This handy montage might make you think twice about letting your characters use the title of the movie in dialogue.
(via fourfour)
This handy montage might make you think twice about letting your characters use the title of the movie in dialogue.
(via fourfour)
Toby Wilkins had emailed me about this weeks ago, but I just now got a chance to check it out.
SpeedCine indexes movies available through iTunes, Crackle, Hulu and Amazon VOD, letting you know where you can find any given title. For example, searching for the The Nines provides links for download through Amazon, iTunes and NetFlix.
Because most of these services are U.S.-only, it’s not much help to international users, unfortunately.
The site is still in beta, and while it’s really useful, I wish it provided better URLs for copy-and-pasting. Right now, SpeedCine gives you a jumble of letters after an ASP query. Here’s the listing for Go in SpeedCine:
http://www.speedcine.com/results.aspx?query=T0001274
and here it is on Crackle:
http://crackle.com/c/GO
That’s small enough to be easily Twittered, and feels permanent enough that I’d be comfortable putting it in a blog post.
But that’s a small quibble. SpeedCine is worth making your first stop when trying to find a movie online.
Update March 2011: SpeedCine has closed.
This terrific compilation clip by FourFour‘s Rich Juzwiak demonstrates what a hoary cliché it has become to explain why movie characters aren’t using their cell phones.
I plead guilty, having used the “signal goes away” variation as a major element in Part Three of The Nines. (I feel both disappointment and relief to have not made the cut.)
Unlike the air duct cliché, the cell phone problem can’t be solved by a simple vow of chastity. Cell phones are real things people use every day, so ignoring them is rarely an option for a movie set present day.
Don’t write movies in which characters would call for help. That’s probably the best advice I can offer.
MakingOf has part two of my interview up on the site. (You can see part one here.)
Some notes on certain sections:
In How to Write a Scene, I go into a lot more detail on “looping” and “scribble versions” of scenes.
My hunch is that the modern era of writing action begins with James Cameron. Every screenwriter I know read and devoured his scripts for Terminator, Aliens and Point Break. We’re all probably channeling him a bit.
I really do try to do most of my work during “office hours.” But during crunch times — which has been a lot more, recently — I find myself going back to work after dinner, or setting the alarm for 5 a.m. to get stuff written before breakfast.
Writing is an inherently selfish act: you’re shutting the world out to live in a fantasy. You don’t really appreciate that until you have a family.
One of the main reasons we procrastinate is to give ourselves an excuse for why things might be terrible: “I know it’s not great, but I wrote it in three days.” Suck early and fix it.
You know who gets writer’s block? Non-writers. They think it’s cool and romantic to struggle to make Art. They make sure everyone knows how torturous the process is, so when they finally squeeze something out, it won’t be judged on its merits but rather the emotional anguish involved in its creation.
Writers write. Hacks Posers whine about how hard it is.1
The twenty minute timer actually works. Do twenty minutes of solid work, then give yourself ten minutes of freedom.
Ideally, you want finesse: a combination of strength and dexterity that uses a scene’s natural momentum to make everything look effortless. But sometimes, that’s not possible: there isn’t time, or there’s some major impediment. With enough craft, an experienced screenwriter can often muscle a scene that shouldn’t otherwise work.
I’m obliquely referencing a meeting for Charlie’s Angels, during which the studio president ripped ten pages out of the script and told me to write around what was missing.
If you want to work in film or television, you need to work on films and television shows. Screenwriting is mostly writing, but without experience in how stuff is actually made, you’ll never be very good at it.