I will be in Denver this weekend to present my fantabulous screenwriting seminar AKA Everything You Wanted To Know About The Movie Business And Were Afraid Was True.
It will be held at the Raddisson this Saturday 9-5 and for information about how to sign up, please contact B.J. Markel at 877-525-5083 (Toll Free). As always I am hoping to find screenwriters who want to sell their scripts. Of all the screenwriting guru-atti I know about, I am the only one who is actively looking for that next Shane Black or Callie Khouri. I want to find the writer who is burning to tell his or her story — and who thinks Hollywood does not care. I’m here to tell you that they do — and I certainly do. I want to see some good movies at the cineplex. They’re such nice buildings, it would be a shame to have to tear them all down from lack of use.
Let’s put on a show!
While I am in Denver I will also be recording a radio pilot with co-creator Gil Whiteley of KNUS 710 AM in Denver. It is one of several radio projects Gil and I will be producing and co-hosting. I am very excited about these and will keep you updated on when and where they will be airing in the weeks and months to come.
Meantime, let’s keep writing. Here is a link to Patricia Burroughs site to show her progress (fast too!) thanks to her using the principles of Da Cat! Thanks for this inspiring update, P!
http://guiltyofbeing.blogspot.com/2006/03/saving-cat-storyboard.html
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Perhaps it’s the theatres themselves that could use some new clothes as well. What ever happened to the days of smell-o-scope and audience interaction?
For the original House on Haunted Hill they sailed a fake skeleton over the audience at just the right time and scared the hell out of people. Anyone ever see Mr. Sardonicus? They let the audience vote for which reel got played at the end, does he live or die?
The last movie I saw advertised as being in 3-D was SpyKids (Magnificent Desolation too, but that is also a rehash) and now I hear there are plans to re-release lots of classics (including, you guessed it, Star Wars) in 3-D format. So why not get a little more audience interaction?
Games are more popular than movies, that tells me people attention spans are getting shorter (there is legitimate scientific study going on to whether this really is happening, and the results so far are not good), so if movies wanna win back their audiences from their own living room, maybe they need to a add a little razzle dazzle to the “show”. Put the sizzle back in the delicious steak. Since prepackaged sequels and redoes virtually sell themselves anyway, why not take that ball and run the audience over with it? Make them a part of the show. This is the 21st century, dammit, where’s my hologram?
I still whole heartedly agree that the story is the most important thing, otherwise the audience leaves with their nose in the air and tells all their friends not to go see it. But maybe we are finally finding the limits to where the technical presentation of film now stands. In the last dozen years fims have gone from being limited to what could be created in the real physical world to being able to literally create anything that we can conceive. Hence, every director, producer, even actor, suddenly could have one of their childhood fantasies come true. And since most of the people really in a position to make these films are Baby-Boomers, their childhood fantasies derive from the TV and film from the last 40 years.
I suppose whoever suddenly realized that people who read comic books would go see the movie version thought they were really clever and that they’d found an untapped goldmine. Guess they didn’t see Captain America or the original Punisher.
Maybe people losing interest in movies now could be a good thing in the long run. It will push the indie filmmakers harder and hopefully push the theatre companies to find new and interesting ways of presenting movies to us.
Oh please no more 3-D movies!
I don’t think attention spans are the problem. Unless you count the problem of a bad film not being able to hold someone’s attention. People want to go see good movies. They don’t need a ploy, they need a good film!
I am actually thrilled to see the number of comic book films coming out. We now have the technology to make GOOD ones. I will find a way to make it to the Ghost Rider premiere, what ever it takes, I will be there. The only problem with turning a comic into a film is the difference in storytelling. I can almost hear Blake screaming “double mumbo jumbo!!!!” (Blake, I will just warn you ahead of time, don’t waste your money on Ghost Rider, you probably wouldn’t be able to stand it!).
One problem is how Hollywood refuses to stick to the orginal story. In Cujo, the boy was supposed to die. In The Horse Whisperer, that man was supposed to die at the end… read the book! Ghost Rider is no exception. They have already said in Wizard magazine that the stories in the Ghost Rider comics sucked (As a die hard Ghost Rider fan I disagree completely) and that they decided to come up with their own. Yet I will still run to see it, for a few reasons…
1) It’s Ghost Rider, my one true indulgance is GR comics.
2) Knowing that another fellow true Ghost Rider fan agreed to be involved (Nick Cage) makes me believe Shane Salerno actually stayed true to his word and followed the advice of fans of the comic. Nick Cage would not do this film if he felt they were disrespectful to the character, trust me on that!
Comic’s were not meant to be believable, they were meant to go beyond belief, to test the limits of what we would find acceptable. That’s why they have been marketed for kids, as adults we start to say “Hey, that can’t happen!”. Children don’t question, they amazingly allow themselves to be sent to worlds where the impossible is the only thing acceptable. They don’t have rules for their imaginations.
When I start to write a film, I ask myself two questions. “What if…” and “Is it possible?”. With comics there is one question. “Wouldn’t it be fantastic if…”. That is the difference between storytelling and why some people cannot buy into the films based on comic books. Regardless of whether the film is an orginal idea, based on something else, or based on a comic, they are in fact “just movies”, which we have enjoyed since their beginning because they allowed us to escape our own realities. In my opinion, the comic based films are some of the only good ones in the last few years (the exception being The Incredible Hulk, I wasn’t happy with it at all).