“Mary Rose,” Part Two

(Click here if you missed Part One.)

To conclude my script review, I’d like to share six personal insights that I took away from the Mary Rose experience.

* First and foremost, there is magic in the fun, playful dialogue of J.M. Barrie’s characters. It’s infectious. At the ripe young age of sixty, Barrie was still having fun with his powerful imagination and bringing his brand of playfulness to the proceedings, as if, “hey, everybody, let’s have fun together!” Too many of us are too damn serious with our scripts, and we’ve forgotten to have fun or to bring a sense of joy to our work. And when Barrie’s plays turn emotional, or even tragic, there is a great tenderness to his approach that I found so refreshing. Even when we’re in the midst of the tragedy of Harry speaking with his ghost of a mother, he could’ve turned bitter and angry about it all, but no. He is good-natured about it. He cares about helping her. He makes the most of his time with her, and in the process, we go through this kind of tender therapy about letting go a loved one.

* Mary Rose proves that logic isn’t as important as emotional content. The island makes no sense whatsoever. But, ya know, we recognize the themes contained in the story, the emotions the characters are feeling about losing a loved one, about letting go, and the play hits all the right emotional points where it counts: the fun in the beginning, the sadness of loss, and sense of liberation in the end. We go to feel and because J.M. Barrie makes us feel something, we give ourselves over to the story – even when it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.

* I don’t blame the studio for passing on the script. In its present form, I would’ve passed on it as well. The magic of the third act does not compensate for all horribly static scenes that preceded it. But, ya know, I also came up with a fun creative writing exercise - to imagine all the ways that I could break up those excessively talkative scenes, especially those first two scenes, to make it more visually stimulating, while also honoring Barrie’s playfulness. I may return to that periodically as a writing exercise for myself.

* Another aspect that bothered me about Jay Presson Allen’s script was not only the excessive amount of dialogue in those first two scenes but the dialogue itself. She covers all of the necessary plot points of the story (and in many cases points that never needed to be made) but what she failed to capture was the playfulness of the words themselves. This script was more about resuscitating Hitchcock’s career than it ever was honoring Barrie’s craft, and some really treasured elements of the play would’ve been lost in transition.

* While I didn’t like the way they handled it, I admired the decision to actually show Mary’s death after her return from the island. That was not in the play. I can’t help but wonder how I would handle it. Once she sees that Harry’s missing, she should try to run away. Then some kind of accident, perhaps, falling down the stairs? I’m not sure.

* I have to say that Hitch and Allen made all the right decisions about the third act. In fact, the way that they handled Kenneth’s conversation with his ghost mother is very close to how I believe I would’ve approached the ending. In the play, the conversation sort of reaches an impasse. He didn’t know how to get rid of her. She didn’t know how to leave. Plus, they weren’t sure where she could even go. And after a bit of time, she gets sleepy and the island takes her back. In the script, Mary wants to go back to the island, and that is far more satisfying. Also in the script, he’s a bit more forthright about being her son, although she never figures it out, which was good. That scene would’ve never worked if she realized he’s her son. It would’ve lost that magic. One thing I would change. I would’ve had Kenneth/Harry ask her to please stay a little bit longer… and then let her go.

Script Review – “Mary Rose”

Hello, my friends,

This is the first of two final posts on what may have felt as a never-ending series on the Unproduced Screenplays of Alfred Hitchcock.

Woo hoo! Hehehe...

This was the film Hitch purportedly wanted to make more than any other but the studios always refused. Biographer Donald Spoto said that Hitch’s failure to make this film was “perhaps the single greatest disappointment of his creative life.” Hitch would say repeatedly in interviews that his contract with Universal allowed him to make any film so long as it cost under $3 million and so long as it wasn't Mary Rose. Of course, this was never verified and probably not true. In truth, the reasons why this didn’t happen are complicated, involving the Tippi Hedren fallout, the failure of Marnie, Hitch’s career crisis, and concerns about audience expectations of Hitch at the time.

