interview by Tim Manners. (more)

Some filmmakers are "using Sundance not just as a sales tool but also as a platform for immediate digital delivery," reports Brooks Barnes in the New York Times (1/25/10). Their reasoning is largely based on hard numbers. Of the $3.7 billion worth of films submitted to Sundance Festival this year, "only about $120 million worth make the schedule, and of those less than $30 million worth will find their way to market through the traditional system." So, for a film like "One Too Many Mornings" (trailer), which cost about $50,000 to make, it's a no-brainer to try something non-traditional.

Michael Mohan, the film's writer and director, is making it available for download for $10 and is selling DVDs for $20. "For $35, customers get a DVD, a poster and a piece of the sofa featured in the film." Michael is also offering theatrical rights via his website for $100,000. "Forget a bidding war," he says. "Whoever gets to their laptop the fastest gets it." Michael doesn't see any downside to his approach. "There's no reason it can't go to theaters after it's available online; it's two different groups of people," he says.

But this probably wouldn't work for a more expensive film. "If you've made a movie for $5 million and you're only doing a video-on-demand deal, your investors are getting killed," says Jay Cohen, an agent. Indeed, the average Sundance candidate cost about $1 million to make. But some think a hybrid distribution strategy like Michael's might have a future. "It probably does send Hollywood some signals," says Joshua Sapan, ceo of Rainbow Media, a Cablevision subsidiary that, among other things, owns the Sundance Channel. However, he cautions that specialty films generally don't "have broad commerciality as a goal."

Walt probably wouldn't have approved, but 92 artifacts of Disney magic will soon be exposed to about 30,000 Disney fans. As reported by Brookes Barnes in the New York Times (9/9/09), Disney's answer to Comic-Con -- a convention of "elaborate pavilions" promoting the Disney brand by allowing access to its treasures -- opens today and runs through he weekend at the Anaheim Convention Center. Called D23 Expo (because Walt opened his studio in 1923), the event was created by the company's PR department. At the center is an exhibition, "Treasures of the Walt Disney Archives."

It will include "the coonskin cap that Fess Parker wore as Davy Crockett ... Annette Funicello's Mouseketeer shirt," as well as the wig Miley Cyrus wore as Hannah Montana. Perhaps the most treasured of the treasures is "the giant, bejeweled storybook used for the opening scene of 'Sleeping Beauty.'" More pedestrian, but possibly even more magical, is the rotary-dial telephone from Walt's own office -- just as Walt left it. "We would never clean it -- that's Walt's grime," says Becky Cline, a Disney archivist.

That might have been okay with Walt, but he almost certainly would not have liked giving fans a backstage view of Disney props, believing it was a mistake to "talk about how we make the magic." But times have changed, obviously, and the Disney empire now realizes its imperious posture doesn't jibe with a world with more than 1,000 blogs about "all things Disney." The full archive numbers about one million items, of which about 80 percent has never been seen by the public. A team of Disney archivists meanwhile continues to comb through storage rooms, looking for more stuff. The Anaheim exhibit "may ultimately be mounted as a traveling show."

Open just once a month and located in an obscure office park outside Philadelphia, the Stoogeum is perhaps a fitting tribute to Moe, Larry, Curly and Shemp, reports Edward Rothstein in the New York Times (8/28/09). The Stoogeum has been around since 2004, created by Gary Lassin, who is married to the granddaughter of Larry's brother. The Stoogeum features "just a fraction of his collection on display -- some 3,500 items out of about 100,000 -- on three floors in a 10,000 square-foot building." Artifacts include "movie posters, magazine covers ... a ceramic cat made by Moe, rare family photographs of Curly, Larry's driver's license."

The Stoogeum "may not be a typical museum -- it requires no admission, sells no souvenirs and allows no spur-of-the-moment visits -- but it has been impressively designed by UJMN Architects. Open the front door and the voices of the Stooges chime in harmonic hellos. A display called Stoogeology 101 offers biographical information on touch screens that at first show only a wild-eyed image of Curly; to bring the screens to life, we are told, 'give Curly an eye-poke.''

