The 2011 Black List is here! Congratulations to all of the writers who made the list.
For those who don’t know, the Black List compiles the “most liked” unproduced (as of voting time) screenplays of the year, as voted on by studio, agency and production company executives in Hollywood. What began as an underground project has become a major announcement for the development community that is reported on by sources such as The Hollywood Reporter.
A clunky first draft is a million times more valuable than a perfect 10 pages or only 3/4 of a script that that never gets finished.
Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon are a very successful screenwriting team whose films have grossed $1.4 billion worldwide (with the Night at the Museum franchise, their creation, being the heavy lifters in their filmography). Garant and Lennon met in 1988 while at NYU film school and joined with other students to form the comedy group, “The State,” which would later become an MTV sketch comedy series and land them a movie deal. Garant and Lennon were the only two members of the group with the discipline to sit down and write a feature-length screenplay, but they were newcomers and the deal fell through (in their words, they “would go out to L.A. and people would yell at us” because their ideas were just too weird for mainstream producers). read more
I had the opportunity to visit the set of one of my favorite shows on television: the sitcom “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” which shoots on the Fox lot. A group of us observed the shooting of a very funny scene in Paddy’s pub (I wish I could tell you the premise, but I can’t reveal any spoilers), toured the set and interviewed the cast. read more
I bought some old comics from a used book store over Christmas for nostalgia’s sake (and hoping the Wolverine guest appearances might be worth something) and I came across this gem in a John Byrne Namor comic from 1991: Stan Lee announces the upcoming Spider Man movie directed by James Cameron!
If you aspire to get paid for your writing, you will need to balance your craft development with marketing efforts. We writers are often most comfortable alone in front of our laptops, so it’s tough to put ourselves and our work out there. But you have to do it. There’s no way around it. read more
It’s that time of year again and we’re all making our New Year’s Resolutions.
Or are you avoiding them, like me? (In my defense, I’m just now finishing up a writing assignment and I wanted to maintain my focus on that, so suck on that, haters.)
Ahem. So…let’s give each other a kick in the pants, shall we? Here’s some advice, take it or leave it… read more
The film was obviously stretched out. Each scene played much slower than it needed to, and in my estimation was cut slower than the previous films have been paced.
The film was obviously shot with 3d in mind, and perhaps even with 3D cameras, although the studio denies this, as there were so many frickin’ things flying at the screen! Even the blocking of actors in the static shots and the resolution of the images, in general, looked composed for 3D.
Add these two things up and you have a huge commercial cash grab that, in my opinion, cheapens one of the great fantasy sagas of our time.read more
You should be focused on writing a great script in a commercially proven genre at a low to medium-size budget. If you hand a big superhero script to an agent or manager they’re going to hand it back and say “I can’t sell this. You’re not a name and this is not a branded property.”
