Sunday, February 26, 2012

84th Annual Academy Award Winners

And the Oscar goes to...

Best Picture: "The Artist."

Adapted Screenplay: Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, "The Descendants."

Original Screenplay: Woody Allen, "Midnight in Paris."

Actor: Jean Dujardin, "The Artist."

Actress: Meryl Streep, "The Iron Lady."

Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer, "Beginners."

Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer, "The Help."

Directing: Michel Hazanavicius, "The Artist."

Foreign Language Film: "A Separation," Iran.

Animated Feature Film: "Rango."

Art Direction: "Hugo."

Cinematography: "Hugo."

Sound Mixing: "Hugo."

Sound Editing: "Hugo."

Original Score: "The Artist."

Original Song: "Man or Muppet" from "The Muppets."

Costume Design: "The Artist."

Documentary Feature: "Undefeated."

Documentary Short: "Saving Face."

Film Editing: "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo."

Makeup: "The Iron Lady."

Animated Short Film: "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore."

Live Action Short Film: "The Shore."

Visual Effects: "Hugo."

Oscar winners previously presented off camera because the were tech awards:

Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award: Oprah Winfrey.

Honorary Award: James Earl Jones.

Honorary Award: Dick Smith.

Gordon E. Sawyer Award: Douglas Trumbull.

Award of Merit: ARRI cameras.

Pretty much what we all thought - "Artist" sweeps. I liked the movie - and it's an example in my Visual Storytelling Blue Book, so I'm happy.

But what about you? Comments section is open.

- Bill

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Lancelot Link: Passion Of The Chimps

Lancelot Link Thursday! This week's links to some great screenwriting and film articles, plus some fun stuff that may be of interest to you. Brought to you by that suave and sophisticated secret agent...



Here are nine cool links plus this week's car chase...

1) Kubrick's Unused Movie Titles

2) British Intelligence Have No Idea Where Charlie Caplin Was Born - Was He A Space Alien?

3) Amazing Charts Of Hollywood's Hits.

4) Long Running LAST SAMURAI Legal Despute.

5) TOTAL RECALL 2 - was it a real project, or only in their minds?

6) End Of The Indie Film On Screen?

7) Behind The Scenes Filming THE ARTIST.

8) The Secret History of STAR WARS revealed.

9) John Logan - He wrote all of the Oscar Nominees this year (okay - some of them).

And the Car Chase Of The Week uses a *boat anchor*...



From KHILADI 420 from Bollywood.

- Bill

IMPORTANT UPDATE:


TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: 110 Pages - No Waiting! Why people in movies never say Goodbye before hanging up the phone.
Dinner: Panda Express - Peppercorn Shrimp, plus...

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

John Carter...

This is a fan made trailer for JOHN CARTER (OF MARS) that blows away the official Disney trailer and makes me wonder why Disney isn't firing people.



Compare it to this official trailer...



And JOHN CARTER (not of Mars)...



- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:


TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Dramatizing Emotions And a film that won THREE Oscars.
Dinner: Taco Bell - and not even the Dorito-Taco.

TV: CASTLE - okay, I probably haven’t mentioned that I’m a big fan of this show, but as a mystery writer how could I not be? This has been a really good season so far - which is amazing because by this point most shows are limping along. KILL SHOT dealt with Beckett’s PTSS over being *shot* at the end of last season and almost dying - and really dug deep into her character’s fears. This has been one of the great things this season - they have taken these characters we know from the outside and takes us deep inside - like in KICK THE BALLISTICS, where Ryan’s stolen gun is used in a murder and he has to deal with his guilt over losing it... that episode also had a triple twist ending that was great. The other episodes have been fun - Castle & Beckett handcuffed together in bed, etc... and though I didn’t like the 1940s Noir episode, it was at least trying to be different and fun (I just didn’t think it worked).

