A lot of photographers shoot rock and roll, but Neil Zlozower is as rock and roll as the bands he shoots. Even if you know nothing about rock and roll photography, if you grew up reading Circus and Hit Parader, you certainly saw his work, and probably saw his photo credit so many times, it’s probably been burned into your brain.

Zlozower is the best photographer to work in the metal and hard rock genres, and is arguably the best live photographer as well. Many have told him over the years he should do a book, and now he’s put together Van Halen: A Visual History 1978-1984.

The book is now available from Chronicle (list price: $35.00), and it features the prime time of Van Halen, the Roth era. Steven Blush, author of American Hair Metal, put it well when he wrote, “If you weren’t snortin’ huge lines of blow off your razor blade-chipped cassette cover of Women and Children First or just cruisin’ in your Camaro to the sound of ‘Jamie’s Cryin’ – all while screaming to chicks, ‘Show us your t*ts!’ – you just did not know how to rock, dude!”

Above: Neil Zlozower

The book isn’t just a collection of Zlozower’s best photos, it also includes a number of recollections from many who were close to the Van Halen camp who have never spoken to the press about the band including their early managers Marshall Berle (whose Uncle was Uncle Miltie Berle) and Pete Angelus, Roth’s former right hand man Eddie Anderson, and many more. Not to mention there’s also commentary on what made Van Halen special from a wide range of musicians, from Ted Nugent to Henry Rollins.

The commentary is of course very respectful, you won’t read the real down and dirty of what happened on the road in that great moment in time when no one knew cocaine, quaaludes and sex were potentially fatal. To paraphrase what Zlozower told the website DLR Army, the statute of limitations on those stories still hasn’t run out. What Zlozower could say, and this says a lot considering he worked closely with Led Zeppelin and Motley Crue, is there was no band wilder back in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s than Van Halen.

Above: A Zlozower Zeppelin shot

A nice touch in the book is giving props to Van Halen’s former bassist Michael Anthony. Anthony was recently booted out of the band without much class or grace, yet as Billy Sheehan, a great bassist in his own right, says in Visual History, “Michael Anthony was and is an irreplaceable part of Van Halen.”

In many quarters, rock and roll photography is still not considered an art form. Once a rock photographer told me that great photos, like a great story on a band, was a matter of access. Yet looking back in a lot of rock magazines, it’s clear any dolt with a camera can’t take a great picture, just like any dolt with a tape recorder can’t get a great interview with a band.

Having admired Zlozower’s work for many years, it’s clear that a great shot isn’t just about being in the right place at the right time. You either have the gut instict for it, or you don’t. Van Halen: A Visual History is not a must for any Van Halen fan, it’s also for anyone who loves true rock and roll photography. Let’s hope there will be more books from Zlozower in the future. A coffee table book of all the eighties bands he shot, with all the big hair, big stage sets, and splashy, custom painted hot rod guitars would be cool, no?

Above: Motley Crue's Helter Skelter picture disc, shot by Zlozower.

What do Yoko Ono, Kevin Costner and Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz have in common? All three will be in Las Vegas next week for the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show, better known as CES. The mammoth technology conference always draws a number of famous folks to Sin City to either perform musical acts and/or promote and advertise various products. But this year, the group of “celebrities” scheduled to appear at CES is quite eclectic.

In my opinion the reason Xbox Live Arcade exists is not to provide a platform for poorly conceived new games but to infuse classic arcade games with new life. Already you can play arcade-perfect versions of Contra, Rush 'N Attack, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but the big one is scheduled to release on Wednesday - the original arcade TRON.

As a kid I can remember my father and I dropping many a quarter in the TRON cabinet at Starworld in Kalamazoo, Michigan and even some twenty years after that I was thrilled to find that there was a working TRON cabinet in the student center where I went to college. I don't know what it is about that game but I still love it.

Sure, it's just four mini-games that increase to an impossible level of difficulty with alarming speed but the graphics and the sound are instantly capable of transporting me back to 1982. I can only hope that Spy Hunter, 720 degrees and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom are on someone's list for the Xbox Live Arcade treatment. Yeah, I know they're all available through MAME but there's something about being able to flop on the couch and play them on the TV.

