Blue Collar Scientist

Ken Miller has written an op-ed for the Boston Globe that all should read.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed has been out in the theaters now for two weeks, and we can revisit the question: how has it done?

Pretty crappy.

After making 2.9 million on its opening weekend, it has barely made that in the following two weeks, for a total of 5.9 million as of today.

After opening in an unprecedented 1,052 theaters, it has been dropped almost 400 of them; as of today it is in only 656 theaters.

The producers’ claims this would be as big as Fahrenheit 9-11, and indeed even as big as Galileo and Copernicus, continue to be unfulfilled.

I’ve been up to my elbows in telescopes for the last couple days and haven’t been reading my blogroll or news, so it is possible this is already all over the internet and everyone knows about it, but still, I feel like I have to post for the sake of completeness.

I’ve already published a letter from a descendant of holocaust survivors about why she thought that Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was a piece of anti-semitic propaganda. And some of the numerous commentators to our Expelled coverage here have made similar points.

Now, the Anti-Defamation League has made a statement denouncing Expelled (emphasis mine):

The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory.

Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler’s genocidal madness.

Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.

The Anti-Defamation League was founded to fight anti-Semitism “through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry,” and Expelled is certainly exhibits anti-Semitism, hatred, prejudice, and bigotry in abundance.

Hat tip to JimboB.

Despite my promise to be off the blog for a day and a half, I just had to jump on here and point you to this post, which contains just the right amount of scorn and contempt, and which I seriously wish I had written. Skeptico rocks.

Tony Zirkle, Republican candidate for Congress in Indiana’s Second Congressional District, spoke to a Nazi party celebrating Hitler’s 119th birthday. For video, go here.

Zirkle claims to be a devoted Christian. That’s his excuse for speaking at a Nazi event:

This is just a great opportunity for me to witness,” he said, referring to his message and his Christian belief.

Zirkle is, as is consistent with his “faith,” a supporter of intelligent design creationism. He thinks that people who home school their children so as to avoid good science education should be refunded a third of their property taxes:

Two of the issue that have been flaming the controversies over public education are the evolution/creation debate and indoctrinating kindergarteners that homosexual domestic partners constitute merely one more acceptable, alternative lifestyle. Our public schools should not be exploiting our elementary school children to become pawns in these highly emotional, divisive debates.

Under the 1st and 14th Amendments, Congress has authority under the due process clause to ensure that states are not depriving citizens of their religious free exercise. Therefore, in any district where public schools take either position on these two issues and force their opinions on public school children, I will propose legislation that will entitle parent(s) to a refund of the approximately 1/3 of their property taxes (or percentage of rent that derives from property taxes) that go the public schools so that the parent(s) can either home school or send their children to a private school.

Now, I’ve not heard of even a single biologist who supports the Nazi cause. But here’s an ID creationist, and such a respectable one¹ that he’s a congressional candidate, who is speaking right there in front of a picture of Hitler and next to a Nazi flag.

What does that say about Expelled’s message that biologists are Nazis?

Orac has a more complete takedown.

1. I use the term loosely. [↩]

Mark Mathis is one of the producers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. He was recently interviewed by Jay Davis of Real Detroit Weekly, and if there was really any doubt about it, this establishes pretty well that Mathis is stupid beyond belief.

I confront Mathis with this point [that intelligent design creationism is untestable], and he counters that evolutionary theory is also untestable. This is patently untrue — to give just one example, scientists have witnessed speciation, the arisal of a new species from an old one.

When I point this out, he interrupts me immediately: “Whoa! Wait a minute! Please send me whatever material you have that demonstrates that we can observe speciation because I have not seen anything. I’ve never heard anyone even claim that!”

Is he serious? He’s just produced a film about evolution, and he’s never heard of the fact that speciation has been observed and thoroughly documented in the scientific literature? I’m stunned. I send him peer-reviewed research confirming this fact via e-mail, and he later responds, “This isn’t an important argument for me.”

The interview goes on, with Mathis lying some more about evolution:

“You can’t apply falsifiability to Darwinian evolution. How is it falsifiable?”

I respond by quoting the biologist J.B.S. Haldane: “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.”

And it goes on:

Mathis pauses before saying, “If you want to get into the science…” He then trails off and mutters something irrelevant before finally confessing, “Look. You can get into the intricacies of the science on both sides. And I am not qualified.” On that point, we can both agree.

The interview then moves on to the subject of the famous night when Mathis summoned armed security guards to prevent PZ Myers from seeing the film (while not recognizing his companion, Richard Dawkins, and hence letting him in):

No producer who releases a film called Expelled would actually expel an individual who appears in his film from seeing that film. Right?