Now we come to this 2 parter, and it just kicked ass in many ways. Part 2 (Monday night) was amazing - but it took part 1 to set it up. What starts out as a murder takes a strange turn when their suspect - a mysterious man named Gage - says that they are in over their heads and the whole case will vanish... and it does! The body vanishes from the Medical Examiner’s table and Gage vanished from a locked cell. All of this brings them to a secret CIA operation in NYC run by the always sexy Jennifer Beals - who is Castle’s ex-lover. So we get some great tension and a nice triangle and Gage is an assassin who is after some target in NYC... but who? As bodies pile up, Castle & Beckett find clues that the CIA never considered and all of this leads to a dead man - who is still alive: a scientist working on a “linchpin theory” that one small event can change the world - create a domino run of events that will result in the destruction of the US economy. As soon as they find this guy, he gets shot by a sniper (Gage?) and Beckett and Castle get rammed into the Hudson in Beckett’s car...

Part 2: The car sinking into the Hudson, slowly filling with water as they try to escape, is a big feature film type scene. Just amazing. And some great suspense. It’s hard to believe you can do stuff like this on TV - it seems like something out of a BOURNE film. And that Linchpin Theory is an awesome concept - when they break it down in this episode you can see how easy it would be to destroy the world with a single bullet - provided you could figure out the one person to shoot who would cause the domino run. The great thing about these two episodes is that they are like a feature film - and yet still have a bunch of series running plot material. The CIA forbids them from discussing the case with Ryan and Esposito... and Iron Gates. So that fuels those running plots. Plus the ex-lover creates conflict between Castle and Beckett - and there’s a nice scene in part 2 where Beals and Beckett discuss how a romance with Castle plays out... Beals’ past and maybe Beckett’s future. The story still has a bunch of plot twists and a great race against time to prevent the assassination of a little kid!

Season 4 of a show that kind of has a simple premise, but still manages to find interesting ways to explore it... and hasn’t run out of steam yet. Created by Nicholl winner Andrew Marlowe who also wrote AIR FORCE ONE.

Monday, February 20, 2012

Presidents Day

INDEPENDENCE DAY:


AMERICAN PRESIDENT:


SUPER PRESIDENT:


PRESIDENTIAL MORPHING:


- Bill

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Writers Guild Award Winners

Film: Original Screenplay

"Midnight in Paris," Woody Allen

Film: Adapted Screenplay

"The Descendants," screenplay by Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash; based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings

Film: Documentary Screenplay

"Better This World," written by Katie Galloway & Kelly Duane de la Vega

Television: Drama Series

"Breaking Bad," Sam Catlin, Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould, Gennifer Hutchison, George Mastras, Thomas Schnauz, Moira Walley-Beckett

Television: Comedy Series

"Modern Family," Cindy Chupack, Paul Corrigan, Abraham Higginbotham, Ben Karlin, Elaine Ko, Carol Leifer, Steven Levitan, Christopher Lloyd, Dan O’Shannon, Jeffrey Richman, Brad Walsh, Ilana Wernick, Bill Wrubel, Danny Zuker

Television: New Series

"Homeland" Henry Bromell, Alexander Cary, Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon, Chip Johannessen, Gideon Raff, Meredith Stiehm

Television: Episodic Drama -- tie

“Box Cutter” ("Breaking Bad"), written by Vince Gilligan

“The Good Soldier” ("Homeland"), written by Henry Bromell

Television: Episodic Comedy

“Caught in the Act” ("Modern Family"), written by Steven Levitan & Jeffrey Richman

Television: Long Form - Original

"Cinema Verite," David Seltzer

Television: Long Form - Adapted

"Too Big to Fail," written by Peter Gould, based on the book written by Andrew Ross Sorkin

Television: Animation

“Homer the Father” ("The Simpsons"), written by Joel H. Cohen

Television: Comedy/Variety (Including Talk) Series

"The Colbert Report," writers: Michael Brumm, Stephen Colbert, Rich Dahm, Paul Dinello, Eric Drysdale, Rob Dubbin, Glenn Eichler, Dan Guterman, Peter Gwinn, Jay Katsir, Barry Julien, Frank Lesser, Opus Moreschi, Tom Purcell, Meredith Scardino, Scott Sherman, Max Werner; Comedy Central

- Bill

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Book Report... Happy Valentines Day!

