Unless a director is already attached to a project, the list usually starts with some fantasy names and then gets whittled down to more realistic names when you find out that, say, Christopher Nolan and Guillermo del Toro are booked solid until the year 2025 or that Catherine Hardwicke is out of your budget range thanks to Twilight.

FORBES: Welcome To Hollywood: The Land That Forgets Female Directors

Great fragrances are usually made by a perfumer, and an art director, who says, 'I want it to be like this.

CNN: STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Meanwhile, the usually meticulous director films the grand political stage with a generic studio realism.

NEWYORKER: The Sun

Usually fans are angry when a film adaptation strays too far from a novel, said casting director David Rubin.

CNN: 'Hunger Games' and Hollywood's racial casting issue

"The stories that we would really like to tell usually don't get greenlit, " said Rocky Seker, a former creative developer for a director with Sony Pictures and now a film curator who runs Invisible Woman ...

CNN: Cover story: Where's the diversity at the Oscars?

The idea is to get relevant information fast, instead of what usually happens, which is getting information long after a crisis is over, said Robert Kirkpatrick, director of Global Pulse, who spoke today at a technology and human rights conference in Berkeley, Calif.

FORBES: Can The U.N. Use Big Data To Respond To Global Disasters?

The entire process of opening a restaurant usually takes nine to 14 months, sometimes longer, said Regina Dick-Endrizzi, director of the Office of Small Business.

WSJ: Bid to Ease the Squeeze on Business

Jason Yan, technical director in Beijing of the U.S. Grains Council, said safety considerations usually take a backseat in China to features designed to maximize production and energy efficiency.

NPR: Fire Kills 119 At Poultry Plant In Northeast China

But even for incumbents, the first re-election bid is usually the toughest, said Nick Demeter, political director for the National Women's Political Caucus, a non-partisan group that works to elect pro-choice women.

BBC: Democrat women running to stand still