In any event, Mary Rose was originally a play by J.M. Barrie (of Peter Pan fame) that Hitch had seen in his youth and loved dearly. In fact, he saw the original production at London’s Haymarket Theatre and was so enraptured by Fay Compton’s performance as Mary Rose that he cast her as the countess in his 1933 film, Waltzes from Vienna. When he was preparing to produce Mary Rose in the early 60’s, he inquired about Compton’s availability (probably to play Mrs. Morland or Mrs. Otery). According to Dan Auiler, during the production of Vertigo, Hitch had sought out from England the play’s original score and sound effects, which he sent to his composer, Bernard Herrmann, for inspiration. (The “call” that prompts Mary Rose's disappearance, which I’ll write about in a bit, was created with bagpipes and “wordless voices” played on a musical saw. Hitch described the sound as “celestial voices, like Debussy's Sirenes.”) Hitch also clung to the rights of the play until 1987 well after his death. He commissioned the only screenplay for Mary Rose (on his own without studio approval and without a greenlight). The script was written by Jay Presson Allen, who wrote the final draft of Marnie. The screenplay can be read here, thanks to Derosa’s Writing with Hitchcock website. (Be warned: the script is a huge 21 MB file.)

Let me just say, when I first went through the script, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. The first twenty pages was the most awful, talkative, static scene I’ve ever encountered in a script and never imagined I’d find in any kind of Hitchcock project. It was two people talking in a room, and it went on and on and on... I thought the damn scene would never end. The next scene was more people talking in a room, which went on for another thirty pages or so. This was followed by a visit to a mysterious island in which all they did for yet another 20-30 pages was sit in one spot and talk. And talk. Was Hitch truly serious about this? Everything in this script betrayed his principles of pure cinema. I could understand Universal’s objections.

But I labored on to the end.

And what I discovered was something at once inexplicable and yet so powerfully moving that I could not get Mary Rose out of my system. In fact, the feelings from the story continue to linger inside of me. So I bought the original play and read it and loved it even more.


The story is very simple, which begins with a man, named Harry (changed to Kenneth in the script) who visits a spooky house that’s for sale. It’s haunted. Harry talks to the keeper of the house, Mrs. Otery, and explains that he used to live there as a child. He points out details he remembers. There’s a hidden little door that leads to another room, but it’s locked. And then he inquires about the ghost stories. Mrs. Otery reluctantly tells him it’s just some scared little woman, nothing to fear. At the end of the first scene, Harry has a spooky encounter with the unseen ghost (oddly missing from the screenplay).

And then we go back in time in a flashback structure to when the house was anew. We meet the parents of Mary Rose, Mr. and Mrs. Morland and a friend of theirs, Mr. Amy. Mr. Morland and Mr. Amy have an ongoing competition about obtaining works of art. The dialogue is playful. Mr. Amy leaves. Mary Rose enters. She's eighteen and wants to marry a middle-aged man named Simon. The Morlands want to talk to Simon alone first. She leaves. In fact, she goes up to the attic to knock on the floor so he’d know she’s nearby and supporting him. (The sheer fun and playfulness of J.M. Barrie’s dialogue is just infectious.) So the parents tell Simon a story about Mary that they felt he should know before marrying her. They took her to an island in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides years ago on a vacation. At the time, she was eleven in the play but seven in the script. The name of the island in Gaelic means “The Island That Likes To Be Visited.” Mr. Morland would fish and watch Mary Rose sketch on the island. Well, one day, she disappeared. They looked all over for her. She was gone for thirty days. And on the thirtieth day, she was found again in that same spot and never realized she had been gone. For her, it was as if a few minutes had passed. They never told her what happened. Yet, somehow, Mary Rose had changed a little. Her mother, Mrs. Morland, said, “I have sometimes thought that our girl is curiously young for her age – as if – you know how just a touch of frost may stop the growth of a plant and yet leave it blooming – it has sometimes seemed to me that a cold finger had once touched my Mary Rose.”

Simon responds by saying, “What you are worrying about is just her innocence - which seems a holy thing to me.”

Naturally, Simon is not dissuaded by the story. The parents consent to the marriage. Simon and Mary reunite, celebrate, and Mary mentions taking him to her favorite island in the Hebrides someday.


Cut to a few years later. They’re on the island. They have a 3-year-old son back home named Harry (Kenneth in the script). She talks about how much fun it would be to sit on Harry’s knee one day when he’s older just as she has him sit on hers. They had been ferried to the island by an Irishman named Cameron who has lunch with them. He’s funny. He tells them stories about the island, one of which was the story of Mary Rose’s disappearance that doesn’t quite click with her. As they prepare to leave, Mary Rose disappears once again.

Cut to almost thirty years later. We’re back at the house with the now elderly Morlands and Mr. Amy. They never found Mary Rose and only recently healed from the wounds. Simon comes back to see them. He’s a Captain of a vessel, I believe, in the war (WWI). Harry escaped to sea at the age of twelve and they haven't heard from him since. In the script, he's missing and thought to be taken prisoner in the war.