Here's the press release from the gang at Microsoft:

"Featuring the familiar gameplay from the original, players battle as the mighty warrior Tron against the insidious Master Control Program and his ruthless right-hand man, Sark. “Tron” offers a four-part retro-futuristic test of skills, including racing light cycles, battling Sark’s tanks, fighting to enter the MCP cone and dodging grid bugs. “Tron” offers both the original arcade game and an enhanced version with new graphics, improved sound and two-person multiplayer. It’s the perfect re-creation of the original game based on the pioneering computer animated Walt Disney Pictures’ 1982 feature film, “Tron.” Plus, the Xbox LIVE Arcade version is the first version of “Tron” with two-person multi-player functionality of co-op and versus. The game will be available worldwide (with the exception of Japan and Korea) for 400 Microsoft Points and is rated E for Everyone by the ESRB."

Here's the Xbox Live Arcade TRON website where you can find more details and screenshots.

As you’ve probably seen at your local newsstand by now, Vanity Fair got the exclusive first look, complete with interviews with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and photos by Annie Leibowitz, at Indiana Jones 4. A movie this highly anticipated ain’t gonna go to any geek site (meeting Lucas and Spielberg in person, and having to get the big story from them, would be enough pressure to cause a geek boy to explode), it’s gotta be with the big boys. Here’s a brief run-down of some highlights:

Jim Windolf wrote the story, and he’s a terrific writer who really likes ‘70’s movies. Windolf also wrote the cover story on the last Star Wars film, and revealed on the magazine’s contributor’s page that he saw the first Star Wars four times in the summer of 1977. For that cover story, Lucas only promised ten minutes of his time over the phone, but they ended up talking about an hour. Now for the Indy 4 piece, Windolf got to see Lucas in person up in Skywalker Ranch.

Windolf made some sharp observations about Lucas, calling him, “a very soft-spoken billionaire. His speech pattern is a jumble of quick bursts that alternate with long pauses worthy of an absent-minded professor. In his favorite chair, he sat in a slumped posture, Nikes up on the coffee table. Over the years he has complained about how much he dislikes writing scripts, directing movies, and serving as the head of Lucasfilm Ltd. – which are his three main professional activities.”

Because of the disappointment many fans experienced with the newer Star Wars films, Lucas has to be aware that if Indy 4 sucks, rightly or wrongly, fingers will point to him first. “I know the critics are going to hate it,” Lucas said, with characteristic pessimism. “They already hate it. So there’s nothing we can do about that. They hate the idea that we’re making another one. They’ve already made up their minds. And all they’re going to do is go to the movie to say they saw it, but they could already write their review today. The fans are all upset. They’re always going to be upset…They write their own movie, and then, if you don’t do their movie, they get upset about it.”

Still, Lucas is confident in the film, and Spielberg revealed, “When I saw the movie myself the first time, there was nothing I wanted to go back and shoot, nothing I wanted to reshoot, and nothing I wanted to add.”

Above: Getting their Indy legs back

As Spielberg told Windolf, “Making the latest installment of Indiana Jones was like getting back on the bicycle I hadn’t ridden in 18 years,” but he got his “Indy legs back in the first couple of days of shooting.”

In talking to Windolf, Lucas remarked that one generation loves the original Star Wars, and another loves the last three. With the next Indiana Jones, the generation gap could work in the movie’s favor if George and Steve play their cards right. Raiders of the Lost Ark, like Star Wars, was based on the films that excited Lucas and Spielberg when they were kids, but updated for modern audiences.

Kids loved Star Wars and Raiders, and the parents who took them to the theaters had their inner children awakened by reliving the old serials and sci-fi flicks they saw when they were young. If Indy 4 succeeds, today’s older generation will relive the magic of seeing Raiders for the first time, and baring force majeure, today’s younger generation should find plenty of excitement as well.

