Chess should be jealous of Mathematics on just one issue!!

 During the last twenty years there were three important Hollywood movies, based on fictitious or (almost) real mathematicians' lifestories. The most well known of these was "A beautiful mind" and the deepest by far (personal opinion) was "Proof"!

 I strongly recommend these interesting movies to interested pupils but ...

 I can not do the same about any movie based on chess as I do consider e.g. "Lhuzin's Defense" etc. as absurd, unrealistic, boring and naive too!...

 But Chess History is often hard, intense, dramatic, highly attractive and full of wisdom, greatness and errors, an extraordinary adventure of the human spirit, mind, heart and soul...

 What do you think folks, can we POTENTIALLY provide (for free in principle, we are chess enthusiasts ...) Hollywood or Germany's, England's or Russia's etc. STUDIOS with synopses of GREAT scripts based (entirely or partially) on Chess History?!?

 I already posted a few ideas of mine at a SonofPearl's blog entitled "Can Chess make for perfect novels?" and in an initiated by me, somehow unlucky topic entitled "A true citizen of the chess kingdom" who's theme is the beneficial attitude of Victor Korchnoi towards the Chess World.

 I 'll repeat (in time...) most of these ideas here and I 'll write more but maybe it's worthy for you to have a look about the "Chess-part representation" in my aforementioned topic!

The current round of back-stabbing, underhanded intrigue involving Polgar and the USCF is probably more likely to become a film script than any stories involving past iconic chess giants.

I've been thinking for a while that a life of Dr. Lasker would make a great movie. It really wouldn't be so much a chess movie, as a life lived in history. Lasker lives from the end of the elegant late victorian-edwardian era into the post war... that amazing terrifying period from 1880 to 1950. 70 years that take us from penny farthings and gas-light to the atom bomb...*EDIT -- okay, lasker is 1868 to 1941, so not quite thru two world wars, and not quite to the atom bomb... but darn close.)*  It would be the story of a man who triumphs against adversity again and again, the story of a guy who never quits -- in which his chess career and his chess games themselves become a metaphor for a kind of indefatigable heroism and courage in the face of those crazy years... We see Pillsbury burn out, and Alekhine shattered by his own moral cowardice, we see Capablanca the media darling swept up in his own legend and thereby failing and meanwhile perserverent Lasker succeeds on his own unlikely terms, for he is truly a hero of the mind, a mind that can't be stopped, cowed, or conquered. He never stops creating, never stops trying new things, whether it's mathematics, or chess, or philosophy, or even literature, or world class chess at age 64! (back when 64 was old), or business... all against the sweep of history... really against the sweep of those seventy years one needn't tell the story of a chess champion, one could follow a parlor maid over that period and have a great story... but Lasker's jewishness makes his invinciblity all the more poignant.

The downside of course is that Lasker, visually, is about as sexy as a run-over squirrel, and chess in general as cinematic as real-time soil erosion. Plus covering some seventy years makes it hard to do anything other than be episodic as hell. Yet focusing on any one era too much defeats the purpose.

Better to create a fictional lasker-like figure (but much better looking!) who plays a large part in the life story of the fictional parlor maid who lives thru two world wars with her chin up...

Hey, I got screenplay idea out of this forum!

 About JG27Pyth's idea:

 "... Plus covering some seventy years..."   Good idea indeed! It would be some script based on emotional balance and investigating both the world of almost professionals chessplayers and of scholars and academicians in both continents!

 Something advantageous about Lasker is that he was a man of mathematics too, he wrote a PhD under great and -by now- famous (woman) mathematician (algebraist indeed) Emmy Noether (of the -famous prewar- German University of Goettingen...) on the theory of rings and there is an important result there called Lasker's theorem... And the era was in the crossroads between ninetheenth and previous century and then in the crossroad between the two WWs! You could see Anderssen, Steinitz, Tarrasch and the echo of Napoleon, Clausewitz and Bismarck, Tshigorin, Pillsbury, the echo of Morphy and even American's civil war and industrialization, Lasker's "amateurism" and reluctance about chess, his turn to Maths, Emmy Noether, David Hilbert, Hermann Weyl and other Goettingen figures, Karl Schlechter... , his return to the chess world, Rubinstein, Nimzowitsch, Capablanca and the "Symphony of the New World", the Saint Petersburg's 1914 Tournament and the clash of ideas and generations and ...,  WW I and post-war Europe, Goettingen's Mathematics Department and even Einstein (through Weyl) and Freud and Weimar's era, the October's Revolution, the immigrants like Alekhine and Bogoliubov, the Moscow Tournaments of 1925 and 1936 (?), the changes in chess thought, in mathematical thought (Reti, Vienna's cycle and Kurt Goedel), in social and political thought, in military thought (at the border of the centuries) and the aftermath of WW I, the Capablanca's rise and fall, Alekhine's rise and decline, the development of USSR and the very birth of the Soviet School of Chess with Botvinnik etc., the change of generations and Nimzowitsch's death, the new generation of chess champions, the dark turn, the economical collapse, the turmoil and Hitler's rise, antisemitism and the end of Goettingen's Mathematics Department, Lasker's questions and dilemmas, his departure for USA, WW II preliminaries and coming, Alekhine's "losts of mind" and his change of attitude towards Lasker's heritage, Lasker's death in New York during the war... plus Chess struggles and mind and soul adventures!

 Mostly a script for a TV series but very goog idea indeed! I had in mind something more intense and explosive but this would be something also!

 Maybe one could combine this with a portrayal of Albert Einstein and someone else, Freud maybe and it goes gigantique!... Hmmm!?!...

 What's about Judith Polgar and USCF?

