John August

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The Queen on a silver platter

Awards, Film Industry

[for my consideration]The inflow of screeners has slowed to a trickle, with only The Queen arriving this week. That makes nine screeners so far:

* The Queen
* Little Children
* Babel
* World Trade Center
* United 93
* Notes on a Scandal
* Flags of Our Fathers
* Little Miss Sunshine
* Thank You for Smoking

The Hollywood Reporter claims its [FYC](http://hollywoodreporter.com/fyc) has screenplays for download, but I’ve yet to find one for any of the movies it features. If any readers find links to the screenplay contenders, please pass them along.

Little Children, a little late

Awards, Film Industry, Follow Up

[for my consideration]Yesterday afternoon, I hauled my butt over to the Sunset 5 to catch [Little Children](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0404203/). I’d been dying to see it ever since catching the brilliant trailer months ago. (The trailer was better than the movie, which is no slam on the film. The trailer really is that good.)

Today’s mail brought a screener copy of Little Children. Anticipating this will be a trend, I’d like to pre-announce the movies I plan to see soon, so that the studios can be ready with the DVD follow-up: Children of Men, The Good Shepherd, and the Alien Quadrilogy.Okay, that last one’s not in theaters. But I’d like a copy, all the same.

Screeners to date:

* __Little Children__
* Babel
* World Trade Center
* United 93
* Notes on a Scandal
* Flags of Our Fathers
* Little Miss Sunshine
* Thank You for Smoking

For My Consideration

Film Industry

One of the considerable perks of being in the Writers Guild is that come awards time, the studios will do almost anything to get you to see their movies.

Yesterday, my WGA card got me two tickets to see Dreamgirls and I am telling you, the only thing that could compare with Jennifer Hudson’s big song was the thrill of signing for my free tickets just one line below [Diane English](http://imdb.com/name/nm0257606/), creator of “Murphy Brown.” It’s weird: I’m not at all star-struck; I don’t understand the appeal of collecting signatures. But coming across the accidental debris of celebrities — or better yet, quasi-celebrities — is strangely fascinating. Look! Diane English is just as cheap as me!

Since one can’t always make it to the theater, studios also send DVD screeners. Two years ago, there was a big effort to cut back on the process, on the theory that it led to piracy. By recent evidence, the studios have decided not to worry so much about it. So far I’ve received:

* Babel
* World Trade Center
* United 93
* Notes on a Scandal
* Flags of Our Fathers
* Little Miss Sunshine
* Thank You for Smoking

I’ve also been sent the scripts for all of these, along with the script for Dreamgirls. As the weeks pass and envelopes keep coming, I’ll try to update the list of movies that I now have no excuse not to have seen.

I heart WriteRoom

Projects, Rave, Software, Sundance, The Nines

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on the production notes for The Nines. The document will end up being about 20 pages, detailing the backstory of how the movie got made, from inspiration through editing, along with everyone’s bios. It’s part of the press kit for the film, helping the journalists at Sundance remember who the hell was in the movie they saw three days ago.

Ultimately, we’ll end up formatting the notes in Word or Pages, but for raw text I lean heavily on TextMate, which is what I use for all of the writing for the site. It’s unbelievably powerful, if occasionally maddening.To wit: If you use command-z “Undo” to fix something you shouldn’t have deleted, TextMate will replace it one letter at a time, undoing each backspace rather than the whole chunk. Apparently, the software creator feels strongly that this is the logically correct behavior, and while I disagree, I fully respect his decision to say, “because that’s how I want it!” I have TextMate set to automagically generate a lot of the formating markup, and the tag-wrapping feature can’t be beat. But on a lark, I decided to try a new application for writing the production notes: WriteRoom.

It’s deliberately, refreshingly bare-bones and retro. When you open a window, it takes over your entire screen, including the menu bar. All you see is the words, complete with a blinking cursor. Perhaps nostalgic for my years writing on an old Atari, I’ve chosen a dark blue background with almost-white 18 pt. Courier. Give me a kneeling chair and a dot-matrix printer and I’m in junior high again.

Other writing applications are picking up this full-screen meme — honestly, it’s hard to figure out why it took so long. Apple’s Pro apps (Final Cut Pro, Aperture) have had no qualms grabbing every available pixel of real estate, although they don’t completely banish the common interface elements. (Except for Shake, which also requires a blood sacrifice to Ba’al.)

The big-screen treatment is the digital equivalent of closing the kitchen door when company comes over: Never mind the mess in the sink, let’s have a nice dinner.

WriteRoom 2.0 is in beta, but there’s nothing spectacularly different or better than plain old 1.0. Either version is worth checking out.

As for the inevitable question: Could I write a script with it?

Yes, no, maybe.

I’ve actually had conversations with two gurus of web markup about creating a simplified screenplay markup that could be imported into “real” screenwriting applications like Final Draft. WriteRoom and its ilk support tabs and external scripts, so it’s conceivable to build a system like ollieman’s screenwriting with TextMate bundle.

But for now, I have an actual paid rewrite to be doing, and it’s a Final Draft job. Sigh.