Fair Game – Movies For Lawyers – The Act Of Communication Point Of View

Katherine:

The job of the director in a film is to put us in the world of the film. Creating the time and place of FAIR GAME was a challenge for director Doug Liman and the team he led. Why? They were dealing with “recent history”.

The attorney faces the same challenge – putting the judge, jurors, arbitrators and mediators into the time and place of “recent history”. Recent history is a challenge — two years, five years, seven years, ten years. In a patent case involving technology, for example, this need to put everyone back in the time of the creation of the technology is vital.

Time goes so slowly. Day after day goes by and the changes to our every day lives are subtle. Incremental. And then ten years later you are going to trial. As you watch FAIR GAME you will find yourself over and over again saying to yourself at the start of the film, “Oh, right – that is what it was like…” Why? Everyone has moved forward through all those changes slowly and accepted all the changes as inevitable. Think about your case…you are often trying to get the fact finders to look at just one piece of the whole picture – the technology that is the focus of your case.

FAIR GAME shows attorneys beautifully how you need to make a complete world to take us back in time. As you watch the events of the Wilsons’ lives unfold, you are not seeing them in a vacuum. Every visual clue that you get from the cars to the phones to the costuming to the computers puts you in that world. That world which happened in our minds not that long ago – but definitely in “recent history”.

How to do this practically? I can remember helping to create a visual for an opening statement. It was a trademark infringement case. We built images one by one on the screen to show how things had changed. A cell phone, a changing computer, headlines from the newspaper, the hair styles – everything that I knew an art director would need in order to create a world for a film. The attorney took the jurors through a “remember when” – three whole minutes from the opening (and three minutes is a long time) to put the jurors back in time using the visual. The attorney told me it was amazing to watch the faces of the jurors as one by one they “got it” and were back in time. And he knew he had their attention there and then. And yes, we won.

TIP: Make sure that if putting your trial back in time is important to the case that you take the time and resources to do it.


Alan:

This is certainly not a new film, but we decided to watch it because we hadn’t seen it when it first came out.

Amazing how long ago it all seems. And how intense the run up to the Iraq War was. And how so many of the issues and people in the film seem like ancient history.

I want to focus on the center of the story. The writers and the director decided to make the story an interweaving narrative of the personal and the political….the marriage of Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, Joe Wilson, as well as the politics and the events leading up to the War in Iraq.

When telling a story, how to structure the narrative, where to throw the focus and how to select what to include and what to omit are the essential decisions facing all storytellers….film makers and lawyers alike.

De-selecting is always the critical issue. You can’t possibly include everything. And you can’t possibly make ALL issues central. In this case, the filmmakers decided to have the emotional impact lie in the personal and to allow the political to ride on top of that.

The questions: Does this decision diminish the political story? Is the marriage of equal weight and interest to the viewer as the political story? And Does it work?

I leave it up to each viewer to determine.

TIP: Weigh carefully where you want the emotional center of your story to reside. Make sure that the emotional basis of your case can comfortable rest on the legal, intellectual basis of your case.





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Movies For Lawyers