Bob Newhart has died. He wouldn’t want people to be anything other than low-key about it… perhaps a deadpan quip. And 94 years is a great run for a person. Maybe not for an elf, mind you, but remember he was management. Still, I’m quite bummed, and I’m hardly alone. You can read obituaries and appreciations from CinemaBlend has a good rundown of where you can see and hear some of his work. And the…
Last week, I shared several links to showrunner wisdom. This week, I figured I’d share one of the inevitable outcomes of screenwriting: notes. I’ve linked to professional writer, de factor pop culture historian, and prolific blogger Mark Evanier before (definitely check out his series on rejection), but here’s a nice piece about the three categories of notes you’re likely to experience as a screenwriter (spurred on by an article by his former screenwriting partner now…
So I’ve been meaning to do a few more posts about screenwriting and I realized I never followed up on “The 11 Laws of Showrunning by Javier Grillo-Marxuach” which I wrote about back in April… and which shows how the year is racing away from me. You see, I meant to follow up the next week with this interview with Javier Grillo-Marxuach where he talks about the 11 Laws, his books Shoot This One and…
Ursula K. Le Guin, who died in 2018, once described imagination as the “single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.“ It therefore feels right that her in Portland, Oregon is set to become a home for future writers, working to unleash their imagination and engage with the community in the best way. This plan was evidently set in motion…
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…
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…
I didn’t post this last week, but I actually saw some news even as I was posting about Public Domain Day last Monday: people aren’t wasting any time, Disney’s legendary legal ferocity be damned. One Steamboat Willie-themed Kickstarter launched on January 1st, there are memes aplenty (see image above), and –of course– there’s a horror movie. There’s plenty more in the works, as Sian Cain details for The Guardian (which also touches on the horror…