Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Writer's Roundtable - Inspirtation & theme

Hollywood Reporter does a series of round table conversations with people in the biz around award season - each segment is about 2 minutes - and here's part one of the series about screenwriters...



Congratulations to the 100 folks who made the semi-finals in Script Shadow's logline contest! Um, I ended up being one of them. Entered on a whim. After reading the other entries - I don't have a chance in hell.

And I have other scripts and projects circling which I will blog about later. Now they're still dreams and possibilities. But, things are happening!

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:

TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: You Are A Failure! - and there is nothing wrong with that.
Yesterday's Dinner: Togos sandwich - tuna.
Bicycle: Short ride to an undisclosed location that is not crowded.

3 comments:

Emily Blake said...

Not a chance in hell? Pft. You're the guy who gives us the advice.

wcmartell said...

There are some *great* loglines there... also some that sound rteally boring or might win a contest but not do so well in the real world.

Hey, all I can do is show you tools to use, then it's up to your imagination. There are people out there who have learned to use those tools!

And... congratulations!

- Bill

yyyyyyyyy said...

I liked your logline. Apparently better than mine. There were lots of periods and no confusion.

I liked Emily's too. I also thought that although many loglines were just wacky, like the Cusack one (Being John Cusack) and Blade Runner, even these conveyed their ideas succinctly, and were much more appealing than the winners of most screenplay contests for money.

Do you wonder if readers might think too much about 'bomb planted in gut'= 'bomb in beer gut', 'bomb makes giant fart', and 'bomb fart makes guts explode all over the place'= 'Yuck!' ?

Which is what would happen if the bomb was modestly sized. It would be like what happened to Mr. Creosote (It's wafer thin... could be a joke).

I suppose there are two ways to handle guts all over the place: show it happening to someone else and make it really horrible so that the audience 'viscerally' sees the stakes. Or avoid the issue entirely by making it a really powerful bomb, the kind in which you disappear in a puff of smoke (also like in Monty Python on TV).

eXTReMe Tracker