Bad Shark, Good Movie

Back in the days before CGI, my roommate was a special effects makeup artist. At that time I had a few friends in this field. There was an ongoing argument that I would have with my creature-making friends about Yoda and E.T., back when both of these characters were make of rubber. They were really just suffocated puppets. My roommate’s view was that both E.T. and Yoda were poorly sculpted. It

Read More

The Best Writing Advice I Ever Got

One thousand years ago, when I was a teenager, I went a sci-fi convention in Seattle. This was probably 1978 or ’79. In those days these kinds of conventions were only attended by hardcore geeks (called nerds in those days) who were on the fringe on society. Big movie stars did not go to these events. The biggest star at this convention was the actor who played Boomer on the original Battlestar

Read More

Water Shortage

Several years ago I wrote a script that had as one of its elements an army of ghosts. Everyone who read the screenplay swore it would sell for big money, and that it was the best screenplay I had written up to that point. I was really proud of this script myself; I felt that I had nailed this story and its treatment.

But when I showed the screenplay to my agent at the time, he looked as if he

Read More

The End

"Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop." -- Lewis Carroll Before I launch into this post I want to apologize for my long absence. My father died and I didn’t much feel like writing the blog. Also I got an idea for a book and wrote that instead.Now on with the show…Endings come up a lot when I’m teaching. Some people say that a happy ending is cheap and that life

Read More

Turn up the contrast (or why we like crazy astronauts)

I often hear people say how much they love a film because it is “dark.” They wax poetic about dark films because they feel that they are more true-to-life than one that is lighter (or “sappy,” as they might say).I feel as if I have asked them what they see in an inkblot. Over many years I have noticed that these people tend to be gloomier people all around. They believe anything good or happy is

Read More

Theme Beats Logic

“Don’t give me logic, give me emotion.”— Billy Wilder’s instructions to his writing partner, I.A.L. DiamondLet’s start to explore this idea of theme versus logic by looking at the film Raising Arizona. Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter play a couple desperate to have a child. They eventually resort to stealing an infant from a couple with quintuplets.When the hapless couple brings the baby home,

Read More

The ultimate sophistication

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." -- Leonardo da VinciDa Vinci’s quote on the sophistication of simplicity has been all but forgotten by creative people today. Screenwriting students, more than anything else, don’t want their work to appear too simplistic, too “obvious.” The idea of communicating clearly with one’s audience is now equated with talking down to them.Good art, we think,

Read More