Ron Howard & the Story Biz

“I literally thought I might get fired at lunch.”
Ron Howard
Speaking about the first day of shooting his first feature film at age 23.
(Grand Theft Auto for Roger Corman. A film Ron co-wrote with his actor father, Rance Howard.)

Ron Howard has had one of the most amazing careers in entertainment history. First, as a youth and a young man he was an actor in several iconic TV shows and movies; The Andy Griffith Show, The Music Man, Happy Days and American Graffiti. He played Huck Finn, met Walt Disney and had cameo parts on Gunsmoke, Lassie, M*A*S*H, The Waltons, and The Twilight Zone. He acted alongside Hollywood legends John Wayne and Lauren Bacall in The Shootist where he earned a Golden Globe nomination.

Then as he shifted to directing he started his education at USC and finished it directing a feature for Roger Corman. From there he’s gone on to make over 30 more films including and as varied as Apollo 13, Cocoon, Slash, Backdraft, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and The Da Vinci Code. In 2002, he won two Oscars for his role as producer and director on A Beautiful Mind. Howard has also won a few Emmys as one of the producers of Arrested Development and From Earth to the Moon.

He comes from a perspective few, if any, can match— accomplish actor, low-budget filmmaker, Oscar-winning Hollywood producer/director. So just maybe he’d be a good person to listen to as the film business transitions to actually not having anything to do with literal film strips. A time when people are asking, “Will there even be movie theaters in the future?”

“It can be unsettling. Any time you go through a period when technology and delivery systems and distribution systems broaden and change, when there are generational shifts—all that influences what filmmakers do, the decisions they make, the kinds of projects they can work on. But I sometimes think about this 96-year-old guy, named Charles Rainsbury, who had a tiny speaking part in Cocoon. He’d been an actor and a film crew member when Fort Lee, New Jersey, was the center of the film world. He hadn’t been on a set since 1915, 1916. When I asked him how movies had changed since then, he said, ‘We didn’t have to shut up when they were shooting then; otherwise, it’s the same, hurry up and wait.’ And I find that comforting. As we go through this period of transition and worry about whether people are seeing our movies in multiplexes or on cell phones—or seeing them at all—I’m reminded that the thing I love is this process that hasn’t changed so much: You try to tell a story that’s meaningful, and share it with people. What really gets me out of bed in the morning is this lifestyle that I’ve always been a part of: the creative problem-solving, the collaboration.”
Ron Howard
DGA Quarterly/Fall 2009

See it’s not really the film biz after all—it’s the story biz. Go tell some meaningful stories.

Link to Ron Howard’s Oscar Acceptance Speech.

Scott W. Smith

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Disrupting Your Comfort Zone

“Under no condition can you teach curiosity.”
Producer 
Brian Grazer
(Apollo 13, Cinderella Man, A Beautiful Mind)

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
Albert Einstein

“I believe in disrupting my comfort zone.”
Brian Grazer

Producer Brian Grazer of Imagine Entertainment has put up some pretty good numbers; More than 50 films for a box office total over $1 billion, five Emmys and an Oscar. (And one funky haircut.)

In the last few days I’ve written about Akiva Goldsman writing the script for A Beautiful Mind, and Sylvia Nasar first uncovering John Nash’s story, and a shout out to the movie’s director Ron Howard, but the connector of the entire project was Grazer. He reportedly had been looking for the right project for years that was an intriguing story about the brain.