And then they get the news. They found Mary Rose. In fact, Cameron found her back in the spot where they left her thirty years ago and he’s bringing her home. When she arrives (and I swear this moment leaves me breathless every time I read it), they discover that Mary Rose is still young. And Mary likewise cannot fathom what’s happened to her. She keeps crying for Harry, her son. This reunion between Mary Rose and her family was heavily expanded in the screenplay to great effect. It’s inexplicable what has happened, and yet, I cannot deny the powerful emotions J.M. Barrie so effectively exploited here.

Cut back to Harry with Mrs. Otery in the house now abandoned and for sale and haunted. Harry goes through the tiny door to the other room and discovers that the ghost is, of course, his mother, Mary Rose. They have a conversation that’s so satisfying and so therapeutic on so many levels. It’s one of those conversations you find in drama that you wish would never end as you read it. Harry’s interaction with Mary resolves her ghostly wandering and searching for her long lost son, and she’s freed to go back to the island. The dialogue in this scene was so very playful and tender. At one point, she actually sits on his knee.

Harry: Do you see who I am now?
Mary Rose: Nice man.
Harry: Is that all you know about me?
Mary Rose: Yes.
Harry: I wonder if there was ever a man with a ghost on his knee before.
Mary Rose: (innocently) I don’t know.
Harry: Seems to me you’re feared of being a ghost.
Mary Rose: Yes.
Harry: I dare say, to a timid soul, being a ghost is worse than seeing them.
Mary Rose: Yes.
Harry: Is it lonely being a ghost?
Mary Rose: Yes.
Harry: Do you know any other ghosts?
Mary Rose: (sadly) No.
Harry: Would you like to know other ghosts?
Mary Rose: Yes.
Harry: I can understand that.

And later:

Harry: All I know about [ghosts] for certain is that they are unhappy because they can’t find something, and then once they’ve got the thing they want, they go away happy and never come back.

And thus, in a moment full of effects, Mary Rose returns to the island.

The end.

Isn’t that a strange story? What the hell does it all mean? What does the island represent exactly? Not even Barrie knew. He just imagined it and wrote it. I’d like to delve into the meaning of the play here and then talk about the script in PART TWO on Tuesday.

There’s more than meets the eye with Mary Rose. After reading the script, I had to know everything about this play, and interestingly, the last few years actually brought some revivals of the play, the most popular would probably be the early 2007 production with Paige Howard (daughter of Ron Howard) at the Vineyard Theatre. I’m grateful because it generated some interesting articles.

Here’s Charles Isherwood in The New York Times:

Although Barrie wrote many plays, even his popular successes, like “The Admirable Crichton” and “What Every Woman Knows” have been largely relegated to the ranks of the unrevived. After its United States premiere in 1920, “Mary Rose” was seen on Broadway very briefly in 1951. Then, like the rest of Barrie’s stage work (“Peter Pan” spectacularly excepted), it sailed off into the Neverland of theatrical obscurity. Such a fate is somehow apt for this elegantly plotted ghost story, which tells of a spunky British lass who has an odd habit of evaporating and then reappearing. The play is in many ways a more mature and mournful reworking of themes Barrie explored in the tale of the boy who refused to grow up. Time is seen as a quiet despoiler of happiness and innocence, and the lure of another world unblemished by its passing has an irresistible seduction.

Steve Cramer wrote in The Scotsman:

On the face of it, the story Mary Rose has to tell has little to do with the war; its title character's story occurs before the start of hostilities. As a child about to enter adulthood, she disappears from a Scottish island on which her family are holidaying, only to emerge weeks later with no account of what has transpired. At a second significant juncture, as she enters motherhood, she disappears from the same ill-omened place, only to emerge, eerily, a generation later. What is emphasised about the character is her continual, childish innocence, as if, after her first disappearance, her growth is stunted. Parallels are drawn between 1904's Peter Pan and this character, yet Peter's continuation as a child is an act of choice, while Mary Rose's development is abruptly halted by inexplicable circumstance. The metaphor must have been especially relevant to a 1920 audience.

