John Rogers

31 March 200919 October 2012

Point & Click

A bit of a backlog of a collection, attributions for which I can’t remember, sorry – though a pretty good bet would be the sidebar, but.

Billy Mernit makes a good case for bad screenwriting.

There are such things as happy endings for screenwriters in Hollywood – just ask Robert Mark Kamen.

Salman Rushdie writes about adaptation.

Thanks, I suspect, to Nick Grant of Onfilm, I have discovered The A.V. Club‘s excellent The New Cult Canon series, in particular this article about the commentary between The Limey’s writer Lem Dobbs and director Steven Soderbergh.

Oh, is nothing sacred, Mr Rogers?

Another Kiwi screenwriting blog! Lyse Beck gives us Birds With Nuts. There’s a nice thread about Watchmen here.

And speaking of the Minutemen, after all my build–up, The Goddess and I went to see Watchmen a week or so ago. She enjoyed it; I hankered for some interpretation rather than faithful replication. Thanks to Mr Slevin I’ve read people who can say what I’m thinking much better than I could here, here and here. (And no one’s mentioned it’s been two whole decades since Tim Burton gave us Michael Keaton as Batman – didn’t that kickstart the mainstreaming of comic-book adaptations?)

9 November 20077 August 2012

Fight the Power

My take on the WGA strike? The thing is, obviously, –

(a) I’m not a WGA member, and
(b) I live a quarter of the world away.

There’s a lot of stuff on the web about it, and the screenwriting blogs have a screed of information to choose from. I’ve found Shawn Ryan‘s guest post on why he’s joining the strike despite being a multi-hyphenate, Josh Friedman‘s succinct report on standing for what’s right, and John Rogers‘ overview all particularly enlightening.

As a card-carrying screenwriter, I wholeheartedly exhort the strikers onward to victory.

21 September 20072 August 2012

Point & Click

Oooh, a few minutes of exposure to broadband at a hotspot and lookee what I gots for you:

almost forty years ago, Storytime was launched into the world by a certain Terry Gilliam; see it, believe it, baby (fedora-tip: The Goddess and mentalfloss.com):

I was going to riff off Phill Barron‘s posts about people who think they can write when John Rogers threw this up;

I recommend Cine-City for well-written – and -thought – essays about films and cinema in general (fedora tip: WGGB Blog);
and finally, get your weekly fix of the life of a studio reder with Studio Reader Stan – feel the pain (fedora-tip: Complications Ensue).

This post-dated post – and possibly the next – is because the Mamea aiga are off to Melbourne for a week (yesss). Play nice now.

26 August 200731 July 2012

The Bourne Ultimatum

The Bourne Ultimatum is here. I’ve prepped by watching its predescessor and enjoying it the second – or third? – time around. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing what John Rogers means by nested sequels.

Roger Ebert enjoyed it – and has received a flood of complaints about its visual style.

I was a bit concerned about the ‘herky-jerky hand-held’ camerawork until I remembered The Blair Witch Project. I remember complaints about it inducing nausea and vomiting. It didn’t stop me from being scared out of my wits. As I’ve told anyone who’s asked me whether to watch Blair Witch: if you can get over the shaky-cam, and the contrivance that the characters obsessively shot everything, it’ll scare the bejesus out of you.

I think (and hope) that what’ll save my brain and stomach from Bourne‘s visual jazz will be the story. If I’m pulled into it sufficiently, I shouldn’t notice the two-second average shot length. I’ll be too busy sitting on the edge of my seat going, Oh my g-, what th-, wait – don’t -, which’ll be just what I want.

(Fedora-tip to Amit for the heads-up.)

17 March 200727 July 2012

Point and Click

Between searching for bill-paying work, and drafting pitches for writing work, all I’s gots for ya this week is more linkages.

John Rogers has a great post on credits arbitration – it’s interesting in an “as you pass a flaming wreck” kind of way. (See also Josh Friedman‘s experience, Being A Play in Two Parts.) For myself, I swear by the excellent New Zealand Writers Guild model contracts, though none of them mention residuals.

John August has an interesting post on publicity. I admit to being Kiwi-bloke-ish in my self-promotion: essentially a “build it and they will come” approach. (This blog and the attendant dfmamea.com site was a tentative step in the self-promotion direction. It’s provided a fantastic avenue for procrasturbation.)

Whilst clearing up my massive RSS backlog (and inadvertently deleting a mass of ‘Important’-flagged ones), I found a wealth of left-field ideas and approaches to film distribution from Tim Clague‘s Projector Films blog. The ideas are a bit scary and newfangled for a conventional and blissful ignoramus like myself, but they’re exciting and exhilarating, and any day now, I’ll understand it all.

And finally, courtesy of this from TeeVee, there’s the Brilliant but Cancelled site which seems to have some neat feeds on a range of shows that didn’t survive transmission on American t.v. It doesn’t have UnSub, Game, Set and Match or Now and Again, but. Hope springs eternal.