It's more a "museum of a collector rather than of a curator, a public display of devotion rather than an interpretation of it. And yet the Stoogeum is almost revelatory about the scale of the phenomenon if not its cause ... The original Three Stooges were all children of Jewish immigrants ... stooges the way all immigrants are: outsiders who could seem less competent and more idiotic than those around them." But there's also "something unbroken in them -- both in spirit and in skull ... for all the hard knocks they exchange, these morons would stand up for one another and be prepared to face down all the demands propriety would make of them."

"Social networks can operate like automated talent scouts, helping the cream rise more quickly to the top," says Michael Lynton, ceo of Sony Pictures Entertainment, as reported by Brooks Barnes in the New York Times (7/16/09). He continues: "While creativity has been pretty evenly distributed in society, it hasn't always been easy to tap into." Michael is among those hoping to change that, starting with a national release of a five-minute animated short, called, "Live Music," created by 52 people in 17 countries who collaborated to create the flick on Facebook.

An outfit called Mass Animation orchestrated the short, with backing from Intel, makers of Core i7, a "processor for animation geeks." Mass Animation created a "fan page" on Facebook (link), and "invited animation enthusiasts -- from total amateurs to professionals working in their spare time -- to compete to create individual shots for the short. Mass Animation provided downloadable Maya software, the story and a soundtrack and ... also rendered the first scene to set the style and look." The storyline centers on "star-crossed love involving an electric guitar and a violin" (trailer).

A total of 57,000 people have become "fans" and "about 17,000 downloaded the software application." Facebook users voted for their favorite entries, and winners were paid $500 per scene. Winning collaborators ranged "in age from 14 to 48," and 11 of the winners were women -- notable because Hollywood animators are almost always men. Total cost: "about $1 million." Encouraged by its success, Mass Animation is now hoping to produce a feature-length film. Facebook's Matt Jacobson comments: "We didn't know if we could do it, but we decided to take the chance and couldn't be more pleased with how it turned out."

Mitch Lowe, president of Redbox, used to work for Netflix, and he understands the differences between the two video-rental concepts, reports Randall Stross in the New York Times (7/12/09). For one thing, Redbox customers, who pay just $1 a night to rent movies from in-store kiosks, tend to be "lower-income households with large families -- the opposite of the profile of the typical customer at Netflix." That difference manifests itself in the kinds of movies rented.

The number-one rental at Redbox is "Paul Blart: Mall Cop," which doesn't even show up on the Netflix top 100, where the number-one flick is "Crash." Redbox customers also are not impressed by a huge selection. Where Netflix "offers more than 100,000 unique titles," Redbox offers "just 200." Mitch says his customers don't "want to wade through titles they won't be interested in." The focus is on titles released within the previous two weeks or that are "in high demand nationally."

Tom Adams, a consultant, offers yet another intriguing insight into the Redbox appeal. "We're only 10,000 years out of caves," says Tom. "Humans like to go out and get stuff and bring it home -- we're just wired that way." Whether the primal strategy will survive a video-on-demand future remains to be seen, of course. In the meantime, Redbox kiosks can be found "in more than 15,600 locations, renting 7.5 million movies weekly ... not far below the 10 million-plus weekly rentals claimed by Netflix." That's up from 600 locations and 24,000 movies just four years ago.

Hollywood's endless fascination with John Dillinger continues this summer with Johnny Depp in the starring role, reports Allen Barra in the Wall Street Journal (6/25/09). Depp is just the latest in a string of actors to play Dillinger, who no doubt would have appreciated the casting, according to Alan -- although Dillinger almost certainly was his own favorite actor. He's said to have "loved watching himself in popular newsreels of the day," and in fact is probably better remembered for his style than his skills as a bank robber.

