“I find violence very disturbing on screen. I hate Tarantino’s films … I hope people will challenge this more. It’s totally unacceptable to be making such films.”
Screenwriter Guy Hibbert (speaking after the release of Django Unchained) Evening Standard 2013
British screenwriter Guy Hibbert began working on the script for Eye in the Sky in 2008—meaning it was an eight year journey to get the script written, the film produced and released.
The movie isn’t going to set any box office records, but I can’t imagine it getting some love come award season. Hibbert has won BAFTAs: No Child of Mine, Omagh, Complicit, and Five Minutes of Heaven. In 2009, he also won the World Cinema Dramatic screenwriting award at Sundance for Five Minutes of Heaven.
Born in Oxford, England in 1950, he dropped out of school at 15, and at age 20 started a career in theater as a stage hand and a tour manager. And he began writing plays. In his words, “I got a couple plays put on—couldn’t make a living out of it, and then moved into television.”
There he’s been able to make a living. And fast forward a little more than 20 years since his writing career took off and I imagine you’ll hear his name mentioned come award season for his script for Eye in the Sky.
Here’s some advice (from the above interview) to writers just starting out : “Work hard. Learn everything. And go out and experience life—as a writer you have to have a story worth telling. So you have to live your life.”
Screenwriter Guy Hibbert
“I’m telling you Iowa is incredible. We should all move to Iowa and start the revolution.” Hannah (Lena Dunham) in Girls, Season 4 episode 2
It’s been a busy month for Lena Dunham as she’s been prominently featured in the press near the center of the film & political world in January 2016. She’s been at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah where her documentary Suited premiers tonight and she’s been stumping in Iowa for Hillary Clinton’s presidential run.
“This is my second time in Iowa, but before I came to Iowa, I was pretending to be in Iowa. We filmed all our Girls stuff not in Iowa. I had seen tons of pictures of Iowa City, we had a location scout from Iowa and a writer from Iowa, so we had our experts in check, but I hadn’t, myself, had an opportunity to come. It was amazing when I came to Iowa City last year on my book tour because I had already had the experience of existing in fake Iowa and I was like, wow, we didn’t do that bad a job.” Lena Dunham The Des Moines Register
January 11, 2016
Dunham, the creator of the HBO show Girls, is the perfect person to follow up my last post (Diablo Cody Day) about Diablo Cody winning an Oscar in 2008 for writing the Juno screenplay. (And since I was living in Iowa at the time, the fact that Cody graduated from the University of Iowa served as inspiration for me starting this blog.)
Well, back in 2008 Dunham graduated with a degree in creative writing from Oberlin College in Ohio. While in college, in the infant days of You Tube, she was also creating short films that went viral.
“I didn’t go to film school. Instead I went to liberal arts school and self-imposed a curriculum of creating tiny flawed video sketches, brief meditations on comic conundrums, and slapping them on the Internet.” Lena Dunham
In 2010, just two years out of college she won the SXSW Award in Narrative Fiction for her film Tiny Furniture. The film made for just $45,000 also earned Dunham Best First Screenplay at the Independent Spirit Awards. (The same award Cody won back in 2008.)
That led to the opportunity to create Girls which has been on the air since 2012, and has won two Golden Globe Awards (Best Television Series—Comedy or Musical, and Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series—Comedy or Musical).
That’s right, she acts, too. And she was paid $3.6 million to write her 2014 memoir Not That Kind of Girl.I don’t exactly fit the demographics of watching/reading Dunham’s work, and haven’t actually never seen a full episode of Girls, and have been out of the loop of the controversies of her work. But I enjoyed the quirkiness of Tiny Furniture (which is currently available on Netflix), and it’s hard not to appreciate what she’s achieved creatively and financially before she’s even turned 30.
And I was curious what Cody thought of Dunham and found this quote:
“I absolutely love Lena Dunham. I don’t know her personally, but I’m completely obsessed with the show. I cannot believe what she has accomplished at 26. I think she is like our new Woody Allen.”
