It's been a while since I plugged the Broken Projector podcast, but last week Scott Beggs and Geoff LaTulippe decided to take on the challenge of answering every screenwriting question you could hope to know.
More accurately, they created an archive of the questions they get asked EVERY TIME they open up for listener questions about screenwriting. It feels like they were had the same sorts of thoughts that led me to write this post last week about how to ask a useful question. Below is a breakdown of the episode question-by-question, with timecodes. It's worth a listen not just for the answers, but understanding the kinds of questions that get asked again and again, and why some of those questions will never have a satisfactory answer.
An intro note on methodology and where to learn formatting [0:00 – 4:15]
A way to rethink the questions you’re asking [4:15 – 9:10]
“Do I have to move to LA?” [9:10 – 11:28]
“How do I get an agent/manager?” [11:28 – 18:10]
“Where do I find scripts?” [18:10 – 20:45]
“What screenwriting books are the ‘right’ ones?” [20:45 – 24:00]
“How do I pitch?” [24:00 – 25:50]
“Should I go to film school?” [25:50 – 31:05]
“I just finished my first script. What do I do now?” [31:05 – 37:45]
“How do I get an actor/actress to read my script?” [37:45 – 44:35]
“How do I get a job as a TV writer’s assistant?” [44:35 – 50:05]
“How did you get your start?” [50:05 – 54:55]
“How do you come up with your ideas?” [54:55 – 59:10]
“What are agents/managers/producers looking for?” [59:10 – 61:05]
“What genre should I write?” [61:05 – 61:10]
“How do you impress a reader?” [61:10 – 63:15]
“How do you expose yourself personally in your writing?” [63:15 – 68:45]
Closing thoughts [68:45 – 73:30]
The podcast is embedded at this link, but you can also subscribe to One Perfect Pod wherever you get your podcasts.
Showing posts with label Broken Projector. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Broken Projector. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
Monday, November 17, 2014
I talk MICHAEL F-ING BAY on the Broken Projector podcast
Continuing my press for MICHAEL F-ING BAY: The Unheralded Genius in Michael Bay's Films, I appeared last week on the excellent podcast Broken Projector. Host Scott Beegs of Film School Rejects was kind enough to ask some good questions about my book and Michael Bay's oeuvre in general.
On any given week, Broken Projector is a must-listen, but I especially hope you'll check out this week's show.
You can find the episode embedded at Film School Rejects here.
Download the episode directly here.
Buy MICHAEL F-ING BAY: The Unheralded Genius in Michael Bay's Films here.
Here's my post announcing MICHAEL F-ING BAY: The Unheralded Genius in Michael Bay's Films.
On any given week, Broken Projector is a must-listen, but I especially hope you'll check out this week's show.
You can find the episode embedded at Film School Rejects here.
Download the episode directly here.
Buy MICHAEL F-ING BAY: The Unheralded Genius in Michael Bay's Films here.
Here's my post announcing MICHAEL F-ING BAY: The Unheralded Genius in Michael Bay's Films.
Monday, March 31, 2014
The need for truth in "based on a true story"
Let me give you a little background to this post. A little over a week ago, my friends Geoff LaTulippe and Scott Beggs over at Broken Projector discussed the issue of fidelity to the truth in content that's labeled as "based on a true story." In particular, they were discussing the case of a twitter account whose author claimed to be dying of terminal cancer. Those who followed the feed found it to be inspirational and quite moving, and they were saddened when a final tweet announced the author's passing.
It didn't take long for people to begin questioning the veracity of the account. As the story became less and less plausible upon examination, the followers started to feel duped and hoodwinked. Geoff and Scott batted this issue around, with Geoff essentially taking the position, "Who cares? Does it matter?" Is there a responsibility to be 100% accurate when telling a story that's ostensibly based on actual events? They invited their listeners to write in with their thoughts on that debate.
This happened to be an issue I've given a lot of thought over the years, so I dashed off a not-small email to the fine gents. On their show this week, they gave the issue another airing and encouraged me to post the letter in full on my blog. Then to drive home the point, they got on Twitter and attempted to get their followers to bully me into posting it.
Message received. What follows is the email I sent them, with a few revisions and additions for clarity:
The first time I can ever really remember thinking about this question was when I was in middle school and ran across a Roger Ebert piece on JFK. The whole piece is worth reading in full, but I'll reproduce a few key paragraphs below:
"Their criticisms all boiled down to a couple of key points: They felt Stone's movie was based on unsupportable speculation, and they believed his film's hero, former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, was an unscrupulous publicity seeker who drummed up his celebrated case against Clay Shaw out of thin air.
