"Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It's not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it's a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event."
Charlie Kaufman: Why I Wrote Being John Malkovich. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla
on Oct 7, 2011 -
47 comments
"What I'm asking is this: Are screenwriters now affected by "spoiler culture" before they even begin the writing process? If you know a twist will be unavoidably revealed before the majority of people see the work itself, and if you concede that selling and marketing a film with a major secret will be more complicated for everyone involved … would you even try? Would you essentially stop yourself from trying to write a movie that's structured like The Sixth Sense?"
Are Spoilers Flipping the Script?
posted by Brandon Blatcher
on Jun 17, 2011 -
128 comments
For quite some time, I’d wanted to make a screwball comedy. A fast-talking, wildly acclerating ensemble comedy that gets stupider and stupider. I never imagined it would be about a war, and inspired by a very recent war at that. But Simon, Jesse, Tony and I all felt that the more we found out about the dysfunction in Washington and the naivety in London leading up to the Iraq invasion, the more obvious it was that the only way to deal accurately and fairly with this topic was as a screwball comedy. - The Oscar nominated script for
In The Loop, with an introduction by writer Armando Iannucci.
posted by Artw
on Feb 13, 2010 -
33 comments
Who Goes There - the
John W. Campbell short story which inspired the movies The Thing from Another World and, closer to the original,
The Thing (which, apparently, was horribly critically mauled upon release but has since become as much as a classic as the 50s film). The story is now being
reprinted alongside a treatment by
Logan's Run author
William F. Nolan for an unmade 1978 screen version.
posted by Artw
on Sep 1, 2009 -
18 comments
“Until the recent Great Rebellion, the Jedi Bendu were the most feared warriors in the universe. For one hundred thousand years, generations of Jedi perfected their art as the personal bodyguards of the emperor. They were the chief architects of the invincible Imperial Space Force which expanded the Empire across the galaxy, from the celestial equator to the farthest reaches of the Great Rift.
Now these legendary warriors are all but extinct. One by one they have been hunted down and destroyed as enemies of the New Empire by a ferocious and sinister rival warrior sect, the Knights of Sith.”
- The first draft of Star Wars...
was awful.
posted by Artw
on May 25, 2009 -
149 comments
"To make off with hubby's fortune, yea, I think I heard of that happenin' once or twice around L.A. And… you want me to do what exactly?" He found the paper bag he'd brought his supper home in and got busy pretending to scribble notes on it, because straight-chick uniform, makeup supposed to look like no makeup or whatever, here came that old well-known hard-on Shasta was always good for sooner or later. Does it ever end, he wondered. Of course it does. It did. Thomas Pynchon's next novel, the 416-page
Inherent Vice, is
described by Penguin Press as "part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon — private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog." While we wait for its August 4 publication, we can read
an essay on the dystopian musical he co-wrote at Cornell or watch
a clip of that movie they made of Gravity's Rainbow.
[more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Feb 6, 2009 -
76 comments
Word Into Image: Writers on Screenwriting {youtube}William Goldman (
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) (
1 2 3)
Robert Towne (
Chinatown) (
1 2 3)
Carl Foreman (
High Noon) (
1 2 3)
Neil Simon (
The Odd Couple) (
1 2 3)
Paul Mazursky (
An Unmarried Woman) (
1 2 3)
Eleanor Perry (
The Swimmer) (
1 2 3)
posted by dobbs
on Feb 22, 2008 -
9 comments
Plotbot is a web-based collaborative screenwriting application where you can write a screenplay with as many or as few people as you like. Adopting the wiki approach to screenwriting, each element is editable by any member of a project. You can also comment on, delete or restore any element.
For all of the "filmic storytellers" on MeFi.
posted by ColdChef
on Jul 30, 2007 -
18 comments
The Flitcraft Parable (Warning: RealMedia) This nicely crafted nugget is taken from
Dashiell Hammett's
The Maltese Falcon. While some literary reputations from the 1920s and '30s are falling (e.g., Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis), Hammett's rep is still rising.
My question: Which so-called genre authors writing today have the greatest chance of still being read in the 22nd century?
posted by bilco
on Sep 3, 2001 -
37 comments