Diablo Cody Huffington Post interview with Lori Fradkin
P.S. Last year, Dunham’s character in Girls began attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City so I thought I’d give some links that give a glimpse to the real place.
BTW—Diablo Cody got her undergraduate degree in Media Studies from the University of Iowa and when asked why she didn’t attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop she said it was easier to win an Oscar than to get into Iowa’s competitive graduate program.
“I had this kind of 1930s childhood because my dad was really into radio serials, and my parents were also very, very anti-TV… It certainly was helpful having grown up with my dad as a film professor, and I studied movies and worked at EW for 10 years…If you’re wondering if I’ve always written dark stories—yes. Starting at age 8.” Author Gillian Flynn (Dark Places, Sharp Objects) who was born in 1971
(Pieced together from three different articles.)
I’m always curious where writers come from and since Gillian Flynn went from being unemployed just a few years ago to be a multimillionaire, NY Times best selling author and screenwriter (Gone Girl) I thought I would show that she may have come out of the Midwest—but she didn’t exactly come from nowhere.
She was raised in Kansas City, Missouri and both of her parents taught at Metropolitan Community College-Penn Valley Community College. She did her undergraduate work at the University of Kansas and graduate work at Northwestern University—not far from where the 43-year-old writer lives now in Chicago.
“I was a Missouri kid in New York working at my dream magazine (Entertainment Weekly) and got laid off and had to figure out what to do with my life next. I did have more time to write; [Gone Girl] was the first of the three books that I wrote while I didn’t have a day job. I think it let me overwrite — I probably wrote two books and had to chop it back to one. I had done journalism school at KU and gotten my master’s at Northwestern, and I thought I wanted to be a crime reporter. Very quickly, I discovered I did not have what it takes to be a good crime reporter: I was too unassertive and a little bit wimpy. It was very clear that was not what I was going to do, but I loved journalism, and I’m the daughter of a film professor, and my mom taught reading. I grew up in a house full of books. So I applied straight to EW right out of Northwestern.” Gone Girl author and screenwriter Gillian Flynn Hollywood Reporter article by Kimberly Nordyke
In other words, she followed a similar (yet different) path of fellow Northwestern University grad, screenwriter John Logan. She wrote a lot. If she was writing stories when she was eight, then it was a about a 30 year journey before her literary success.
“To make a good film, to write a screenplay, is surprisingly hard. It shouldn’t be that hard. You’re really creating a diversion for people for two hours. But because of the length—it’s almost like writing a villanelle, or one of those forms that has so many requirements, that to hit the marks you need to hit and to express something is incredibly hard. And the result is there are a handful of people who know how to do it.”
Oscar-nominated screenwriter Paul Attanasio (Donnie Brasco, Quiz Show) The Dialogue interview with Mike De Luca
Screenwriter Paul Attanasio, like screenwriter Sheldon Turner, came into the film world not through film school but through law school. He also says he was not “one of those clerk in a video store” kind of guys, but that his writing is based in literature. After graduating from Harvard Law School he turned an internship with the Washington Post into a four-year stint as a film critic.
I’m not sure how he made the jump onto the filmmaking side, but he had the advantage of being mentored by Oscar-winning writer/director Joseph Mankiewicz (All About Eve). His first produced screenplay (Quiz Show) was directed by Robert Redford, his second film Disclosure was directed by Barry Levinson and starred Michael Douglas and Demi Moore, and his third film (Donnie Brasco) starred Al Pacino and Johnny Depp. He had two Oscar-nominations right out of the gate. A pretty good start, huh?
In the ’90s Attanasio also made his mark in TV when he created Homicide:Life on the Street (based on the book by David Simon) and from 2002-2012 he’s credited as executive producer on House M.D.