"He liked to amuse bank customers with quips and wise cracks during holdups," says Paul Maccabee, author of John Dillinger Slept Here. "He would leap over the counters to show off his athletic ability and sometimes fired his Thompson submachine gun into the ceiling just to get people's attention. Witnesses may have been robbed, but they got their money's worth." Such theatrics not only continue to inspire filmmakers to make movies about Dillinger, but also influenced actors including Humphrey Bogart in gangster roles.

Dillingers's modern-day box-office appeal may also be helped by the recession, given his starring role in the Depression-era's popular resentment against banks. "He wasn't a Robin Hood, but he was living a revenge fantasy that millions of Americans dreamed about during the Depression," says Sandy Jones, a historian. "If he was alive today, he'd probably be going after Wall Street brokers." As fate would have it, Dillinger was killed shortly after watching Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Gable, having been "fingered" by the so-called "lady in red" (who actually wore orange), which of course inspired the film, Lady in Red.

"The challenge with Eddie is that you have to put his brand on the right tin can," says Hollywood consultant James Ulmer in a New York Times piece by Brooks Barnes (6/25/09). With any luck, it's a tin can in a fat suit. For whatever reason, Eddie Murphy remains one of Hollywood's most bankable stars, largely because of his overseas and DVD appeal, even though he flops spectacularly at the box office with eye-popping frequency. At the moment, he's riding on two big flops in a row, and appears headed for a third disaster.

As Rick Bentley of the Fresno Bee put it, "If Eddie Murphy's career were an injured horse, it would be shot and the carcass buried in the remotest part of the desert to ensure no one ever stumbled upon it." Perhaps his most memorable bomb was The Adventures of Pluto Nash, a 2002 film that "cost about $100 million to make but only sold about $7 million worldwide in tickets." And yet, he "is still considered Hollywood royalty," mainly because the studios know his potential for success is huge.

"He is explosive, given the right project, the right circumstances, the right concept, the right director," says Jeffrey Katzenberg. In other words, as James Ulmer, explains: "His audiences are very straightjacketed in their expectations of him, and by that I mostly mean fat suit, fat suit, fat suit." Hollywood types also know "that big-time comedy careers are often volatile," and " a few misses are considered normal." Next up for Eddie Murphy is A Thousand Words, a "comedic drama about a fast-talking agent who realizes he only has 1,000 words left to utter before he dies" and is then buried in the remotest part of the desert ...

At a time when most people are cutting back, some movie theaters are raking it in by offering a sense of community, reports Martha T. Moore in USA Today (2/9/09). "For most Americans, the closest thing they've got now to ... the public square is the shopping mall ... and let's face it, most of these movie theaters are between the JC Penney and the Claire's Accesories," says Robert Thompson of Syracuse University. In January, Mary Jo Foye and her husband paid $6 each for themselves and their two sons to watch the Obama inauguration with about 150 others at a movie house in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Mary Jo says she went to the theater instead of watching the inauguration at home because it was "a public moment, not a private moment. I wanted to share that historical event with other people." Meanwhile, about "80 theaters around the nation (showed) the NBA's annual slam-dunk and three-point shot contests ... in high-definition and 3-D." In other words, you can "pay $18 and up ... to watch an event you can watch at home for free, on your big-screen TV, in your underwear, a short trip from your beer-stocked refrigerator." Why? Well, for a number of reasons -- it's bigger, it's more like actually being there, and it's more social.

When you have hundreds of people together, it's "more than just your friends, it's your community," says Ellen Flacker-Darer, who, along with her husband, paid $125 to watch the Oscars at the Campus Theater in Lewisburg, Pa. In addition to drinks and hors d'oeuvres, they were given a red-carpet treatment, complete with "faux paparazzi ... and a local theater troupe to play adoring fans" greeting their arrival. Mary Bannon, the theater's executive director, comments: "People are dressed to the nines, they come in, they get that star treatment ... people have a longing to be at the Oscars personally." ~ Tim Manners, editor.