“A Comedy Lesson From Mel Brooks” Here’s a really nice story from TV writer Marc Flanagan about how his life intersected with one of his childhood comedy heroes producer-actor-writer-director Mel Brooks. It all started with this: A few years after seeing Mel’s first film and prior to “Blazing Saddles,” I met
Here’s a premise for a movie Tell me this Popular Mechanics article doesn’t sound like a premise for a sci-fi movie: Something invaded our solar system and whacked Jupiter, but professional astronomers were looking the other way at the time. Now, as the shock wave slowly subsides, astronomers are working around the clock to
“Is free the future?” I’ve been meaning to post on this article — Macolm Gladwell’s review of Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price.” Anderson, who is the editor-in-chief of “Wired” magazine and author of another influential book re technology & culture, “The Long Tail: Why
“‘The Achievers: The Story of the Lebowski Fans’ explores the Dude phenomenon” LA Times reports on a new documentary about a cult cinematic figure: Eddie Chung, a former philosophy student who is accustomed to pondering life’s deepest mysteries, is still stumped by something that shapes lives by the thousands: Why has “The Big Lebowski” become the most popular and all-consuming
More tips from “Screenwriting Tips, You Hack” More tips from the script reader blog “Screenwriting Tips, You Hack”: Screenwriting Tip #49 Everybody names their protag ‘Jack’ or ‘Zack’. Everybody names their preppy douchebag character ‘Chad’. Try to pick something cool, weird and/or memorable. Screenwriting Tip #47 You came all this way in your story just so
The Whitest Kids You Know: “Movie Pitching Guy” My buddy Jerry Rapp gets a big fat H/T for sending me this link. Great stuff. For more on The Whitest Kids You Know, featured on IFC, go here. Comment Archive
Interview — Judd Apatow To cap off the run-up to the release of his latest writing-directing effort Funny People, today’s interview is with Judd Apatow. I normally spotlight our interviewee’s writing credits, but what’s equally impressive about Apatow is that he is a successful producer as well with producing
Daily dialogue — August 1, 2009 “I’m gonna punch you in the ovary, that’s what I’m gonna do. A straight shot. Right to the babymaker.” — Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell), Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004), written by Will Ferrell & Adam McKay Comment Archive
“Big idea” + character arc = bingo In a comment on this post about the pitch sale “InFAMOUS,” DC Mar wrote this: “Big idea” + character arc = bingo Folks, if you needed the simplistic, most spot on description of the essence of a successful screenplay, this just might be it. Big idea: The story’s underlying concept Character
How They Write a Script — Diablo Cody If there’s a modern day ‘talisman’ for anybody who dreams of breaking into Hollywood as a screenwriter, that would have to be Diablo Cody who’s gone from stripper-phone sex operator-blogger to Academy Award winning screenwriter in a head-spinning whirl, all because of a spec script
Character introductions We’ve been batting around the topic of character introductions in the advanced screenwriting course I’m currently teaching. In a lecture, I noted: Whenever you first describe a character, it’s important to telescope who they are to the reader. Nowhere is this more critical than in the first
Great Scene: “Psycho” After I first saw the movie Psycho as an impressionable youth, there wasn’t a week that went by for several years that, while taking a shower, I didn’t recall (and get freaked out by) this great scene (screenplay by Joseph Stefano, based on the novel by Robert Bloch)
Pitch sale: “InFAMOUS” Sony buys pitch adaptation of Sony PlayStation 3 game “Infamous” from screenwriter Sheldon Turner: “inFamous” was just released in May, to positive response from fans and critics alike. The game tells the story of Cole MacGrath, a bike messenger who is at ground zero when a catastrophic explosion leaves the
How They Write a Script — Charlie Kaufman So we’ve had Shane Black’s shoe box, David Lynch’s sugar rushes, and Paul Schrader’s charts. All interesting approaches to writing a script. But perhaps none as personal and iconoclastic as Charlie Kaufman. Here are excerpts from three interviews available online. The first is from Indie Wire
“What’s Next? A Ramen Noodles Movie?” Somehow missed this post from a few weeks back by the entertaining Michael Adams at his blog “Schlock & Awe”: Hollywood’s going through a new Golden Age of comedy. But as funny as they are, we don’t owe thanks for this period of soda-out-the-nostrils mirth
The Bitter Script Reader: “Titles” A quick tip re the importance of script titles from The Bitter Script Reader: Your title is the first thing any reader will see. In some cases — who am I kidding? — in EVERY case it will determine which script they pick off the slush pile next. A good title should
Daily dialogue — July 30, 2009 “I dated this girl for a while. She was really a… nasty freak. She just loved to get down with sex all the time. It was like… anytime of day, she was like, ‘Yeah, let’s go! I’m so nasty!’ And I’d be nailing her and she’d
First review: “District 9” Kirk Honeycutt from the Hollywood Reporter digs the movie: Combining the very best of the postwar sci-fi movies with their trenchant political undertones and pulse-pounding dynamism and contemporary movie technology that can blend aliens seamlessly into a realistic human world of urban and moral decay, “District 9” flirts
Screeenwriting 101 — Dennis Lehane START WITH CHARACTERS: “The plot is just the vehicle by which the characters are revealed. You create a bunch of characters and let them start bouncing into one another. That’s how a good story happens.” KEEP ’EM MOVING: “My agents has a great line: ‘Alice was down the rabbit
Daily dialogue — July 29, 2009 “It calls back a time when there were flowers all over the Earth… and there were valleys. And there were plains of tall green grass that you could lie down in — you could go to sleep in. And there were blue skies, and there was fresh air… and there were
“Solomon Kane” director Michael Bassett blog H/T to reader kgmadman who posted this commen re Comic Con: Solomon Kane director Michael J. Bassett has a really interesting, candid blog he keeps about film. I think he’s an amazing talent and I loved his film DEATHWATCH as well as WILDERNESS. You should check it out:
“The only way out is through” Among the responses to the recent writing question “What’s the best piece of writing advice,” daveed answered, “In writing the first draft: “the only way out is through”. Can’t recall where I picked that up from, though…” Perhaps it came here on GITS. Here is that original post.
Spec script sale: “Prisoners” In an unusual sale, Alcon Entertainment drops a reported $600K / $1M for thriller “Prisoners” from first-timer Aaron Guzikowski: The budget is expected to be in the $30-$40 million range for Guzikowski’s tale, which looks at a small-town man whose daughter is kidnapped and responds in a
Hollywood tales “So we picked this girl up in this big bus of a car, and she had us drive to a party in Beverly Hills. It was the house of a man named Cliff Henderson, a pilot, a kind of Howard Hughes character. And he has in his library a wall
