William Goldman on What Makes a Good Movie (According to Rosalind Russell)

“Let me tell you the super story that Cliff Robertson told me a dozen years ago, and I think I’m giving the credit properly. It was a story he had been told by Rosalind Russell. I think he met her during the filming of Picnic. She said, ‘Do you know what makes a good movie?’ And he answered something like, ‘I don’t know—good script, good actors, good cameraman, and good directors, etc., etc.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘ A couple of moments that people remember, that they can take with them, is what makes a good movie.’”
William Goldman (Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride)
The Craft of the Screenwriter
Interview with John Brady
page 149

Note: I originally posted this quote in 2009 under the title Screenwriting Quote of the Day #118.

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »

‘I never saw a screenplay until I was 33-years-old’–William Goldman

“When I started [my film career] there weren’t film schools. I never saw in my life— not even for a second—I never saw a screenplay until I was 33-years-old. And a lot of kids [today] are finished with their careers when they’re 33, because they’ve been to film school, they got their first movie done when they were 23 or 25, and now that they’re 33 they’re directors or whatever else. When I first hear of film schools I thought it was the stupidest f—— idea I’d ever heard of.  Why would anybody—because we fell in love with movies going to the LCN theater in my little town in Illinois. You went to the movies and they were wonderful. And now movies are important, which they never were when I was a kid.”
2-time Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman (All the President’s Men, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid)
Writers Guild Foundation 2010 Interview 

Scott W. Smith

 

Read Full Post »

The Small Beginnings of ‘Game of Thrones’

When I began [writing Game of Thrones], I didn’t know what the hell I had. I thought it might be a short story; it was just this chapter, where they find these direwolf pups. Then I started exploring these families and the world started coming alive. It was all there in my head, I couldn’t not write it. So it wasn’t an entirely rational decision, but writers aren’t entirely rational creatures.”
George RR Martin
The Guardian article by Alison Flood

Read Full Post »

‘Usually a day is all any of them took.’— Stan Lee on How Long it Took To Write His Comics Book Stories

“I’m a fast writer. Maybe not the best, but the fastest.”
Stan Lee

RollingStone printed a “Lost” Q&A with Stan Lee and here’s an excerpt that gives you a glimpse of how quickly ideas for the comic books featuring X-Men, Hulk, the Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man. Books in the Marvel universe that became the foundations for movies that made billions of dollars at the box office.

Brian Haiatt: Someone asked Bob Dylan, how did you write all those 1960s songs in a short period? And he looked back, and even he doesn’t quite know how he did it. Do you feel the same way?

Stan Lee: No, I know how I did it. I was very lucky, it came really easily to me. Once I knew who the villain was, and if I had already established the main characters, which you only had to do once, then writing the story didn’t take that long. It took a little less than a day. You know, I’d wake up in the morning, I’d talk to my wife for a while, and read the paper, and then I’d start writing, and by dinner time it was over, and I had done the book.

I don’t know if Stan Lee had any superhero powers, but he sure got a lot done on some days. In that interview Lee said of his ideas for the comic books, “Usually a day is all any of them took.”

P.S. Of the $24 billion that Marvel movies have made, one of them was this year’s top-grossing film The Black Panther, which alone made 1.3 billion worldwide. Lee created that character with Jack Kirby in 1966.

Scott W. Smith

 

 

Read Full Post »

‘How did I learn screenwriting?’—Frank Darabont’s Answer

“How did I learn screenwriting? Endless hours at the typewriter, then the computer, which came along later. It was really a lot of applied time and effort and self-study. Which is the way most people learn.”
Oscar-nominated screenwriter Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption)
The Best of Creative Screenwriting Interviews

And here’s a similar quote from Darabont that I think I originally found in Zen and the Art Screenwriting (Vol. 2) by William Froug:

“For me, it was a matter of years of trying to develop my writing in the same way that some people spend years learning to play the violin.”
Writer/director Frank Darabont (Co-creator of The Walking Dead)

Related posts:

Frank Darabont and ‘The Woman in the Room’
The Shawshank Redemption Payoff of $1 to #1
‘Television Used to Suck’—Frank Darabont
Descriptive Writing (Frank Darabont)
It’s a Wonderful Prison

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »

‘Searching for Sugar Man’

If you haven’t seen the documentary Searching for Sugar Man yet check it out on Netflix this weekend. The 2012 film won the Oscar and the BAFTA for Best Documentary, and the Sundance Special Jury Prize and the Audience Award for best international documentary.  Among winning many other awards the film’s writer/director/editor Malik Bendjelloul also won Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary from the DGA.

For whatever reason, I missed it when it first came out and had the benefit of not knowing (or remembering) the backstory on the film. It made for a great movie-watching experience. So if you haven’t seen it, don’t even watch the trailer below or read anything else about it—just experience it.

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »

Stephen King on Theme

. . . I’m quite sure that I never thought much about theme before getting roadblocked on [writing] The Stand. I suppose I thought such things were for Better Minds and Bigger Thinkers. I’m not sure I would have gotten to it as soon as I did, had I not been desperate to save my story. I was astounded at how really useful ‘thematic thinking’ turned out to be.”
Stephen King
On Writing, pages 206-207

P.S. The one warning King states in his book is “[S]tarting with the questions and thematic concerns is a recipe for bad fiction. Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme.”  Just one more view on the concept of writing (or re-writing) with a theme in mind. One of the reasons I love touching on theme on this blog is because there are so many differing views on the subject. It ranges from writers who do start with theme, to writers who say theme is never a consideration when they’re writing.

BTW—Speaking of Stephen King, look what A Quiet Place screenwriters Scott Beck and Bryan Woods are working on now…

Related posts:
Screenwriters Bryan Woods & Scott Beck on Theme
Ryan Coogler on the Theme of ‘Black Panther’
David Mamet vs. Aaron Sorkin/Judd Apatow/Martin Scorsese on Theme
Writing from Theme 
More Thoughts on Theme
Michael Arndt on Theme
Diablo Cody on Theme
Scott Frank on Theme
Sidney Lumet on Theme

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »