Oscar night: a movie for everyone.(The Talk of the Town)(short film shown during Academy Awards ceremony)

Anifty feature of the Oscars ceremony this year was a short film showing about a hundred people, some famous and some not, talking about movies. The segment was directed by the filmmaker Errol Morris, whose grim comic take on the world, in documentaries such as "Mr. Death" and "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control," might seem incompatible with the earnest, happy pomp of the Academy Awards.

One thing about Errol Morris, though, is that he likes to make television commercials. Not long after September 11th, he shot an ad for United Airlines, in which United employees, in uniform, share unscripted inspirational thoughts about the airline. According to Morris, Laura Ziskin, the producer of this year's Oscars, saw the United spot and said, "I want that guy." She called him in late December and asked whether he'd like to make a short movie about the movies, which would replace the dance number that usually kicks off the show.

Over five days of shooting (one in Boston, one in San Francisco, two in New York, and one at the White House), Morris interviewed dozens of people, civilians and celebrities, among them Christy Turlington, Wavy Gravy, Lani Guinier, Jello Biafra, Al Sharpton, Laura Bush, and a guy who happened to be wandering the set with a tray of fresh fruit. (Morris tried but failed to land interviews with the Queen Mother, Fidel Castro, and Anna Nicole Smith.) By last week, he had more than twenty-four hours of movie talk -- some pretentious, some lame, some delightful, some strange -- and he whittled it down to an Oscar-friendly four minutes and fifteen seconds. "I really want to do something more with this thing, as a movie," he said last week. "I'm absolutely convinced it's going to have a life after the Oscars. I'd like it to be a long-form film."

Morris's interviewing technique is unorthodox. He sits out of sight of the subject, in a curtained booth with a camera and a monitor, while the subject stands ten yards away, facing a customized device that Morris calls an "interrotron." Basically, the interrotron is a camera with a special screen that displays the live, disembodied image of Morris as heshouts out questions, makes funny faces, and orders his subjects to repeat things.

Two weeks before the Oscars, Morris was in his booth, in a studio on West Fifteenth Street. The interviews were stacked up, one per half hour, and by mid-morning the schedule was a shambles. On camera, Walter Cronkite was telling Morris about "The Best Years of Our Lives." (Morris: "Say it again?" Cronkite: "The Best Years of Our Lives." "Again!" "The Best Years of Our Lives." "And again, please!") Donald Trump was waiting, with mounting impatience, in the wings. Mikhail ...