» Posts Tagged ‘hollywood’
Filmmaking has gone through many great evolutionary events in its over 130 years of existence. It has seen technological advances: from Edison’s Kinetograph, (arguably) the first motion picture camera to the Blackmagic Cinema Camera, from exhibiting films on a Kinetoscope, to exhibiting them on smartphones. However, one change that has yet to really be made in the film world is its presence of female directors. Fandor released an infographic that breaks down the distribution of women in both independent cinema and Hollywood, and the figures may surprise you. More »
With news surfacing a few days ago about Lynne Ramsay’s mysterious ’no-show’ on the set of her first gig as a director-for-hire Jane Got A Gun, many media outlets are reporting it as ‘irresponsible’ behavior. Speculation abounds. The ‘feminist western’ with Natalie Portman did not shoot as planned last Monday, leaving a crew of 150 wondering why they didn’t have a director and resulting in sending 175 extras home on the first day. Lynne had reportedly been having a feud with producer Scott Steindorff over the privilege of the all-important final cut. In the wake of this news that could either be interpreted as a middle finger to Hollywood or an artist’s attempt to grasp the ideal, it’s interesting to revisit this recently-published 2011 interview from DP/30, below: More »
'Before VFX' Blog Gives Us a Glimpse of Blockbuster Movies Without the Visual Effects
If you’ve ever heard someone play an electric guitar totally unplugged, tasted raw cookie dough, or planted a seed, you know the feeling. There is potential there, but something is clearly missing. This is the exact feeling you get scrolling through the Tumblr blog ‘Before VFX.’ The title just about says it all, along with its brief self-description: “Blockbuster movies without visual effects.” The core or basic element of a shot is there, for certain, but in each case, it’s obvious there’s plenty of additional magic and ingredients that must go into the shot before it can be called complete. Check out a few examples from Before VFX below. More »
There are plenty of vital positions in the entertainment industry we inevitably end up appreciating less than we probably should. So much has to go on in the background for each element to crystallize and become integrated into the final product in an organized way. The agent is a large part of this — the intermediary between the creative artist (writer, director, actor, etc.) and what their next gig will be — or, from another perspective, where their next paycheck will come from. Thanks to The Hollywood Reporter (you can watch the other roundtables we’ve shared here), we are now privy to a great deal of anecdotes, recollections, and candor from a number of high-profile agents, all of whom happen to be women. More »
Getting a film made in Hollywood is no small task, and more often than not, many projects wind up in what many call “Development Hell.” This is where a project gets stuck in an endless loop of nonsense that usually involves a back and forth among the various individuals who are working on a particular film. Joshua Marston, writer/director of Maria Full of Grace and The Forgiveness of Blood (which also happens to be available from the Criterion Collection), has put together a graphic giving a (only slightly) tongue-in-cheek step by step process to getting a film green-lit in Hollywood. More »
'The Quest': Spend 6 Months Being Mentored by Hollywood Screenwriter Scott Myers
Speaking of Scott Myers and the Go Into The Story blog, Scott (writer of K-9, Alaska, and Trojan War) is doing something that I’ve never really seen done before at this scale, and with no entry fee. Starting today, he’s going to give four screenwriters the chance to write a screenplay and be mentored by him for a total of 24 weeks. I’ve been following this for the past week, but Scott has been writing posts describing the foundations of screenwriting and what he expects from those who submit — and they are very important to increase your odds of being picked. So what is the contest, that Scott is calling “The Quest”? I’ll let him explain in his own words below: More »
What Hollywood Script Readers Really Think About Your Screenplay
Getting a producer to read your script can be almost as daunting a challenge as getting beyond the blank page. But before you even think about a producer reading your script, you need to get your script past the script readers. Contrary to what you may believe, script readers want your script to be good because they want to read good scripts. Recently, Scott Myers of the Go Into the Story blog on The Black List stumbled into a late night Twitter conversation with The Bitter Script Reader, Nate Winslow, and Amanda Pendolino, three Hollywood script readers, and he captured their conversation for our educational purposes. Here are some of the highlights: More »
Hollywood’s accounting practices are so infamously convoluted that you could write a book on them. Two, in fact: author Edward Jay Epstein has written two books on the topic, The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood and The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies (with an update of the latter on the way). I read his first book, but by this point my memory’s a bit hazy, so listening to the latest episode of the Script Notes podcast by screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin was a great refresher on the topic of where the money goes in Hollywood. More »
A $160 million movie that grossed $825 million worldwide isn’t exactly DIY filmmaking, but because I wrote about the film when it came out — and because this is just really cool — here’s a behind-the-scenes look at Inception’s “horizontal rotating corridor” sequence: More »
If you’re a screenwriter and you don’t live in LA, odds are you’ll be making a trip — or many trips — to LA in order to take meetings. 26-year old screenwriter Bradley Jackson (@BradleyJackson) has written a great guest post on John August’s blog about how to make the most of such a trip. Speaking from personal experience, when I was in LA with the project 3rd Rail, we had eleven meetings in three days: we had our pitch, we had a borrowed car, we had a primitive phone-based GPS, we had a full docket of meetings all around town, and we didn’t have a clue as to how to pitch or what to expect. Bradley’s post includes a lot of useful advice for screenwriters who might find themselves in a similar situation, and I wish his post existed before I went. Here’s one of his tips (a short film he wrote and directed is also embedded below). More »
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