“A Beautiful Mind was an impossible movie to get made. Brian (Grazer) got it made. For a time, I wasn’t even going to direct it. But it was going to be a movie. Brian made sure of that. Brian nurtured this difficult project to fruition. He was responsible for A Beautiful Mind.”
Ron Howard
Esquire magazine

One of the ways that Grazer is said to keep information and ideas flowing in the pipeline is to work with a “cultural attaché.” A person who can keep up with cultural trends and help direct Grazer to meet some of the most interesting people alive. A couple of years ago in The New Yorker, Lizzie Widdicombe published an unofficial email that entailed just what a cultural attaché was expected to do working for Mr. Grazer:

This person would be responsible for keeping Brian abreast of everything that’s going on in the world; politically, culturally, musically. . . . They’re also responsible for finding an interesting person for Brian to meet with every week . . . an astronaut, a journalist, a philosopher, a buddhist monk. . . . There is LOTS of reading for this position! Grazer may ask you to read any book he’s interested in. You’ll probably get to read about 4 or 5 books a week and you may be required to travel with him on his private plane to Hawaii, New York, Europe—teaching him anything he asks you about along the way. . . . You will also be provided with an assistant. . . . Salary is around $150,000 a year. . . . You will be to Grazer what Karl Rove was to Bush.

Not a bad gig if you can land it. (Not sure if you’re paid overtime, but it doesn’t sound like a 40 hour a week job.) But if you can’t work for Brian Grazer—or be Brian Grazer (and I don’t think they’re currently taking applications for that position either)—you can at least learn from Brain Grazer.

“When I started out in the entertainment business, I made a list of people I thought it would be good to meet. Not people who could give me a job or a deal, but people who could shake me up, teach me something, challenge my ideas about myself and the world. So I started calling up experts in all kinds of fields: trial lawyers, neurosurgeons, CIA agents, embryologists, firewalkers, police chiefs, hypnotists, forensic anthropologists, and even presidents.”
Brian Grazer
Disrupting My Comfort Zone
NPR June 6, 2006

P.S. If you happen to be Brian Grazer’s cultural attaché, I am available next Wednesday for lunch if Mr. Grazer happens to be traveling through Iowa—or more likely flying over.(We do actually have one small connection. Back in the late ’80s when his film Parenthood was being shot in Orlando, my wife and son were extras. Our red Toyota van even got a cameo for a few seconds—a few frames?— in the alley scene where Steve Matin & Mary Steenburgen digging through trash. Almost famous.)

Update 2/17/11: Found a interview where Grazer was ask if he still has a cultural attaché, and he said, “That was sort of a joke title. I’ve been out meeting different people, I have a record, for 24 years, of meeting someone every two weeks. It helps inform your filter and hopefully informs your taste. I don’t have anyone that’s doing that for me right now. I use a couple of my assistants and I just say ‘hey, can I meet so-and-so’ and then we work on it or I’ll call them myself, but I don’t have a person that does that any longer.”

Related post: Jack Kerouac in Orlando

Genius, Madness & a Genuine Third Act

Scott W. Smith

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Genius, Madness & a Genuine Third Act

“Literature abounds with stories about meteoric rises followed by catastrophic falls. There are very few stories, much less true stories, with a genuine third act. But John Nash’s life had such a third act. In fact, it was that amazing third act that drew me to his story in the first place.”
Sylvia Nasar

On the DVD commentary of A Beautiful Mind director Ron Howard mentions that mathematicians on the level of John Nash don’t think it terms of numbers but of patterns.  I’m no mathematician (and certainly no genius), but in doing this blog for the past three years I’ve seen a number of patterns emerge. Today it happens to be journalists and Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Just as there was a great trail of talented people that led to the making of the classic film On the Waterfront , there was also a lot of talented people who were behind the success of A Beautiful Mind. And though both of those films were made over 45 years apart there are some common denominators between them.

Important parts of both stories take place in New Jersey. On the Waterfront in Hoboken and A Beautiful Mind in Princeton. I have been to both places, and though they are only 50 miles apart, culturally they are a worlds away from each other. (At least they were years ago.) Both stories center around a man facing great odds with a strong woman helping them endure. Both movies won Best Picture Oscars: On the Waterfront (1955), A Beautiful Mind (2002). Wait, both titles also have three words—this is getting scary.