 As I go on thinking, Steinitz's lifestory, struggle and creation (interrelated to culture, Clausewitz's based ideas maybe, social life and the struggle of minds for liberation etc.) would be something else but something too! Plus the poverty situation, the social status, the age problem, the health problems at the time...

lol cuncatorg... I love your intellectual enthusiasm... but my idea was preposterously unweildly to begin with and your additions go beyond my most Wagnerian ambitions! This is no movie, this is a750 page novel that requires Thomas Mann to write it (I think maybe he did, actually...).

I think we need a more manageable idea... an art film... how about a dark Beckettesque monologue -- sort of a Krapp's Last Tape, of chess... Alekhine on the night he dies, going thru a drunken monologue of self-pity and paranoia and moments of lucidity... as he talks of preparing for the big match that will restore his reputation, yet reveals he shuns it because he knows he's lost his game to alcoholism, while babbling about conspiracies and assassins sent to kill him for his anti-semitic polemics, and nostalgic reveries of an aristocratic boyhood in pre-revolutionary Russia, and fist shaking self-aggrandizement at his triumph over capablanca, etc.... I'm not sure what the dramatic conflict is, but he'd be a great character, a proud aristocrat of a bygone era, a gentleman in the old sense, a genius of chess and a true artist, but disgraced & broken & on the skids yet still with his crown... a bit of Lear, and Richard III.

LOL

Something tells me that not too many filmmakers are gonna go along with you on that.

Speak for yourself (if I go through all the trouble of writing a screenplay, I wanna get paid for it).

Amen to that. Let's suppose you wrote a script that became an Oscar-winning movie. And let's suppose Warner Brothers Studios netted $78 Million from it worldwide. Do you think they'll give you a piece of that pie just to be nice? Nope.

Never give anything (such as that) away for free. Especially to a studio that knows how to exploit it.

 To tonudal:

 there are already, three movies about Maths ("Good Will Hunting" at 1997, "A beautiful mind" shortly after and then the "Proof") and there will be more... And I spoke just for myself, THAT'S WHY I wrote: "... for free in principle...", I was well aware of the fact that there are at least a few experts both on chess history, human sciences and script making also in this very site!...  

 to JG27Pyth (Python, Monty Pythons?) who is missing a t on some spelling!

 It would be a good idea for a writer to cultivate the idea of yours, in fact I had in mind a TV (mini?) series with the german, the american, the english, the israeli etc. INTELLECTUAL audience as a primary target. But the target of a profound series about cultural (including Maths and Noether) adventures has a much "broader" target... And -for the best or the worst- I will not be the producer!... But what about the producers of series about Freud or Queen Elizabeth I !?!  After all chess is an exciting (to some...) GAME!

 My point is that a solid chess scenario at the hands of a talented and interesting director will be a wonderful action movie!!!... There will be minimum (but impressive!...) physical action during the "dense" phases of the game and will be plenty of "hardcore" mental action into the minds of both opponents during all the game! The artistic representation of this very action is the key of my idea about chess movies, read carefully please my #2 post in this very topic, read then the "true citizen" topic of mine and then accuse me or not!! Anyway I 'll come back!

 What's the meaning of "lol" or "LOL" of yours? And what about Judith and the USCF?

Come on, be serious!  Chess as an "action move"?  LOL (look it up, btw...it's certainly a common enough acro).  And I doubt very seriously that there will be too many more math movies (A Beautiful Mind was more about a guy going nuts anyway).

Why not a movie about chess - that not everyone realises is about chess c.f. Through the Looking Glass.

Oh, yeah, man, it's in the works!  Sylvester Stalone stars as Paul Morphy, in the thrilling, explosive new film, "Blood on the Board".

LOL:  laugh out loud in text communication.  Most often employed when something is not funny, or is slightly droll, and the writer is not laughing out loud.

 Mental action boys and girls, that's action too!

 In a movie of 90-120 minutes, you can spend about 10 (maybe more?) minutes on the issue of the mental process in the mind of both chess players (in contrapunto) with respect to the estimation of the position, the calculation of variations and the decision making just before the (more or less) fast "realisation" (doing) of three, five or just one move! In cinema you have many ways to give a (visual basically) representation (allegedly, an imitation in fact) of the mental processes that are taking part into the brains of the opponents! The key ideas is a) to do not this "linearly", as just a photographic calculation of the variations, b)  to do not this in a constant speed, c) to give the impression to the audience that in this very representation there are elements (the ordering, the focus, the repetition...)  that are important in the thought of chess champions by differentiating and ordering the content of the allegedly "mental movie", this will contain focus on squares, pieces and other "contacts", both "actual" and "virtual" (variations namely) and even in contrapunto or in "compliance", focus in complexes of squares, focus on certain pieces AND of course ("photo")calculation (obstructed oor not) of variations ETC. Every  (you can combine the proposals of a few...) well educated international master (not to mention grandmasters) can give advices in order to imitate these processes ABOUT every given real game...

 Ten minutes of this kind of action out of 90-120 total minutes is enough time, movies of the StarWars saga contained the same percentage of light saber (and force) dueling action... And the rest of the story runs during the chess game, in between the scenes of "mental action", there is much of (time and emotional) pressure and impression already, the parallel running of the "human story" would increase these factors. And Star Wars has a commercial target of hundreds of millions, chess movies will have the much more limited target of the "Good Will Hunting"... So what's the problem, don't be so negative, try instead to find a solution to the "exercise"...

  Paul Morphy was (and in fact is...) an extremely fascinating figure, his actual life story would be a great one basis for artistic representation and not just for USA intellectuals!...

  Paul Morphy "conquered" the Old World around 1850 and its echo runs still...

  artfizz, I never read the "Through the Looking Glass" of yours, could you please "be more specific"?... On your point about the "non-realisation" also...

 On your "word" about Judith and USCF?