I recently saw "Searching for Bobby Fischer," and it seemed to me that it managed to capture a good deal of what we saw in Zallian's filmscript for "Schindler's List." The complexity of character was what attracted me. The two men--Larry Fishburne and Ben Kingsley were fighting for control over the kid's talent. Mantegna's great speech to the boy's teacher let Mantegna capture the magic of his acting and caught the interplay between his pride, his confusion, and his ambition for his son (with not a little bit of hubris on his part). When Joan Allen kicks Kingsley out of the house, cheers went up in my household. Somehow, Zaillian seems to understand the mothering side of feminism, and how many scriptwriters can you say that about? And in the end the generosity of allowing the boy to appropriate all that he needs of everyone in the final match of the film reminded me that Zaillian put all those words in Schindler's farewell speech (which I thought was the only bathetic part of the movie), and in his own hands, he denied explaining it all. I think scriptwriting is one of the undervalued side of films among us teachers and critics, and I think that it is Zaillian's strength, whether he moves into directing or not. Gerald Forshey Professor of Humanities Daley College City Colleges of Chicago [log in to unmask]