“Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut” will be released on DVD and Blu-ray November 3.

We talked with Alex Tse, the last of “Watchmen”‘s long series of screenwriters, about the challenges of adapting a revered and iconic work, and why Alan Moore is a reluctant elephant in the room.

Mavervorl Media: “Watchmen” is a beloved series of books in a fiercely partisan genre, and fans are very protective. Were you worried about keeping comics fans happy when you took the gig?

Alex Tse: I made peace with the fact that I would be judged for taking on this piece of work, but some dude in a Night Owl costume is not going to intimidate me more than a gangbanger.

MM: It seemed like “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” (another Alan Moore movie adaptation from which the author removed his name) was a non-starter, but people were especially passionate abut “Watchmen” being just so. Was that a lot of pressure?

AT: You lose the right to complain once you take the job. but in our initial conversation, (“Watchmen” director) Zack Snyder, who obviously was also a huge fan of the books, said, “Do you really want to do this? I don’t want to fuck it up.”

Zack is the only motherfucker who could have made a movie like that. Very few people had the leverage to do “Watchmen” the way they wanted, but Zack had just come off of “300″ and. he had the currency to fight the studio. And I said, “I don’t want to fuck it up either!”

MM: But the ball had been passed around for so many years…

AT: Right, and one of the things you’re left saying, as a fan, is “Do you want someone else to fuck it up?” It all comes down to who has the ball at the end of the game.

MM: Alan Moore is famously prickly. And I notice his name is not on the DVD packaging.

AT: Yet anyone i know who’s actually dealt with him has nothing but nice things to say. David Hayter, “Watchmen”‘s previous writer, said that Alan Moore could not have been more supportive. He is supportive of writers in general. But I came at this project like a fan. I saw properties of Alan Moore’s fucking destroyed. “League” was utterly heartbreaking. I became increasingly nervous about what people would do with his stuff.

MM: Does it take a fan to adapt something like this?

AT: Well, I’m a fan, and not a fanatic. I’d like to think I have a little perspective. I read “Watchmen” when I was 13. I started out with “X Men,” maybe because it was more accessible, read “The Dark Knight Returns” and thought “Holy shit – you can do that with Batman?”

There was a whole world of comics I wasn’t aware of.

But after “Dark Knight” I started paying attention to the writers. I wanted to know who Frank Miller was. I started following his work. And then someone said, “If you like Frank Miller, then you should read Alan Moore.”

And the first thing I read was “Swamp Thing.” It was like literature. It was one of the things I read where the entire paradigm shifted. If “Dark Knight” had advanced and opened my eyes to what the medum of what comics could be, “Watchmen” did that for me for stories in general.

MM: There have been a number of writers onboard “Watchmen” as it has passed between studios and directors. What personal touches are you proudest of?

AT: The “McLaughlin Group” scene seemed like an Alan Moore-ish thing to do, to have John McLaughlin talking about superheroes was pretty fucking cool. But in the Ultimate Edition where the “Tales of the Black Freighter” story is integrated, I suggested using Nina Simone’s version of “Pirate Jenny” from “The Threepenny Opera,” suggesting that the Freighter was an allegory for civil rights.

Tse said the “Watchmen” job elevated his profile. In Hollywood special attention is paid to people who can get a project off the ground. Tse, who was the screenwriter with the ball at the end of “Watchmen”‘s long drive to theatres, was under intense scrutiny from fans but also executives who could get him further work.

“But it didn’t make my life night and day,” Tse said. “I still have to go to work.”

In addition to adapting Paul Pope’s “Battling Boy” graphic novel for the screen, Tse is also writing “Frankie Machine” for Michael Mann and an adaptation of “The Illustrated Man” for Zack Snyder.

MM: When “Watchmen” finally appeared -

AT: It was pretty split critically -

MM: Did you go to see it at the theatre?

AT: I had already seen it a bunch of times at screenings, but when it was released I stood outside (Hollywood’s) the Arclight and waited for my friends to come out. I’d spent two years on this project from beginning to end and I just couldn’t sit in the theatre.

MM: The ending of “Watchmen” the movie has been controversial.

