"Avengers' fan art"

Here's another Mary Doodles short film showing her drawing some fan art of The Avengers (2012).

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'Blue Jasmine' - Trailer

Here it is, the trailer for Woody Allen's latest, Blue Jasmine. The story involves a situation in which Cate Blanchett is trying to pick up the pieces of her life after her marriage to a wealthy businessman ends. 

Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a rating of 89%.

Lots of critics have penciled in Blanchett for another Oscar. As one critic put it, "She offers more memorable moments in this trailer alone than Allen was able to serve up in all of To Rome With Love."

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Book review: "Hello, He Lied"

Lynda Obst is a former editor of The New York Times Magazine. She moved to Hollywood in 1979, where she became a producer, author, and commentator on the film industry. She was involved in the development of Flashdance (1983), and produced The Fisher King (1991), Sleepless in Seattle (1994), Someone Like You (2001), The Invention of Lying (2009), and a stack of other movies and TV shows.

She recently published a book which is getting a lot of attention—Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business. I haven't read it yet, but during my week by the seaside I caught up on an earlier work, Hello, He Lied, and Other Tales from the Hollywood Trenches.

It's an excellent title for a book, but not original to Lynda Obst.

People seemed to lie to each other as a matter of course. No big thing. "Hello, he lied" was a joke I heard about someone I knew during my first month at work.

But, as a great producer would, she recognized the potential of the phrase and put it to work.

In the book, Lynda shares what she learned during twenty years in the business, all that stuff we know producers do but don't know how they do it, such as how to pitch an idea, impress a suit, win a bidding war over a hot script, massage an ego, and how to dress on location, what to say to skittish directors, where to eat lunch, and how to produce a successful movie.

Although the book is written from a producer's POV, it contains some excellent material for writers. I will be talking about some of that in more detail in the near future. In the meantime, it's an excellent read for anyone who has ever wondered what is really going on in the movie business.

As usual, here are some quotes to give you a feel for the book. _______________________________________________________________________

• This is the flip side of ambition: debilitating exhaustion and the constant threat of defeat. Therefore every crisis can't be taken too seriously or you won't survive.
• It is just as important to move on in the wake of stunning success as in the wake of disaster.
• A writer should bring a producer to a pitch meeting for social savvy, political leverage, and simultaneous translation for the artistically challenged.
• Being quick on your feet isn't the same as being good on the page.
• Good writers pitch badly and bad writers pitch well.
• To me The Fisher King was a masterpiece about the healing power of grace. To Peter Guber (then chairman of Columbia TriStar) it was a summer buddy comedy. Fine. We were both right.
• Bulletin to all Cinderellas, female and male: There are no rescues here. No fairy godmothers. No princes. No white horses. You have to do it yourself.
• The corollary of never going to a meeting without a strategy is never getting off a jet without a strategy, never going to a screening without a strategy, never going to dinner without a strategy, never going to a breakfast without a strategy.
• Flashdance, like its progenitor, Rocky, is a paradigm bull's-eye movie in that any movie where the hero reaches for and achieves his or her dream, particularly one with dance numbers, is bound to connect with, at the very least, the American public.
• Never ask permission. It will not be granted.
• Getting what you want is dependent on knowing how things work.
• Learn to ride the horse in the direction it is going.
• You must never look threatened as the big players come on. The march of the big players is the drumroll that announces the movie will in fact be made.
• When a producer has information, he must never share it, except tactically. Ipso facto, gossips know nothing because they are not trading information for anything useful, unless they are gossip columnists.
• Power is a place as well as a verb; it is inside the information tent.
• If there are so many powerful people in Hollywood, why are there so many nervous people at Hollywood parties? Because they're all standing on shaky ground, and the calm ones stay home.
• If you are in a war where the damage is beginning to exceed any possible gains, surrender, Dorothy. You will be astonished to learn how little you have lost, because no one will even remember what the spoils of the original war were supposed to be.
• Beware of all people campaigning for your friendship. Especially if you're hot that week. Too much obvious effort is suspicious.
• Beware of obsequious human beings. Everyone here has a strong, healthy ego. The most dangerous wolves are in sheep's clothing.
• Beware of inappropriate personal revelations—these are often part of a campaign.
• The fact that I know little or less about the man's point of view in Hollywood doesn't stop me from theorizing about it endlessly with my girlfriends.
• The fuzzy model is always acceptable, of course, in writers. This is true also for men. Being kind of distracted, artistic, vague, sensitive—these are all excellent traits for writers. They bring out the maternal in the woman executive, the paternal in the male executive, and this is how talent gets embraced by its protectors: the agents who have to mediate between it and the exploitative buyers.
• Style for women is a vital component of success. If you can afford it, Armani is the rule for crisp girls on the move.

These are just a few of the gems. There are wonderful sections dealing with handling pitches, meetings, script auctions, how to dress, how to keep stars happy, and ten commandments for women working in film. This book is highly recommended.
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Hello, He Lied    IMDb    Twitter    Website    Sleepless in Hollywood

"Alma"

Alma is an animated short film written and directed by Rodrigo Blaas, an animator who worked on Brave (2012), Up (2009), WALL·E (2008), Ratatouille (2007), Cars (2006), The Incredibles (2004), Finding Nemo (2003) and Ice Age (2002).

A young girl gets lured into an enchanted toy store, drawn in by its beautiful collection of dolls, including one that looks just like her. She discovers only too late that the shop is nefariously intent on adding her to its permanent collection.

The Hero's Journey

A movie is structure. ~Richard Brooks

Screenplays are structure, and that’s all they are. ~William Goldman

Screenplays are structure, the greatest ‘idea’ in the world is not enough to produce a satisfying film. ~Peter Jackson

Screenplays are structured stories, pure and simple. ~Christopher Boone

A screenplay is a story told with pictures, in dialogue and description, and placed within the context of dramatic structure. ~Syd Field

Screenwriting is all about structure (and other things). There are several major theories about structure, one of the more famous is "The Hero's Journey." You can learn about it by reading Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, or Christopher Vogler's book The Writers Journey. 

Or, you can learn about "The Hero’s Journey" from puppets, by watching this Glove and Boots video. (And find out why recent Adam Sandler films sucked at the same time. Bonus.)

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Elmore Leonard on Writing

Elmore Leonard started out writing westerns, then turned his talents to crime fiction. He has written more than forty novels, including bestsellers Up in Honey's Room, The Hot Kid, Mr. Paradise, Tishomingo Blues, Pagan Babies, and Glitz: A Novel.

Many of his books have been made into movies. Unlike most genre writers, however, Leonard is taken seriously by the literary crowd.

Back in 2001 he wrote a short piece for The New York Times, called Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle.

He rewrote that in 2007 and published it as an 85 page book under the title Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing.

What follows here is the essence of his original advice. 
 

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These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

1. Never open a book with weather.

If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want. 

2. Avoid prologues. 

They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: 

I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks... figure out what the guy's thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that.... Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle.... Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That's nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don't have to read it. I don't want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.

Killshot (2008)

3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ''she asseverated,'' and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"...

"... he admonished gravely." To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs."
 

Out of Sight (1998)

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words ''suddenly'' or ''all hell broke loose.''

This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

Jackie Brown (1997)

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range : Wyoming Stories.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

Get Shorty (1995)

9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things. 

Unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you're good at it, you don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.

52 Pick-Up (1986)

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

"The Unlikely Maestro"

Here's the short animated film which recently won the New York Tropfest, "The Unlikely Maestro." It was written by Nick Baker and animated by Tristan Klein, both from Sydney.

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