Tuesday, March 28, 2006

On The Shoulders of Giants

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Sir Isaac Newton once said that, "if I see further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." He was of course referring to th...
10 comments:
Thursday, March 23, 2006

Paddy Chayefsky’s Dead

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Starting sometime in the 80’s film directors became art directors. The look of a film became more important than any other aspect of the fi...
5 comments:
Wednesday, March 15, 2006

MYTH OF GENRE part 2

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If you think about it, Jaws is just a monster movie. And, like a lot of monster movies, incidental characters are picked off as our hero tr...
6 comments:
Friday, March 10, 2006

THE MYTH OF GENRE

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Genre is visible. People know if they are watching a western or science fiction. But invisible ink is about the inner workings of story, n...
Monday, February 27, 2006

DIALOGUE part 4 (ADDRESS AND EXPLAIN)

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This is related to “address and dismiss” but serves a different function. The best example is in the first Star Wars, when Luke Skywalker s...
2 comments:
Tuesday, February 21, 2006

DIALOGUE part 3 (ADDRESS AND DISMISS)

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The first time I noticed this technique, I was watching John Carpenter’s The Thing. In the film, an alien creature with the ability to assu...
1 comment:
Friday, February 10, 2006

DIALOGUE part 2 (SOUNDING NATURAL)

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Over the last few years, I have noticed that every character I read, or see in the movies or on television, sounds like another movie or tel...
Wednesday, February 01, 2006

DIALOGUE part 1

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My barber wants to make a film. He wants to write a screenplay, so he wants to know the format. He figures that once he knows the format, ...
Wednesday, January 11, 2006

The Strange Case of Sherman Alexie

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I was once asked to give a talk about storytelling to a convention of high school media students with Native-American writer Sherman Alexie....
3 comments:
Wednesday, January 04, 2006

We Live in the Dark Ages part 2

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The more I talk about, and teach, structure the more I see that people have a fundamental misunderstanding about what it really is. Story s...
2 comments:
Tuesday, December 27, 2005

We Live in the Dark Ages

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These are the Dark Times. This is, in my opinion, the worst time in the history of cinema. This trend toward bad films began around 1980. ...
2 comments:
Monday, December 05, 2005

King Kong -- An American Icon

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King Kong was one of my favorite movies. Until recently. While flipping through a book on the making of the 1933 film, I saw a pre-produc...
6 comments:
Monday, November 28, 2005

GOOD STORIES, GOOD BUSINESS Part 3

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I have a friend who was in the story department of a production company and their job was to come up with feature film ideas to be done usin...
1 comment:
Wednesday, November 16, 2005

GOOD STORIES, GOOD BUSINESS Part 2

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I recently had drinks with a Hollywood agent at a major agency. We got into a little debate. He kept saying that good films are hard to ma...
2 comments:
Monday, November 07, 2005

GOOD STORIES, GOOD BUSINESS Part 1

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In 1993, there were, as I understand it, more comic books published than in any other year. Just a few short years later, so few comics wer...
3 comments:
Sunday, October 30, 2005

The Use of Clones Part 2

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John Steinbeck uses a cast of clones in his novel, Of Mice and Men. The armature of that story is that people need companionship. It is bo...
1 comment:
Tuesday, October 25, 2005

THE USE OF CLONES Part 1

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“ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WERE THREE LITTLE PIGS… .” What I am calling clones have been called other names—“mirror characters” and “reflection...
Wednesday, October 19, 2005

RITUAL PAIN part 3

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The Apartment has two characters who change, but they both learn essentially the same lesson. Because change is never easy, and is resisted,...
Tuesday, October 11, 2005

RITUAL PAIN part 2

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James Cameron took what could have been a little B movie and made Terminator into a surprise box office hit. He put Linda Hamilton’s charac...
1 comment:

RITUAL PAIN part 1

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James Cameron took what could have been a little B movie and made Terminator into a surprise box office hit. He put Linda Hamilton’s charac...
1 comment: