Anyone Who Doesn’t Think the Job Market is Improving… by Jared Bernstein

Obama Math: Probability of a Win Now Seventy-Five Per Cent by John Cassidy

This should lend some certainty to "job creators" and campaign contributors.

BEYOND THE MATRIX: The Wachowskis travel to even more mind-bending realms. by Aleksandar Hemon

Usually, I experience an erosion of confidence around famous people—an inescapable conviction that they know more than I do, because the world is somehow more available to them. But I got along splendidly with the Wachowskis. Seemingly untouched by Hollywood, they did not project the jadedness that is a common symptom of stardom. Lana was one of the best-read people I’d ever met; Andy had a wry sense of humor; they were both devout Bulls fans. We also shared a militant belief in the art of narration and a passionate love for Chicago. 

Eventually, I asked them to consider letting me write about the making of “Cloud Atlas.” They talked it over and decided to do it. By then, they’d sent the script to every major studio, after Warner Bros. had declined to exercise its option. Everyone passed. “Cloud Atlas” seemed too challenging, too complex. The Wachowskis reminded Warner Bros. that “The Matrix” had also been deemed too demanding, and that it had taken them nearly three years to get the green light on it. But the best the studio could do for “Cloud Atlas” was to keep open the possibility of buying the North American distribution rights, payment for which would cover a portion of the projected budget.

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“The problem with market-driven art-making is that movies are green-lit based on past movies,” Lana told me. “So, as nature abhors a vacuum, the system abhors originality. Originality cannot be economically modelled.” The template for “The Matrix,” the Wachowskis recalled, had been “Johnny Mnemonic,” a 1995 Keanu Reeves flop. 

In the parking lot outside Hanks’s office, the Wachowskis and Tykwer shook off the bad news before going in. Hanks had read the screenplay, though not the book. “The script was not user-friendly,” he told me. “The demands it put upon the audience and everybody, the business risk, were off the scale.” But he was interested in working with the directors and intrigued by the challenge of playing six different roles in one film. Hanks was in the middle of reading “Moby-Dick” and, when the filmmakers sat down, he engaged them in a discussion of Melville’s masterpiece. Lana pointed at a poster for “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which was serendipitously hanging on the wall of Hanks’s office, and said, “ ‘Moby-Dick’ and this—that’s what we want to do.” “I’m in,” Hanks said. “When do we start?” Looking back at that meeting, Hanks told me that he had been particularly impressed that the Wachowskis “were not ashamed to say, ‘We make art!’ ” 

With Hanks on board, the directors went back to Warner Bros. to plead their case. They insisted that a project as narratively complex as “Cloud Atlas” had no precedent and therefore no template. They presented the overarching story as a tale of redemption, of the continuity of essential human goodness, whereby individual acts of kindness have unforeseeable repercussions. They broke the story down into a simple progression: “Tom Hanks starts off as a bad person,” they said, “but evolves over centuries into a good person.” Warner Bros. was convinced, and the studio was in for distribution, but with a lower offer than the directors had hoped for.