Frederica Sagor Maas dies at 111; silent film screenwriter. Her 1925 script for "The Plastic Age" launched the career Clara Bow. She wrote numerous scripts during the silent era, including movies starring Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer with whom she became friends. But she felt badly treated by Hollywood, her scripts stolen, plagiarized or bowdlerized. She was also blacklisted, wrongly accused of being a communist. Broke and dispirited, she and her husband contemplated suicide. But she survived, and went on to write a highly critical book about early Hollywood, where she dished on many famous figures.
[more inside]
posted by VikingSword
on Jan 8, 2012 -
13 comments
"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
Zombie Baby, Fucking Jane Austen, The Last Witch Hunter, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, American Bullshit, Better Living Through Chemistry... just some of the titles that made this year's
Black List, a list of the best unproduced screenplays of the year as voted on by industry insiders.
LA Times and
Deadline Hollywood have pieces on it and here's an October
audio interview with Franklin Leonard, creator of the Black List. In past years, aspiring screenwriters could find PDFs of the scripts online. It's gonna be
a lot harder
now.
posted by dobbs
on Dec 13, 2010 -
42 comments
Patrick Sauriol's
Corona Coming Attractions, the comprehensive insider film news site of the late-'90s (resurrected in December 2008), presents the top unproduced screenplays for 2009 as selected by film professionals (
Part 1 |
Part 2). "Over 300 film professionals were asked to submit the titles of up to ten of their favorite screenplays. The only condition for the picks were that the projects would not be released in theaters this year." Some sound fascinating, others cringe-inducingly tired.
posted by AugieAugustus
on Feb 4, 2010 -
21 comments
ScriptShadow reviews the latest screenplays from Hollywood, usually with links to the screenplays themselves.
posted by alby
on Jul 7, 2009 -
13 comments
The "Raiders" Story Conference In 1978 George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan spent five consecutive nine-hour days hashing out the characters and plot for
Raiders of the Lost Ark. The 125-page transcript of their meetings, unreleased before now, details their
insane talent and techniques for populist storytelling. (It also makes one wonder what happened to George Lucas, a man who once had a
math formula for exciting cinema.)
via Ain't It Cool News, unfortunately
posted by incomple
on Mar 10, 2009 -
135 comments
Simply Scripts is a repository of screenplays. Sort of a collection of links to scripts hosted on other sites (like official studio or screenwriter sites). There's some neat stuff there. For instance, I found a Coen brothers script (
pdf), based on a James Dickey novel, I'd never heard of before.
posted by Manhasset
on Dec 7, 2008 -
14 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
"
The Day The Clown Cried." Even unfinished, the breathtaking scope of it's...
awfulness has for thirty years
both attracted and repelled would-be producers and distributors. (
script, zipped Word doc) Just the concept is startling, like some kind of hellish Sad Lib -- Jerry Lewis plays a clown in Auschwitz who leads children to the gas chambers. Harry Shearer, one of the few to see the film: "You are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. 'Oh my God!' -- that's all you can say." Can this movie ever be made?
posted by stupidsexyFlanders
on Jul 16, 2003 -
39 comments
