The 200th issue of the Paris Review features an interview with Terry Southern (who, among many other things, wrote the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove) that’s been in the works for 35 years. Southern was interviewed in 1967, but never got around to approving the transcript, and since the magazine allows its interviewees that privilege, it never saw print.

The interview has only recently been discovered, and I find these thoughts of Southern’s prescient:

In five years television screens will be half the size of a movie screen, they’ll occupy a whole wall. And people will just sit there. They’re not going to leave the house except to see something groovy, something that they can’t see at home.

The great future, not for creative writers, but for professional writers, is in television, because pay television is going to come in, and that will take the place of the art movies that exist now, and ordinary television will take the place of what now exists in movies. In twenty years, the movies that compete with TV and pay TV will have to be pretty far out. Otherwise people will simply hang with the tube.

So not only did he foresee the coming age of quality pay television—with Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and the like—but also the massive screens on which we’d watch them all.

I ran across two intriguing quotes over the past couple of days that have absolutely nothing in common and have no right to be rubbing up against each other like this. But here they are anyway, and make of them what you will.

First, Philip Kennicott, reviewing (well, eviscerating) “The Art of Video Games” exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum for the Washington Post, wrote:

What must a game do to become art? And when will the medium itself begin to look more like the art world than the entertainment industry?

I’d propose some of the following: We’ll know it’s art when old games are as interesting to people as new ones; when particular games play a role in changing the actual world, just as novels such as The Sorrows of Young Werther, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle altered ideas of identity and politics; when the best games are richly self-referential to an accepted canon of classic games; and when the contemplation after playing a game is more pleasing than the game itself.

Which to me says more about the fact that the Post should have sent someone else to review the exhibition than it does about the exhibition itself. (more…)