Gizmodo landed in scolding hot water this week after pulling a mean-spirited prank at CES 2008. During the show, Gizmodo staff used a gadget called TV-B-Gone to turn off several TV monitors on the CES exhibit floor, which sabotaged a few booths and even disrupted a Motorola video presentation. Worse, Gizmodo publicized its prank by posting the video under the headline “Confessions: The Meanest Thing Gizmodo Did At CES.” Now the stunt has caused a serious controversy and put tech blogging under the microscope.

It’s funny to think of 3-D as being the salvation of today’s movie industry. It’s not exactly a new or cutting edge idea, and it wasn’t that long ago it was considered a relic from another era, like the hula-hoop. If Hollywood hopes to profit from 3-D, it better learn the lessons from its history, especially the lesson that it can’t make a crappy movie any better.

The first full-length feature film that launched the 3-D craze was Bwana Devil in 1952. In the ads for Devil, you were promised: “A lion in your lap! A lover in your arms! Newer than television!” As it turns out, 3-D was around before even motion pictures.

As the book Amazing 3-D recalled, 3-D photography was around in the 1800’s. Back then there were stereoscopes where you could look at photos in three dimensions. The viewing glasses that would one day enable 3-D movies came along in 1858. Scenes shot on film in 3-D were first shown to the public in 1915, and the first feature film in 3-D, The Power of Love, which came in with the development of Technicolor, was shown in 1922.

Above: This photo of audience watching Bwana Devil ran in Life Magazine.

But in the early ‘50’s, the major movie studios were frantically trying to win back the audiences they were losing to television, hence Bwana’s “newer than television” promise. In 1952, Cinerama and 3-D were looked to as the saviors of the movie industry. But where Cinerama cost a theater $70,000 to set up, 3-D was a much cheaper proposition.

Bwana Devil was released on June 18, 1952 and was a huge success, grossing $95,000 in just two theaters in its first week (the famous photograph of a packed movie house wearing 3-D glasses was taken during a showing of Devil). The reviewers panned the film, but with 3-D it was critic proof. The cover of Variety now hailed 3-D as “the next big thing” and soon every studio reportedly had a 3-D movie in development.

There were a lot of mediocre 3-D films made quickly to cash in on the trend, but some classics were made in the format as well. It Came From Outer Space, written by Ray Bradbury, had a big impact on John Carpenter when he was a child. As he recalled in his biography, Prince of Darkness, when a meteor flew right off the screen and literally blew up in his face, he knew he wanted to make movies when he grew up. In Film Comment, Martin Scorsese declared House of Wax, which starred Vincent Price, as the best 3-D movie ever made, and he loved the irony that its director, Andre de Toth, only had one eye.

Above: Yes, they even made porno in 3-D.

3-D movies went in and out of popularity throughout the ‘60’s and ‘70’s before having one last comeback in the early ‘80’s with two films that were produced by a former Xerox salesman, Treasure of the Four Crowns, and Comin’ At Ya! It wasn’t long before the major studios jumped in with Spacehunter (released by Columbia), Metalstorm and Jaws 3-D (both released by Universal), and Friday the 13th Part 3-D (released by Paramount). Originally the third Star Trek film was going to be in 3-D, but then Paramount decided to use the technology for the third Jason film, which is reportedly the highest grossing 3-D film in history.

Above: Will 3-D be the salvation of the business? Not if Hollywood makes crapola like Jaws 3-D.

3-D wasn’t flawless technology, and if a 3-D movie wasn’t well made or projected right, it could be a disaster (the common complaint was it caused eye strain and headaches). Cinefantastique magazine did a special 3-D issue in the fall of 1983, which included tips on the best place to sit in a theater when watching a 3-D movie. They also recommended buying better quality glasses with sturdier frames, which were then available for $5 a pair, instead of the flimsy cardboard ones the theaters provided.

The issue also had an article on “Why Most 3-D Films Are So Bad,” and noted that 3-D movies, and the technology, had to get better if the industry expected it to survive. But by the end of the summer of ’83, the major studios decided to shoot their 3-D projects in development, like Little Shop of Horrors and Return of the Living Dead, “flat” instead, and one of Hollywood’s best known gimmicks went flat-line.

Above: James Cameron’s much anticipated Avatar, now moved to December 18, 2009, will also be in 3-D, and Cameron has reportedly predicted by ’09 there will be enough 3-D theaters around so the movie can play on thousands of screens opening day.

