The Circuit

Indie helmer Michael Almereyda will receive the 2008 Sundance/Sloan Commissioning Grant to develop his sci-fi project "The Stanley Milgram Project."  Almereyda, who broke onto the indie scene with "Nadja" and the Ethan Hawke-starrer "Hamlet," will collect $25,000 as well as support from Sundance's Feature Film Program.

Script is centered on the "obedience experiments" conducted at Yale in the '60s by Stanley Milgram, where ordinary people succumbed to authority figures and were moved to inflict harm on others.

Check this out from Wikipedia:

The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the subject believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks, but in reality there were no shocks. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level.^[1]

Sundance also announced that Ryan Knighton has been named the 2008 Alfred P. Sloan Fellow for his script, "Cockeyed," about a working class rocker who loses his sight.  Knighton, who was diagnosed with a congenital eye disease, developed the project at the 2008 Sundance Screenwriters Lab.

Both the grant and fellowships are collaborations between the Sundance Institute and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and are focused on themes of science or technology.  The partnership also extends to $20,000 prize awarded at the Sundance Film Festival.  This year it went to Alex Rivera's sci-fi "Sleep Dealer," to be released by Maya Releasing later this year.