The morning after this year's Oscars, journalist and author Mark Harris took time out of his schedule to speak about his beautifully wrought Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, a glimpse at the 1968 Best Picture race where old Hollywood met the innovative likes of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate. Given Mark Gill's recent statement about the state of independent filmmaking, the optimism of the early part of this conversation, an exploration of the 2007 independent scene, may find itself sealed in time, may express the type of energetic hopefulness that rightly layers itself into so many of Harris' pages for Pictures at a Revolution.

With Harris reading this Thursday evening at the New York Public Library, we reflect upon the conversation and seek in it some clues for the future of filmmaking from its rarely sensible, sometimes ridiculous and often inspired past.

In the following chat, screenwriter Yarrow Wayman reflects upon her experiences with screwball comedies, the facts of a commercial writing life and her feature screenplay Molewhackers, the story of an alien serial killer with a death wish and the two arcade junkies who try to coach him through it, without, that is, becoming the next targets on his hit list.

SM: How did you get your start in writing, screenwriting in particular?

YW: It was an odd invitation. I was accused of plagiarism in college for an essay I wrote, and it was kind of funny, the professors said, “No student can write like that. No writer can write like that. We’re going to look for the sources of your material, and then we’re going to throw you out of school.” They just thought I cobbled it together from a bunch of different sources. I thought, “That’s weird. I guess I’ll take that as a compliment.”

On the other end of the phone line, screenwriter and filmmaker Avi Weider makes potato latkes for the next day’s house warming party. It’s December, and Weider and his family, as is their habit in the last four years or so, have moved yet again. At times during the conversation, he pauses for a second, “I’m tasting a latka. It came out great.” It’s a very familial, very comforting, very human sort of action that juxtaposes nicely against the following chat about his well-received feature script Zeroes and Ones, an exploration of technology, history and the spaces where the two meet.

SM: What was the genesis and then the evolution of this project?

AW: The genesis is from two directions. One is a documentary that I’ve been working on for several years about society and technology, how technology affects human values. The premise for that project was this bet made between two futurists about whether a computer will be as intelligent as a human by the year 2029. I’ve been interviewing futurists and scientists, people who are completely opposed to technology, writers and collecting a lot of information about these types of issues regarding technology. It’s almost, as one of my interviewees said, a theological discussion of technology.

At a small table in San Francisco Coffee, filmmaker Mike Brune works on a crossword puzzle. “It’s about the movies,” he says as I pull the chair out to sit. “Here let me give you one. An actor who always looks likes he’s going to kick ass.”

“Samuel L. Jackson.”

“An actor who always looks creepy.”

I’m thinking Ghost World, Filmmaker Magazine interview with Tom DiCillo, Armageddon. Armageddon?