Memo to Tom Cruise:

Been seeing you all over youtube, what a great, hilarious way to start off the new year. Who knew you had a sense of humor? Half ack, oh you’re killing me! Thank God so many people are helping spread the word, no matter how hard your “religion’s” goon squad tries to tear ‘em down, people keep puttin’ your clips back up for all to enjoy and spread the word of LRH. Keep ‘em comin’, and KSW babe…

ATTENTION! This motion picture will be shown in the starling new multi-dimension of SENSURROUND Please be aware that you will feel as well as see and hear realistic effects such as might be experienced in an actual earthquake. The management assures no responsibility for the physical or emotional reactions of the individual viewer. - From the ad for Earthquake

For Vanity Fair, Jim Windolf wrote about Star Wars Revenge of the Sith, as well as the current cover story Indiana Jones 4. In the magazine, he recalled that back in the day before you could rent VHS, let alone DVD or Hi-Def, you went to movies over and over again. Besides seeing Star Wars four times in its original run, he also saw Jaws, Tommy, Young Frankenstein, and Earthquake, “mainly for the ‘Sensurround’ – this special effect that shook the seats.”

It may be laughable in the age of surround sound and THX, but for a brief shining moment, Sensurround did try to push a new innovation in theater soundtracks. The late Jennings Lang was a Hollywood producer who knew the power of showmanship. He was the first to call a film an “event” back in 1974 for Earthquake, which like many disaster films of the day featured an all star cast. It also featured Sensurround, which he created.

“My dad was one of the last true showmen,” says Rocky Lang, his son. “He realized that movies had to be bigger and more event oriented. He was always trying to find a way to make the movie going experience bigger and better.”

Legend has it the idea for Earthquake came to Lang when he was in a theater watching a movie, and out of nowhere a real life earthquake happened. What if he made a movie about a major earthquake hitting Los Angeles, and was able to somehow shake the hell out of the audience as well? By setting up a series of speakers in the theater, and running a soundtrack with very low tones, it could be done (there were cues on the soundtrack when the special speakers were to be triggered).

Sensurround cost $2,000 per theater to set up, and it didn’t require rebuilding the entire sound system like it would with future innovations like THX. Movies didn’t even have Dolby stereo until the late Seventies, and Star Wars was the big movie that theaters had to rebuild their sound systems for.

Reports vary as to how well Sensurround worked, but it proved very effective during one screening on the Universal lot. In the adjacent theater watching another movie was a group from Nicaragua, who had recently endured a devastating earthquake in their homeland. Once the room showing Earthquake started rumbling, everyone in the screening room next door panicked and fled the theater.

Earthquake premiered at the Mann Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Rocky remembers big speakers being loaded off of trucks, like roadies carrying them for a rock concert, that would help shake the theater. “Inside the theater I looked up and they netted the entire arc of the ceiling,” Lang continues. “They didn’t know if the theater shaking would bring anything down!”

The film was a big hit for Universal, grossing $66 million, but Sensurround was only used in three more movies, Midway, Rollercoaster, and Battlestar Galactica, which was the three hour series pilot cut down to two hours and released in theaters in 1979.

Watch for Tom’s look back at the cinema gimmicks of yesteryear, coming soon.

Germany has given society a great many things, including Tom’s Hardware Guide of course. But a German company’s recent contribution to gaming is a little dubious: it’s called FpsBrain, and it’s a pill designed to enhance your gaming performance.

Last year, the famed Japanese studio Toho celebrated its 75th anniversary. Yes, they released movies from their national treasure, the genius director Akira Kurosawa, but it’s fair to say that Toho is the house that Godzilla built, or its Mickey Mouse, the big icon that brought in the big grosses.

With the opening weekend success of Cloverfield, the giant monster movie shot fast and furious with handheld cameras, there have been several top monster lists hitting the web. No such list would be complete without Godzilla, the original city stomping lizard himself. Even though he hasn’t made a movie in a few years, he’s still a pop culture icon here, and in his homeland of Japan.

Steve Ryfle, a contributor for the L.A. Times and Creative Screenwriting magazine , is also the foremost expert on Godzilla, and his Godzilla biography, “Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star,” is the definitive book on the big guy. As Ryfle explains in the book, the idea for Godzilla was born, legend has it, on a plane.

Toho producer Tomoyuki Tanaka was flying home to Tokyo. Toho was going to make a horror film called In the Shadow of Honor, but the deal fell through and Tanaka had to come up with a new idea for a movie in a hurry. On the plane it hit him. The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms had just been released in the United States and was a big success. “The Beast” in that film was a dinosaur revived by nuclear energy. Now Japan would have its own giant atomic dinosaur.

Like many ‘50’s science fiction movies, Godzilla would serve as a warning against nuclear power, and in Japan the bombing of Hiroshima wasn’t that distant of an event. “The theme of the film, from the beginning, was the terror of the Bomb,” Tanaka said. “Mankind had created the Bomb, and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind.” As Ryfle wrote, “For those who delve beneath the surface, Godzilla is no mere movie monster. He is a paradox of sorts – a horrible embodiment of the Bomb that created him, and yet a pitiable victim of it; a symbol of Japan’s post-war regrets and nuclear fears and, alternately, the nation’s rage and retaliation.”

In the more current Godzilla films, CGI and more advanced effects have been incorporated, but Godzilla still remains a low-tech man in a rubber suit, even over fifty years since his film debut. As Ryfle told Tom’s, “The basic formula of a stunt actor in a latex costume, miniature sets, mechanical models and explosions has remained mostly intact because it has become a tradition, and something that is viewed as an essential part of a unique genre with its own aesthetics.”

Above: Godzilla gets his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

Even as a kid, it wasn’t hard to tell Godzilla was a guy in a suit. Watching Godzilla films as a child, you’d think it would be fun to play in that suit, stomping on little buildings and swatting toy planes, just like you’d think being your favorite character at Disneyland would be a great job, until you realized how hot the suit gets in the summer. Playing Godzilla was likewise no day at the beach.

Above: He may not be giving George Lucas a run for the money, but Godzilla has done well with merchandising like video games, and toys.

The suits weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred pounds, and trying to move around under all that weight is tough. During the course of making a movie, Haruo Nakajima, who was the man inside the suit from 1954 to 1972, would lose ten to fifteen pounds. There were also mishaps and accidents. Nakajima passed out several times from the heat of the costume and the bright lights on the set. “In the movie Varan the Unbelievable, a miniature tank exploded between his legs and burned his nuts,” Ryfle says.

As Ryfle explains, keeping Godzilla a guy in a suit isn’t just a matter of budget. “Japanese FX artists are very skilled at digital effects, and an all CGI Godzilla could be done in Japan, but Koichi Kawakita, the SFX director for the ‘90’s Godzilla movies has said that to abandon the man-in-suit would take away Gozilla’s ‘Japaneseness.’” And as one L.A. Times reporter covering the making of a Godzilla film put it, the “feel of cheap camp is all part of Godzilla’s enduring charm.”

“Because Hollywood FX people are obsessed with cutting-edge technology, it’s easy to look at the Godzilla franchise as something stuck in a low-tech time warp,” says Ryfle. “But the Japanese filmmakers don’t necessarily see it that way. They still place a high value on things that are made by people, with human hands, as opposed to ones and zeroes floating around on a hard drive. So ever since its inception, Godzilla has had a handmade quality that makes him rather unique.”

Perhaps the reason Godzilla is still remembered since his debut in 1954, and after twenty-nine movies, is he’s the fun monster you don’t outgrow. To paraphrase the last line of the film Godzilla 2000, maybe there’s a little Godzilla in all of us.

Above: A storyboard drawing for Godzilla 3-D, a project that was in the works during the '80's 3-D revival that never made it to the screen. A 3-D Imax Godzilla film is reportedly in the works.

Just because the Star Wars movies are over and done with doesn't mean we can't still enjoy the occasional videogame entry into the storyline. After all the games are what kept us Star Wars fans going between 1983 and 1999. LucasArts' latest Star Wars game - The Force Unleashed - introduces the new character of Darth Vader's secret apprentice and force abilities on a scale we've never seen before.