AT: I’m quite proud of it, actually. We kept David Hayter’s ending because it keeps the spirit of “Watchmen.” To me, anyway. Besides, you would have to set aside 40 more minutes of an already long movie for the fucking interdimensional cephalapod. People would say, “What the fuck is this?” Don’t get me wrong, there’s something about that that would have been really cool, too, but would it have been an addition for the sake of nostalgia, not narrative.

MM: You’re currently working with Snyder on “The Illustrated Man.” How would you characterize the challenges of dealing with the reactions of Ray Bradbury fans versus Alan Moore fans?

AT: I’d say whatever difficulties are all high class problems to have.

“Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut” will be released on DVD and Blu-ray November 3.

In the exhaustive two-hour documentary “The Shark Is Still Working” (a reference to the frustrating non-operation of “Bruce,” “Jaws”‘ centerpiece prop), filmmakers James Gelet, Jake Gove, Erik Hollander, and James Michael Roddy explore the effect this pre-CGI monster movie had on the people who made it as well as its cultural impact and enduring popularity.

“This movie…crashed into people like a speeding truck,” said Richard Dreyfuss, whose role as icthyologist Matt Hooper (a movie starring an icthyologist?) was made more heroic in the screen version than its homewrecking paperback counterpart.

Dreyfuss said the cast and crew were so wrapped up in the famously troubled production – even then the talk of Hollywood – that it wasn’t until the movie premiered that he realized how much of a hit it could be.

Dreyfuss, now white-haired and looking unsettlingly like Chris Elliot’s character in “There’s Something About Mary,” provides animated, often manic interviews.

Among other tidbits for fans to relish, Dreyfuss says that the late Robert Shaw, who played salty Captain Quint, delighted in winding up the brash young actor, then in his 20s.

“He acted like he had my number,” Dreyfuss says. “And he did. He made me doubt things I already knew.”

Shaw would dare the young actor to dive from the mast of the Orca, the cast’s floating set, into frigid Vineyard Sound. “I bet you can’t do that,” Shaw would say.

Director Steven Spielberg, who in past interviews seemed reluctant to talk about the movie – the then 27-year-old had directed numerous television episodes and the low-budget features “Sugarland Express” and the truck-as-shark thriller “Duel” – here opens up with numerous anecdotes about the grueling five-month shoot (completed with underwater shots in editor Verna Fields’ tiny San Fernando Valley swimming pool) and seems to concede that, three decades later, it is foolish to continue to distance himself from the movie that made him famous.

“It gave me a career,” he says.

Composer John Williams details the crafting of his iconic score (“The theme was very simple,” he says), the late voiceover actor Percy Rodrigues says that he went for “deep” rather than “high” in his “Jaws” promos, and poster artist Roger Kastel finds his original shark research photos.

Spielberg, Dreyfuss, and Scheider were all interviewed for Laurent Bouzereau’s excellent “The Making of Steven Spielberg’s ‘Jaws’,” which has appeared on “Jaws” reissues since its laserdisc debut. But “The Shark Is Still Working” fleshes out these interviews and goes back to Martha’s Vineyard, where many of Amity’s supporting players are still living.

These interviews are a treat. Lee Fierro, who played Mrs. Kintner, the bereaved mother of shark-gobbled Alex, recalls that for years she was asked to replicate the slap she delivered to Roy Scheider when her character learned that Chief Brody knew a shark was out there, but didn’t close the beaches in time to prevent her son’s death.

“It was mostly young men who would ask me (to slap them),” she says. “I finally had to stop doing it.”

Fierro, now a children’s theatre instructor on Martha’s Vineyard, refrains from using her upstage hand.

In a quick sequence, we watch as Fierro wallops several male fans over the years. Oddly enough, she uses her left hand each time, though with Scheider she used her right.

We also meet Henry Carreiro and Dick Young, who played Felix and Pratt, two wisecracking Amity fishermen.

“They called us ‘Costello and Costello,’” says Young, whose famous line to Dreyfuss, “A wha?” is one of “Jaws”‘ most quotable.

