Claude Shannon Documentatry, “Bit Player”, Released Today
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http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon...
"The word communication will be used here in a very broad sense to include all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another. This, of course, involves not only written and oral speech, but music, the pictorial arts, the theatre, the ballet, and in fact all human behavior. In some connections, it may be desirable to use a still broader definition of communication, namely, one which would include the procedures by means of which one mechanism (say automatic equipment to track an airplane and to compute its probable future positions) affects another mechanism (say a guided missile chasing this airplane)."
You can also tell this was written around war times.
Same for information theory, cryptography was the driving force, see Bletchley Park. Also, one closely related result by Shannon was an analysis of cryptography and ciphers, see Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems by Claude Shannon [0], written in 1945 and remained classified until 1949. In this paper, Shannon proved the security properties of One-Time Pad.
Also, the NSA made a digital computer in 1943 in Project SIGSALY. The computer itself was an engineering accomplishment, but even more, the system was the first implementation of digital audio in PCM, with its own audio encoding algorithm for compression.
There is however only a link to the trailer there too.
The youtube link posted in another comment seems to work. Thanks for the tip!
There are probably business considerations I don't understand since I'm not in the industry, but I've often been perplexed that indie films seem to spend years making the rounds in the film festivals, when they could be making money for the filmmaker from people like me who are eager to stream them.
Or so I was told.
They all have high hopes for their films, and Netflix pays a maximum of $50k for a documentary, one-time, no royalties. So it is always the fallback consideration, while a distributor who thinks they can make a lot more, with royalties, is always the hopeful pick.
So it takes years of trying to recoup what is often a few hundred thousand dollars by playing in festival circuits and sometimes limited on-demand streaming distributors.
Then, finally, they almost all give up and take Netflix's money (and long-term exclusivity). If they wait too long, it often isn't even $50k, so it's all a big gamble.
Of course, everything is changing now that there are no film festivals and theaters are closing permanently every day.
Edit: spelling
I'm totally on board with this way of re-enacting or dramatizing an interview when everybody shown is an actor. But later we see an interview with Shannon's real first wife, Norma (Levor) Barzman, who went on to become a well-known Hollywood screenwriter (and Communist!), and who amazingly was something like 97 years old at the time of the interview. Eventually (around 27 minutes in to the movie) we hear the voice of the same fictional interviewer offscreen. The interviewer shares a revelation with Norma: that Claude Shannon quit his fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study after only two months to go work for the war effort, apparently without telling her, and around the time their marriage went sour. This comes across as a big surprise to Norma (28 minutes in).
The presence of the fictional interviewer interviewing the real Norma (who also doesn't look 97, but pretty sure that's really her) confused me -- are we meant to take literally that Norma Barzman never knew that Claude Shannon had quit IAS and gone to work for the war effort until 75 years later when Kaliswa Brewster, playing a fictional character, told her in the process of filming a semi-dramatized documentary about her first husband? Norma was interviewed for the book (which also includes this information) in 2014 -- did she really not know? Was this the first take of the interview or is Norma also "acting" here...? Why use the same "interviewer" in both a fictionalized interview with other actors and a real one? Was Brewster actually there interviewing her, or is her voice just dubbed in later so the audience doesn't have to hear the real documentarian's voice? Or am I just mistaken and the offscreen voice is somebody else? It really sounds like her!
The scene you recall appears to be a real-time revelation, but in the end I'm not sure it matters much.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32919530-a-mind-at-play
The author is interviewed in the documentary.
That said... I look forward to watching this!
"The Mathematical Theory of Communication"
It's a surprisingly readable small paperback book. It's not a hard read if you have some familiarity with the basics of information theory. There aren't a crazy amount of equations or anything.
https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Theory-Communication-Cla...
https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/143233/claude-shannon-man...