Here’s a glimpse into his writing process:
“I’m a late convert to outlining. I used to really try to know where I was going to end up and feel my way through it. And [Steven] Soderbergh when we did The Good German said, ‘no, why don’t you outline.’ And I was at the point where my process had gotten so amorphous—it wasn’t quite as amorphous as my friend Alvin Sargent—but it was semi-amorphous. And I said, “Okay, I’ll try that.” And it’s good. It’s like having a road map on a family trip. What happens is the kids have to go to the bathroom, you leave the road, you see something interesting, you go to it, then they’re hungry and you go there. But then when you have to get back to the highway, you know where the highway is, or at least you have a general direction to find your way back to the highway. Writers who stick rigidly to an outline, and never go up those blind alleys aren’t real writers. But on the other side of it is if you’re collecting scraps of paper you can take a long time to write a screenplay.” Paul Attanasio The Dialogue interview with Mike De Luca
P.S. Here’s part of Attanasio’s 1987 review of the movie Hoosiers; “In Hoosiers, director David Anspaugh and screen writer Angelo Pizzo have taken the tired ‘go for it!’ dramatics of a David-and-Goliath story and revived it with the fervor of real experience. Hoosiers demonstrates that it’s not the tale but the telling, for beneath the cliche’s lies a rich and detailed portrait of a time, a place and a way of life.” (I’m pretty sure that should be “beneath the cliches” or “beneath the cliche” but who am I to correct the Washington Post or Attanasio? Anyway, you get the idea of what he was saying. My guess is his years reviewing films was Attanasio’s substitute film school.)
P.P.S. Paul’s brother, Mark Attanasio, is the principle owner of the Milwaukee Brewers Major League Baseball team. Talented family.
“I believe in the affirmation of life. If we lose that hope, if we lose the possibility of it, we’ve lost an awful lot.” Writer/Director Paul Mazursky Film Comment 1978 Interview
“I never thought, I’m going against the grain, I’m going to inform America about the problem of women, about society, about the bums on the street. I just thought, is this a good story, and can I make it work? The European directors I love really showed me that. You make the movie you want to make, that engages you, the movie that you have to make. They got away with it for a long time. And I guess I did too.”
Paul Mazursky TheWrap
Oscar and Emmy nominated Paul Mazursky’s died a couple of weeks ago. The career of the producer, director, writer and actor spanned seven decades. I was in film school when his 1982 film Tempest came out and once remember seeing Mazursky walking across W. Olive Ave. in Burbank as I waited at the stoplight next to Warner Bros. Studios. (When you’re 21-years-old and from outside L.A. you don’t forget those Forrest Gump-like moments.)
At that time in his career he already had two Primetime Emmy nominations (The Danny Kaye Show) and four Oscar-nominations (writing Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Harry & Tonto, An Unmarried Woman— the later also was nominated for Best Picture). But some of his more popular films were still to come including Moscow on the Hudson, Enemies, A Love Story, and Down and Out in Beverly Hills.
As an actor he also worked on a wide variety of films and TV programs; Blackboard Jungle, The Twilight Zone, Antz, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Kung Fu Panda 2.
But when I think of Mazursky, Tempest is what comes to mind first. He directed the film from a script he wrote with Leon Capetanos based on the Shakespeare play. It won the audience award at the 1982 Toronto International Film Festival.
The reason I link Mazursky to that film is not even the film itself that starred John Cassavetes, Gena Rowlands and Susan Sarandon (and which just happens to be Molly Ringwald’s big screen debut), but because Mazursky wrote a making of book on the film–fittingly called Paul Mazursky’s Tempest.
Keep in mind that in 1982 there was no Internet so behind the scene books were a key place to get a glimpse into the filmmaking process. I still have my copy of that book. Here’s a couple of shots from the book that may help you in scheduling your film.
The Director’s Guild of America has a video interview of Mazursky online. And here are a couple of videos interviews the Writers Guild of America did with Mazursky did last year.