Robert Shaw received coaching on what it was like to be a working class resort town fisherman from the late Craig Kingsbury, a Vineyard local who played the doomed Ben Gardner.

Kingsbury’s daughter says that her father mostly lied to Shaw, who would then repeat the stories in TV interviews.

Shaw does appear in archival footage in the documentary, but these are teasingly short clips, and this is where the doc can’t be all things to all fans. As a fan film, albeit a very professional one, “Shark” can still never be as comprehensive as the die-hard fan would like; in the same way Matt Hooper can’t produce the shark tooth from the wrecked hull of Ben Gardner’s boat for Mayor Vaughn, we don’t get to see Robert Shaw repeating Kingsbury’s whoppers on color TV.

And for this fan, there was simply not enough coverage of the iconic “Indianapolis Speech,” in which Quint reveals to Hooper and Brody both his hatred and respect for sharks. Quint tells them he was on the U.S.S. Indianapolis, which in the summer of 1945 delivered “the Hiroshima bomb.” On the way back from the Pacific atoll Tinian, the Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine and two-thirds of her crew were devoured by sharks.

“June 29, 1945,” Quint says.

That speech, not included in Benchley’s novel but introduced for the movie by uncredited scribe Howard Sackler (and revised by everyone from chief “Jaws” screenwriter Carl Gottlieb to “Apocalypse Now” screenwriter John Milius to Spielberg to Robert Shaw himself), gives a date that was more than a month premature; the atomic bomb was loaded onto the Enola Gay and dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, within days of its delivery by the Indianapolis. Why did Quint get the date wrong?

“Robert was a little drunk,” said Carl Gottlieb. As part of the United Film Festival debut of “The Shark Is Still Working,” Gottlieb attended a screening of “Jaws” at Hollywood’s beautiful Vista Theatre to meet with fans and sign copies of his own book, “The Jaws Log.” I cornered him at the popcorn counter.

“Sackler actually had the date right,” Gottlieb said, “and Robert did, too, at first, but that scene was shot many times over two days and I remember he got the date right in one version. But he had some drinks in him and the different versions got spliced together.”

So “The Shark Is Still Working,” which delivers the most comprehensive dose yet of the type of trivia and behind the scenes footage that unites Trekkies, “Buffy” geeks, “Star Wars” LARPers, and (lately) “Big Lebowski” fans in hand-fluttering information overload ecstasy, can’t possibly capture (as Quint says) “the head, the tail, the whole damn thing” of “Jaws” meta lore.

But maybe Hooper would say that “The Shark Is Still Working” gets close enough to the cage so you “can get him in the mouth.”

Narrated by Scheider, who also gave his final “Jaws”-related interview prior to his death in 2008, “The Shark Is Still Working” features more than 40 interviews with cast members and professional fans, including Kevin Smith, Bryan Singer, Eli Roth, Robert Rodriguez, and M. Night Shyamalan.

Principal interviews were conducted throughout 2005 and include footage from Martha’s Vineyard’s “JawsFest” of that year.

The filmmakers have not secured distribution, despite enthusiastic fan support and sold out festival screenings. At a recent Sunday morning encore showing in Los Angeles, producers marveled at the turnout.

“You don’t expect packed houses for documentaries at 10 a.m. in Hollywood,” one said.

With “Jaws” reaching its 35th anniversary next year, producers say this series of performances, for the United Film Festivals, is “strategic.” They wish, among other things, that their documentary be purchased for inclusion on future “Jaws” anniversary editions.

“We don’t understand why Universal doesn’t get how popular the movie still is,” one said. “We made this movie because we’re fans of ‘Jaws’ and we wanted to know everything about it.”

See also: The Shark Is Still Working: The Impact & Legacy of “Jaws”, The Jaws blog

Unknown to school children and hoary academics alike, Shakespeare’s work was once considered some of the finest literature of the 19th century. And Shakespeare has even been misplaced in his native France, which recently chose the late mime Marcel Marceau as the namesake of its new Spay And Release building for dogs.

But even if the works of Shakespeare are available only in rare bookstores and via the complex oral traditions of his ancestral Oglala Sioux, the modern reader will find there is a lot to learn from the man known as The Avon Lady.

