Screenwriting News, Baby! 8/3/09

Ahh, yes, the lovely Jenny Lumet who can be seen in Vogue’s latest Age Issue. God, I love screenwriters.

Now that my schedule has cleared up and I finally have the opportunity to get reconnected with all the goings-on around the World Wide Web, I thought we’d resume the News Links. “Around Blogosphere” will resume as well as “Goodies for Cinephile.”

Hope you enjoy the link love.

-MM

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New Screenplays (with a hat-tip to SimplyScripts!):

To Catch a Thief – An undated draft script by John Michael Hayes

S. Darko - undated 2nd draft script by Nathan Atkins

He's Just Not That Into You - July 20, 2007 draft by Abby Kohn & Marc Silverstein

X-Men Origin: Wolverine - June, 2006, draft by David Benioff & Skip Woods

Tropic Thunder - September 5, 2006 revised draft script by Etan Cohen, Ben Stiller, Justin Theroux

The Wild Bunch - February 12, 1968 revised draft script by Walon Green & Sam Peckinpah

Petulia - March 30, 1967 draft script by Larry Marcus

The Miracle Worker – undated draft script by William Gibson

What Price Hollywood - May 10, 1932, final draft by Adela Rogers St. Johns (What a name!)

A Serious Man - June 4, 2007, draft by Joel and Ethan Coen

The Ruins - January 19, 2007 draft script by Scott Smith

Speed Racer - January 4, 2007 draft by Larry & Andy Wachowski, although WHY anyone would want to read this is beyond me.

Casino Royale - December 13, 2005 draft by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade (and revised by Paul Haggis)

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus - May 26, 2007 draft by "Terry McKeown and Charles Gilliam" (in other words, Terry Gilliam and Chalres McKeown. Those crazy kids!)

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From the Hollywood Roaster: "Study reveals 88% of screenwriters fell off the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down." (Really? Take a good look at Variety’s 10 Screenwriters to Watch. Some of them are hot. And did you see the photo of Jenny Lumet above?)

Spielberg to direct a Harvey remake. Yippee.

More exciting news. Hold me back: Twilight Screenwriter Reveals One Of Rachelle Lefevre's Final Scenes. Even better: Etan Cohen tries to defend the idea of a Candy Land movie: "I think that people expect that it's just a way of marketing toys," he says. “But the real opportunity and the fun of it is to take a game that people love and have really warm associations from playing it as a kid and then do something totally innovative and new.” Uh huh.

“I have written or co-written 15 screenplays and I have only seven movies,” said Guillermo del Toro. “I find it frustrating when you write a screenplay and it lives, but you don’t get it produced – which is a lottery – it exists in a limbo that does not allow it to become public. A filmmaker will never be known by the movies he left in the drawer. Unlike a musician, a painter or a poet, nobody is going to open a box after I’m gone and say, ‘Oh, look, another great movie that he didn’t make.’”

Peter Jackson: Movie fans are 'fed up with the lack of original ideas'

Apple Blog’s review of Final Draft 8


Screenwriter Says Star Trek 2 Won't Be Like Revenge of the Fallen. Not only that, Orci and Kurtzman are also being showcased in the New York Times, of all places, who have labeled the scribes of Transformers 2 as The Dynamic Duo. The world is coming to an end.

Via The Examiner: Through news from The Hollywood Reporter, Sucker Punch Studios now has the chance to bring its highly successful game inFAMOUS from the Playstation 3 to the big screen, not unlike that of Naughty Dog Studios and its own prized title, Uncharted. Screenwriter Sheldon Turner has worked with the studio and Sony Pictures to bring what she believes is "...the future of gaming. The game, while big and fun, is at its core a love ballad to the underachiever, which is what our hero, Cole McGrath, is."

Interview with Orphan screenwriter, David Johnson here and here.

$70 Movie to Hit Theaters

This is for you, Mickey Lee: Mass Effect 2's Lead Writer Tells us How to Get a Writing Gig at Bioware.

Via FirstShowing.net: Way back in January it was announced that Roland Emmerich would be directing an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy. That's all we really knew at the time, but when Emmerich appeared at Comic-Con yesterday, he confirmed (via ComingSoon) that they've hired a screenwriter for the adaptation - Oscar nominated writer Robert Rodat (Saving Private Ryan, The Patriot). "He is the most knowledgeable person I ever met about the Foundation novels. It's great to write with somebody like that because… he knows it. I had a certain idea and he had a certain idea and that together I think will make this a movie."

“Screenwriters persuade us to adore characters we should hate and make us see ourselves in the most demented scenarios.” Thank you, Ellie Rennie. And now Judd Apatow (whose latest film Funny People has tanked at the box office) says "I Don't Really Want to Watch People Who Do the Right Thing". I guess the Apatow revolution is over.

Author Paul Theroux's main advice to writers: Leave the house

Screenwriter finally gets top billing on GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra
He must be proud.

No Eric Bana for Star Trek Sequel – This is news?

Former World of Warcraft movie scriptwriter reveals himself
In a post on the Quarter to Three forums, Gary Whitta, the former editor in chief of PC Gamer magazine and now a big time Hollywood screenwriter (Denzel's next movie is written by Whitta), stated he had actually been working on the World of Warcraft movie script "for the past two years" for Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. The result was a screenplay that he felt "distilled the sprawling Warcraft mythology into a narrative that was easily accessible to the non-player, and everyone was really pleased with the results." That is until Raimi was brought in as the movie's director. Whitta states that Raimi "had his own pretty specific vision of what he wanted to do story-wise so that's the version they're now pursuing." There's no hard feelings, however, as Whitta says, "so far as I'm concerned Raimi is the best possible director for this."

From 10 Questions for Jerry Bruckheimer
Does an unknown writer have any chance of getting a script read by a studio or put into production? Of course. Every writer in Hollywood started by writing a screenplay and getting recognition. If the movie didn't get made, it at least got noticed by somebody--a producer or an agent. If someone is prolific and keeps working at it, they're going to do it. You've just got to keep writing. I'm sure we could show you instances of very famous screenwriters whose first screenplay wasn't very good. They just kept at it.

Top 25 Movies about Writers

Black Screenwriters Roundtable 7/27/2009

Thoughts on the Gears of War Script

Social Network script: A meaner take on Facebook

Twilight Zone Movie Gets Screenwriter


Raymond Chandler's Double Indemnity cameo

Girls on Film: Men Writing Women
There's no way around it. Unless a screenwriter is writing about one-minute section of life where other sexes do not enter, or a world filled with one sex that practices asexual reproduction, men are going to write about women, and women are going to write about men. But can they do so successfully?

Q&A with (500) Days of Summer director Marc Webb

Alan Ball on True Blood
What genre of television would you say True Blood is, if you had to pick just one?
Drama. We don’t have an actual sign in the writers room that reads, “It’s the emotions, stupid,” but we might as well. We feel like we have to keep these characters rooted in some sort of emotional reality because otherwise, it’s a parade of special effects and set pieces.

On the implosion of the Moneyball project
The movie, based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, wasn't just in pre-production. It was literally five days away from filming when Soderbergh turned in a new version of the script that Pascal and her Sony team found unacceptable. The decision was so abrupt that the film's producer, Michael DeLuca, got the call about it while on his honeymoon in Paris. As a courtesy to the talent, Pascal gave them an opportunity to try and set the film up elsewhere, but no other studio has shown any interest. So the movie remains at Sony, but will it ever get made? Will Pitt stick with the project? And what exactly went wrong…? And now, apparently, Aaron Sorkin is rewriting the script.