The first trailer showed the new apprentice pulling a Star Destroyer out of the sky and crashing it into the ground announcing that the title was being taken quite literally. This game would feature the Force with the kid gloves off.

This latest video discusses the technological challenge of implementing three separate systems to replicate how the real world reacts to physics. The often used Havok physics engine runs alongside Pixelux's Digital Molecular Matter and NaturalMotion's Euphoria to create a destructible yet believable world for the player to enjoy. From the looks of it we're finally getting away from the "ragdoll" physics that makes everyone look like... well... like ragdolls.

I was already looking forward to this game but seeing the technology in action makes the wait even longer.

With the box office success of Cloverfield, a lot has been written about the film’s shaky, hand-held camerawork, which has drawn comparisons to The Blair Witch Project, and the monster being unseen throughout the film, which some of the best horror films in history have done as well.

Keeping the monster hiding in the shadows is certainly nothing new in cinema. Two of the best classic examples are the films of Val Lewton (Cat People), and the original version of The Thing from the ‘50’s. It’s never been explained exactly why master filmmaker Howard Hawks decided to show the Thing late in the game when many directors would have shown it throughout the movie, but Hawks’ biographer Todd McCarthy believes it was due to his shrewd storytelling sense.

“Knowing Hawks’ intelligence and shrewdness about these things, I’m sure that’s what it was,” McCarthy says. “Certainly in a lot of those ‘50’s films, if you showed the monster too much, you could see how phony it was. That could have played a role, but I think it was just shrewd storytelling. Hawks always went for understatement as well, and would shy away from anything that would have led him to show it more blatantly.”

One of the most cited modern examples is Jaws. The mechanical sharks that were built for the film kept breaking down, and Spielberg was forced to show the shark less than he initially planned. It was an enormous headache during the shoot, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

Carl Gottlieb, the screenwriter of Jaws, says, “Steven and I were both impressed by The Thing as young moviegoers, and we knew (hiding the monster) was a valuable device. We couldn’t show the monster, we didn’t have a monster! If we had a full budget for the shark and the shark was working, you would have seen much more of it. It may have been problematic in it wouldn’t have been as effective of a movie, but I would give Steven credit enough that if we had a shark for all the shots we needed a shark for, I think we would have created an equally terrifying movie, we just would have gone about it in a different way.”

In the documentary The Universal Story, Spielberg said, “By the shark not working, it allowed me to be much more experimental and find a way to make the surface of the water and the threat of the unseen as powerful as having seen the shark too early. I think the film would have made half the money had the shark worked.”

Alien also got a hell of a lot of mileage out of keeping its monster hidden for most of the film. “There are many good reasons for that, just as a simple dramatic principle of writing something scary, the unknown is the most frightening thing,” says Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon. “Make the audience squint, stare and try to catch glimpses of the thing in the shadows. Underexposure is always more effective than overexposure when you’re trying to scare people.”

“That’s what made Alien scary,” says legendary make-up effects artist Tom Savini. “If you showed the creature early in the film, the audience reaction would have been, ‘Oh, that’s it? I can take that,’ because they’d know what the threat is. By not showing it, you leave them in a state of confusion.”

When Roman Polanski decided not to show the infant spawn of Satan in Rosemary’s Baby, the film’s producer, William Castle, was certain the audience would feel burned. “Of course,” Polanski replied. “But I don’t think we should ever let them (see it). On the contrary Bill, everyone will have his own personal image. If we show our version—no matter what we do—it’ll spoil that illusion. If I do my job right, people will actually believe they’ve seen the baby.”

As Castle recalled in his autobiography, “Polanski was right. Many people leaving the theater believed they had seen Him. When Rosemary was shown on TV, columnists reported that ‘due to censorship,’ ABC had cut the scenes where the ‘baby’ was shown. Rosemary’s ‘baby’ was never photographed.”