"These points are no doubt well-taken. I believe they are irrelevant to the film, which is not a documentary, not a historical study and not a courtroom presentation, but a movie that weaves a myth around the Kennedy assassination - a myth in which the slain leader was the victim of a monstrous conspiracy. The pollsters tell us that most Americans believe this anyway. Even Tom Wicker, down deep in his piece, says he does not believe the Warren Commission's finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Well, who does? And yet the image of Oswald as the lone killer has been the official establishment myth for 28 years. Is it such a terrible thing Stone has done, to weave a countermyth?
"Here on the movie beat, I always sort of quail when anybody makes a film that ventures out of pure Hollywood fantasy and into the real lives of the experts in the front section of the newspaper. I'm sure to be treated to many analytical studies of the factual accuracy of the film, in which the writers may be sound in their knowledge of history, but seem to have little idea why they or anyone else in the audience really goes to see a movie. People will not buy tickets to "JFK" because they think Oliver Stone knows who killed Kennedy. And when "Babe" comes out this summer, and inspires all sorts of disillusioned analysis on the sports page, that movie's factual accuracy will have nothing to do with the tickets it sells, either.
"People go to the movies to be told a story. If it is a good story, they will believe it for as long as the movie lasts. If it is a very good story, it may linger in their memory somewhat longer. In the case of "JFK," which I think is a terrific example of storytelling, what they will remember is not the countless facts and conjectures that the movie's hero spins in his lonely campaign to solve the assassination. What they will remember (or, if they are young enough, what they will learn) is how we all felt on Nov. 22, 1963, and why for all the years afterward a lie has seemed to lodge in the national throat - the lie that we know the truth about who murdered Kennedy."
A perspective like that is why I'm generally pretty forgiving about "inaccuracies" in movies like CAPTAIN PHILLIPS. When the distortions are in service to the story and as long as nothing truly batshit happens like aliens rescuing the ship, I can live with some fudging in terms of specific characters and attitudes. But then I can't help but remember that in another review of a movie based on a real-life incident, Ebert muses that "for an entire generation, this will be how they remember the truth." I can't remember the film or the real life incident, unfortunately. But I get where this is coming from - if APOLLO 13 implied that the malfunction was the work of Russian spies looking to cripple the NASA space program, that would be beyond the pale, no matter how much drama it made for.
So to some degree, I think that the need for fidelity in filmmaking varies with the scope of the incident and the significance of the incident to the larger world. It'd be easy to say a blanket "Who cares?" but I don't think it's that black-and-white. Now just to contradict myself, I'll revisit an issue that was batted around a few weeks ago. The whole story with THE BRINGING really strikes me as distasteful. To take a real life incident where someone actually died and use their real names while wrapping it up in a supernatural context strikes me as really distasteful. Even though this real-life story is relatively unknown (I hadn't heard of it until the film), it bothers me that the script seems to capitalize on that tragedy when it would be so easy to change the names and merely allow the story to be vaguely inspired by the real incident, as most LAW & ORDER eps are.
And yet, I don't have a problem with the myriad of time-travel stories that deal with someone going back to the Kennedy Assassination, even when the story reveals that the traveler ends up being the assassin. I recognize there are a lot of contradictions in my stance.
With regard to the internet hoaxes discussed on the podcast, I think that it's ridiculous to get fired up over things like if Diane in 7A was real or not. If someone was using that viral lie to solicit money or otherwise profit from it, then I'd have an issue. In general, most harmless Twitter hoaxes don't bug me. This also includes THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. I thought it was brilliant how they tried to add some verisimilitude to the whole thing by building that internet rabbit hole for people to fall down if they attempted to do an internet search on that story.
When it comes to someone like James Frey, though, fuck that guy. I mean, it turns out that lying to Oprah is the least of that guy's sins, but I think once you've gone on Oprah and tried to pass your hack writing off as a real memoir, you deserve what you get when people call it out. If the BLAIR WITCH filmmakers appeared on Oprah under the pretense they wanted to raise awareness about these missing kids and how Maryland was doing nothing to find them, then they'd be rightly drawn and quartered when the truth came out.