Here are John Lahr’s comments in The New Yorker:

“The only ghosts, I believe, who creep into this world, are dead young mothers, returned to see how their children fare,” Barrie wrote. He knew, from experience, that a mother could be both alive and dead. In 1867, when he was six, his thirteen-year-old brother, David, was killed in a skating accident. Barrie’s mother, Margaret, took to her bed and became a ghostly presence, who was both there and not there for her little boy. “Do you mind nothing about me?” Barrie recalled asking her as he sat on her bed, in his idealizing memoir, “Margaret Ogilvy.” To revive his mother, Barrie even dressed up as David and tried to imitate David’s whistle. (He also is said to have stopped growing at the age at which his brother died, and was only five feet tall.) “She lived twenty-nine years after his death,” Barrie wrote of his mother. “But I had not made her forget the bit of her that was dead. . . . In those nine-and-twenty years he was not removed one day farther from her. Many a time she fell asleep speaking to him, and even while she slept her lips moved and she smiled as if he had come back to her, and when she woke he might vanish so suddenly that she started up bewildered and looked about her, and then said slowly ‘My David’s dead.’ ” In life, Barrie could not heal his haunted mother or reclaim her; in “Mary Rose,” written fifteen years after “Peter Pan,” when Barrie was almost sixty, he does both. In the play, Harry (Richard Short), who left home at the age of twelve to go to sea, returns as an adult to release her ghost from its restless tribulation. “Being a ghost is worse than seeing them,” he tells his mother when they confront each other at the finale.

And later, he wrote:

When Harry first returns to the haunted family home, he’s dressed in a First World War uniform; he takes a dagger from his belt and sticks it mysteriously into the floorboards. “It’s not a knife, it’s a visiting card,” he tells the housekeeper, who goes to make him some tea. The knife augurs some kind of battle. While Harry waits for his tea, the play happens; he imagines Mary Rose’s entire story. When her ghost is finally coaxed into view, the knife disappears. Harry, who doesn’t seem at all scared, demands that she return it; she hands it over. There is no contention, no struggle, and, finally, no drama. Barrie didn’t want to face his own aggression in life; he can’t face it in theatre, either. Here, with the empathic power of his imagination, Harry, whose mother never actually recognizes him, nonetheless liberates her from woe and engineers a kind of salvation for them both. The psychological progress—this is commercial entertainment, after all—is strangely painless, a fairy tale of deliverance, mostly Barrie’s own. The last line of this production is Barrie’s final stage direction, “Harry hears nothing but he knows somehow a prayer has been answered”; that prayer was Barrie’s.

Joseph McBride wrote in Cineaste:

Barrie's style is charmingly fey. But something sinister about Mary Rose's reason for disappearing is briefly suggested by her cryptic response to her father when he asks what frightens her. She replies, "I am most afraid of my daddy." Perversely, this revelation leaves Mr. Morland "rather flattered." It implies that her escape to her "safe place"--safe from growth, sexuality, and the adult responsibilities of marriage and motherhood--is motivated by fear of being dominated or even sexually violated by her father, and perhaps also by fear of her future with her equally paternalistic husband. Along with its overtones of incest, her anxiety suggests the dangerous futility of attempting to preserve childhood innocence beyond natural limits.

The play's great success with British audiences in 1920 has been attributed in part to its psychological timing. Mary Rose opened less than eighteen months after the end of World War I. In the stage version, Mary Rose's son, who has run off to sea at the age of twelve, returns from the war as an Australian soldier. Patrick Chalmers observed that Barrie's "lovely and spiritual conception was staged in the ugly and uneasy period that followed immediately upon" the armistice, bringing "joy and peace and a tear or two to thousands, weary of the War and the War's aftermath, during the years of its run." Audiences took from the play a mystical answer to Rudyard Kipling's cry of national bereavement, "But who shall return us the children?"

And also:

Matte artist Albert Whitlock, whom Hitchcock described in the late 1970s as "by far the finest technician that we have in our business today," had trouble grasping what the director had in mind for Mary Rose. Whitlock remembered doing "a lot of sketches" for the project, calling it "a very moody thing. And I said to him, because he was always very strong on the selling point, 'What's the selling point, Hitch?'" Revealing his need to claim Barrie's story as his own, Hitchcock replied that the film would be sold not as "Hitchcock's Mary Rose" but as "A Ghost Story by Alfred Hitchcock: Mary Rose." "That'll get 'em," Hitchcock declared.

A somewhat more concrete sense of what Hitchcock visualized came in his discussion of the project with Truffaut in their 1967 interview book. Hitchcock described Mary Rose as "a little like a science-fiction story. I still haven't definitely dropped the idea of making it. A few years back it might have seemed that the story would be too irrational for the public. But since then the public's been exposed to these twilight-zone stories, especially on television...

"If I were to make the film, I would put the girl in a dark-gray dress and I would put a neon tube of light inside, around the bottom of the dress, so that the light would only hit the heroine. Whenever she moved, there would be no shadow on the wall, only a blue light. You'd have to create the impression of photographing a presence rather than a body. At times she would appear very small in the image, at times very big. She wouldn't be a solid lump, you see, but rather like a sensation. In this way you lose the feeling of real space and time. You should be feeling that you are in the presence of an ephemeral thing, you see."