And both stories were first brought to light by journalists. On the Waterfront flowed from 26 front page articles written by Malcolm Johnson. They first appeared in 1947-48 in The New York Sun and later in book form. For his work in exposing organized crime Johnson won the Pulitzer Prize.

A Beautiful Mind was the brainchild of Sylvia Nasar.  She was working as an economics reporter for the New York Times when she heard that John Nash would be sharing the Nobel Prize for his doctoral dissertation that was over 40 years old.

What had become of John Nash? Was he even still alive? He was alive, but he didn’t  understand why anyone would want to write a story on his life and did not give Nasar a formal interview. His friends and peers also were reluctant to speak to Nasar. She knows why, “There had not been a paragraph written on Nash, and no one who knew him wanted to put schizophrenia on the record because he had already suffered so much.” In 1994, The New York Times published Nasar’s article, The Lost Years of a Nobel Laureate.

One person who did talk to Nasar was Nash’s sister and that was enough to get started going deeper into the story. Nasar was also able to interview and talk with John’s wife, Alicia.

“In many ways these were the first prints in the snow, and the greatest thing that could happen to a reporter. It was an extremely rewarding experience not just telling a rise and fall story, but the fall and rise of an intellectual giant.”
Sylvia Nasar

Nasar took leave from the Times and spent two and a half years writing the book A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash. In 1998 the book won the National Book Critics Award for Biography and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Nash had a great (though not perfect) first act as a rising academic in the cold war era when some mathematicians were rock stars. He earned his Ph.D. at the age of 21. He married a physics major who also happened to be a cheerleader and was said to resembled Elizabeth Taylor in the movie Butterfield 8. 

Act 2 is when things got rough. He failed to accomplish the great things he thought he would in his field. He began hearing voices and having delusions. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia in an era where the treatment was brutal. He ended up divorced, living in poverty and obscurity.

Five years after their divorce John called Alicia from a mental hospital  in West Virginia and asked her to help him. She did. And a mere 25-years-later he was honored with the Nobel Prize, and later the film A Beautiful Mind. He had finally found the success and fame that he hungered for as a young man.

“I dedicated my biography of John Nash to his wife Alicia. A Beautiful Mind is a drama about the mystery of the human mind, but it’s also very much a love story. It is very much an exploration of what Wordsworth called “the tenderness, joys, and fears of the human heart”...Without Alicia, Nash would have perished. There would be no recovery, no Nobel, no second take on life or the marriage.
Sylvia Nasar
Talk at MIT & Interview

So what does all of this have to do with Yellow Springs, Ohio? That is where Sylvia Nasar received her undergraduate degree in literature at Anitoch College. A place I have mentioned before since it is where Rod Serling graduated from on the road to creating The Twilight Zone.

We’ve all heard the horror stories from authors of books who’ve been less than pleased with the movie results based on their writings. Nasar’s Hollywood experience is on the other end of the spectrum.

“Was I happy with the movie? Well, look….when Ron Howard screened the movie for us I had read many drafts of the screenplay. I visited the set, I talked with Ron Howard—nothing prepared me for how good it was. I was really blown away. To me this movie captured what was truley— yes, in a fictional way— what was truly unique and meaningful about this story, and did something that I have never seen any movie do by this very cleaver device it put the audience in the shoes of someone who can’t distinguish between delusion and reality…To be able to translate a story about two states of mind, mathematics and schizophrenia, that are pretty remote from most people’s experience and to communicate that to audiences in many different cultures  and countries around the world I think is extraordinary. So, I was very happy with it.”
Sylvia Nasar
MIT Talk

Nasar is the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Business Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.

