Scott Myers

Update: “Nice Guy Johnny”

Following up on this post from Wednesday, the day Ed Burns’ new movie Nice Guy Johnny was released on iTunes, DVD, and VOD, there’s this IndieWire article. Here’s how the article ends: Burns is no stranger to being creative when it comes to finding an audience for his

Great Characters: Viola De Lesseps (“Shakespeare in Love”)

A compelling Attractor character which led to an Academy Award. I’ve had the opportunity to screen Shakespeare in Love (written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard) again recently. What a superb film! And this time, I was struck by the story’s Attractor Viola De Lesseps, played wondrously by

Daily Dialogue — October 29, 2010

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”  — Star Wars, multiple times in multiple movies The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is callbacks suggested by @tiffanyleigh. Comment Archive

Boba Fett’s invoice

Via SlashFilm. Comment Archive

If Judd Apatow Wrote a Horror Movie

Via TheWrap: Judd Apatow’s next movie (still untitled) comes out on June 1, 2012, Universal announced on Wednesday — and Deal Central has heard (completely false, made up, not true) rumblings that the funnyman could be branching out into horror and/or sequelizing one of his earlier successes. With Halloween

Callbacks explained

This week’s Daily Dialogue theme is callbacks. A few readers have asked me to explain exactly what a callback is. My definition goes back to the time I made a living doing stand-up comedy. In that context, a callback is when a comic recalls a joke / punch line

Update: “The Dark Knight Rises”

More from Geoff Boucher with Nolan adamant about not going the 3-D route with this really interesting comment: There’s plenty of time to do the conversion for “The Dark Knight Rises,” which doesn’t begin filming until April, but Nolan said he was “able to make the case

The Business of Screenwriting: Never forget who the star is

We’re in the office of a studio executive. In the room are the exec, the project’s director, us, and a speaker-phone on a coffee table. The person on the other end of the conference call is in NYC. He is the personal screenwriter for this project’s

Daily Dialogue — October 28, 2010

“Parlay!”  — Elizabeth Swann (Kiera Knightley) / Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) / Mullroy (Angus Barnett) The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is callbacks suggested by @tiffanyleigh. Trivia: When Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, the screenwriters, originally pitched the movie to the Disney executives in the early ’90s, it was rejected.

Peter Jackson talks about “The Hobbit”

Including behind-the-scenes machinations whether the movie will be shot in New Zealand or not. Hey, all you GITS readers in New Zealand (I know we have more than a few): What’s the inside scoop? With budget projections of $500M for the movie, I know it’s a

Girls on Film: How Women Shaped Horror Genre

All you female horror fans, you have a soul-mate in Monica Bartyzel: There’s this strange, prevalent notion that horror belongs to men … that it’s the guys who like to watch the blood pour and the screams curdle while the women want nothing more than epic romances that

Happy Birthday, John Cleese!

One of the original members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus celebrates his 71st birthday today: John Cleese. For those of you who missed this post from a few weeks back, I’m embedding Cleese’s talk on creativity here again: If you haven’t watched it, take a few

Filmmaker podcast motherlode

Wow! iTunes and the Apple Store, SoHo in New York City have teamed up to bring you insights from the makers of today’s biggest films. Subscribe to the podcast to hear behind-the-scenes stories from the onscreen stars as well as filmmaking wisdom from a diverse selection of

Cameron: “Avatar 2” and “Avatar 3”

Per THR: James Cameron has locked in a deal with Fox to make Avatar 2 and 3, due in theaters December 2014 and December 2015 respectively. Said the director in a statement, “It is a rare and remarkable opportunity when a filmmaker gets to build a fantasy world, and watch

“Christopher Nolan reveals title of third Batman film and that ‘it wont be the Riddler’”

Geoff Boucher at “Hero Complex” with this exclusive: Christopher Nolan’s third Batman film will be called “The Dark Knight Rises” and though the Gotham City auteur isn’t ready to reveal the villain of his 2012 film, he did eliminate one of the big contenders: “It won’t be

Screenwriting 101: Anna Hamilton Phelan

“If I could say anything… it is to keep going. Don’t go back and fix that first scene. Don’t go back and fix that dialogue. Write yourself a little note saying, ‘Put in first scene such-and-such,’ if you happen to think of something, then get a

Daily Dialogue — October 27, 2010

“I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”  — Philip Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush) / Viola De Lesseps (Gwynneth Paltrow) The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is callbacks suggested by @tiffanyleigh. Trivia: Tom Stoppard added several characters in his work on the screenplay, including Christopher Marlowe. Some of his additions, including those

Some background on the movie “Alien”

For Day 1 of the “7 Days of Screenplays: Horror” challenge, which is posted here, several posters commented on the script’s scene description: Zampana said… Surprised this format isn’t used more often — I know Wall-E was written this way, and I wrote a script like this — mine

Edward Burns says digital is future of indie films

More news [from AP] on the digital distribution front from filmmaker Edward Burns: Edward Burns revisits his indie roots — with a modern twist — in his latest project, “Nice Guy Johnny.” The 42-year-old actor-filmmaker leaped onto the scene in 1995 with the Sundance Film Festival darling “The Brothers

“Here’s How Movie Studios Rejected Scripts in the Early 1900s”

This is an awesome find from MovieFone: If only The Essanay Film Manufacturing Company (1907–1925) was in existence today, perhaps we’d have at least one studio focused on producing original works. That’s what we might think after seeing a manuscript rejection slip from Essanay currently making the

Hollywood Tales

“I’ll tell you one thing I’ve noticed, and it’s absolutely true for me. My best writing has been on the the scripts I wrote as suicide notes to the industry — sort of, ‘Fuck you, guys, I’m outta here. This is the last script you’ll ever

Daily Dialogue — October 26, 2010

“I’m not even supposed to be here today.”  — Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran), Clerks (1994), written and directed by Kevin Smith The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is callbacks suggested by @tiffanyleigh. Clerks suggested by CWillGoWrite. Trivia: The first draft of the script was 168 pages.  Comment Archive

Producer Spotlight: Lorenzo Di Bonaventura

Let’s say you live outside Hollywood. Perhaps way outside. While writing a great original script is the most obvious — and important — single thing you can do to get you from here (where you live) to there (Hwood), there are other tasks you would be wise to put on your

Dumb Little Writing Tricks That Work: Name That Tune!

Pick songs which speak to the core essence of specific characters. So I posted a DLWTTW the other day suggesting the value of ‘star-casting’: …that reminded me of “star-casting,” where a writer imagines ‘casts’ certain actors to ‘play’ the roles of various characters in the screenplay they are

On writing

“On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket