New Years Resolution: update blog in a timely manner … starting right after I post this news of a piece that ran almost a month ago. But if you love film and you love to write and you love writers in film, this one may have been worth the wait. Thanks to Ryan Rivas for including my Ten Lessons of Fictional Writers in Film on the Burrow Press Blog in December. The following is only the first lesson. Check out the rest here and have a look around Burrow Press while you’re at it.
Funny Farm
In Funny Farm, Chevy Chase plays a writer who moves to the middle of nowhere in order to jumpstart work on his manuscript in solitude. When he’s finally done, he rents a hotel room, chills champagne, hands his wife his manuscript, and sits with his hands folded together in anticipation—watching intently, reading her facial expressions as the pages turn, leaning to check whether or not her laughter erupts in just the right places. Lesson? Don’t do that.
You can now get your ebook copy of Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinemaright here. A very special thanks to Simon Smithson at Calavera Books, each of the phenomenal contributors and interviewees, book cover designer Steven Seighman, and book trailer producer Vernon Lott for all of their hard work and support. I’m thrilled to share the result of their efforts with you and to see just how much we can raise to help replace the Joplin High School JET-14 students’ studio equipment, field cameras, and supplies that had been destroyed in the May 22 tornado. So go buy it! I promise it’ll be $4.99 well spent.
Everyone’s writing about Charlie Sheen. I didn’t want to write about Charlie Sheen. So I wrote about Emilio’s brother instead. You know, that one-dimensional guy who barely registers in films like Red Dawn and Young Guns. But this is a good thing, you see, because I don’t think I could watch Charlie Sheen in anything anymore, but Emilio’s brother is a-okay: READ IT HERE.
… that I’m late in posting here. First, I offer a few alternatives to the late-summer, early-fall movie slump that plagues us each year in Watch This, Not That. Then, after seeing Inception no less than three times (so far), I’ve finally figured it out: there is no figuring it out. Also, I call Christopher Nolan a smart-ass cheat, and I mean that endearingly. Lastly, for now, I explain why my grandfather crush on Robert Duvall should be yours in a review of his latest film Get Low.
