Mystery Man posts #2
Some more MM posts I featured on GITS:
Mystery Man On Film talks about active and passive verbs, and Stephen King to boot in “The Timid Screenwriter” [3/19/09]:
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.
Mystery Man on Film talks about Managing Your Emotions in this post where he analyzes the Scott Frank script “After Hailey” [4/23/09]:
Ever since I read fellow Script columnist Bill Martel’s article on Scott Frank’s After Hailey, I’ve been curious. Scott Frank, the man who fixed Minority Report and gave us Out of Sight, Dead Again, and Get Shorty wrote a melodrama about a man recovering from the death of his wife. Really? The story is based on a novel by Jonathan Tropper in which a 20-something man’s older wife dies. He returns to his old home for his sister’s wedding, and he is reunited with the troubled teenage son from Hailey’s previous marriage. Ho hum, right? Martel called it “Plot 53B” because we’ve seen it a million times. Hell, I’d say it’s beyond clichéd to have this kind of setup. If a couple of producers asked me to write this kind of story for them, I’d pass. I can foresee all the potential problems — the clichés, the passive protagonist moping about over the death of his wife, and the stomach-churning melodrama. You’d have to be insanely careful to avoid so many career-halting pitfalls in this kind of setup. But — Scott Frank took this on. SCOTT. FRANK. How the hell would he handle this subject? Thus, I had to read it.
Mystery Man on Film returns from a brief hiatus with an amazing review of the movie Farenheit 451 [5/14/09]:
So I did a lot of flying around the last few weeks, and I had the chance to read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which was phenomenal. I loved it! When I’m involved in a big project, as I was last month, I’m riddled with ADD. It’s a struggle to focus on anything other than the project, but F451 held my attention from beginning to end, an amazing feat. It’s actually quite short, about 173 pages. One could easily get through it in one sitting (or a long flight). Then I watched the 1966 film adaptation by Francois Truffaut, which I’ll cover in a bit. You can also see the film instantly on Netflix. After that, I sat down to read Frank Darabont’s September, 2005, screenplay adaptation.
MM was smart and offered great insight in his reviews, but what always got me was how much passion MM had for film analysis. MM just seemed to love to dig into movies and see how they worked.