"It's a lovely subject," commented Truffaut. "Also a sad one."

"Yes, very sad," Hitchcock agreed. "Because the real theme is: If the dead were to come back, what would you do with them?"

(Click here for Part Two)

Trust the Reader

From a recent TS script review of mine:

I want to say a word on trusting the reader. An inevitable sign of growth in a new writer (and we all go through this arc) is in the area of trusting the reader. Newbies who haven't developed the discipline of trusting the reader tend to over-explain simple things in the action lines or they over-explain obvious reactions in characters or they indulge in on-the-nose dialogue to convey obvious emotions we all know that particular character is feeling. Over time, you'll learn that you only need to explain something once (or not even explain it at all) and then move on because you know very well that your readers are with you, will get it without needing your help, and will appreciate you more for trusting them and moving forward. An example of this might be, like on pg 62, you mentioned that the gang saw "an ocean of trees." Okay, great. But then you had to add, "Absolutely no sign of civilization, whatsoever." Yeah. We got that with "ocean of trees." Let's move on. Do you see what I mean? I also mentioned characters indulging in on-the-nose dialogue to convey obvious emotions we all know that particular character is feeling. This brings to mind the moment after Kevin sees [his best friend] Josh [kissing his girlfriend] Emily, and he's all pissed off and he later tells everyone off. Well, we've seen this a billion times before. We all know exactly what Kevin's thinking and feeling, and it's moments like these where a writer has to find ways to show us something totally unexpected from a character. What if he didn't tell them off? What if he embraced Josh? Why would he do something crazy like that? What if, when Emily kisses him, he doesn't push her away but pulls her in, and I don't know, has angry sex? You lower interest by having characters play out in ways that are totally expected and you make people more engaged when they do the opposite.

Also -

You should also consider multiple setups in one scene. I'm a believer in horizontal / vertical storytelling. I think a writer should work hard to give the audience a smooth, seamless, and efficient setup to the story. You establish many things in as few scenes as possible to quickly move us down that horizontal plane of storytelling. That is, until you get to those vertical moments, which is the reason we're all there to see that film and the time when the story could slow down or briefly stop. In an action movie, it's the action sequences. In a comedy, it's the big gut-busting moments. In a horror story, it's the suspenseful moments of horror. So when you finally get to those moments, like when the engineer transforms and you have Angie on her way to see him, that's when you should slow down, focus your creative energies in dragging out the suspense to excruciating levels. I recently posted a murder scene on my blog that was actually written by Alfred Hitchcock from an unproduced screenplay. One murder scene took up 12 pages. Mind you, it wasn't the greatest murder scene ever since Psycho but it was fascinating to analyze. It wasn't about getting a murder scene done quickly in order to move the plot forward. It was about the EXPERIENCE of the murder scene. It was about the characters and the question of "will he or won't he commit murder" dragged out to excruciating levels. That's what horror does. And I think almost all of your scary scenes, which were good, could have still been dragged out longer, could've been more intense to heighten the EXPERIENCE for the audience. It's not about volume of scares but quality of suspense.

HW Producers & Samuel Johnson

Thought these Slate articles might interest you guys:

What Does a Hollywood Producer Do, Exactly?

…The top post of "producer" is just the tip of the iceberg, as anyone who's watched the opening credits of a movie knows well. Although Slumdog Millionaire, for example, credits only one producer, it lists two executive producers and two co-executive producers, along with a co-producer, an associate producer, and a line producer.

An executive producer often owns the rights to a book or story idea or secures at least 25 percent of the film's budget. Executive producers rarely have creative or technical involvement and are often caught up with several projects at once. The "co-executive producer" title applies to studio executives or distributors who have a limited financial stake in the project. A co-producer works under the producer and often helps with casting, financing, or postproduction. The line producer is on the set at all times to supervise the budget but has little or no creative input.

"Associate producer" is a largely honorary title. Sometimes it's a form of recompense for exceptional performance on-set. A script doctor who saves a bad screenplay, for example, might be granted an associate-producer credit. The title is also frequently an inexpensive way for a producer to pay back a favor or reward an assistant or colleague who had little to do with the film. As David Mamet wrote in State and Main, an associate producer credit is "what you give to your secretary instead of a raise…"


See also this rather amusing article: Money Made Him Do it: What Samuel Johnson can teach us about writing.

