You like stars? I’ma give you EIGHT stars. How you like’a dat?
Last night I saw the final Harry Potter film, and once again appreciated that the Potter film franchise brought together an ultimate dream cast of British thespians. You wonder that the biggest challenge in a Potter film may not have been the preponderance of special effects required to realize J.K. Rowling’s world, but simply the [...]
Strangely, I do not mourn
Three years ago, when the WGA Strike ended, I sounded a note of cautious optimism based on the amount that studios had given away in order to preserve their gamble on the ad-supported streaming model for Internet content. They all claimed that the Internet was in such infancy when it came to its relationship with [...]
Affirmation
My long-time buddy Irish knows my writing going back to my very first, very miserable-bad screenplay, and he’s both pretty sharp when it comes to story and pretty willing to speak his mind. He’s one of those trusted readers who usually see the earliest drafts of whatever the latest screenplay is. And in this case, [...]
How to Do ‘First Class’ screenwriting in a comic-book movie
(Full disclosure: I know a couple of the guys who wrote the script for X-Men: First Class. I’d feel the same way about their movie if I knew them or not, but part of the reason to write this is really to thank them for such a great piece of entertainment that could have gone [...]
R.I.P.
If you ever want the experience of having a movie hit you between the eyes with a lightning bolt, watch A Place in the Sun and pay attention to the first moment where Montgomery Clift meets Elizabeth Taylor. This was a woman that, just by turning her head, could put a passion into the camera [...]
A great day for independent film
Many of the first studio bosses were showmen – theatre-chain owners for whom bringing in an audience and giving them something to love was in their blood. In the Golden Age of Hollywood, all the major studios owned their own theatre chains, until anti-trust actions forced them to sell them off. The argument about whether [...]
Oscar Nominations – First Reaction: Hear Woman Roar
(Going to do my breakdown of the field in a later post. This one deserved to stand on its own.) My first observation from reading this year’s nominees for the Academy Awards is what an amazing year it is for women in film – and why can’t every year be at least this good? Coming [...]
Problems you want to have
I’ve been meaning to trade up on my screenwriting software for some time. My old burned copy of Final Draft can’t do .pdf conversions, and Adobe’s own site doesn’t know what to do with old Final Draft files. Enough industry people have moved away from Final Draft that I’ve had to resort to sending that [...]
Making the movie proved too precious for the country to resist
File this under “News They Oughtta Know Isn’t Really News”; the LA Times is confirming that The Hobbit will film in New Zealand after all, in spite of weeks of recent grumbling amongst SAG, a small sister union Down Under, and the Peter Jackson filmmaking empire. The thing is, they were never going to pack [...]
Instead of R.I.P., let’s just say Thank You
I want to tell you about someone awesome that you have probably never heard of. Sally Menke was found dead this morning in a ravine among the canyons and hiking trails around the Hollywood Hills. The early speculation is centering around an accidental fall possibly triggered by heat stroke during yesterday’s record-shattering 113-degree weather. Hiking [...]