I know that I've been a slacker when it comes to the Blog so far this year, but I hope to turn that around now that I'm done with the Visual Blue Book and think I have figured out the best way to expand future titles. I wrote a monster article on Silent Films, then took my primary example and re-ordered the techniques covered in the original BB to match the film... then completely integrated the "Bonus Material" articles into the main body of the book to prevent duplicate lead paragraphs. Now that I know what I'm doing, the next BBs will be better. Using BRIDESMAIDS for Supporting Characters BB, and writing a new article on comedy characters that uses HANGOVER (1) plus adding some articles from the vault.

The 63k words (full length book!) on VISUAL will probably not happen again (but who knows) - the new silent movie article is actually longer than the original paper BB. But now that I've figured out the best way to expand the Blue Books there will be less beating my head against the wall and more time for blogging and those new Script Tips I promised. Hey, since we're talking about books...




I just began reading my friend Nancy's Oprah-endorsed Best Selling Novel THE CROWN on my Kindle – and it's off to a great start! Not my usual genre (since it's a period story I don't expect many car chases) but I'm trying to get around to reading books written by my friends (a problem – because they are mostly writers!) and *Oprah* loved this book. I feel by reading Nancy's book, I'm closer to touching the hem of Oprah's garment...

But here's the great thing – not my genre, people wearing frilly shirts... and from the first page I'm *hooked*! Nancy opens with conflict, which not only gets us involved in the protagonist's story, it also exposes the protagonist. After only a couple of paragraphs I'm totally with the protagonist. The year is 1537, the country is England, and a broke young woman is trying to get a ride into town so that she can attending a woman's hanging... wait, it's not just a hanging - they're burning her alive. The dude who owns the cart wants *cash*, and even thought this young woman might clean up real good – at this point in time she's been wearing the same sweat stained clothes for a while – which she has probably slept in – and to top it all off she's biracial at a time when that was not considered “hot”. So there is no way in hell this guy is going to let her on the cart.

She is the uber-underdog and yet finds a way to get herself of that cart headed to the hanging, er - burning alive. The method she uses (not sexual – more tragic) shows that she is resourceful and driven to get to this burning. Which also creates a fair amount of mystery. Oh, and to add to the mystery we discover that this scruffy looking gal is a *nun* who has escaped from a convent, and the woman being burned alive is her cousin (more of a sister). This is a great
opening to a story... and a lesson that works in screenplays as well.

Nancy's Author Page on Amazon – this photo looks more like the real Nancy than the photo on the book.





Whether you are writing a screenplay or a novel or a short story, you need to grab the reader on page one! This is nothing new, by the way, Edgar Allan Poe said you need to grab your reader in the first sentence or you have lost them. My friend Joshua Grover-David Patterson – I think his zombie novel with heart MERCY was one of my past book reports – has a novelette on Kindle called BABY TEETH that opens with this sentence: “This is the night I'll finally kill my baby.” Okay – don't you want to know why someone would kill their *infant*? And why they've been thinking about it, maybe planning it, for long enough that it's *finally*? I know I did, and that's why I kept reading.

No matter how we tell our stories, we need to start strong and find that scene or line or situation that pulls the audience into the story and makes them want to read more. If we're writing a screenplay and it takes a while before anything interesting happens, there's a good chance you need to cut those boring scenes or at least find some way to reorder your scenes so that the story hits the ground running. Even “slow burn” screenplays like THE SIXTH SENSE opens with *something interesting happening* - going down into the dark wine cellar and having the light explode... plunging the scene into scary darkness. This sets the stage for the rest of the screenplay – it tells us that spooky things *will* happen, wait for them!