Johnson's father, a bookseller, never made much money, and in time his business failed completely. Johnson got to spend a year at Oxford, after he came into a small legacy, but the money wasn't enough to keep him there until he could earn a degree. He spent his 20s trying, and largely failing, to find work as a schoolteacher. When Johnson got married at age 26 to 46-year-old widow Elizabeth Porter—whom he called Tetty—he used most of her money to start up a school, which attracted exactly three pupils and closed after 15 months. By the time he set out for London in 1737, with no assets except a play he hoped to get produced, it could not but seem, as Meyers writes, that "his life thus far had been catastrophic."

But London proved to be Johnson's salvation. He made a connection with the editor of the popular Gentleman's Magazine and started to earn a living by hackwork. Soon enough his reputation was made by his satirical poem "London"; his heroic labor on the dictionary, which appeared in 1755, made him famous. Working alone, with just a few assistants, he did for the English language what it had taken the whole Academie Francaise 40 years to accomplish for the French. The terms of the book trade, however, were not generous to the author in the 18th century. Johnson spent his fee for the dictionary well before the book was published, and he earned no royalties. This may seem unfair, but as Boswell wrote, "[W]e must, at the same time, congratulate ourselves, when we consider that to this very neglect, operating to rouse the natural indolence of his constitution, we owe many valuable productions, which otherwise, perhaps, might never have appeared."

"Fame is the spur the clear spirit doth raise/(That last infirmity of noble minds)/To scorn delights and live laborious days," said Milton. But while Johnson cared about fame, it was simple need—the need to eat and keep a roof over his head—that made him accomplish so much. Over the course of his career, beyond the dictionary, he produced an edition of the complete plays of Shakespeare; an encyclopedic series of Lives of the English Poets; the poem "The Vanity of Human Wishes," one of the great satires in the language; the moral tale Rasselas, a kind of English Candide (written in one week, Johnson claimed, so that he could pay for his mother's funeral); A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland; and the 208 essays of The Rambler, which for more than 100 years were known to every well-read person in England and America. And that is not to mention the translations, book reviews, lectures, sermons, parliamentary reports, and assorted journalism...

Screenwriting News & Links! 2/23/09

Oh my head...

Hey MM, what did you think of the Oscar winners?

Eh. Where's the coffee?

-MM

--------------------------------------

New Screenplay:

Slumdog Millionaire - August, 15, 2007 draft by Simon Beaufoy

(Hat-tip to SimplyScripts)

--------------------------------------

First, a few Oscar Links:


The complete list

Notable quotes from the 81st annual Academy Awards

Ryan Seacrest is a Douchebag

Slumdog Millionaire bags Oscar for best adapted screenplay

Here's The New York Times

Best Original Screenplay Winner Dustin Lance Black Backstage Q&A

Hunky Gay Man Wins For Best Screenplay

Dustin Lance Black's Oscar Acceptance Speech for Original Screenplay

Where are all the old fat screenwriters that we are used to seeing?

The funniest he's been since Shanghai Surprise

Big Picture: Not exactly an enchanted evening

Backstage: Kate Winslet hugs, Sean Penn on Mickey Rourke, more!

Reports from the theater, parties...and bathrooms!

I'm going back to bed...

Peter Bart’s Oscar doesn't carry the same weight: How winning an award no longer cements career
Nothing we own today is worth what it was a year ago -- not our houses, our 401Ks, not even our careers. So with the Oscar noise at last dying down, it's worth asking whether even an Oscar is worth what it used to be. I would argue, hell no. For filmmakers, winning the top prize, or even a nomination, used to mean a ticket to creative autonomy as well as to plump paydays. Look what a Pulp Fiction best screenplay Oscar did for Quentin Tarantino in '94 or the screenplay Oscar for Matt Damon and Ben Affleck for Good Will Hunting in '97. Well, not anymore. Tarantino's been busy, but we haven't seen much work from Bennett Miller (Capote), Taylor Hackford (Ray), Peter Weir (Master and Commander) or Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich) since their moments in the sun. Sure, these are talented guys with idiosyncratic tastes, but still, despite all the attention showered on them, they haven't been getting their work out there.

See also Cieply’s NYT article: Movers and shakers in the film industry don’t like to grumble openly about the Oscars. After all, nobody wants to be caught talking down a ritual that has been very good, for a very long time, to a very large number of people in the glamour business. Still, the Hollywood table-talk this year has been much less about Oscar prospects and more about the process. And an overriding theme is this: The movie prize cycle had better become shorter, brighter and more popular in its bent — or some major players are pulling back.

"2009 Spirit Awards: Truly Indie Anymore?" asks Nikki Finke.

Oscar-winning writer Ronald Harwood reveals what it's like to win
But – I whisper this – they’re terrible, a controlled, noisy chaos where no one seems to care who you are or what you’ve won. My wife and I went to three and they were all dreadful. At the Vanity Fair after-party, no one made us feel welcome, no one brought us a drink and only a polite few congratulated us. And at this point – under instruction not to put it down because they often get stolen – I was still clutching my Oscar.

Juno and the Best Screenplay Debacles of History
Great screenplays are a lot like sports officials in that the good ones stand back and orchestrate events, facilitating the flow of the action while doing their best to draw as little attention to themselves as possible. You know the referee has had a good game when you simply didn’t notice he was there and the same is true of a good screenwriter. But if there was ever a case of the writer speaking directly out of the mouth of the characters then Juno is it. The impossibly named Juno MacGuff comes across as a great many things: brave, smart and compassionate. But one thing she spectacularly fails to come across as is a 16-year-old high school girl and it is a testament to Page’s great ability that she could carry the film off while weighed down by a screenplay littered with distractions and attention seeking dialogue. Diablo Cody seems so desperate for some sort of validation from her audience that she is completely unable to detach herself from the story she is telling and ends up sounding like the worst kind of writer - one whose material so insists on itself that she not only tries to tell the adults what all the kids are into these days, she tries to tell the kids, too.

--------------------------------------


Simon Beaufoy: Looking for the Perfect Love Story

A Dustin Lance Black article called 30 Years Later
So much of what I’ve done in this business up to this point has been to make myself ready to take on the overwhelming responsibility of retelling Harvey’s story. It took many years of research, digging through archives, driving up to San Francisco in search of Harvey’s old friends and foes, charging a couple of nights at the Becks motor lodge on Market and Castro with my principal source, Harvey’s political protégé, Cleve Jones. What I discovered on those trips wasn’t the legend of the man that I’d heard in adolescence. What I discovered was a deeply flawed man, a man who had grown up closeted, a man who failed in business and in his relationships, a man who got a very late start. Through Harvey’s friends, foes, lovers, and opponents, I met the real Harvey Milk.

Also - Hollywood slowly opening door to gay drama


Interview with Benjamin Button Screenwriter Eric Roth

Playwright Robert Anderson Dies at 91
He also wrote the film and television versions of most of his works, earning an Oscar nomination and WGA Award for I Never Sang For My Father. He also received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay for The Nun's Story and a Golden Globe Award nomination for The Sand Pebbles.

SAG rejects 'final offer' from AMPTP

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang - Screenwriter Sued by Ex-Girlfriend for $5 Million
Hollywood screenwriter Shane Black is being accused of terrorizing his former girlfriend, Sonya Popovich. She alleges he physically assaulted her on several occasions, often in a drug-fueled rage, and at one point even wielded a loaded weapon in her direction.

Colin Farrell splits with writer girlfriend, Emma Forrest
Actor Colin Farrell has reportedly split from his writer girlfriend Emma Forrest, after dating her for a year. According to US magazine In Touch, Forrest confirmed that the pair are no longer an item. Reports suggested that the split occurred because Forrest was unhappy with Farrell's lack of commitment to the relationship. A source said: "He would not introduce her to his family. She was also upset that he didn't thank her at the Golden Globe Awards."


Look. There’s an Organization of Black Screenwriters. Who knew?

Catching Up With... Fanboys writer Ernie Cline
So, Lucas said, “Sure. Why not?” And that changed everything. For a while it looked like DreamWorks was going to make it. They told me Steven Spielberg was going to take the script home and read it. And I was like, “That’s not even possible.” But it was. It happened. But for whatever reason, DreamWorks said no. But somehow the script got to Harvey Weinstein and he read it. He flipped out for it. He loved it. He read it on a Friday night and by Saturday night he was on the phone with the producer saying, "I want to make this movie with you guys." That was 2005. And within four months they were shooting the movie. They started casting. And suddenly it was Carrie Fisher: Princess Leia was going to be in it. And Lando Calrissian, and William Shatner, and all these great actors. And I got to go and be an extra. I played one of the Star Trek guys in Riverside, Iowa. The reason I did that was because I could be in a scene with Shatner, not knowing that the day I’d get to meet him I would have to be in a Star Trek outfit, which was embarrassing.