Related Posts:
Writing “A Beautiful Mind”
A Beautiful Heart
Rod Serling’s Ohio Epiphany

Scott W. Smith

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Writing “A Beautiful Mind”

“I was the worst writer in my seventh grade class. And when I went to college I was the worst writer in my college class. But each time somebody told me to stop writing, I never stopped…When I went to graduate school and tried to get  a degree in creative writing they told me to stop because I wasn’t that good. And I didn’t stop writing.”
Akiva Goldsman
2007 WGA Rally

It seems every step of the way Akiva Goldsman has had someone tell him that he wasn’t that good of a writer. It’s a good thing that he has an Oscar to remind himself otherwise. But perhaps it was Goldsman’s naysayers that best prepared him to write the screenplay for A Beautiful Mind (2001).

As he told the story based on the life of John Nash and Sylvia Nasar’s bio of the mathematician who suffers from schizophrenia, Goldsman had to know he was also telling his story. A story of a man who knew that he could achieve something greater than what he had accomplished up to that point in his life. (By the way, that story or theme will resonate with every man, woman, and child that’s ever walked on this earth.)

Goldsman was raised in a group house where his mother, a child psychologist, lived and worked with children diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia.

“I am no expert on mental illness, but I am sure of one thing: the children who shared my home were not without reason. Their behavior made sense to them. They had reasons for everything they did. We just couldn’t understand their reasons. So, the idea of writing a screenplay about John’s life and the way he saw the world was tremendously exciting to me.”
Akiva Goldsman
A Beautiful Mind, The Shooting Script

An the team at Imagine Films (Brian Grazer, Karen Kehela, Ron Howard) got behind Goldsman’s vision of writing the story from the perspective of someone who has schizophrenia. Much of the time we see the world as Nash saw the world.

“It’s not a literal telling of Nash’s life. I tried to take the architecture of his life—his genius, his schizophrenia, his Nobel Prize—and construct a semi-fictional story.”
Akiva Goldsman

One of the pieces of the Nash’s life that became an anchor for the story was the relationship with his wife Alicia.

“It’s kind of a grown-up romance. The relationship was intensely complex, as where the challenges that Alicia and John faced together. John Nash’s story is incredibly heroic, but so is Alicia’s.”
Ron Howard
Director, A Beautiful Mind

One of the ways that Goldsman visually showed that bond comes at the 40 minute mark of the movie when Alicia puts a handkerchief in Nash’s tuxedo pocket just before he has his picture taken. On the DVD commentary this is how Goldsman explains the importance of that moment :

“Here’s where we set up the handkerchief. The sort of talisman, the ‘objective correlative’ as Wallace Stevens said. The object that represents emotion—in this case the handkerchief is the object that represents their love and will carry throughout the piece.”
Akiva Goldsman

The handkerchief becomes a motif throughout the film. And in the closing speech at the end of the film, John Nash is wearing the same handkerchief that she gave him—a symbol of their love and endurance.

And speaking of endurance. Goldsman not only endured the years in school where he was discouraged from continuing to write, but he was by his own admission a “failed novelist for ten years” before turning his hand to screenwriting. And screenwriting is where he started winning awards, unfortunately his first award was a Razzie which honors bad acting, writing and filmmaking. And he actually won two; the 1997 Batman & Robin (Worst Screenplay) and the 1996 A Time to Kill (Worst Written Film Grossing Over $100 million.) It must have good felt five years later to walk up and receive his Oscar for A Beautiful Mind.

And Goldsman has gone to write many other screenplays that have made him one of the highest paid screenwriters in the history of motion pictures.

P.S. I’m going to start throwing that phrase”objective correlative” around, because that really makes it sound like you know what you’re talking about. Not to mention that T.S. Eliot used it as well.

“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”
T.S. Eliot/Hamlet and His Problems

Objective correlative. Hence the presence of some outward object, predetermined to correspond to the preexisting idea in its living power, is essential to the evolution of its proper end, — the pleasurable emotion.
Washington Allston around 1840 in the “Introductory Discourse” of his Lectures on Art

A few “objective correlative” examples off the top of my head are the volleyball from Cast Away (WILSON!), the fish from Jerry Maguire, and the Heart of the Ocean necklace from Titantic. Can you think of others?

