A Genius -- Part 1

"I like Keaton's [films]. But Chaplin is the best of 'em all." -- Howard HawksCharlie Chaplin was a genius. I know, I'm not the first one to say this, but people tend to take him for granted. We think of his little tramp character as too cutsie -- we are too sophisticated nowadays to laugh at something so corny. He doesn't look funny to us with his Hitler mustache, bowler hat and baggy pants. But

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FLIP-FLOPS

When I say flip-flops I don’t mean shoes. Flip-flops is the name that I give characters who are opposites, but exchange character traits.Oscar and Felix of Neil Simon’s play The Odd Couple, are probably the most famous flip-flops. One is clean and prissy while the other is sloppy and gruff. Their marriages have broken up and they are thrown together as roommates. They are extreme opposites,

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Get Rich Quick! Become a Hollywood Screenwriter!

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” -- Thomas EdisonI was once asked to show a short film of mine and speak about filmmaking at a community college. At the time my film (a short film called “White Face”) had been running on HBO. After a few standard questions like, “What was the budget?” and “How long did it take to make?” came a question

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Please Don’t Kill The Animals

In the last couple of years, several animated films have used animals as major characters. Now I am told by my friends in that business that the studios are looking to buck this trend. They feel that the audience is growing tired of watching animals. I find this baffling. Animal stories did not emerge in the world with the advent of computer-generated animation, and will be with us long after we

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The New Holy Grail

People tell me about how good the stories are in games nowadays, but I have never seen this to be true. The games are exciting and the graphics are great, but they do not tell stories. (I can hear some of your knees jerking from here, but hear me out.)Because video games have many of the elements of a story -- characters, settings and exciting events for instance -- it is easy to be fooled into

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The Artist’s Vision

“Why do you want to build an amusement park, they’re so dirty.” -- Walt Disney’s wife, on his idea for DisneylandFor those of us born after 1955 it is difficult to imagine a world without Disneyland. But for the people who were born the other side of that year, it was just as difficult to imagine a world with Disneyland in it. Mrs. Disney was correct: amusement parks were dirty places. She could

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Target Practice

"The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." -- MichelangeloWhile teaching a class, I once mentioned that it wasn’t just luck to repeatedly produce good work as a storyteller. I said that if it were being in the right place at the right time, you could not have people whose successes span decades, such as Alfred

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