Batman 3 Script Scoop
IGN Movies has learned that, as of right now, Christopher Nolan is the only screenwriter attached to Batman 3. Studios and guild members are required to submit work lists to the guilds of the projects that they are on. IGN has learned that a work list from Warner Bros. was submitted last week listing Christopher Nolan as the sole screenwriter on Batman 3. From what we've learned, The Dark Knight's Jonathan Nolan or David Goyer aren't officially involved in the script phase as of yet.


David Hayter talks Metal Gear Solid and Lost Planet Movies
Yes, very much like Dune. I don't have any original ideas! (laughs) Fortunately, I work in Hollywood and they don't want any.

David Hayter Insists Fox More Satanic Than Most Studios


Why Alan Moore Hates Comic-Book Movies
“The main reason why comics can’t work as films is largely because everybody who is ultimately in control of the film industry is an accountant. These people may be able to add up and balance the books, but in every other area they are stupid and incompetent and don’t have any talent. And this is why a film is going to be a work that’s done by dozens and dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of people. They’re going to show it to the backers and then they’re going to say, we want this in it, and this in it... and where’s the monster?”

BTW - Jon Savage traces the history of the smiley face.

Soderbergh and Dobbs battle in The Limey commentary
But even by his high standards, Soderbergh’s commentary with screenwriter Lem Dobbs on 1999’s The Limey is something special, a heated feature-length argument that couldn’t be further from the ego-stroking sycophancy of most tracks. It’s a case study in what happens to a script after it’s run through the sausage factory of production; even with a sympathetic director at the helm—Soderbergh championed Dobbs’ script for Kafka before making it his second feature, and the two remain friends—the writer will always get the shaft in the end. That’s why writers tend to be miserable cranks, and Dobbs is as cranky as they come; for his part, Soderbergh is magnanimous enough to take his licks and give a little back in return. Here’s Dobbs near the beginning of the commentary, setting the tone: “I’ll say, in your defense and mine, that screenwriting is a hopeless profession. My God, if Robert Towne can complain about Chinatown to this day, what do you want? Didn’t I fax you that interview with [writer] Alain Robbe-Grillet complaining about Last Year At Marienbad? [Director] Alain Resnais just totally fucked it up, Delphine Seyrig was completely wrong, ruined the whole movie. So if the screenwriters of Last Year At Marienbad and Chinatown can complain about what directors did, then what do you expect?”

Superman Returns & X2: X-Men United Writer To Adapt Dead At 17

Hardy Men Gets A New Screenwriter
When we first heard about Hardy Men, it was well before Tropic Thunder, and the pairing of Ben Stiller and Tom Cruise in a buddy comedy sounded totally bizarre. Now, on the other side of Les Grossman, the idea sounds inspired-- and a new writer has been hired to hopefully get the project off the ground. Ed Solomon, who wrote Men in Black as well as Eddie Murphy's upcoming Imagine That, will try his hand at the script, which was mostly recently retooled by Mr. and Mrs. Smith writer Simon Kinberg. THR notes that Stiller and Cruise are still lined up to star, with Night at the Museum director Shawn Levy planning to direct.


Disney hires new scribe for 20000 Leagues

How to Write a Great Twist For Your Third Act
One way to improve a screenplay is to find a way to look at it from another viewpoint – whether the story is to be optimistic or pessimistic. If we take the notion of optimism versus pessimism and look to Aristotle, we can come up with a truly original ending for our scripts. Aristotle defined a "reversal" as being a plot change by which the action veers round to its opposite. According to Aristotle, the best reversals are caused by the main character’s recognition of something that causes the reversal, so it doesn’t come out of left field, that is, it must be subject to the boundaries of probability or necessity. The reversal arises out of the recognition of something that could have been seen before, but was not. This is where we reach those edges of boundaries that will help you find that original twist you were looking for.

History of Poop in Movies

Details about Spielberg's Lincoln

--------------------------------------

On the Contest Circuit:

Acclaim Announces Feature Contest Winners

Acclaim Announces TV Contest Winners

Two Scriptapalooza Alumni Get Projects Produced

CWA Announces 2008 Successes

First Glance Announces Feature Contest Winner

ScriptapaloozaTV Announces Contest Results

All Access Competition Announces Semifinalists

Free Screenplay Contest Announces Winners

Kairos Prize Announces Competition Winners

Big Bear Lake Announces 2008 Contest Results

American Screenwriting Competition Announces Semifinalists

L.A. Comedy Scripts Announces Finalists

Cowrite Announces Week 2 winner

Female Eye Announces Screenplay Winners

HSI Announces Latest Contest Winner

--------------------------------------

And Finally…