Scott W. Smith

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A Beautiful Heart

“It’s a difficult case…to give a man back his heart.”
Angel (John Travolta) in Michael

“The fact is, I don’t like people much. And they don’t like me.”
John Nash in A Beautiful Mind

At the core of the film A Beautiful Mind is a love story. Sure it deals with mental illness and the fragmented life of John Nash, but at the end of the day—it is a love story. A love story between John Nash (Russell Crowe) and his wife Alica (Jennifer Connelly). Here is how screenwriter Akiva Goldsman brings the story to a close as Nash gives a speech at the end of the film:

INT.—ROYAL SWEDISH ACADEMY—NOBEL CEREMONY

A giant hall. Full. Nash, stands at the podium, blinking his eyes. Hundreds sit watching, as camera flashbulbs finally cease.

But Nash just stands there. A long beat. And even longer.

KING-CLOSE. In the audience. Concerned. (*)

ALICA-CLOSE. In the front row. Starting to worry.

Back to Nash. Still standing there. See what he sees. Hundreds of faces staring back at him. Finally, just when all seems lost…

Nash: Thanks You for your patience.

But he’s not only looking at the speech before him. He’s not looking at the audience. He’s looking at Alicia.

Nash: I have always believed in numbers. In the equations and logics that lead to reason. I was wrong. It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reason can be found. Perhaps it is good to have a beautiful mind. But a better gift is to discover a beautiful heart.

And suddenly there is no one else in the room but the two of them, Nash’s magical vision reveling the patterns of the heart.

Nash: Thank you for your belief in me after so many years. You are the reason I am here today.

On the A Beautiful Mind DVD commentary this is how screenwriter Goldsman sums up that scene;

“This speech, which was not a speech that was actually made, was for me a construct for me to signify what was important about the theme of the film and personally my experience with people who suffer from mental illness began very young, and this movie and the writing of this movie was a tribute to my mother…What she taught me is this ‘It is a good thing to have a beautiful mind, but a better gift is to discover a beautiful heart.’ I’d like to believe that’s what this movie’s about.”

And as a nice poetic gesture, Goldsman’s mother was on stage sitting behind Russell Crowe when they filmmed that scene.

Nash’s personal life may have been even more schizophrenic than the movie, (and we could debate the dichotomy separating the head and heart for the next decade) but I think director Ron Howard & Goldsman were simply creating a story that would resonate more with audiences’ hopes and dreams. How we’d like life to be, rather than how it is. The movie did resonate with audiences and the Academy as well as it won four Oscars in 2002, including Best Director, Best Picture and Best Screenplay (based on other material, Sylvia Nasar’s book A Beautiful Mind, The Life of a Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laurate John Nash.)

And over the credits of the film is the beautiful voice of Charlotte Church singing All Love Can Be:

I will guard you with my bright wings,
Stay till your heart learns to see
All love can be

Happy Valentine’s Day—

(*) Isn’t that moment echoed in The King’s Speech?

Scott W. Smith

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10 Cinematography Tips (Roger Deakins)

“I feel like I’m just getting started.”
61-Year-Old Cinematographer Roger Deakins

Tonight Roger Deakins will be honored with the 2011 American Society of Cinematography Lifetime Achievement Award in Los Angeles. It must be odd to win such an award when you’re still in your prime. Nine times he has been nominated for an Oscar for his cinematography including this year for True Grit. Twice his ASC peers have given him top cinematography honors; The Shawshank Redemption and The Man Who Wasn’t There.

From time to time I just like take a detour from talking about screenwriting to show another side of the moviemaking process and today I’ve pulled ten quotes from Deakins taken from answers he’s given on the  forum on his website as well as a couple from an NPR Interview.

1) “To me if there’s an achievement to lighting and photography in a film it’s because nothing stands out, it all works as a piece. And you feel that these actors are in this situation and the audience is not thrown by a pretty picture or by bad lighting.”

2) “When you move the camera, or you do a shot like the crane down (in Shawshank) with them standing on the edge of the roof, then it’s got to mean something. You’ve got to know why you’re doing it; it’s got to be for a reason within the story, and to further the story.”

3) “There’s nothing worse than an ostentatious shot or some lighting that draws attention to itself, and you might go, ‘Oh, wow, that’s spectacular.’ Or that spectacular shot, a big crane move, or something. But it’s not necessarily right for the film — you jump out, you think about the surface, and you don’t stay in there with the characters and the story.” (Note: That’s a sort of a combination of #1 & 2—but worth repeating.)

4) “I am finding that my lighting becomes more and more simplified as I gain experience, which facilitates moving the camera more easily. I always operate myself and so I am very aware of the flexibility I need as an operator. With that in mind I have always tended to light for the situation and not a single shot. It is hopeless to light a close shot, however brilliantly, only to find that the lighting used can in no way be justified in a wider view.”

5) “On the Coen’s film that I am shooting right now  we are averaging about 11 set ups a day whilst the screen time can vary from 6 minutes to 2 minutes depending on the scene. My set up time averages around 20 minutes. Normally the first set up will take the longest and my time will generally coincide with hair and make up time. For that reason it is usual to do the most complex or widest set up first. We rarely work more than 12 hours on this film and some days are shorter. The film has been very well prepared and I have a clear idea of the way we will shoot each sequence.” (Note: Comment was made in 2008 so that could have been A Serious Man)

6) “I have never been a fan of filters to soften an image. I used a black pro mist for a film I shot in 1985 and have regretted it ever since. I have done some tests with the Alexa ‘footage’ adding a selective amount of grain and I will be doing this for certain sequences of the film I am shooting right now. However, that choice is one of personal aesthetics and not because i feel the image from the Alexa looks too sharp or ‘electronic’.”

7) “I usually dim down a tungsten lamp if I want it to match a household practical source.” (The color temperature of the tungsten bulbs is slightly cooler than typical bulbs found in most houses.)

8  “Most of the films I have shot have been based in reality, so it follows that much of what I do is founded in a naturalistic approach.”

9) “There was no additional lighting used for any of the snow scenes (in Fargo)…we just dug out the snow, which was quite deep, to lay down dolly track as we needed.”

10) “I would suggest the choice of location is the most important one if you have little money in the budget for lights. You might consider the films of Terry Malick. They utilize very few artificial sources.” (Note: If I recall correctly,  on The New World—which was written and directed my Malick—DP Emmanuel Lubezki did not use a single light and earned an Oscar nomination in cinematography.)

Bonus quote (and suitable for framing) for all the new shooters out there lusting after ever piece of equipment (and the old shooters as well):

“I am not a fan of having too much gear.” —Roger Deakins

Granted Deakins has the budget to rent those 18K HMIs and any dolly he wants on his features. But he’s also not beneath using “cotton bed sheets” and 4 X 4 bounce boards. (Note: When I’m on location shooting interviews with a limited (or no) lighting package I like to go to an art store and pick-up two pieces of white foam core to have with me. Home Depot/Lowes works as well with those large 4X8 boards in the insulation area. (I forget what it’s called but it is white on one side and silver on the other. Just ask them to cut the board in half.) Keep in mind that Deakins spent many years shooting documentaries where he just had to make do with little or no lighting.

Because the Coen brothers and Deakins do extensive pre-production planning before they shoot—visiting each location, and planning each shot well before they shoot—studying one of the many films they’ve done together is a great way to improve your eye for cinematography. Breakdown a scene asking yourself why you think they put the camera where they did. How did they light the scene? Why did they move the camera?

February 14, 2011 update: Last night, Deakins also picked up BAFTA award for Best Cinematography for True Grit.

