I am in the evidently crowded camp of people wary of many a trailer because they reveal too much of the plot. However, I do still enjoy trailers that give you the feel of the film journey they want you to take: you have an idea of the characters, the genres, the tropes to be honored, the tropes to be subverted, and the overall tone. These days, the trailers that pull this off are usually…
I’ve been thinking of Monday’s post about Roger Corman and how B movies are chock full of tropes. Tropes for days! This reminded me of another Corman story where the movie poster was created before the film: it provided the inspiration for what the film would be. I forget the specifics. It might have been a giant dinosaur rampaging downtown a la Godzilla or even Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. A delightful creature feature trope to…
Roger Corman, the producer of close to 500 feature films and the director of over 50, has died at the age of 98. You can read obituaries and appreciations about his career from: A common theme amongst the pieces is not only how prodigious his filmography is, but how various films within it represent “the break” for a nontrivial amount of filmmakers from directors like Francis Ford Coppola to Martin Scorsese to James Cameron as…
I came across Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s “Eleven Laws of Showrunning” in the context of the entertainment industry not having the best management training for showrunners, the creative captains who steer a narrative show through all aspects of pre-production, production, and post-production. One of the notions raised in yesterday’s post was the fact that, well, a lot of people in a lot of industries are promoted to a management position… and the results are less than ideal.…
One of the nice outputs of reading Maureen Ryan’s Burn it Down, that I referenced last week, was to learn about Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s guide “Eleven Laws of Showrunning.” (PDF link) This guide was mentioned in the context of needing good management. So many showrunners are writers who have created the ideas of the show and are expert at both writing and solving writing problems, but they so often have zero managerial experience. Not only that,…
While I was covering the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes last year, an obvious question for a follow-up was what the future of Hollywood would be. While there’s certainly been a lot of pieces since the end of the strikes, one of the conversations I found that touched on this was with Adam Conover on his Factually podcast. It’s from August of last year, arguably during the height of the strikes. I actually linked to it…
I’ve been working on additional film industry posts, but in the meantime, this brief article about an adjacent industry caught my eye. Video games are a huge business — and from talking with some industry folks here and there, they experience some of the same bull that the film industry rank and file experience, so I read this piece by Lauren Morton for PC Gamer with that in mind.
The beginning of the end of Star Trek: Discovery‘s five-year mission streams this Thursday, April 4th. Originally, this fifth season of Discovery was apparently not intended to be the final one, which has caused all kinds of rampant speculation online. However, Trek overall, is not only not going anywhere, the powers that be want to maintain what isn’t just a franchise, but a veritable Intellectual Property (IP) empire. In a longform cover story for Variety,…
I’ve had the chance to catch up on a lot of Scriptnotes episodes over the past few weeks, which is always a good thing. Scriptnotes is a weekly podcast hosted by screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin which has been going on for over a decade and continues to have things about and interesting to screenwriters. As I’ve been meaning to do some posts about the future of Hollywood following last year’s strikes and the…
I’ve already done a couple public domain posts this year, notably the one for Public Domain Day and one on Monday about how people are, predictably, already having fun with the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse which entered the public domain in the U.S. on January 1st. But if you just want to get deeper into the legal philosophy behind public domain and also how that particularly involves Mickey Mouse, I have a couple…