(And as indicated, my disgust with Frey is at an extreme because of the story in the link above. I think people who prey on naive writers are the lowest of the low. Taking advantage of someone's naivete in order to get them to sign over basically all rights to their creative work with an insulting low pay scale is really offensive. As far as I'm concerned it's indefensible. For a fellow writer to do that to people who look up to him as a mentor is about the slimiest thing ever. So yeah, fuck that guy.)
So I don't know. I think it would help if there was agreement on what consisted a major inaccuracy in an adaptation. I'm tired of every Oscar season turning into hit piece after hit piece on these "based on a true story" films. Sometimes the changes are major, but when we get to stuff like nitpicking deliberate timeline inaccuracies or composite characters, it gets out of hand.
In the second podcast, Geoff touched in this and said that he had no issue with those kinds of articles if they approached it from a more academic standpoint. In other words, if they come from the angle of "Look at what they changed and understand why some of that was necessary," it could be educational about the process of writing a script. Too often, these pieces carry the subtext of "They changed a few facts so this movie doesn't deserve an Oscar." I'm not sure that should be one of the main criteria when evaluation how effective a film is as a piece of drama.
So what are your feelings on adapting true stories? I'm curious to see where some of you draw the line.
It didn't take long for people to begin questioning the veracity of the account. As the story became less and less plausible upon examination, the followers started to feel duped and hoodwinked. Geoff and Scott batted this issue around, with Geoff essentially taking the position, "Who cares? Does it matter?" Is there a responsibility to be 100% accurate when telling a story that's ostensibly based on actual events? They invited their listeners to write in with their thoughts on that debate.
This happened to be an issue I've given a lot of thought over the years, so I dashed off a not-small email to the fine gents. On their show this week, they gave the issue another airing and encouraged me to post the letter in full on my blog. Then to drive home the point, they got on Twitter and attempted to get their followers to bully me into posting it.
Message received. What follows is the email I sent them, with a few revisions and additions for clarity:
The first time I can ever really remember thinking about this question was when I was in middle school and ran across a Roger Ebert piece on JFK. The whole piece is worth reading in full, but I'll reproduce a few key paragraphs below:
"Their criticisms all boiled down to a couple of key points: They felt Stone's movie was based on unsupportable speculation, and they believed his film's hero, former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, was an unscrupulous publicity seeker who drummed up his celebrated case against Clay Shaw out of thin air.
"These points are no doubt well-taken. I believe they are irrelevant to the film, which is not a documentary, not a historical study and not a courtroom presentation, but a movie that weaves a myth around the Kennedy assassination - a myth in which the slain leader was the victim of a monstrous conspiracy. The pollsters tell us that most Americans believe this anyway. Even Tom Wicker, down deep in his piece, says he does not believe the Warren Commission's finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Well, who does? And yet the image of Oswald as the lone killer has been the official establishment myth for 28 years. Is it such a terrible thing Stone has done, to weave a countermyth?
"Here on the movie beat, I always sort of quail when anybody makes a film that ventures out of pure Hollywood fantasy and into the real lives of the experts in the front section of the newspaper. I'm sure to be treated to many analytical studies of the factual accuracy of the film, in which the writers may be sound in their knowledge of history, but seem to have little idea why they or anyone else in the audience really goes to see a movie. People will not buy tickets to "JFK" because they think Oliver Stone knows who killed Kennedy. And when "Babe" comes out this summer, and inspires all sorts of disillusioned analysis on the sports page, that movie's factual accuracy will have nothing to do with the tickets it sells, either.
"People go to the movies to be told a story. If it is a good story, they will believe it for as long as the movie lasts. If it is a very good story, it may linger in their memory somewhat longer. In the case of "JFK," which I think is a terrific example of storytelling, what they will remember is not the countless facts and conjectures that the movie's hero spins in his lonely campaign to solve the assassination. What they will remember (or, if they are young enough, what they will learn) is how we all felt on Nov. 22, 1963, and why for all the years afterward a lie has seemed to lodge in the national throat - the lie that we know the truth about who murdered Kennedy."
A perspective like that is why I'm generally pretty forgiving about "inaccuracies" in movies like CAPTAIN PHILLIPS. When the distortions are in service to the story and as long as nothing truly batshit happens like aliens rescuing the ship, I can live with some fudging in terms of specific characters and attitudes. But then I can't help but remember that in another review of a movie based on a real-life incident, Ebert muses that "for an entire generation, this will be how they remember the truth." I can't remember the film or the real life incident, unfortunately. But I get where this is coming from - if APOLLO 13 implied that the malfunction was the work of Russian spies looking to cripple the NASA space program, that would be beyond the pale, no matter how much drama it made for.
