Since the launch of the NewsQuake blog earlier this year, we've featured quite a few interviews, with personalities as diverse as Geoff Emerick, Michael Musto, William Langewiesche, Rob van Hattum, and Carlo Bonini. In all these cases, we've welcomed comments from visitors. However, this top-down approach didn't feel quite right for a social news site. To a great degree, it still left the community on the margins, which contradicts the fundamental fact about any social news site: the community belongs in the center ring.

So we're going to try a different approach. Below you will find the subjects of three impending interviews here at Propeller. What we're asking is for community members to submit questions in advance. We can't promise that all questions will be included in the final product--there may be duplicates, or questions that simply don't fit into the conversation. We will also experiment with different ways of integrating these questions: they may be threaded into the interview proper, or grouped at the end as a kind of lightning round. But we hope as many members as possible will join the party. We'll probably set up a mail queue for this express purpose, but for now, please do send those questions to James Marcus via Propeller site mail. Here are the subjects, folks, along with some relevant information about each one:

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
Francis Ford Coppola is the writer and director of such classic films as The Conversation (1974), The Godfather (1972), The Godfather: Part II (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979). His new film, Youth Without Youth, is based on a novella by the Romanian philosopher and religious scholar Mircea Eliade, and will open in the U.S. in December.

ALEX ROSS
Alex Ross writes about classical music for The New Yorker (and occasionally contributes profiles of such hard-to-pigeonhole performers as Björk). He is the author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which was just chosen by The New York Times as one of The Ten Best Books of 2007. Ross blogs about his many musical interests at The Rest Is Noise.com.

GARRETT M. GRAFF
Garrett M. Graff is the founding editor of the blog FishbowlDC.com, and was the first blogger ever to cover a White House press briefing. While still a teenager, he worked on Howard Dean's campaign, serving as the candidate's first webmaster. He is currently an editor-at-large at Washingtonian magazine, and is about to publish The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House. You can learn more about him here, and check out his personal blog here.

Rory Kennedy opens her latest documentary, The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, with footage of the Milgram Experiment, a 1961 behavioral study designed to ask the question, "Could the entire Holocaust really have been the work soldiers following orders?" The results demonstrated that most people will step way beyond their personal moral boundaries if directed to do so by an authority figure. In the Milgram case, subjects thought they were inflicting near-fatal electroshock treatments on unseen prisoners (in reality, they were causing no harm). Conversely, Kennedy demonstrates that the American soldiers involved in the infamous Abu Ghraib torture incidents were made to think that they were doing nothing wrong. When images of the extreme interrogation techniques leaked and the government needed a scapegoat, many of those same soldiers were then sent to prison for following orders.

Netscape sat down with Kennedy last month at the Sundance Film Festival. It was the morning after President Bush's State of the Union speech, and the director, a member of America's most famous left-leaning political family, discussed not only her film but the War on Terror, military history, governmental transparency, and why she thinks the majority of Americans "are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore." Ghosts of Abu Ghraib premieres Thursday, February 22 on HBO.


The film uses the Milgram Experiment as a structuring metaphor. Did you begin the project with that in mind?

I had originally planned to do a very different film, which was more about the nature of ordinary people who commit extraordinary acts of evil. We were looking to genocides to exemplify that. And then, like so many other people, I was horrified by the photographs that came out of Abu Ghraib, and continued to be haunted by them years after. I found myself asking: Who were these people and what motivated them? Were they the kids next door or were they psychopaths? What was their childhood like? And so I then went back to HBO, where I had been developing the film on genocide, and I said, "How would you feel if we were to change direction and look at Abu Ghraib as our example?'" They were excited about that, and I was then able to get access to a number of the soldiers involved in the abuse--and ultimately to the detainees.

When I talked to these people and asked the question, "Why did you do this?'", they all said the same thing: "I did it because I was told to do it." So Ghosts of Abu Ghraib became much more of an investigative film, and less of a psychological film.

Early on in Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight, Donald Rumsfeld announces that the U.S. Army is about to engage in "the first war of the 21st century." There's an unmistakable note of pride in this statement, which dates from the eve of the Iraqi invasion in 2003. And that archival clip is a fitting place for Ferguson to begin his argument, which takes the former Defense Secretary to task for his arrogance, stubbornness, and general refusal to admit mistakes.

Ferguson built the film, his first (the Brookings Institute fellow received guidance from co-producer Alex Gibney of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room fame) out of 200+ hours of interviews with diplomats, scholars, former Bush administration officials and U.S. soldiers. The filmmaking team also ventured into war-torn central Baghdad, at great personal risk--this is the first film I've seen in which members of a security detail are given on-screen credits in advance of the editor and cinematographer. Ferguson's goal: to meticulously examine the first year of the conflict, pinpointing the key mistakes that continue to hamper the war effort today. The resulting film, though clinical in its treatment of the facts, paints a damning portrait of the Bush Administration's insistence on staying the course. Netscape News sat down with Ferguson and Gibney at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, where No End in Sight premiered to standing ovations and was ultimately awarded a Special Prize by the Festival's Documentary Jury.

Netscape: I personally have a knee-jerk reaction against charges that key members of the Bush Administration are "stupid" or "evil." What's a more reasonable way of explaining why these guys made so many bad decisions?

Charles Ferguson: I think it's much more about blindness, and perhaps also arrogance. Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld are intelligent, accomplished people. But they seem to have been very narrow-minded, unwilling to listen, and also, in a number of cases, dangerously arrogant.

Alex Gibney: I also think this administration has had an obsession with executive power. I mean that in both the literal sense--in terms of the chief executive, the President--but also in terms of other executives, such as Jerry Bremer, in whom they invested a tremendous amount of power. This is something that goes back into deep history. Ever since Nixon's resignation, I think both Rumsfeld and Cheney have been obsessed with that idea. And that's fed into this larger sense of arrogance, of a kind of willful blindness, because they're determined to retain the prerogatives of the executive, the ability to do what they want to do, no matter what anybody else says.

There are a number of title cards in the film, referencing Bush administration officials who wouldn't speak to you on camera. What do you think is behind that shared reticence, given that Rumsfeld, Bush, etc, seem so confident in their deeds and ideas when they speak to the press?

Ferguson: Well, they're confident when they speak to the press. They're not, in general, nearly as enthusiastic or confident about accepting critical questions from the press when they can't be controlled. And that, unfortunately, has been the experience of not just myself in making this film, but of many journalists who have tried to explore what happened.

This morning I had a chance to speak with Scott Erickson, Senior Product Manager for the Microsoft Zune. The Zune, in case you managed to escape the buzz, is a music and video playing handheld device set to launch tomorrow.

Fabienne: The Zune has had such a big buzz on the internet, are there any sorts of differences in the review models that will change with the production model of the device?

Scott Erickson: The devices we sent out for review are the same as those in stores tomorrow. There were some misconceptions in the form of early screen shots that weren't actually from the device.

Fabienne: Are you looking forward with relief to the launch tomorrow after such a long pre-buzz?

Scott Erickson: No, not at all. [laughing] Yes of course, it's going to be one of the largest Microsoft product launches with 30,000 retail outlets including interactive kiosks at retailers. We'll also have the Zune at music stores such as the Virgin Megastore.

Fabienne: What is your favorite part about the Zune -- in the interface, the hardware, or elsewhere?