One of the reviews of Nancy's book says you can't put it down – and though I've obviously stopped reading to write this blog entry... I can't wait to get back to those people in frilly shirts in 1537 England!

- Bill

IMPORTANT UPDATE:


TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Writing Sequels -
Dinner: Togos #9 sandwich.
Movies: SAFE HOUSE and THE GREY (plus lots of others I haven't told you about... but will!)


bluebook


BRAND NEW!

*** VISUAL STORYTELLING *** - For Kindle!
*** VISUAL STORYTELLING *** - For Nook!

Expanded version with more techniques to tell stories visually! Using the first Oscar Winner SUNRISE and Oscar Nominee THE ARTIST plus other Oscar Winners as examples... as well as RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Print version is 48 pages, Kindle version is around 250 pages!

Only $2.99 - and no postage! (limited time price)


bluebook


FINALLY!

*** THE SECRETS OF ACTION SCREENWRITING *** - For Kindle!
*** THE SECRETS OF ACTION SCREENWRITING *** - For Nook!

Why pay $510 for a used version of the 240 page 2000 version that used to retail for $21.95? (check it out!) when you can get the NEW EXPANDED VERSION - over 500 pages - for just $9.99? New chapters, New examples, New techniques!

"SECRETS OF ACTION SCREENWRITING is the best book on the practical nuts-and-bolts mechanics of writing a screenplay I've ever read." - Ted Elliott, co-writer of MASK OF ZORRO, SHREK, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN and the sequels (with Terry Rossio).(ie; 4 of the top 20 Box Office Hits Of ALL TIME.)


Only $9.99 - and no postage!


bluebook


*** YOUR IDEA MACHINE *** - For Kindle!
*** YOUR IDEA MACHINE *** - For Nook!

Expanded version with more ways to find great ideas! Print version is 48 pages, Kindle version is around 155 pages!

Only $2.99 - and no postage!


bluebook


*** CREATING STRONG PROTAGONISTS *** - For Kindle!
*** CREATING STRONG PROTAGONISTS *** - For Nook!

Expanded version with more ways to create interesting protagonists! Print version is 48 pages, Kindle version is once again around 155 pages!

Only $2.99 - and no postage!


bluebook


NEW!

*** DIALOGUE SECRETS *** - For Kindle!
*** DIALOGUE SECRETS *** - For Nook!

Expanded version with more ways to find great ideas! Print version is 48 pages, Kindle version is almost *200* pages!

Only $2.99 - and no postage!

Thursday, February 09, 2012

Lancelot Link: Honey I Blew Up The Chimps!

Lancelot Link Thursday! This week's links to some great screenwriting and film articles, plus some fun stuff that may be of interest to you. Brought to you by that suave and sophisticated secret agent...



Here are six cool links plus this week's car chase...

1) Lost Films - movies that there are no known prints of.

2) How To Win An Oscar - "Everybody knows you never go full retard." (that was from TROPIC THUNDER, so don't write me letters, okay?)

3) David Mamet's hand written outline for HOMICIDE.

4) Banned Movies! Shocking! Disgusting! Time Travel!

5) Great advice on crowd funding your film!

6) How about all of the audio tapes of Truffaut's interviews with Hitchcock? 12 HOURS!

And the Car Chase Of The Week....



ARMOR OF GOD with Jackie Chan. Love the explosive cardboard boxes.

- Bill

Wednesday, February 08, 2012

Bourne Again

From the Universal press release:

The narrative architect behind the "Bourne" film series, Tony Gilroy, takes the helm in the next chapter of the hugely popular espionage franchise that has earned almost $1 billion at the global box office: "The Bourne Legacy." The writer/director expands the "Bourne" universe created by Robert Ludlum with an original story that introduces us to a new hero (Jeremy Renner) whose life-or-death stakes have been triggered by the events of the first three films.

For "The Bourne Legacy," Renner joins fellow series newcomers Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Stacy Keach and Oscar Isaac, while franchise veterans Albert Finney, Joan Allen, David Strathairn and Scott Glenn reprise their roles.


