Interview (Audio): Ron Bass

A 78 minute podcast with the Oscar winning screenwriter of Rain Man.

In a January 2000 New Yorker article, Ron Bass was described as “The Two-Billion-Dollar Man”, referring to world wide box office revenues for movies he’d written. Those credits include Rain Man, Sleeping with the Enemy, The Joy Luck Club, Dangerous Minds, Waiting to Exhale, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Stepmom, and Snow Falling on Cedars.

Here is a 2014 ‘The Road to Cinema’ podcast featuring Bass covering a wide array of subjects:

Here is an excerpt from the New Yorker article:

“Everything I write is in three acts, and I actually start with three pieces of paper. I have some notion of where each act begins and ends before I get to this stage. I know my people and I know roughly about how many scenes each act should be. I start from the beginning and end of an act, working forwards and backwards toward the middle. I know that somewhere there’s going to be a moment of this, a moment of that, and it’s like a matrix. I don’t work with cards, just one page per act. When I finish three acts, I page budget. I want to know I can tell the story in a distance that’s appropriate. And I’m rarely more than ten pages off.”

For more of ‘The Road to Cinema’ podcasts, go here.