"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
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
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
FBI 101 -- "Essentials for Writers," an "exciting and informative" interactive workshop for writers being offered to members of my union -- the Writers Guild of America, East - by the FBI Office of Public Affairs and FBI New York. ... -- Very interesting account of a workshop the FBI puts on for writers in NY.
What's in it for the FBI?
...The only question we have for you is 'Will it show us in a good light?'" ...
posted by amberglow
on Jun 9, 2007 -
13 comments
Do you know your rhetoric? You can hear how it is used in the
top 100 American speeches of all time, 63 of which have the original audio recordings!
(prev.) The list has some odd omissions, such as the
Gettysburg Address (and here in convenient
presentation form) and non-American speakers like
Churchill, so this shorter
international list may be useful. While the slow decline in the quality of presidential addresses
is much lamented,
scriptwriters are stepping up, see for example,
top movie speeches of all time ("Smells like victory" beats "You can't handle the truth"). So, MeFiers, do any of these still inspire, or is rhetoric dead?
posted by blahblahblah
on May 24, 2005 -
31 comments
