Favorite Screenplays: Death Proof part 1
Quentin Tarantino’s movies are explosions of meaning. They spew significance of many different kinds in every direction on a shot-by-shot basis. Every element of every shot is fraught with references, usually to other movies. As such, they invite multiple readings from a number of different points of view and philosophical schools. For instance, I just read a book-length monograph on Pulp Fiction that examined every aspect of the movie but one — what the characters in the movie do and say.
I am not smart enough or cool enough to catch every one of the thousands of references that give Tarantino’s movies their postmodern punch — I’ve never seen a Shaw Bros kung-fu movie, for instance. So I will limit myself in this analysis to what I do understand: characters and their motivations. And I will leave the examination of angles, design choices, costumes, hairstyles, cultural freight and songs to others.
Screenwriting 101: The Pitch
What would you say are the top three pitfalls of pitching? Like, what are some rookie mistakes; what should come out of a successful pitch meeting; what are some things that you should never, never do? —pirateman
So in that situation [where some stranger walks in and ruins your pitch] do you just run with it and incorporate it or argue for your original point? —johnnycrulez
If you’ve been reading this journal for very long, you know that I’m the last guy you should ask for advice about pitching.
I hate pitching with a passionate, burning intensity. Partly because it’s a degrading, humiliating experience antithetical to good writing, and partly because I suck at it.
True Hollywood Stories: the Stranger in the Room
The producer calls the writer, says "I’ve got this fantastic property I want to develop." The writer says "Oh I love that property, by all means let’s do this." The producer and the writer have a series of meetings where they talk about what would make a good movie based on this property. The writer has ideas, the producer also has ideas, they work together to come to an agreement of what the movie should be. When they feel like they’ve got a firm handle on the idea, they call up the studio people and set up a meeting.
Sam’s Freighter
Click to enlarge.
Allow me a moment of paternal pride in the presentation of my son Sam’s "Freighter" painting and poem.
They were created as part of a class project studying "the harbor." The "harbor project" involved building a room-sized harbor out of wooden blocks, which each child building his or her own model boat — ferries, freighters, tugboats, fishing boats, pleasure craft, ocean liners — and then operating that boat within the "real world" of harbor commerce — for instance, Sam would collect money from exporters to haul cargo to Hawaii, and would pay a fee to the tugboat who took him out of the harbor and into the ocean, and also to the child who operated the dock in Hawaii, and so forth. It was pretty freakin’ awesome (each child also built their own fully-functioning lighthouse), but for me his evocative, vivid, carefully rendered painting of the freighter disaster was the high point of the show. Where most of the kids were content to present their subjects in a straightforward, "documentary" way ("I am a buoy, I keep the ships from running aground," etc) Sam both placed his subject into a narrative, and further, decided to make the narrative a disaster story, in the tradition of the disaster songs of the early 20th century, such as "The Ship Titanic" ("it was sad when the great ship went down").
Movie Night with Urbaniak: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
urbaniak and I are in the middle of a little John Ford – John Wayne retrospective. Last Thursday we watched The Searchers (because it’s out now on a spectacular blu-ray transfer) and tonight it was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. (We’ve just finished a little "30s Gangster Movie" retrospective, having watched Scarface, The Roaring Twenties and Little Caesar all in a row, with The Public Enemy still waiting in its shrinkwrap.)
Family Movie Night: Spinout
We’ve been having Family Movie Nights on weekends here at chez Alcott. Last weekend it was The Sound of Music, last night it was Monsters, Inc. (which deserves its own in-depth analysis for its ingenious plotting alone), and tonight, for some reason, the kids requested the 1966 Elvis Presley vehicle Spinout.
¿Qué el protagonista desea?
I was pleased as punch that What Does The Protagonist Want? was been linked to by the popular Spanish-language comics blog La Carcel de Papel.
I admit I was a little confused when I discovered the reference to me the other day — it’s exceedingly rare that anyone confuses me with an authority on comics, much less someone from the Spanish-speaking world. I read the piece with great interest, but alas, my Spanish is no better than what I have picked up by watching Dora the Explorer with my daughter.
The piece begins:
Anti-post
No blogging today as I catch up on some too-long-neglected work. Instead, why not head over to Obamicon and have some fun with turning your favorite photos into world-class inspirational political posters? And do remember to post your results here.
Superheroes: Batman Begins part 2
Yesterday I laid out the basic structure of Batman Begins. And while structure, as any screenwriter knows, is the name of the game for a successful screenplay, it is not the only thing that makes Begins such a detailed, well-considered movie.
Assuming the reader is already familiar with the structure, here are some observations I have in chronological order:
Superheroes: Batman Begins part 1
WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? Bruce Wayne, orphaned at eight, wants to overcome his fears and honor his father. This turns out to be rather more complicated than he suspects.
Batman Begins presents a radically new vision (for the movies, anyway — this stuff had been around the comics and the animated series for many years beforehand) of the Batman story, grounds it in a startling new sense of reality, presents not just a caped crusader and a wacky new villain but a whole wealth of good guys and bad guys, all following their stars in increasingly complex and interconnected ways, all of it bound together with the one fantastic conceit of a young billionaire who dresses up like a bat. It strongly reminds me of the Casino Royale re-boot, which brought the James Bond character to a new level of immediacy while retaining enough of the series’ fantastic hallmarks to still qualify as escapism. There is still enough silliness in Batman Begins to make it a recognizable "superhero movie" (grand, outsized villains with colorful personalities and an ambitious scheme to destroy an entire city, spectacular action sequences that teeter at the brink of believability, production design that borders upon science-fiction) but it’s presented with a sober, straightfaced earnestness that’s nothing less than shocking after the garish camp of Batman & Robin. The Dark Knight would successfully develop all of Begins‘s good ideas into an even more complex, startling vision of modern urban justice.