So to some degree, I think that the need for fidelity in filmmaking varies with the scope of the incident and the significance of the incident to the larger world. It'd be easy to say a blanket "Who cares?" but I don't think it's that black-and-white. Now just to contradict myself, I'll revisit an issue that was batted around a few weeks ago. The whole story with THE BRINGING really strikes me as distasteful. To take a real life incident where someone actually died and use their real names while wrapping it up in a supernatural context strikes me as really distasteful. Even though this real-life story is relatively unknown (I hadn't heard of it until the film), it bothers me that the script seems to capitalize on that tragedy when it would be so easy to change the names and merely allow the story to be vaguely inspired by the real incident, as most LAW & ORDER eps are.
And yet, I don't have a problem with the myriad of time-travel stories that deal with someone going back to the Kennedy Assassination, even when the story reveals that the traveler ends up being the assassin. I recognize there are a lot of contradictions in my stance.
With regard to the internet hoaxes discussed on the podcast, I think that it's ridiculous to get fired up over things like if Diane in 7A was real or not. If someone was using that viral lie to solicit money or otherwise profit from it, then I'd have an issue. In general, most harmless Twitter hoaxes don't bug me. This also includes THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. I thought it was brilliant how they tried to add some verisimilitude to the whole thing by building that internet rabbit hole for people to fall down if they attempted to do an internet search on that story.
When it comes to someone like James Frey, though, fuck that guy. I mean, it turns out that lying to Oprah is the least of that guy's sins, but I think once you've gone on Oprah and tried to pass your hack writing off as a real memoir, you deserve what you get when people call it out. If the BLAIR WITCH filmmakers appeared on Oprah under the pretense they wanted to raise awareness about these missing kids and how Maryland was doing nothing to find them, then they'd be rightly drawn and quartered when the truth came out.
(And as indicated, my disgust with Frey is at an extreme because of the story in the link above. I think people who prey on naive writers are the lowest of the low. Taking advantage of someone's naivete in order to get them to sign over basically all rights to their creative work with an insulting low pay scale is really offensive. As far as I'm concerned it's indefensible. For a fellow writer to do that to people who look up to him as a mentor is about the slimiest thing ever. So yeah, fuck that guy.)
So I don't know. I think it would help if there was agreement on what consisted a major inaccuracy in an adaptation. I'm tired of every Oscar season turning into hit piece after hit piece on these "based on a true story" films. Sometimes the changes are major, but when we get to stuff like nitpicking deliberate timeline inaccuracies or composite characters, it gets out of hand.
In the second podcast, Geoff touched in this and said that he had no issue with those kinds of articles if they approached it from a more academic standpoint. In other words, if they come from the angle of "Look at what they changed and understand why some of that was necessary," it could be educational about the process of writing a script. Too often, these pieces carry the subtext of "They changed a few facts so this movie doesn't deserve an Oscar." I'm not sure that should be one of the main criteria when evaluation how effective a film is as a piece of drama.
So what are your feelings on adapting true stories? I'm curious to see where some of you draw the line.
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Hear me discuss Amazon Studios on the Broken Projector podcast
I really should have linked to this sooner considering that posts about Amazon Studios tend to be among my most-viewed. This week, I had the honor of being the guest on Scott Beggs and Geoff LaTulippe's podcast Broken Projector. Screenwriter Justin Marks also joined the conversation as we weighed the pros and cons of Amazon Studios' new venture into producing 14 pilots and then crowdsourcing the development of those pilots.
You can find the embedded post here.
You can download it directly here.
You can subscribe via iTunes here.
Broken Projector is one of my favorite podcasts, so it was a great pleasure to be invited on the show. If you love movies, this is a podcast you need to be listening to every week. As a bonus, you now know the proper "voice" to hear in your head as you read Geoff LaTulippe's tweets.
You can find the embedded post here.
You can download it directly here.
You can subscribe via iTunes here.
Broken Projector is one of my favorite podcasts, so it was a great pleasure to be invited on the show. If you love movies, this is a podcast you need to be listening to every week. As a bonus, you now know the proper "voice" to hear in your head as you read Geoff LaTulippe's tweets.
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