Scott W. Smith

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Cinematographer Roger Deakins

“I have an overall kind of approach to cinematography— that it should be as simple and submissive to the script as possible.”
Roger Deakins
Nine-time Oscar-nominated Director of Photography

Here is the list of films that cinematographer Roger Deakins has shot that have been nominated for Oscars in cinematography:
True Grit
The Reader
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
No Country for Old Men
The Man Who Wasn’t There
O Brother, Where Art Thou
Kundun
Fargo
The Shawshank Redemption

And if that doesn’t impress you he was also the director of photography on Fargo, Doubt, Jarhead, House of Sand and Fog, Barton Fink, and A Beautiful Mind. Watching films multiple times and  sometimes with the sound off is a habit I learned in film school, and any of Deakins films above are worth studying.

Deakins has been a major supporter of shooting on film and has shot all of his movies on film…except the one he just shot. Now (written and directed by Andrew Niccoi) was shot digitally on the Arri Alexa. One more sign of the changing of the guard.

“Am I nostalgic for film? I mean, it’s had a good run, hasn’t it? You know, I’m not nostalgic for a technology. I’m nostalgic for the kind of films that used to be made that aren’t being made now.”
Roger Deakins
Slashfilm interview with David Chen

If you’re a writer who would like to direct (and maybe even shoot) your work, Deakin’s has a website where he has an informative forum where people ask him questions about lighting and his work. Between his forum and studying a film or two of his in depth you can take major strides in better understanding the filmmaking process.

It’s also worth mentioning that Deakins grew up far from Hollywood in Torquey, Devon, England and while he had an interest in still photography as a youth, working on Hollywood films was way off his radar.

BEGINNER LESSON: LEARNING TO LIGHT

“You should get a simple lamp, some diffusion, some bounce materials and practice lighting a face. Just experiment with the light and see what variations you can achieve with limited means. You might also start taking photographs of a face under natural lighting conditions, perhaps augmented by some bounce material. Experiment with the way that the face reacts to differing conditions of back light, front light etc.. Find what it is about light that excites you and don’t try to copy what someone else sees.” (Note: You can start doing this without even having a video camera—just whatever still photo camera you can use.)
Roger Deakins
Learning to Light post

INTERMEDIATE LESSON: DIGITAL VIDEO CAMERAS

“If I were starting out, quite frankly, I would concentrate on digital capture. The possibilities now on offer and the new work flows that are available seem to me to have tipped the equation. I have yet to shoot a film digitally but I am seriously beginning to doubt that I will shoot film again – other than on my Leica M6 that is. On the one hand I find that a little sad, just as I find it sad that Du Art in New York has processed its last roll of film, but on the other hand I am really excited by all the creative opportunities that digital capture can offer and which will only expand to ‘who knows where’ in the future.”
Roger Deakins
August 17,2010

ADVANCED LESSON: CINEMATOGRAPHER LANGUAGE
“The courtroom (in True Grit) was primarily lit by the light coming through the windows, which was created using three 18K HMI par lamps. When we were looking away from the windows I augmented the light with a couple of 2K Blondes bouncing off some muslin, which was hung between the windows.”
Roger Deakins

A fitting end to this post is to show some photos highlighting the work of Deakins from one of the many films that he’s made with a couple of Minneapolis natives, the Coen brothers, and featuring the song Leaning on the Everlasting Arms sung by Iris DeMent , who lives right here in Iowa. (If you were a Northern Exposure fan you may remember her song Our Town at the closing of the final show.)

Scott W. Smith

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Success, Battered Egos & Costco Bacon

It’s a 3 for 1 quote Friday here at Screenwriting from Iowa. I came across these quotes late last night and they begged to be grouped together. (And you know how they get when they don’t get what they want.)

