Postcard #118 (Mike Evans)

“The only way to tell if a play is truly spectacular is if it makes the fans jump up and say ‘O, damn, did you see that!”
Actress Taragi P. Henson (Hidden Figures)
Introducing the Play of the Year at NFL Honors ceremony

Let me sneak in one more football post on this screenwriting blog. This isn’t a great photo, but it is a great catch. I knew the one-handed grab by Tampa Bay Buc Mike Evans was special when it happened. So much so that I took the above photo of the reply on the scoreboard.

Apparently some other people thought it was special because a few days ago it was named the Bridgestone Performance Play of the Year.

It was an Thursday night nationally broadcast game. I hadn’t been to an NFL game in over a decade but drove over to Tampa from Orlando last November to see the game. They were playing the Atlanta Falcons who were winning the game 33-14 just before the end of the third quarter.

Since I knew it’d take me two hours to get home I decided I was going to leave after the third quarter. I’m glad I stuck around long enough to see Evans’ catch. I’ll have that tucked away in my good memory bank for as long as I have a memory bank.

And speaking of great catches here’s the only clip I could find of Julian Edelman’s remarkable catch at the Super Bowl Sunday. (Def a play that made fans say ‘O, damn, did you see that!”)

Scott W. Smith

 

Read Full Post »

Screenwriting from Massachusetts

“I was just a guy with a pen and paper and an idea for a book.”
Sebastian Junger
Author of The Perfect Storm

“Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline.”
Peter Benchley
Author of Jaws

With the New England Patriots winning Super Bowl LI, I thought this would be a fitting time to repost a Massachusetts-centered post featuring writers with connections to that state.

In the years since I wrote the original post I know I’ve added several more related posts, but I don’t think anyone has emerged shinning brighter than writer/director Damien Chazell. The Harvard grad’s movie La La Land received 14 Oscar nominations. And since Chazell won the top award from the Director’s Guild of America Saturday night he is favored to win Best Director Oscar. (Screenwriting Straight Outta Harvard)

While I’ve centered on Massachusetts in general and Boston specifically, a good number of the writers below attended Harvard.

Frank Pierson  (Dog Day Afternoon) 1976 Oscar winner
James Agee (The African Queen) 1952 Oscar nomination
James Torback (Bugsy), 1991 Oscar nomination
Whit Stillman (Metropolitan) 1991 Oscar nomination
Ron Bass (Rain Man) 1988 Oscar winner (shared with Barry Morrow)
Philip Kaufman (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) 1989 Oscar Nomination
Erich Segal (Love Story) 1971 Oscar Nomination
Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line) 1999 Oscar Nomination
Douglas Kenney (co-writer Animal House, Caddyshack) Co-founder of National Lampoon magazine
Norman Mailer (The Executioner’s Song) 1983 Primetime Emmy Nomination
Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream)
Sooni Taraporevala (Salaam Bombay!)
William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch)
John Updike (Rabbit, Run)
George Plimpton (Paper Lion)
Ben Mezrich (21)
Ethan Canin (The Emperor’s Club)
Scott Turow (Presumed Innocent)
Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park)
Peter Benchley (Jaws) Novel and co-wrote script that became the first film to make over $100 million
Matt Damon (Good Will Hunting) 1998 Oscar winner
Robert Rodat (Saving Private Ryan) Oscar-nomination

(I’m sure that’s not an exhaustive list, but it’s a decent start.)

Eugene O’Neill (Long Day’s Journey Into Night) winner of four Pulitzer Prizes for drama studied playwriting at Harvard and honed his craft writing one-act melodramas for the Provincetown Players on the northern tip of Cape Cod.  From there he became one of a handful of giants in American theater.

While he was born in New York and found his greatest success on Broadway, O’Neil is one more example of someone developing their talent in smaller towns.

But not all writers from Massachusetts have had the benefit of a Harvard connection. In fact, there is one writer from Belmont, Massachusetts who is a nice role model for this entire blog. Sebastian Junger was armed with a degree in cultural anthropology (from Wesleyan College in Connecticut) when he kicked around as a freelance writer until he had an accident while working as a tree cutter in 1991.

In just so happened that at the same time a six fishermen who had left Gloucester on the Andrea Gale died at sea. Junger became fascinated by what happened and used his down time recovering from his injury to write an article, that became a book, that inspired the movie The Perfect Storm.

Junger writes in the introduction of The Perfect Storm:

“My own experience in the storm was limited to standing on Gloucester’s Back Shore watching thirty-foot swells advance on Cape Ann, but that was all it took. The next day I read in the paper that a Gloucester boat was feared lost at sea, and I clipped the article and stuck it in a drawer. Without even knowing it, I had begun to write The Perfect Storm.”

