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Jan
14
2011
 
Movie Cloning (Avoiding Cliches)Posted by: screenwritingfromiowa in Screenwriting From Iowa“Yeah I think I know what my father meant when he sang about his lost highway…” Hank Williams Jr. All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down) “You must break from cliché. You must ‘Give us the same thing…only different.’” Blake Snyder Save the Cat The movie Country Strong is no Tender Mercies. And there are [...]
Jan
14
2011
Movie Cloning (Aaron Sorkin)Posted by: screenwritingfromiowa in Screenwriting From Iowa “What jumped out at me (about the 14 page treatment for Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires) wasn’t Facebook. Facebook wasn’t something I knew a lot about when I started. Frankly, it’s not something I know a whole lot about now. I know more about Facebook in 2003-04 than I do in 2010. But [...]
Jan
14
2011
Movie Cloning (Blake Snyder)Posted by: screenwritingfromiowa in Screenwriting From Iowa“Listen to Spielberg or Scorsese talk about movies. They know and can quote from hundreds. And I don’t mean quote as in ‘recite lines from.’ I mean quote as in ‘explain how each movie works.’ Movies are intricately made emotion machines. They are Swiss watches of precise gears and spinning wheels that make them tick. [...] “Long ago, when wishing still could lead to something, there lived a king….” Grimms’ Fairy Tales, The Frog King “The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a certain king, who made a marriage feast for his son….” Matthew 22:1, a parable told by Jesus Half of the time I read Joseph Campbell (The Hero [...] “Stop me if this seems familiar: There’s a new cop comedy coming out that pairs a loose-cannon SNL veteran with a growling, resentful partner in a semi-sendup of the 80’s buddy comedy genre. “ Kyle Buchanan The Other Guys Trailer: Cop Out with Jokes I didn’t see Cop Out last year, but I’ve read that it [...] I didn’t intend to spend several days exploring movie cloning, but it’s turned into quite a rabbit hole of information. On top of the words that I listed in part 1 that explain why some movies remind you of other movies (remake, update, homage, rip-off, mash-up, inspired by, parallels, movie mapping, story patterns, story echo, [...] “When a hero starts his life as an orphan, it is to show he has nothing to lose. He is unattached and unencumbered by family ties and social obligations, so he is usually portrayed as an orphan to indicate that he is not saddled with the normal attachments the rest of us have. This sense of [...]
Dec
13
2009
Character Flaws 101 (tip #30)Posted by: screenwritingfromiowa in Screenwriting From Iowa“Well. nobody’s perfect.”
Dec
12
2009
Screenwriting Quote of the Day #118 (William Goldman)Posted by: screenwritingfromiowa in Screenwriting From Iowa“Let me tell you the super story that Cliff Robertson told me a dozen years ago, and I think I’m giving the credit properly. It was a story he had been told by Rosalind Russell. I think he met her during the filming of Picnic. She said, ‘Do you know what makes a good movie?’ [...]
Dec
11
2009
Writing Quote of the Day #9 (Cheyefsky)Posted by: screenwritingfromiowa in Screenwriting From IowaThe Craft of the Screenwriter was one of the first books I ever bought on screenwriting. It’s older than some of the readers of this blog. I picked it up when I was in film school in 1982 when screenwriting resources were limited. (The Craft of the Screenwriter is worth having in your library and [...] |
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