John August.com: “Notes on the state of the industry” Courtesy of John August’s assistant Matt [God bless you Matt, wherever you are!] we’ve got his notes from the “Studio Development: From Script to Greenlight” event on Thursday night we pimped here earlier this week. By all means, read the entire post on August’s blog, but here
“Will the recession change movies?” Earlier this week, CNN ran a fairly generic article about the effects of the recession on the movie business. They threw out some facts: Audiences are going along for that ride in record numbers. Gross movie ticket sales to this weekend were up 18.8 percent over the same period
Video interview: Beyond Words 2009 I already posted my notes from the recent Beyond Words event at the WGA Theater in Beverly Hills on Thursday, February 5th. Moderated by writer-director Judd Apatow, the five panelists were all nominated for screenwriting awards this year: Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire), Dustin Lance Black (Milk), Tom McCarthy (The
“Dennis Potter: 3 To Remember” DVD collection The LA Weekly has a nice write-up about a new DVD collection of prolific writer Dennis Potter TV projects: At his best, Potter was sublime, but like many prolific geniuses, he could crank out the dross too. I’ve never yet seen a poorly scripted, directed or acted Potter
Interview: Jonathan Hensleigh With much attention being paid nowadays to the action genre, it’s good timing for this interview with screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh. His screenwriting credits including A Far Off Place (1993), Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995), The Saint (1997), Armageddon (1998), and The Punisher (2004). Here are a few excerpts
Movie Story Type: Mistaken Identity In an ongoing series of posts on movie types and sub-genres. So far we’ve looked at: Body Switch Buddy Picture Fish-Out-Of-Water (FOOW) Frustration Comedy Road Picture Today we look at Mistaken Identity. The basic premise is that a primary character is identified wrongly as someone
Friday movie reviews Crossing Over (Weinstein Co.) Daily Variety (Todd McCarthy) Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) New York Times (Manohla Dargis) Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience (Buena Vista) Daily Variety (Peter Debruge) Los Angeles Times (Mark Olsen) New York Times (Nathan Lee) Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (Fox) No reviews
Pitch sale: “The B Team” Sony acquires comedy pitch “The B Team” from writer Chris Henchy and writer-director Adam McKay: Sony Pictures Entertainment has acquired “The B Team,” a spec pitch package for an Adam McKay-directed action comedy that will team Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg as cops. Sony intends to register the
Great Scene: “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” Butch and Sundance return to the Hole in the Wall Gang… and a challenge. Fight scenes. Whether swords or knives, guns or fists, lasers or kung fu, fight scenes are a staple of the movies. One problem: They’re so common, what can a screenwriter do to distinguish theirs from
Daily dialogue — February 27, 2009 “Nobody sits like this rock sits. You rock, rock. The rock just sits and is. You show us how to just sit here and that’s what we need.” — Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman), I Heart Huckabees (2004), written by David O. Russell and Jeff Baena Comment Archive
New from the Coen brothers! From the Huffington Post: The Reality Campaign has released a new ad. They’re the folks behind the widely-played ad that featured a foreman in a hard hat taking viewers on a tour of a non-existent clean coal facility. In this new ad, a pitchman gives us the
Remakes (cont’d) Another one of those days where remake mania bashes you in the face. From Done Deal Pro, three projects announced today: Title: Arthur Logline: A boozy playboy’s plan to marry into a moneyed family goes awry when he falls in love with a working class gal. Writer: Peter Baynham
Watchmen: “Looks like we have the first real flop of 2009” The Hollywood Reporter puts the wood to Watchmen in this review by Kirk Honeycutt: As stimulating as it was to see the superhero movie enter the realm of crime fiction in “The Dark Knight,” “Watchmen” enters into a realm that is both nihilistic and campy. The two make odd companions.
Bumping around the blogs h/t to Joshua James for alerting me to this excellent post by Todd Alcott on Annie Hall and rom-coms: Anyway, yes, Alvy Singer is the protagonist of Annie Hall. And yes, what he wants is “the eggs,” but he doesn’t really understand that until the end of
Daily dialogue — February 26, 2009 “The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and… Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it? It’s not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You’re on ten here, all the way up, all the way
2008 spec script sales by genre chart Thanks to joeld42 and Belzecue, we have this pie chart version of the 2008 spec script sale by genre information I put together and posted here. If you click on pie chart, it gives you a bigger version / better view. The pie chart really highlights how popular comedies are. Variations
Characters as “profound individuals” — Part 2 Following up on my post yesterday about characters as “profound individuals,” I thought it would be interesting to consider the Jewish theologian Martin Buber and his influential book “I and Thou” (“Ich und Du”). I and Thou (or You) is Buber’s central thesis on human existence as encounter.There
What would you write… …if you had one year to live? From today’s Writer’s Almanac: It’s the birthday of novelist Anthony Burgess, (books by this author) born on this day in Manchester, England (1917). He went off and taught in Malaysia. He didn’t even want to go there, but he
How they write a script — Billy Wilder “In a serious pictures, you don’t hear them being bored, but in a comedy you can hear them not laughing. You tried so hard and the guy did the pratfall, but nothing — and you wish you were dead.” What can I say? Billy Wilder is my favorite director. Why?
Pitch sale: “Dog Show” Warner Bros. leashes comedy animation pitch “Dog Show” from writers Alan Schoolcraft and Brent Simons: While plot details are being kept on a leash, the story centers on a stray dog and her misfit friends who shake up the famed and pure-bred world of a Westminster-like dog show.
Screenwriting 101 — Victoria Wisdom “Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is everything. I think people walk around wondering what the big idea is. Ultimately, everybody is thinking of the same idea at the same time because everybody is seeing the same movies. Everybody is reacting to the market. Everybody has to bear in
“Studio Development: From Script to Greenlight” From the WGA for those of you in the LA area: STUDIO DEVELOPMENT: FROM SCRIPT TO GREENLIGHT Thursday, 2/26, 7:30 p.m. WGA Theater, 135 S. Doheny Dr., Beverly Hills. RSVP: (323) 782–4602. Members in good standing plus one guest. Join the Writers Education Committee in a
Spec script sale: “Shimmer Lake” First time writer Oren Uziel sells spec bank heist mystery “Shimmer Lake” to Fox Atomic: “Lake” centers on a sheriff investigating a series of murders as well as the disappearance of a bank robber, with clues and the movie’s timeline leading back to a heist the robber committed. The
Characters as “profound individuals” How to create compelling and authentic characters? How to breathe life into them?How to lift them off the page? How to write what we may call “profound individuals”? First, let’s parse that phrase profound individual. By profound, I mean a character into which the writer has entered deeply,
Sal Lupo: Filmmaker Who’s Sal Lupo? From Sal’s YouTube page: My name is Sal Lupo. I’m a filmaker I drive a cab in NYC. I’m making a CIA Thriller movie. I’ve been working on it for awile now. Its realy starting to come to gether. subscrimb to my