One example is that Shakespeare could deftly insert comedy into his tragedies. Very popular when it was first performed in 1952, Hamlet is a tragedy about a person with a very funny name. The audience thinks, “Hamlet should be happy all the time because his name makes us laugh.” But the moody youth, considered to be The Artist Formerly Known as Prince of 12th century Denmark, was anything but happy. Because he was a Jehovah’s Witness.

And Shakespeare could also make big tragedies smaller and more intimate. The star-crossed Macbeth, whose regicidal doom is foretold by witches, nevertheless shares the stage with another character whose misery is recognizable to any office drone: the sad-sack Ross.

In the beginning of Macbeth. Ross, acting as messenger for King Duncan, brings the news to Macbeth that the latter is now Thane of Cawdor, a title that would allow Macbeth a small pension and the right to officiate at mall openings. The old Thane was killed for treachery.

But Macbeth’s friend Banquo does not believe Ross.

“What, can the devil speak true?” says Banquo, and Macbeth remarks that the Thane of Cawdor is still alive, and that Ross shouldn’t dress him in borrowed robes, whatever that means.

At this moment we feel tenderly toward Ross, who after all had just brought Macbeth good news from the King, only to be openly doubted. But Ross lets it all wash off his back.

Later, following Duncan’s murder, an anguished Ross isn’t even allowed a moment of grief without some spoilsport ruining it. He notes the feral sorrow of the late king’s horses:

ROSS

And Duncan’s horses–a thing most strange and certain–
Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,
Turn’d wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,
Contending ‘gainst obedience, as they would make
War with mankind.

Old Man

‘Tis said they eat each other.

Well thanks for lettting me get all wound up, Granddad. Why Ross doesn’t knock the Old Man’s eye out is unclear. What is clear is that Ross in his speech was only working up to the horse-eating-horse data but Old Man chose to step on his punchline.

When MacDuff, who should have known his place after being born by Caesarean Section, arrives on the scene, he nevertheless further belittles Ross by not answering his question.

Enter MACDUFF

ROSS
How goes the world, sir, now?

MACDUFF

Why, see you not?

Jesus, we say to MacDuff, just answer the goddamn question. If he could see it he wouldn’t have asked you.

And even when Ross invites the murderer king to dine, Macbeth goes out of his way to pretend that Banquo’s ghost is hovering at the available seat; anything to avoid sitting with Ross.

ROSS

His absence, sir,
Lays blame upon his promise. Please’t your highness
To grace us with your royal company.

MACBETH

The table’s full.

Despite the insult, Ross gamely tries to engage the gibbering Macbeth in conversation, only to be shut down by the shrew Lady Macbeth:

MACBETH

Can such things be,
And overcome us like a summer’s cloud,
Without our special wonder? You make me strange
Even to the disposition that I owe,
When now I think you can behold such sights,
And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks,
When mine is blanched with fear.

ROSS

What sights, my lord?

LADY MACBETH

I pray you, speak not

When Ross slogs across a battlefield to bring grim but concise news to Malcolm, the future king, Malcolm shows the haughtiness of his future office by not even listening.

ROSS

Your castle is surprised; your wife and babes
Savagely slaughter’d: to relate the manner,
Were, on the quarry of these murder’d deer,
To add the death of you.

MACDUFF

My children too?

ROSS

Wife, children, servants, all
That could be found.

MACDUFF

And I must be from thence!
My wife kill’d too?

ROSS

I have said.

It is only here where the good Ross allows himself any well-deserved spitefulness, but otherwise Ross can’t win. He has to repeat everything he says and yet is told to shut up. He tries to be hospitable but is mocked. Up to and including the very last scene of Macbeth does Ross have to endure the slings and arrows of men who don’t think him worthy of their attention.

ROSS

Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt:
He only lived but till he was a man;
The which no sooner had his prowess confirm’d
In the unshrinking station where he fought,
But like a man he died.

SIWARD

Then he is dead?

No, you dummy, he was kidding.