Mathis laughs before offering two reasons why he told the security guard at the screening not to let Myers in. First, Mathis says, “He has viciously attacked me personally and attacked the film.” Just to clarify, Myers did not break into Mr. Mathis’ house in a drunken rage with a bowie knife—he has simply been critical of Mathis’ arguments.

The second reason? Mathis assumed that the incident would engender “some additional attention” for the film. I’m not joking. He actually called that a reason.

“He was not invited to the screening,” Mathis says. “I don’t have time to read P.Z. Myers’ oral diarrhea.”

“But the screening wasn’t done by invite, was it?” I ask.

“It’s still our screening. I’m still the producer on site. And I still have the ability to say, ‘I didn’t invite you. And you’re not coming.’” Mathis repeats, “I denied him entrance to a film that he was not invited to.”

“But just to clarify, others who weren’t invited were allowed in, right?”

“Done by discretion! Done by discretion!” In case you’re wondering, this means yes. It seems safe to say that discretion is something that Mark Mathis lacks entirely. I let him scream for one more minute.

“We have the option of ex… uh, of kicking, uh, of not allowing P.Z. Myers to come to the film he wasn’t invited to. Okay? Who cares?!”

Ok, that last quote? That’s not even intelligible speech.

I shouldn’t be surprised. That’s exactly what we’re accustomed to getting from creationists.

Hat tip to Joe. Just Joe, again, who apparently reads Pharyngula more often than I do.

The producers of Expelled, having been notified by XVIVO (pdf) that their movie infringed on XVIVO’s copyright of an animation of the inner workings of a cell, responded to that by almost immediately filing a lawsuit against XVIVO. This, of course, is well known, since it happened more than a week ago.

Yoko Ono, Sean Ono Lennon, Julian Lennon, and EMI Blackwood Music Inc, have apparently decided not to allow Expelled’s litigious, lawsuit-happy producers strike the first blow in their case. They have filed a lawsuit against Premise Media Corporation, C&S Production LP and Rocky Mountain Pictures, Expelled’s producers and distributors, seeking an injunction preventing them from continuing to use John Lennon’s song Imagine, and also seeking damages.

This story hits a little closer to home than most lawsuits involving big-ticket celebrities and movie distributors. BCS contributor Iatra Polygenos, back when she was a freshly-minted veterinarian, was part of a team that treated one of Yoko Ono’s cats. Iatra is loyal to her clients, even clients that really belonged to her clinicians at a time before she really had clients of her own, so the BCS family is rooting for the plaintiffs in this case, just out of sheer biased loyalty.

As many people have pointed out, plagiarists don’t steal from just one source. If you do it once, you are going to do it again, and again, and again. Plagiarists are serial offenders by nature.

I’m not sure what is going to happen next, but it seems likely that the next shoe to drop will involve Expelled’s alleged stealing of video from PBS. Or it might have something to do with Expelled’s use of the song All these Things That I Have Done, by The Killers, which has also been said to be a result of plagiarism.

What’s sad about these cases is that it is really simple to get rights to clips and music. For the most part, all you have to do is call up whoever owns the rights, and ask for a license to use the material. A fee is negotiated, usually off a fairly standard fee system, you pay it, and you get to use the material¹. The only reason someone wouldn’t do this if they were going to use three major pieces of other peoples’ work in a movie that opens in 1,052 theaters would be - well, that they are bad, evil little people.

1. Granted, the licensing fee for a song of the significance of Imagine would be very high. [↩]

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is out, and it looks pretty certain at this point as though it is only appealing to religious extremists. Predictions from the producers that the movie would make $12 to $15 million on opening weekend, and blow Fahrenheit 9-11 out of the water, have turned out to be no more than smoke from a wet campfire. And the self-satisfied predictions from the producers that this was going to be as big a deal to science as Galileo and Copernicus - well, that was all just silly.

But now that the movie is out, the fringe religious activists that are behind it are going to follow up with certain political action. I think that one of the political actions they are going to take is to try to get the movie screened in schools.

It isn’t a new idea - this was done with An Inconvenient Truth, for which a program was started to distribute free copies to science teachers. I’d expect a program like this to crop up for Expelled sometime soon, and I’m not the only one.

So, the question is - what do we do about it?

I’m of the opinion that the more widely that Expelled is seen the better - movies like this one, which are blatantly antisemitic, obviously misleading and condescending to the audience, and, by most accounts, overwhelmingly boring, really can’t hurt our cause as long as we are in a position to respond to what is happening.

At the moment we have no coherent response. I’m thinking of putting together (along with some of my friends) an information pack for Alaska school districts about the movie, utilizing some of the resources at Expelled Exposed, here, and elsewhere on the net. Perhaps I should seek the collaboration of other potentially interested organizations?

Let me know what you think.

(The title of this post is best explained here.)

