Bumping around the blogs
Blake Snyder posts about Act Zero:
Your imagination is a powerful thing. It paints pictures like crazy — and alot of the painting is absolutely necessary. But we have to be editors, too. Deciding what is important in any story we tell — no matter how we tell it — is the job. And just because we’re dazzled by the details doesn’t mean others will be too.
Try putting all that backstory into the place we’ll never see it, in the Act before the Action starts: Act Zero.
Or as David Sontag, my colleague at UNC-Chapel Hill says, “What’s the story before FADE IN?”
Too bad we can’t rewind the clock because if it was yesterday, as Christian Toto noted here, you could watch The Descent for free:
Fearnet.com is making it available today as part of the horror site’s new feature — 15 free movies each Wednesday.
So mark that down in your calendar on Wednesdays: Free horror movies online!
Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood provides a report>= that DreamWorks Animation may have a hit on its hands with Monsters vs. Aliens:
“We are currently assuming Monsters vs. Aliens opens at $55M, which is 13% below where Madagascar 2 opened in November 2008, however, adjusted for higher (3-D) ticket pricing, implied attendance levels would be nearly 25% lower (while this is an original film vs. a sequel, downside risk at $55M opening weekend appears limited).”
Ooh, fun with numbers!
John August ponders the idea how screenwriters “Show Your Work”:
For math and science exams, we were often required to “show our work” — not merely to prove we weren’t cheating, but to demonstrate we understood the underlying principles involved.
I’ve been thinking about this in relation to screenwriting. When it comes to making a film, the screenwriter’s craft is probably the most direct and transparent. What did you do? You wrote the script, the 120-or-so pages of Courier around which everything else revolves. Your work is front-and-center.
Mystery Man On Film talks about active and passive verbs, and Stephen King to boot in “The Timid Screenwriter”:
Not long ago, I reread Stephen King’s how-to diatribe, On Writing. In fact, I read quite a few grammar books as a refresher and to help spice up my articles for Script Magazine. With respect to King, I’m sorry. The more I read his book, the more I disagree with him. His book is more pokable than the Pillsbury Doughboy. 1) A Thesaurus is actually a wonderful thing. Rogets can INSPIRE breathtaking sentences! And 2) don’t even get me started on adverbs. King was horrifically wrong about adverbs. But the one area upon which we can agree is that timid writers suck the big one.
MMOF even throws in 10 qualities of a timid screenwriter. Check it out to see if you qualify.
Neil Gaiman talks about his recent appearance on “The Colbert Report”:
I love The Colbert Report. It gets Tivoed in my house and it gets watched.
Originally, I didn’t. Caught the first few when it spun off from the Daily Show, and wasn’t impressed — didn’t like it, didn’t get it. It was the fact it became my son Mike’s favourite TV programme that drew me back. And when I came back, I loved it.
Patrick Goldstein at The Big Picture asks “How many movies got their start as a TV commercial?”:
If you want to see the future of film, all you have to do is keep your hand off the TiVo clicker and watch TV commercials. The ads we see on TV (along with music videos) are where the rubber meets the road, the creative oasis where a host of great filmmakers do R&D for the new techniques and technology that will pop up down the road in bigger, more ambitious feature films. A timely example is this new Comcast “Dream Big” ad, which features a dazzling combination of live action and animated backdrops. As Seth Stevenson’s smart piece in Slate explains, the ad is especially hypnotic because the camera never cuts: “It zooms in and out and pans around, but it’s all one seamless journey through what appears to be a fully realized, bustling, imaginary neighborhood.”
Anne Thompson from Thompson on Hollywood reports from Austin, TX and the SXSW 09 festival:
I had a schizophrenic festival, catching Alexander the Last before I left LA, and watching a combo of competition documentaries and solid studio entries such as opener I Love You, Man, Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell and Observe and Report, starring Seth Rogen. I caught a few panels, several of them well-attended by the interactive side. The digital future is front and center now: all of our futures depend on it. And I saw one SXSW micro-indie narrative feature, David Lowery’s deliberately mysterious St. Nick. “It’s an art film,” somebody warned me ahead of time. That it is. At the Q & A, the filmmaker basically said: I did it my way. Explaining it all to you is not the point.
And I’ll leave it to Todd Alcott to offer his eulogy for Natasha Richardson:
I am shocked, nay, stricken by the news of the death of Natasha Richardson. Back in the 1980s, she was, all by herself, a good enough reason for me to go see a movie. I loved her as Mary Shelley in Ken Russell’s absolutely stark-raving-mad Gothic, then as Patty Hearst in Paul Schrader’s movie of the same name, then in The Handmaid’s Tale and again with Schrader in The Comfort of Strangers. I knew that if Natasha Richardson was in it, it was bound to be smart, daring and a little bit crazy. I regret not seeing her on stage in New York when I lived there and she doing O’Neill with Liam Neeson. I have nothing else to offer, except my deepest sympathy for her family.
Godspeed, Natasha.
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