Perhaps Shakespeare saw himself as Ross. Was Shakespeare, as someone once said, “a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard of no more”? I sure hope not.

Like his idol F. Scott Fitzgerald, Shakespeare took his own life with a shotgun. The note said that the frustrated writer wanted no longer to be “wasted away again in Margaritaville,” which some scholars believe is a reference to Shakespeare’s unrequited love for schoolteacher Margarita Ville.

But only by experiencing Shakespeare’s plays can we listen to him, finally, the way no one listened to Ross.

One way to do this is to see Theatre Banshee‘s excellent production of Macbeth running until April 26.

A word I learned (or thought I did) by osmosis, “kitsch” is defined by Kundera in his 1982 book “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” as “the absolute denial of shit.”

In America we hear kitsch in the same sentence as camp, and both words are most often used adjectivally to describe low-brow art; things magneted to refrigerators, propped ironically in hutches and on altars, things described as “guilty pleasures.”

But Kundera puts kitsch in context, first through his character Sabina, an artist who dismisses all untruths and fights to recognize and suppress her own (and our own, Kundera says) sentimentality. Then, through the lens of the 1968 “Prague Spring” and occupation of Czechoslovakia by Soviet forces, Kundera extols kitch’s virtues as a political tool.

Totalitarian kitsch, Kundera says, is the sentimentalization of the country, the party, the government. A government that only distinguishes between “good” and “better”; a government that denies its own shit.

And “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” defies narrative kitsch, too. The characters vacillate. Where we want and expect Tomas to be a Howard Roark figure of principals and sacrifices, he is that only part of the time. Where the final resolution would be – had the novel been written by someone else – here occurs in the middle of the book. The narrative is turned on its head, with Kundera popping in now and then to remind us that the book is an invention.

But the recent allegations, which if true reveal that the then-21-year-old student Kundera made a police report about a man who was later convicted of spying against the Czech government, provide a whiff of narrative kitsch of their own.

Because Kundera, it is suggested, was a “true believer” in Communism as a student and young man, and only cooled on it when his government made a hash of the philosophy. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is populated with characters who inform on others and who justify atrocities in service to totalitarian kitsch. “We didn’t know,” Kundera quotes them. The denial of shit.

But if the definition of kitsch can be extended to the pat phrase and the easy answer, the conventional, doesn’t the widespread acceptance of an iconoclastic work such as Kundera’s threaten it, too? Think of the lesser (or greater) imitators of Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” and “Reservoir Dogs”: we can’t even watch the originals now without lamenting their dissolution.

So haven’t meta-projects like “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” “Pulp Fiction,” and “The Sixth Sense” become kitschy, too? And is the subversion of Kundera’s own dissident character by a 58-year-old police report just the narrative anti-zing we’ve come to not-expect?

And once we start, the kitsch keeps coming; it kitschochets between the book, the author, and history.

First, we kitschily apply the words of one great author to the life of another. “If it were true, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath Caesar answered it” says Antony in “Julius Caesar.” If it were true, Kundera committed an act out of ignorance (‘We didn’t know”) that sent a man to 14 years of labor in uranium mines.

Then comes Life Imitates Art. While it is convention to graft the author onto his stronger protagonists, Kundera has instead become his character Tereza, who unwittingly cheats on her husband with a Communist spy only to realize later that the interlude had been recrded as potential blackmail.

While Mr. Ripka denied fishing for damaging information on Kundera, it is no secret that the author is not loved in the former Czechoslovakia, which he fled in 1970 for Paris. The Czech Republic lives uneasly with its puppet regime past.

The unearthing of the 1950s police report is the clearest echo from the book, as Kundera the narrator points out that damning information was often collected by the Communists to be released at just the right time. Calling the allegations “pure lies” last month, Kundera said they amounted to “the assassination of an author.”

We will defy kitsch by refusing to end this article with Kundera’s assassination. But we must also by all means forgive what Kundera denies ever happened, so where does that leave us, narratively?

Buy The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
Buy “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” movie

See also: Report Says Acclaimed Czech Writer Informed on a Supposed Spy, The Big Website About Milan Kundera