Bumping around the blogs
We begin with John August who takes on a reader’s question “Why do LA people suck” and provides some sound advice:
Here’s the thing to remember: Friends are for your personal happiness. Colleagues are part of your career. You may go to drinks with both, but don’t confuse them.
With the opening of I Love You, Man, we have to check in with Billy Mernit for his analysis of the new ‘bromantic’ comedy:
One I thing I love about movies: they’re equal opportunity wish fulfillment fantasy machines. For years, romantic comedies have presented us with contemporary dream girls: lovely and lovable, charmingly kooky, perhaps even beautiful-but-difficult, but nevertheless the kind of woman most guys would cherish… if they could only be found in off-the-screen reality. Now that men have raided and virtually taken over Romantic Comedy-land, the contemporary Bromantic Comedy has yielded a male equivalent: the kind of guy most guys would love to have as a best friend, if they, too existed in the world as we know it.
Blake Snyder makes a good point about a movie being about “one idea”:
But one idea, well told, is actually the way to make your script more meaningful. Finding the “one idea” makes your story spine stronger. Yours must be a tale in which we “follow the bouncing ball” of a hero who changes from beginning to end. Your hero must learn a lesson — pick one– and you are telling us what that is by clearly planting your Theme Stated up front… and tying it to the “lesson learned” at the end.
Mark Waid at Kung Fu Monkey recalls the movie Se7en and provides some excellent analysis and a lesson for screenwriters:
And then, near the end of Se7en, the murderer the detectives have been chasing all this time makes an amazing choice that seems to come out of absolutely nowhere. He simply walks into the station, confesses, and surrenders…and tells the cops he can take them to two final bodies if they’ll just get in the car and let him navigate. And they just start driving.
Up to that moment, we in the audience kind of knew where the story was ultimately headed. We didn’t know how it would happen, but we knew the cops would eventually catch and punish the criminal, the end, because that’s what happens in a procedural. And, suddenly, boom, one character kicks the game board over, and now, for the first time since the opening credits, no one in the audience has the slightest clue where this story is going.
Lee Goldberg compares the finale for NBC’s long-running TV series “E.R.” with the finale of an even longer-running series CBS’ “Gunsmoke” — as in there was no finale:
The legendary CBS western ran for 20 years and 600+ episodes…far more than ER. And unlike ER, most of the principal stars of GUNSMOKE remained to the bitter end… bitter, not because the show was doing poorly creatively or in terms of audience numbers, but because it was cancelled without a final episode, without so much as a thank you to the cast and crew that had labored over the show from 1955–1975. Everyone on GUNSMOKE thought they’d be coming back for another season. They found out their weren’t by reading it in the trades. That would be unthinkable today.
Neil Gaiman posts some “really embarrassing photos” of himself:
Almost immediately afterwards, the hair got spiky and the clothes got a lot less big-scarfy and then I was a 16 year old punk. But this is a 15 year old Neil for you.
Patrick Goldstein gives background on one of the shortest — and most successful — movie pitches on record, based on a studio marketing executive’s real life:
Sherak says he was on the phone one day with Paramount production chief John Lesher, discussing some other business, when he asked if he could pitch him a movie. “All I said was, ‘When your kids move back into your house with their kids, that’s the movie.’ Lesher laughed and said, ‘Let’s do it.’ “
Julie Gray responds to a reader who has a bad case of “Writers Group Blues”:
In my opinion, Annoyed, a good writing group should have one, underlying mission statement and that is to support one another with positive feedback, thoughtful criticism and intelligent conversation, no matter where each writer is on the curve. Even a very new, not very good writer can give some great feedback. You seem to want to know what’s in it for you. But you need to be thinking also about what you can bring to the table for the others. Don’t be so quick to judge; you might be surprised.
Anne Thompson has this excellent feature on Seth Rogen:
“I feel very comfortable telling someone I know how they could improve their script,” he says without a hint of arrogance. “I feel much more comfortable as a writer than an actor. I feel like I am a much better writer than I am an actor. So that’s why I improvise, maybe, because it’s a sneaky way I’ve discovered of using my actual talent, heheheheh.”
And Todd Alcott finally screened Battle of Algeirs and was blown away by it:
With all those crowd scenes, all those speaking parts, all those extras, all those costumes and sets and effects, I kept looking something — anything — that would indicate that this is “a movie,” and could find nothing. There is not a false moment, not a movie-movie moment, not a hand-tipping performance, in the entire thing. Which, as a sometime filmmaker myself, makes me incredibly sad and depressed — I struggle to get little bitty moments of authenticity into my work, and here is a movie with oceans of authenticity exploding out of every frame. It just doesn’t seem fair.
Blog on!
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