But what really separates him from everyone else who heard about that story is he followed his curiosity and eventually did the research, wrote the article, then the book that became a #1 New York Times Bestseller and a George Clooney movie. He ended up on Oprah, with a career as a writer, and even part owner of The Half King bar and restaurant in New York.

Of course, Massachusetts has a long literary tradition going way back to the Puritans founding the Massachusetts Bay in Colony in 1630, and then with Thoreau, Hawthorne and Emerson that I won’t touch on here. I’m not as interested in an exhaustive history lesson as much as encouraging you to write.

But the well does appear deep in Massachusetts. And here’s one more example for you to focus on your writing not where you live:

“New York’s playwright find of the year (Eugene O’Neill) lives obscurely in a clean little cottage, miles from nowhere on Cape Cod.”
Olin Downs
Boston Sunday Post (August 1920)

Additions since the original post: Screenwriters from Boston may be interested in the Screenwriting Certificate Program at Emerson College and the group that calls itself New England’s oldest screenwriters network is the Harvard Square Scriptwriters. If you are interested is shooting in Massachusetts contact the Massachusetts Film Office. Paul Sherman has a book out called Big Screen Boston that goes into detail about some of the many movies that have been made in the Boston area. Two-time Oscar winner Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo) is from Rockport, Massachusetts.

Related New England area posts:
Writing ‘Spotlight’
‘The Verdict’ Revisited
Tony C
Screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski (‘Prisoners’)
Will Simmons’ Road to Hollywood
Screenwriter Paul Attansio
Screenwriting Quote #179 (Chris Terrio)
Nora Ephron (1941-2012) Graduated from Wellesley College.

Read Full Post »

‘Patriots Won?’

“Patriots won?” were the first two words I heard this morning. Those two words from my wife forming one question sum up pretty well the Super Bowl game last night.

My wife stopped watching  when the underdog Atlanta Falcons had a 28-3 lead. She woke up not knowing the final score and saw on her phone that the New England Patriots won 34-28. It was a game full of drama. The Patriots spent almost three quarters doing everything they could to lose and one quarter fighting to tie the score before time ran out. Then one drive in overtime to become Super Bowl champs—again.

So yeah, the Patriots won. Even if you were pulling for the Falcons to win their first Super Bowl, or what seemed more common, for the Patriots not to win there fifth Super Bowl—you have to at least appreciate excellence at the highest level.

P.S. I’ve only been to one NFL game in the last decade or so and it was earlier this NFL season in Tampa when the Buccaneers played the Falcons. Got to see Mike Evans make this one-handed catch that was voted the NFL Performance Play of the Year.  It’s nice when things line-up so you can see excellence in person.

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »

Harold Loyd & Buster Keaton, Football Stars (Kind of)

In light of Super Bowl LI today I thought I’d repost this from 2012:

“When we speak of silent comedy we speak instantly of three names—Chaplin, Loyd, Keaton.”
Walter Kerr
The Silent Clowns

 

I thought it would be a fun challenge  to see if I could connect the silent film era with the Super Bowl. And so here’s the Harold Loyd Vs. Buster Keaton debate—in the battle of football movies.  (I didn’t include Chaplin because he recently had his own post—Mr. Silent Films—plus he didn’t make a film about football.)

“It is taking nothing from Keaton or Loyd to say that Chaplin built the road along which they swept to success.”
Kevin Brownlow
Hollywood; The Pioneers 

Despite Loyd being famous for his clock management, and Rudy-like zeal (Indiana reference #2) of not being that gifted athletically—he was only a first year player in The Freshman (1925):

Keaton would appear to have the advantage because as Walter Kerr  pointed out, “Keaton ran so often during the twelve features he made in the 1920’s that the sprint became a trademark.”   And, in fact, he did run a good deal in  Three Ages  (1923):

And the winner is—Buster Keaton. Why? Three reason:

1) First, Keaton not only starred in Three Ages, but he’s also credited as producing, directing and writing the film.
2) The Freshman was said to be pirated from H.C. Witwer’s short story, The Emancipation of Rodney.
3) I trust drama critic Walter Kerr’s (1913-1996) assessment of Keaton in his book The Silent Clowns:  “Let Chaplin be king and let Keaton court jester. The king effectively rules, the jester tells the truth.”

P.S.  Just for some added Midwest mojo, Buster Keaton was born in Piqua, Kansas and Harold Loyd was born in Burchard, Nebraska—more unlikely places for Hollywood icons to come from. Talent comes from everywhere. Kerr (who was also a produced playwright, on top of writing for the New York Times) was born in Evanston, IL and received his BA and MA from Northwestern, on his way to becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer in criticism.

