Just call him Mr. Sundance.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is attending his sixth Sundance Film Festival, this time as writer and star of his directorial debut and host of the festival’s closing awards ceremony.
The 31-year-old premiered “Don Jon’s Addiction” Friday at the independent-film showcase. He plays the title character, a man who prefers pornography to real sex, even though he brings home a different woman every weekend. Scarlett Johansson, Tony Danza and Julianne Moore also star.
“I wanted to tell a love story, and in my observations, what gets in the way of love often times is the way the people objectify each other,” Gordon-Levitt said in an interview Saturday. “The story centers on a relationship between a boy and a girl, and the boy watches too much pornography, and the girl watches too many romantic Hollywood movies, and they’re both sort of objectifying each other.”
He brought the film to Sundance because of its community of artists that love storytelling.
“It’s a community that reassures each other that there’s more to movies than glitz and glamor and box office,” he said. “And look, that stuff’s all fine. But stories predate Hollywood. Stories predate the English language, and the reason that I love working in movies is because I love stories … and I love being a part of this community here at Sundance that embraces that more than some of the other things that tend to take prominence in other parts of the movie industry.”
He said his film “would never get made within the studio system, but it’s a mainstream comedy.”
“It doesn’t follow the formula, but it’s going to get out there and be in front of mainstream audiences,” he said. “Sundance makes that possible for movies that don’t follow the same old formula to get out there and find audiences.”
Gordon-Levitt said he plans to spend the week seeing films before hosting the awards ceremony on Jan. 26.
AI-Assisted Works Can Get Copyright With Enough Human Creativity, According To U.S. Copyright Office
Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could further clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.
The nation's copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated.
And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office's approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the "centrality of human creativity" in authoring a work that warrants copyright protections.
"Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection," said a statement from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the office.
An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artist's handiwork is perceptible. A human adapting an AI-generated output with "creative arrangements or modifications" could also make it fall under copyright protections.
The report follows a review that began in 2023 and fielded opinions from thousands of people that ranged from AI developers, to actors and country singers.
It shows the copyright office will continue to reject copyright claims for fully machine-generated content. A person simply prompting a chatbot or AI image generator to produce a work doesn't give that person the ability to copyright that work, according to the report. "Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine ...... Read More