"Narrative Architect"? Is "writer" a dirty word?



And the poster:



August 3rd... I wonder if Renner has those headaches?

- Bill



bluebook

IT'S BACK!

*** SECRETS OF ACTION SCREENWRITING *** - For Kindle!

*** SECRETS OF ACTION SCREENWRITING *** - For Nook!

Why pay $510 for a *used* copy of the 2000 version when you can buy the Expanded 2011 Version - now over 500 pages - for $9.99? NEW Chapters! NEW Techniques! NEW Examples! It's the book pro screenwriters recommend! An Oscar Winner and the co-writer of FOUR of the Top 20 Box Office Movies Of All Time recommend it! (which is probably why someone is selling a used copy for $510.) Filled with techniques you will not find anywhere else!

Only $9.99 - and no postage!



bluebook

NEW!

*** DIALOGUE SECRETS *** - For Kindle!

*** DIALOGUE SECRETS *** - For Nook! (coming soon)

Expanded version with dozens of ways to improve your dialogue! Print version is 48 pages, Kindle version is almost 200 pages!

Only $2.99 - and no postage!



bluebook

NEW!

*** YOUR IDEA MACHINE *** - For Kindle!

*** YOUR IDEA MACHINE *** - For Nook!

Expanded version with more ways to find great ideas! Print version is 48 pages, Kindle version is around 155 pages!

Only $2.99 - and no postage!



bluebook

NEW!

*** CREATING STRONG PROTAGONISTS *** - For Kindle!

*** CREATING STRONG PROTAGONISTS *** - For Nook! (coming soon)

Expanded version with more ways to create interesting protagonists! Print version is 48 pages, Kindle version is once again around 155 pages!

Only $2.99 - and no postage!

Thursday, February 02, 2012

Lancelot Link: Groundhog Day

Lancelot Link Thursday! This week's links to some great screenwriting and film articles, plus some fun stuff that may be of interest to you. Brought to you by that suave and sophisticated secret agent...



Here are five cool links plus this week's car chase...

1) STAR WARS... remade by a bunch of different people one scene at a time, often with Legos.

2) More Oscar Nominated Screenplays - Legal Download!

3) The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores In Rge World!

4) SXSW Line Up (with clips)

5) Ridley Scott wants *your* movie!

And this week's car chase...



From FASTER.

- Bill


bluebook

IT'S BACK!

*** SECRETS OF ACTION SCREENWRITING *** - For Kindle!

*** SECRETS OF ACTION SCREENWRITING *** - For Nook!

Why pay $510 for a *used* copy of the 2000 version when you can buy the Expanded 2011 Version - now over 500 pages - for $9.99? NEW Chapters! NEW Techniques! NEW Examples! It's the book pro screenwriters recommend! An Oscar Winner and the co-writer of FOUR of the Top 20 Box Office Movies Of All Time recommend it! (which is probably why someone is selling a used copy for $510.) Filled with techniques you will not find anywhere else!

Only $9.99 - and no postage!



bluebook

NEW!

*** DIALOGUE SECRETS *** - For Kindle!

*** DIALOGUE SECRETS *** - For Nook! (coming soon)

Expanded version with dozens of ways to improve your dialogue! Print version is 48 pages, Kindle version is almost 200 pages!

Only $2.99 - and no postage!



bluebook

NEW!

*** YOUR IDEA MACHINE *** - For Kindle!

*** YOUR IDEA MACHINE *** - For Nook!

Expanded version with more ways to find great ideas! Print version is 48 pages, Kindle version is around 155 pages!

Only $2.99 - and no postage!



bluebook

NEW!

*** CREATING STRONG PROTAGONISTS *** - For Kindle!

*** CREATING STRONG PROTAGONISTS *** - For Nook! (coming soon)

Expanded version with more ways to create interesting protagonists! Print version is 48 pages, Kindle version is once again around 155 pages!

Only $2.99 - and no postage!

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