Scott W. Smith 

Read Full Post »

Screenwriting Quote #201 (Blake Snyder)

Shortly before he died I had a brief email exchange with Save the Cat author Blake Snyder.  I asked him if he had any encouragement for screenwriters living outside of L.A. and this is what he wrote back:

“I have said often that geography is no longer an impediment to a career in screenwriting. I know of one woman who decided to be a screenwriter in Chicago, wrote 5 scripts, sold 2 and got an agent and manager, all while never leaving the confines of her condo.  It starts with a great concept! You have a great idea and a great poster, if you execute that well, you will get phone calls — and deals.  The key is: the great script!  And that starts with the step by step process I outline in Cat!  Go get ‘em!”
Blake Snyder

*Pulled from the 2008 post Screenwriting da Chicago Way.

Scott W. Smith

 

Read Full Post »

10 Solid Movies Under 100 Minutes

“The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.”
Alfred Hitchcock

It’s not uncommon for me to walk out of a film these days and think, “that was about 20 minutes too long.” I would blame the Internet for stunting my attention span, but I thought La La Land at 128 minutes flew by.

In reading over my 2008 post Screenwriting by Numbers (which now feels about 20 minute too long itself) I noticed a solid list of films which had running times of under 100 minutes, so I thought I’d list ten of them today.  (And if your desire is to make low-budget independent films, then make a film under 100 minutes simply to save productions costs.)

Reservoir Dogs 99m.
Juno 96m.
When Harry Met Sally 95m.
Annie Hall 94m.
Halloween 91m.
Stand by Me 89m.
Stranger than Paradise 89m.
She’s Gotta Have It 84m.
The Gold Rush 82m.
Toy Story 80m.
Rope 80m.

What’s also interesting about this list is it includes films made by Tarantino, Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Spike Lee, Chaplin, and Pixar. Juno may be the only film that isn’t at least considered a classic in its genre, but it Diablo Cody won the Oscar for writing that script. (And give it 10 or 20 years and it might become a modern day classic in the teenage genre.)

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »

10 Solid Exposition Examples

“Primary exposition is telling and showing to the audience the time and place of the story, the names and relationships of the characters, and the nature of the conflict.”
Irwin R. Blacker
The Elements of Screenwriting

“I crack up every time I’m watching a movie and a character says, ‘Let me get this straight…’ and then recaps everything!”
Screenwriter Diablo Cody

Keep it short. I’m trying to learn.

Ten years ago when I started blogging I used to write these long posts that were sometimes over 1,500 words. Today’s post is taken largely from the 2008 post Screenwriting & Exposition and boils it down to a shorter post.

Exposition being the thing spoken or shown that explains a situation or reveals a character. Ideally, it’s sprinkled into the story so it doesn’t feel clunky. Procedural TV shows are often guilty of the worst exposition, where things are over explained.

Here are 10 examples of exposition done the right way. (More effective if you know the movie and the context in which they were given. Exposition, as these show, can be a minor character reveal or a major plot twist.)

“Are you something else I’m going to have to live through?”
Erin Brockovich

“What was your Childhood like?”
“Short.”
Escape from Alcatraz

“Dad was a Yankees fan then so, of course, I rooted for Brooklyn. But in ’58 the Dodgers moved away so we had to find other things to fight about.”
Field of Dreams 

“I am your father.”
Star Wars

“I see dead people.”
The Sixth Sense

“Rosebud”
Citizen Kane

Sometimes exposition is straightforward, but still dramatic:
“Houston, we have a problem.”
Apollo 13

Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire script shows that sometimes you just have to get the exposition directly out at the start to orientate the the audience.

And for #9 I’ve picked the opening of Jack Nickolson in As Good As it Gets because it’s a great example and reminder that exposition doesn’t have to be spoken.

And example #10 shows the old trick of burying exposition in action. And a reminder that it’s best not to reveal exposition until you have to.

“I am not left-handed either.”
The Princess Pride

P.S. And the best example of exposition in real life was a fellow I did a video interview with in London who said,”The memories of my father could be put on the back of a postage stamp.” That one lines says lot more than a typical movie scene than dumping a two-minute monologue on his relationship with his father.

Scott W. Smith

 

 

Read Full Post »

Screenwriting Quote #200 (Chayefsky)

“Who is your hero, what does he want, and what stands in his way?”
Three-time Oscar winning screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky (Network)
From the book The Craft of the Screenwriter by John Brady

Note: I pulled this quote from my 2009 post, Starting Your Screenplay.

Read Full Post »