The Train Wreck Scene in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)

My friend Larry sends me the below communication between his professor and him for a course he is taking at USC on digital marketing. At the bottom I weigh in on his message back to his professor. Background: we had both just seen Steven Spielberg’s latest movie about his childhood, The Fablemans where Spielberg’s first passion for making movies was stirred by watching the train wreck scene in the circus movie, The Greatest Show on Earth. He duplicated and filmed the scene with the Lionel train set he got for Christmas after seeing the film. My response is very EE Cummingsesque. 

John

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Larry, thank you for your insights! I enjoyed reading your reflections in the original post and to your peers. Great work incorporating personal experience and class materials. Please note, APA style is one space in between sentences rather than two (the previous standard).  Anika

Seriously? How funny! That thumb has been typing two spaces for more than 60 years, when the typing instructor used to penalize me for only one space. I’ll have a conversation with the errant thumb, but I’m not hopeful. It will blame my brain, claiming a twitch is at fault (which seems doubtful, given the consistency). From both an aesthetic and UX point of view, the two spaces look and feel better to me. One seems abrupt and disproportionate to the pause I want to impose. It looks like a runon sentence when only one has to carry the load of the traditional two. I appreciate your comments on my content enormously and I humbly ask that you overlook the extra millimeter of white space after periods in my writing just as the other instructors have accommodated them. 🙂  Larry

Great stuff Larry!This sentence looks like that Lionel train that crashed into the back of the “Great stuff Larry!” train in Spielberg’s re-enactment of the scene from the movie The Greatest show on Earth.   The  animals    

have   all escaped  and      

are   running    all       over the place.

John

Six Year Old Steven Spielberg Recreates the Train Wreck Scene from The Greatest Show on Earth