“I think for creative people generally, and certainly for film people, the biggest danger is success. Success will kill you, and extinguish you—your source of creativity. So you have to take risks.”
Writer/Director Peter Weir (Dead Poets Society, Green Card, The Truman Show)
Talk at the British Academy of Film and Television

“Only recently I was heard to mutter resentfully when The Diving Bell and the Butterfly received great acclaim at the Cannes film festival. Pathetic to admit, but my ego suffered a battering. The director was covered in glory, the screenplay hardly mentioned. And whose concept did the critics and the journalists think was at the heart of the movie? No prize for the answer. And no use complaining either. Another lesson: screenwriters should keep their egos under wraps.”
Oscar-Winning screenwriter Sir Ronald Harwood (The Pianist)
2007 article Ego? Forget about it

“For every writer I know that lives high on the hog I know twenty who buy their bacon at Costco.”
Josh Friedman (War of the Worlds)
From his blog I find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing

2/12/11 Update: In the comments Carla said perhaps success needed to be re-defined and John said I should move my answer into the post so here it is:

Carla–It’s always healthy give your version of success an examination from time to time.

There are some wonderfully tragic stories (real and fictional) of people who flew too close to the sun with their wax wings. It’s also good to remember that those who climb to the top of Mt. Everest only get to stay there for five minutes.

Screenwriter Josh Friedman also writes,”Whatever else the A-list (of screenwriters) is, it’s written with disappearing ink.”

Scott W. Smith

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Fire Your Inner Critic

“I used to have this inner critic, but I got rid of him a long time ago, A professor once said to me, ‘Remember, no one will ever see what you’re writing until you want them to see it.’ This really freed me up to just write. It’s like playing jazz guitar and you’re just riffing, and the stuff that sounds really good is the stuff you record. The rest of it just floated away into the cosmos. You’ll just be paralyzed if you labor over every sentence because it happens to be perfect. I have friends who take six to eight months to write a script, and I think it’s stupid. First, the chances of selling a script are so ridiculous no matter who you are, why spend so much time? Then, if you don’t sell it, you’ll feel devastated. Second, you’re talking about 120 pages with a lot of white in them. How can it take you six months to write that? Especially if you have an outline. The reality is that if you can write three pages a day, and that’s really low, that’s 40 days, a month and a half. So, to think it has to be perfect is a dangerous habit. It should be vomited out as fast as you can manage to get it out. Nobody ever has to see it. Then finesse it, massage it, sweeten it, and do everything you can to make it better.”
Screenwriter Scott Rosenberg (Con Air)
The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters/Karl Iglesias

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Super Bowl, Superman & Green Bay, WI

Coming off a couple of posts on Super Bowl commercials, I thought I’d point out that making commercials is not an uncommon place for writers and directors to hone their skills. Today I’ll highlight one such person who made the commercial below that aired during the 2003 Super Bowl and who has since built a career making feature films:

It’s fitting in light of the Green Bay Packers winning  Super Bowl XLV to mention that the director of that commercial, Zack Snyder, was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin.  He didn’t live there long, but he was born there in 1966. He went to art school in London and also attended the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He spent many years making music videos and high end commercials.

One of his best known commercials is this 1997 Jeep spot called Frisbee which was a Clio winner.

His first feature film Dawn of the Dead, was released  2004, and in 2007 he wrote and directed 300. Two years later he released Watchmen and in 2010 he produced and directed Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga ‘Hoole. Next month his latest film, Sucker Punch (it’s been called “Alice in Wonderland with machine guns”), will be released which he co-wrote (with Steve Shibuya), produced and directed.

And he is on board to make the next Superman movie, The Man of Steel.

“In the pantheon of superheroes, Superman is the most recognized and revered character of all time, and I am honored to be a part of his return to the big screen. I also join Warner Bros. and the producers in saying how excited we are about the casting of Henry (Cavill) . He is the perfect choice to don the cape and S shield.”
Zack Snyder

Snyder and his wife, Deborah, have a production company in Pasadena called Cruel and Unusual Films.

According to Box Office Mojo, the first four moives Zack has made have a phenomenal box office average of $100 million a film.

Scott W. Smith

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