Saturday Hot Links
Time for the 103rd installment of Saturday Hot Links!
Today: The Telluride Film Festival Edition!
The 2013 Telluride Film Festival dedicated to Roger Ebert.
The Coen brothers hit Telluride.
Telluride: 12 Years a Slave.
Telluride: Labor Day.
Telluride: Palo Alto.
Telluride: Prisoners.
Telluride: Under the Skin.
Telluride: The Unknown Known.
Where do thoughts occur.
Fall Movie Preview: The 30 movies you must see.
Put down that highlighter.
Kristin Bell in Vanity Fair on the “Veronica Mars” movie and her new film The Lifeguard.
Did Bobby Riggs fix ‘The Battle of the Sexes’ against Billie Jean King?
Where did the 8-glasses-of-water-a-day myth come from.
HBO making new ‘Westworld’ Series with JJ Abrams and Jonathan Nolan.
Did life on Earth come from Mars?
Director Bob Peterson officially off Pixar’s ‘Good Dinosaur’.
How to rip a phone book in half.
Dark Horse comics is resurrecting “Firefly”.
7 Tips from Silicon Valley on giving confidence to potential investors.
Jason Reitman will direct a live read of ‘Boogie Nights’ at the Toronto Film Festival.
Why teach and study English.
The 32 most successful movie franchises of all time.
4 reasons physics say you should not exist.
10 things you didn’t know about Mary Poppins.
Illegal vodka pipeline discovered in Kyrgyzstan.
FX orders period drama pilot starring Paul Giamatti.
Why every email should be 5 sentences long.
Warner Bros. plans $25M campaign around The Wizard of Oz anniversary.
50 things you didn’t know about The Wizard of Oz.
We are closer than ever to a human mindmeld [video].
Vulture interviews Chris Carter on “The X-Files” and rewriting Vince Gilligan.
The single most important change you can make in your work habits.
How small movies got big in a bloated summer.
5 toilet technologies of the future.
Nonfiction storytelling and the movies: A winning combo?
22 songs that write themselves from “The Songwriter’s Rhyming Dictionary.”
Jim Rash and Nat Faxon’s scriptwriting master class [video].
How intelligent constraints drive creativity.
Madonna made $125M last year.
10 amazing ways video games can change your life.
How The Silence of the Lambs has informed our attitude toward Chelsea Manning.
The crushing cost of college. Still worthy it?
Nikki Finke leaving Deadline?
How podcasts conquered comedy.
America: You really don’t matter all that much to Hollywood studios anymore.
A linguistic dissection of our affect/effect problem.
Watch Kevin Spacey Edinburgh Television Film Festival keynote address [video].
Is it okay to shower in a thunderstorm.
13 of the funniest jokes from the James Franco roast.
23 signs you’re secretly a narcissist secretly masquerading as a sensitive introvert.
If you haven’t seen it, here it is: Kristen Chenowith and Sarah Horn duet on “For Good” [video].
Why aren’t there more cancer vaccines.
Hollywood is in trouble and we’re all going to pay.
14 Swedish words that conflict with the Ikea products they name.
Did you know there is a Harlan Ellison YouTube channel?
12 things we know about how the brain works.
Sundance programmers explain what makes a submission successful.
Dishwasher cooking: Make your dinner while cleaning your plates.
Major shift from TV to digital video ad spending.
The 6 rules of personal success.
How Jim Carrey’s belief system explains his choices in movie roles he plays.
Yes, an underwater strip club really exists.
Screenwriting Master Class tip of the week: Later today, I will have a teleconference with up to 20+ writers who are taking my Core I: Plot class. It’s been an amazing week with participants from Canada, England, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, Israel, Chile and all across the United States, reading and discussing in online forums a character-based approach to screenplay structure, as well as workshopping their stories.
This is just the first of eight Core classes I will be teaching this fall, each a 1-week online course. 48 lectures, all of which I wrote, plus dozens of screenwriting tips and techniques, over 300 pages of original content to ground writers in professional theory and practice.
On Monday, September 2, the next class begins: Core II: Concept. The story concept is critical to the success of your spec script and far as I’m concerned, this is the best, most informative and helpful offering available on this important subject.
For more information on Core II: Concept, go here.
To enroll in the class, go here.
Or do what many of the writers I’m working with now have done: Sign up for The Core Package, allowing you to take all eight Core classes at a big discount. To learn more about that, go here.
This fall is the only time I will be teaching the Core curriculum in 2013. So join me, will you?
I look forward to the opportunity to work with you!