City of Ember: "Movie Production" Lit Circle Review

One of my favorite parts of doing a lit circle as a movie production is the way it disguises the "work" as play acting. There is not much fun for children in reading an interesting book and then going back analyzing everything. The movie production method is a clever way to disguise the work and analyzing as a fun project.
Fortunately, my group was made up of self-starters and we could all be trusted to do our work, so we decided right up front to dispense with the offered position of "manager" (which is the group task-minder, the one who makes sure that everyone does their job and stays on track). There was a long list of jobs to choose from, but we had a large group to spread them around in. We divvied up the jobs by offering them openly to anyone who cared for a particular job, and then distributed the rest by picking jobs from a "hat". We also decided that we would change our jobs halfway through the book. Everyone agreed that this seemed like a good idea to enforce with children. Personally, I think that jobs should be randomly assigned each time a literature circle meets, so that its participants all get the same chance at getting the choice and less-choice jobs. The aggressive child will usually get the favorite positions over the shyer child, unless there is some rotation or randomization of job assignment, and the rotation of jobs also ensures that participants are pushed outside of their normal routine if they are given jobs that are less familiar than their usual fare. If the logical child never is assigned an artistic task, how will they ever be challenged? Rotation also prevents power struggles, and also from faster readers rushing ahead and completing all of their work ahead of time and then slacking off.
Our meetings went well, it was very pleasant to know what exactly to present for the circle rather than having to explain vague concepts or nebulous connections. There seemed a natural progression down from "important" positions presenting to "lesser" positions (it seemed to vaguely follow the order in which our tasks would be presented in movie credits) so there was little wasted time or silence. Since the discussion and tasks were fun, I felt that our discussion of the books, what was to come, what had happened, and how we felt about them, came very naturally, to the point that we forgot about time and Grant had to come fetch us (twice) and bring us back to class!
I can see this sort of lit circle working extremely well with children. It is fun, dynamic, and keeps children on task. It sounds less intimidating than a traditional literature circle, provides enough structure for those who might otherwise fall behind, and has the potential to feed into larger projects. Definitely a keeper!