The cost of living in Los Angeles is nuts. Seattle can be expensive (and was especially so back in the dot-com boom), but L.A. is a whole new league. It is for this reason that people as old as me still have housemates. And heaven forbid your tank hits empty while you’re in Beverly Hills, [...]
This weekend Mystery Man is hosting a blog-athon of people’s favorite screenplays. As he suggests, favorite screenplay turns out to be a tougher question than you might assume on first consideration. One’s favorite film isn’t necessarily one’s favorite screenplay. It took a while for me to settle on the right choice. At first, my thoughts [...]
Am I the only person who finds Variety really annoying? Last year, I had a subscription to The Hollywood Reporter. When it ran out, I took advantage of a frequent flier miles program to get Daily Variety. Hundreds of dollars worth of magazine for free. Hooray. And I do read it. I know that I [...]
I try not to be a bandwagon blogger. However, a few screenwriting blogs have mentioned scriptclouds, and I couldn’t help myself. The concept is that you can enter a .txt file of a script you have written, and you will get out an analysis of what words are most frequently used. It does an oddly [...]
Holy frack, what a great season finale! Depending on how you count, there were no less than three BIG reveals and twists in tonight’s episode of Battlestar Galactica.
There’s a webcam on the portal page in my browser, and the window rotates through various Seattle views. At different points last week, it produced these images: Meanwhile, here in L.A., it was sunny yesterday and sunny today. I expect it will be sunny tomorrow, and then probably sunny for like the next century and [...]
I caught the debut of The Riches last week. If you are a writer, make sure you find a way to see this episode of television. The world and the storytelling tone are incredible. Eddie Izzard proves himself to be an amazing performer, dress or no, and Minnie Driver’s talent and mastery of accents is [...]
If you are a screenwriter, don’t let this story in Variety pass you by, about a consortium of writers getting a special deal at Warner Bros.
This is not a movie review. I watched 300 today. However, while it is true that I have now seen it, I don’t know if it was a good movie. For all my study of character and structure, for all my constant analysis of hours of storytelling each day, I have no clue how I [...]
I was in a West Hollywood coffee shop today, when a man came wandering in, searching for something. He paced about a bit. He left the shop, then came back in. The man looked at the two customers seated at tables. He selected the guy who wasn’t me, and asked him a question: “Excuse me? [...]
Last night, the CW network premiered Pussy Cat Dolls: The Search for the Next Doll to 3.9 million. Let’s take a moment to put that in perspective. In today’s ever-widening world of viewer choice, it takes only about 15 million viewers for a prime time show to be branded successful on one of the larger [...]
After catching the Rise of the Silver Surfer trailer released around Christmas, I didn’t know if I wanted to see the movie, but I did think it was one of the best trailers I’ve seen in a long time. In my opinion, the commercials that have started to air for this movie just recently have [...]
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