The box-office results for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed were pretty mixed. The opening weekend was far lower than producers’ expectations, but still pretty high. Yet the high earnings were mainly a result of the number of theaters the movie opened in - the per-theater earnings were pretty low. I’ve covered all this here, and concluded that Expelled is bad news, but not anywhere near as bad as it could be, and not nearly the success the creationists are making it out to be.

This balanced assessment is not what you would get if you were reading science framist Chris Mooney’s blog. He leads with:

Expelled a Box Office Success

I merely report the facts: Expelled, opening at over 1,000 theaters this weekend, has raked in $ 3.15 million, placing it ninth at the box office. In terms of political documentaries, it is already the eighth highest grossing of all time.

This does a lot to show that for Chris, “framing” means “misleading people with data and statistics.” First, it isn’t clear to me that this documentary should be categorized as a political one - it’s a religious documentary, if you ask me (though it could also be considered science fiction and fantasy). Second, he says nothing about the demographics of where the movie is screening. Third, he says nothing about the per-theater receipts, which are dismal. Despite having all that information available to him, he says “I merely report the facts.” Not so, Chris, you report a carefully selected and edited set of facts. And isn’t it funny - that’s just what the makers of Expelled did.

In any case, the figures Mooney apparently cites (but neglects to link to) can be compared to figures for documentaries in general (the only two categories available), where Expelled is currently number 26.

Another weird voice about the impact of the movie is that of Randy Olson, maker of A Flock of Dodos, a documentary about evolution and creationism that took a neutral point of view. Despite having previously said that Expelled was no problem…

I had heard about “the Ben Stein movie,” over a year ago when a friend in Toronto told me her best friend’s boyfriend was a cameraman on the movie. I had tried to warn everyone, “if this thing turns out to be entertaining, the evolution world is in trouble.”

It isn’t. Crisis averted. Thanks to Ben Stein. We can now throw this on the scrap heap alongside the growing mountain of boring global warming documentaries. And folks, warn your children, don’t use film to try and educate people. It’s an entertainment medium.

…he now says that Expelled is a massive problem and a huge success for the creationists:

This weekend Ben Stein’s anti-evolution movie, “Expelled,” had a HUGE opening, estimated to rake in over $3 million dollars.

Again, no mention of the number of screens the movie was on, or the low per-theater receipts. He goes on in condescending fashion:

To counter the blockbuster power of “Expelled,” the National Science Foundation, NAS and AAAS are organizing a panel discussion about putting together a committee to look into the possibility of creating a brochure that tells the public how to make a website for a petition that says evolution is fun.

That should probably take care of the problem.

You know what? I’m really fed up with the bureaucratic approach to communicating science. So much so that the International Year of Astronomy still strikes me as a potentially pointless exercise (but I have an open mind, and am heartened by Pamela Gay’s involvement - we’ll see how it goes). And I’m a frequent vocal critic of activism by institutional committee, which is what Olson describes here.

But really, this is a bit over the top, even for me. Olson is criticizing institutions that are sharply limited by their funding sources over what they are allowed to do. It’s an unfair slur. He should be agitating to change the rules, not condemning these institutions for following them.

Moving into the comments, Olson tells us who to blame:

You should focus your anger on the people who are paid to communicate evolution broadly. They should have created a voice for evolution so loud and powerful that disinformers like Ben Stein are drowned out. There should be five popular pro-evolution movies at the box office right now, instead of none.

Does anyone else find it funny that a filmmaker, who has never made a pro-evolution film, is criticizing those of us who aren’t filmmakers for not having made a bunch of pro-evolution films?

Having gotten the matter of blame out of the way, he then tells us what to do:

why doesn’t somebody run a film festival for pro-evolution films?

I suppose because doing that is expensive, and the people paid to do science communication work on shoestring budgets. I also suppose it is because people who know evolutionary biology don’t generally know how to run a film festival. But I’m only guessing. A commenter to the blog makes another cogent point, responding to Olson’s suggestion that a high-school kid who made an evolution movie would have nowhere to send it to:

A high-school kid? Youtube of course. And that has the potential to reach an audience larger than Flock of Dodos and Expelled combined.

I find the idea of a “film festival of pro-evolution films” as outreach hopelessly naive, if not just self-important. 99.9% of the public couldn’t name a single major international documentary film festival (let alone a specialized one), and a vast majority probably don’t even know documentary film festivals exist at all.

Olson then goes on to piss all over people like me:

It’s called supporting innovation. It DOES NOT HAPPEN in the world of science communication right now.

Right, Randy. I go into the schools 60-70 times a year and communicate science. Half the time I’m linking up to a school above the Arctic circle while I’m in southcentral Alaska using my broadband internet and a camera on my computer. I’m using 3-D models in my presentations. I teach in a roundtable format. I get funding for supplies and models for the classrooms I support by hook or by crook. Everything I do is based on how we know various scientific facts, and everything I do has students design an experiment so we can learn more about the subject. Everything I do can be part of at least two, sometimes three or four areas of study (astronomy, mathematics, physics, and biology).