This doesn’t just apply to horror films. Quentin Tarantino certainly learned a lot about making movies from the horror genre, and used what you imagine is worse than what you can see to great effect in Reservoir Dogs. As Christopher McQuarrie, screenwriter of The Usual Suspects, said at a seminar for Fade-In Magazine, “You hear people talk about Reservoir Dogs, this torture scene that was so horrible and so brutal... but they shot a wall. They started cutting his ear off, and then they panned away. And I’ve heard people vividly describe this brutal torture scene that isn’t there.”

Then Tarantino applied to same principal to one of the classic elements of Pulp Fiction. When I interviewed Tarantino’s former writing partner Roger Avary for Creative Screenwriting, I asked if there was definitely something in the suitcase, or if it was intentionally not shown so the audience would be left guessing. Well, he wouldn’t say exactly, but he did say that the suitcase was originally going to have the diamonds from the Reservoir Dogs heist. This idea was quickly abandoned, because “it’s not fantastic enough,” Avary said. “Nothing is fantastic enough. The only way to make something truly fantastic is to not tell people what’s in it, then it’s different for every person in the audience.”

Brian DePalma once said the key to suspense was withholding information. How much you show, or don’t show, in a horror film is ultimately up to the filmmaker’s taste, or lack thereof. As Anthea Sylbert, the costume designer on Rosemary’s Baby, says, “I believe in all good films, and indeed in all good art, you have to know what to leave out, what to eliminate. It gives importance to what you include.”

When I was first learning how to play guitar, I subscribed to all the guitar magazines (Guitar Player, Guitar For the Practicing Musician, Guitar World), and bought a lot of songbooks. Many magazines and songbooks boast “note for note transcriptions” of your favorite songs and solos, and although I couldn’t read music, myself and many other aspiring musicians learned from tablature, which had six lines representing the strings of a guitar, and numbers on the lines indicating what frets you need to finger.

A sure sign to me that the Guitar Hero phenomenon hasn’t slowed down was when I walked into Guitar Center and saw the Guitar Hero songbook, just like the ones I learned my favorite tunes from, displayed prominently.

The songbooks for Guitar Hero and Rock Band are from Hal Leonard, a leading sheet music publisher. In a press release for the songbook, Jeff Schroedl, Vice President of pop and standard publications for Hal Leonard, said, “We’ve gotten many requests for a songbook, so this should appease the game’s rabid fans who aspire to play the guitar for real, or get better at it. Our songbook lays out the notes and tab for them to actually learn the songs they know so well from the game.”

As Schroedl told us, it took about a year total to get it all together, including securing the song licenses, and getting all the approvals from Activision. He won’t say exactly how many copies the book has sold so far, except that “it sells as well as our top artists. It’s early, it’s been out a month and a half, but out of the gate, it’s an A list book in terms of sales.”

Jim Meinhardt, advertising manager for Hal Leonard, says, “It’s our biggest selling songbook by a wide margin for 2007, and it came out late last year.” Meinhardt says book is already in its third printing. Unless a music book is a big seller, a title can have a single publication, then wind up out of print because another printing would be too expensive. Clearly, that’s not a problem with Guitar Hero.

None of this would be happening without the game inspiring kids to pick up the guitar for real, and it’s given many bands a big boost as well. “It’s probably getting more kids involved than anything the music industry is providing us with at the moment,” says Guitar World editor in chief Brad Tolinski. “The band Dragonforce has gotten a boost because their song, “Through the Fire and the Flames,” is the ultimate Guitar Hero song. It’s the most challenging track on Guitar Hero, and all these kids are aspiring to play it.”

Above: The band Dragonforce

“A lot of bands I’ve spoken with have told me it’s improved their visibility substantially,” says Schroedl. “I don’t know if it’s saving the industry, but it can’t hurt. Talking to a lot of industry people, the consensus is it’s helping.” Guitar World also recently ran the sheet music for “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” another Guitar Hero favorite the readers wanted to learn.

In the gear industry, Peavey are now making guitars that you can really play and use as controllers for Guitar Hero. The guitar case company Coffin Cases are now making casket shaped cases for Guitar Hero controllers. And in response to all the latest Guitar Hero mania, the cover of the June issue of Guitar World, due to hit the stands in April, will promise: “How to Become a Real Guitar Hero: It’s Not Just a Game!”