“I’m a writer-director-actor, which I’ve always kind of enjoyed. I compared it to the Olympic biathlon. “Not only can he cross-country ski, but he’s a terrific marksman as well.” Writer-director-actor Harold Ramis
“Harold Ramis and I together did the ‘National Lampoon Show’ off Broadway, ‘Meatballs,’ ‘Stripes,’ ‘Caddyshack,’ ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Groundhog Day.’ He earned his keep on this planet. God bless him.” Bill Murray on the death of Harold Ramis New York Daily News
When you look at the run Harold Ramis had between 1978 and 1984 it’s a rather prolific string as a writer (Animal House,Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes, and Ghostbuster). But don’t forget to add that to that his longer career (including Back to School, Groundhog Day, Analyze This) and a career which also included his wearing the hats of producer, director and actor. For someone with such a grasp of writing humor it may seem odd that he took a serious approach to writing movies.
“I have a great respect for the moviegoing experience. It’s such a unique thing. You’re not getting up and walking around the house or flipping channels during the dull parts. You’re in a dark space, and the movie fills most of your field of vision. You’re surrounded by sound, and the colors are deeply saturated, and faces are fifteen feet high. If it’s done well, you’re really going to feel some big emotions or have some big belly laughs. That’s why I’ve tried to stay away from mild satire. I want an audience to feel something more powerful for their ten bucks. If they’re going to spend two hours with me, I’d like to take them someplace special. I’m thinking of doing a marital comedy for one of the studios, but I want it to be so painful that it’ll have a profound effect on married couples who see it together. I want husbands to cringe, and their wives to glare at them, and couples to talk about it later and ask, ‘Do you feel that way?’ ‘What? No, no, of course not.’ I want to explore marriage without the usual Hallmark-card platitudes. Life is difficult, and I like movies that acknowledge that.” Harold Ramis The Believer interview in 2008
“Without people who believe in you as a writer, or in your screenplay, or in the film itself, it would have been impossible.” Oscar-nominated screenwriter Craig Borten (Dallas Buyers Club)
In the post Screenwriter Melisa Wallack I mentioned how she co-wrote Dallas Buyers Club with Craig Borten. Wallack waited for more than 10 years so see the film get made, but Borten actually had a vision of this film for more than 20 years. Dallas Buyer Club producer Robbie Brenner read one of Borten’s early drafts before Wallack came on board to co-write the script.
Brennertold Alexandra Cheney at Variety of her journey with thescript. (A script that Brad Pitt was once attached to.):
“It’s such an amazing story but throughout the time it took we wanted to kill ourselves. And the frustration, the peaks and valleys and not getting the movie made and then getting the script back, I feel like this is just the most amazing completion. The whole thing came full circle. We spiritually and emotionally made this movie and all of the wrongs, all of the frustrations have been righted. This is what you dream of.” Robbie Brenner Oscars: Emotional End To Long Road For ‘Dallas Buyers Club’
Borten had a personal connection to Ron Woodroof’s story. He told the PhiladelphiaInquirer, “I had gone through some similar experiences with my father having lymphoma, in terms of the doctors, and dealing with the medical establishment, the protocol, the coldness. My father was thinking of seeking out alternative treatments in Mexico – so Ron’s experiences spoke to my heart.”
Borten is originally from Philadelphia and studied international relations at Syracuse University. He’s credited as one of the writers of The 33 that will be released later this year.
“I’ve sold some other screenplays, and I sold some other pitches, and adapted some stuff over the years. But I’ve never got anything to the finish line. [Until the Dallas Buyers Club was produced.] People ask, if you knew it would be 20 years, would you still have done it? And that’s been a tough question to answer. But sitting here today, I can tell you it was worth it.”
Craig Borten Interview with Steven Rea, The Philadephia Inquirer
“I don’t think there’s any artist of any value who doesn’t doubt what they’re doing.” 5-time Oscar winner Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather) Academy of Achievement Q&A Below is a partial list of Francis Ford Coppola related posts I’ve written over the year. I’m going to designate Coppola the Godfather of this blog. If you’ve never […] […]