This is not the science classroom you attended if you were raised in the United States at any time prior to about 2003. I’m so innovative that the teacher’s union isn’t sure they love me or hate me. Half the time I’m teaching a subject in a classroom that the teacher isn’t rated “highly qualified” to teach. Half the teachers interested in having me in their classrooms can’t figure out how to get the job done with the resources they have to hand. What I teach is way beyond the curricular requirements of the districts I teach in.

And I do this all for free, not necessarily because I’m a good guy and generous with my time - but because there is no money to get subject matter experts to bring this kind of innovative science communication into the classroom. What could I do if I could spend even the meager salary of a classroom teacher on my efforts each year? Probably quite a lot - the problem being, of course, that if you have that much money to spend, you are going to spend it on a teacher, not on me. And I perfectly understand why that is the case - so I go on doing what I do pro bono.

But all this isn’t good enough for Randy Olsen. I’m guessing he’s never heard of me¹, and doesn’t have the first idea about what I do.

Perhaps we science communicators could get some constructive criticism from supposedly expert pro-science communicators for a change? Eh? Please?

1. Yes, I’m calling him ignorant. Anyone who doesn’t understand what grassroots activists do, and how many of us there are, and still says the kinds of things Olson says, is profoundly ignorant. [↩]

(Update: Although I posted on Monday, the box office numbers cited below were revised, showing a very sharp drop in Expelled attendance on Sunday. The upshot is that Expelled failed to reach the $3.2 million previously reported on its opening weekend. The revised figure, now available on the page I link to, is $2,970,848.)

The box office numbers for the creationism propaganda movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, are (like any other set of numbers that measures something) interesting. Expelled barely achieved $3 million in its opening weekend, despite the producers’ expectation of $12 to $15 million.

The high opening weekend is mainly the result of getting Expelled released in lots of theaters - 1,052 of them - on a weekend when no major films were being released. And it probably doesn’t hurt that they are paying people to watch the movie, either - not something I’ve noticed on offer on any other movie I’ve wanted to see.

Through its website, Team “Expelled” is offering goodies to entice group sales in the Bible Belt and beyond, a move some call borderline bribery.

The ” ‘Expelled’ Challenge” urges schools and home-schooling groups to get students, parents and faculty to show up in force, promising donations of $5 to $10 per ticket stub for those who register.

“In speaking with Christian schools, we’ve found that hosting a school-wide ‘mandatory’ field trip is the best way to maximize your school’s earning potential,” the site explains.

Despite these advantages, on opening day, it did a dismal $1,145 per theater, and plummeted after that to less than $950 per. Compare this to the per-theater figures for An inconvenient Truth ($70,000), Super Size Me ($12,000), and Roger and Me ($20,000).

Also compare opening weekend figures: Expelled did 3.2 million in 1,052 theaters, while Sicko earned $23.9 million in just 441 theaters. Fahrenheit 9/11 earned $23.9 million in 868 theaters.

If you do some simple math, and assume four screenings per day, and that the ticket price is $7, then each showing attracted somewhere around 37 people. That’s not a lot.

Another way to evaluate this is to do actual statistics, which S. Walker at Inconcinnus Sermo has kindly completed. Go there to look at the chart. After an initial mathematical mistake, he corrected his analysis and concludes:

As you can see based on the number of theater’s that expelled opened in, it is a flop of extraordinary proportions. Although this isn’t the best way to do it (I don’t have time to sit and play with this), the residual of the expelled data is -16 standard deviations away from the predicted line.

Another question we should be asking concerns the demographics. My impression is that this movie will mainly preach to the converted - that is, closed-minded, extremist science-hating religious radicals. Most mainstream people won’t go see it. A list of states in which the movie is screening is interesting (just scroll down to the last list of states, updated April 16 - most of Lippard’s predictions are at this point moot) - you’ll note the strong bias placing the screenings in as many theaters as possible in states having a high proportion of fundamentalist Christians and Mormons. Even Alaska got two theaters, which was not the case for opening weekend on a lot of other documentaries - I think we had to wait about two weeks for An Inconvenient Truth, and longer for some other documentaries that had similar earnings.

So, to conclude: Expelled’s numbers were not very good. It appears they preached mainly to the choir. Still, Expelled is bad news. Anytime you see a big block of people conspiring to lie like this, and demonize innocent people as responsible for the Holocaust, in an appealing pop-cultural way, you’ve got a society with serious problems, and Expelled is not going to make those problems better. But it is at least clear that Expelled is not on track to being much of a success as a movie - certainly not the success that many of us were worried about leading up to the release.