August 10, 2013.

Hollywood Takes Spanish Lessons

And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films textbooks, telescreen programs, plays, novels----with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the Party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers, containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole subsection----Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak----engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.

LOS ANGELES----In a small room of the Paramount Pictures lot here, postproduction work is under way on a movie that sounds as derivative as they come: the fourth sequel to "Paranormal Activity."

Three messages had slid out of the pneumatic tube with Winston was working; but they were simple matters, and he had disposed of them before the Two Minutes Hat interrupted him. When the Hate was over he returned to his cubicle, took the Newspeak dictionary from the shelf, pushed the speakwrite to one side, cleaned his spectacles, and settled down to his main job of the morning.

But flickering on an editor's monitor are the types of scenes rarely seen in Hollywood: Characters are shown visiting botanicas----storefronts where witchcraft is practiced. One woman tries to cure he possessed grandson by ritualistically rubbing a raw egg on him. Much of the dialogue is in Spanish, with no subtitles.

Winston's greatest pleasure in life was in work. Most of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem----delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guide you except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your estimate of what the Party wanted you to say. Winston was good at this kind of thing. On occasion he had even been entrusted with the rectification of th Times leading articles, which were written entirely in Newspeak. He unrolled the message that he had set aside earlier. It ran:

The four previous "Paranormal Activity" films grossed a total of more than $350 million, thanks in large part to packed theatres in Hispanic neighborhood. Now, with the next installment, "Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones," some of the series' most fervent fans will see people who look and speak like them on screen.