European visitors to the 19th Century American West would marvel at how many humble homesteading families would keep a cheap collected Shakespeare volume next to the Bible in pride of place. His plays would be performed in mining camps, saloons & even on whaling ships.

https://twitter.com/PettyOkino/status/1867307722107965512

Popular newspapers of the day were filled with Shakespeare allusions, even some deep cuts, because it was assumed that the mass reading audience would be conversant in the plays enough to pick up the references.

It's insane that when Deep Space Nine was on the air the Bajoran politics episodes got derided as boring when you watch them now and it's incredible actors like Louise Fletcher & Frank Langella in what feels like a preview of 21st century genre shows like BSG and Game of Thrones. Ironically, the Dominion war episodes that got everyone excited at the time ("finally, kick ass action in Star Trek") have aged a lot worse, between the VFX limitations & the fact that we've had so much space war content since then. But all the political scheming? Still great!

My one contribution to the semi-annual Starship Troopers discourse is that the film supports a lot of different readings because director Paul Verhoeven is a weird and complicated guy whose politics and aesthetics are often in conflict with each other. If you read interviews with him, Verhoeven's clearly a basic euro-lefty politically. He also talks about how he was marked by spending his early childhood in Nazi-occupied Holland, sometimes seeing the bodies of shot-down Allied pilots. But here's where it gets interesting...

Anyone want me to do a thread on what I learned about writing action scenes (specifically fights) that play well for a reader from one of the best working action screenwriters? 1: First bit of advice. Pay particular attention to how your fights begin & how they end. Don't choreograph every punch or shot, but think about the moments that will stick with the reader, especially ones where character is revealed through action.

One of the easiest ways to tell a script by a new TV writer from an experienced one--what are the characters DOING during their dialogue scenes? Old TV pros know that actors like to be physically doing things instead of just talking, so tend to add bits of "business" for them. On Smallville, their go-to during the obligatory "Lex and Lionel in the study" scenes was to have Lex making himself a drink, to the point that the network told them to tone it down, because they were making Lex look like an alcoholic.

During the brief period a decade ago when we were doing research for Top Gun 2, the funniest thing I learned is that Navy fighter pilot call signs tend not to be badass names like "Maverick" and "Iceman" but something funny or embarrassing about the pilot. So we met a pilot who had nerves of steel flying an F/A-18 at Mach 2 but would faint whenever he had to get a shot. His call sign? "Needles." Another pilot who never kept track of his fuel consumption in a combat zone was "NASA." It stood for "No Apparent Situational Awareness."

The number of people answering this who have NO FUCKING CLUE how television is made...

https://twitter.com/dbwofficial/status/1509280593720213504

There are working writers who owe their entire careers to scripts that retained their names on them while being page one rewrites by the showrunner.

Watching Lord of the Rings with the kids for the first time in ages & struck anew by what an extraordinary job McKellen did as Gandalf. In the fireplace scene with Frodo, his relief that turns to anguish as he realizes Bilbo's trinket is the One Ring is tremendously affecting. McKellen really makes you feel Gandalf's deep love for Frodo and the other hobbits and how much it hurts him to know how much they're going to suffer over the course of the story.

The amount of time that gets wasted in Hollywood by the insistence on going to the most aspirational, low-percentage shots for actors and directors--who invariably dither for 3 months before passing-- is absolutely mind-boggling. People who give quick nos are underrated. Hollywood is so filled with deception, happy talk & blowing smoke that the ones willing to be straight with you are absolutely treasured. I still remember fondly the time Tony Scott picked up the phone to say "Sorry boys, it's not working out" instead of doing it through agents.

Someone asked me for advice on sweating pages out of a script without cutting whole scenes. My quick go tos:

1: Eliminate almost all parentheticals. Your dialogue should be good enough that you don't need to tell the reader that a line is being delivered sarcastically. 2: Look at each of your scenes and see if you can get in later and get out sooner. If a line is strictly functional--i.e. "What do you mean?"--it can probably be excised.

Remember that brief period in the '90s when instead of Marvel, respected directors who needed a payday and surefire hit directed...John Grisham movies? That's how we got Sydney Pollack's The Firm, Robert Altman's The Gingerbread Man, & Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker. Ironically, the best Grisham adaptation from that period was...The Client, written by Akira Goldsman (his best script IMO) and directed by genial studio hand Joel Schumacher.

I've gone down a rabbit hole of reading about the life of Yellowstone wolf 21, who seems to have been the wolf equivalent of the Buddha crossed with Batman. In his entire life he never lost a fight & never killed a defeated enemy. What a legend. He shared his kills and was a gentle and nurturing dad and uncle. 21 was the male role model we all need:

When did production design & set decoration in American movies go from more or less reflecting middle and working class life to becoming ridiculously aspirational? The Steve Martin Father of the Bride remake seems like a major inflection point. From the replies I've concluded that lifestyle inflation in American film interiors largely comes from John Hughes and Nancy Myers. As I've said, if Nancy Myers is the Michael Bay of chick movies, then copper pots hanging in a kitchen is her "helicopters against the sunset" shot.

Brief thread on TV writing inspired by @JoseMolinaTV's "bring back 22 episode seasons!" comment from yesterday. I love long seasons of TV. Here's the challenge: in genre TV, it's really difficult to pull off given the demands for serialized storytelling. In the old days of Star Trek or Mission: Impossible, it was simpler. The characters went on a different adventure or solved a different problem each episode, with little to no continuity between episodes. But over time, serialization came to genre TV...

Die Another Day is widely considered the nadir of the Brosnan Bonds, but it's underappreciated just how WEIRD it is. It's got surfing Bond, young Rosamund Pike with a sword, and boldly asks "What if Kim Jong Un went to a Cuban clinic that turned him into Richard Branson?" Also, even if you hate it? Right in the middle of the movie is one of the greatest action scenes of the past 20 years-- the sword fight where Bond & Graves get madder & madder at each other and smash up a gentleman's club sword fighting each other.

Bridget "Biddy" Mason had one of the most fascinating & dramatic lives in early Los Angeles. Enslaved by a Mormon pioneer, brought to 1850s Los Angeles & kept in slavery despite California being a free state, Mason was rescued by a sheriff's posse led by two free black men...

https://twitter.com/CapitolReefNPS/status/1363219383552794632

...Charles Owens & Manuel Pepper. Mason then petitioned for freedom for herself & her children in court & won after the man who enslaved her first bribed her attorney not to show up, then skipped town himself. Mason became a pillar of L.A.'s nascent black community...

My unasked for 2 cents on the whole "can you believe all these young TV writers who aren't familiar with classic television?" debate: all of us came to writing from different places. Some grew up mainlining MASH & I Love Lucy, others think TV began with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Is it good to have a deep well of knowledge about the classics, especially in the area you're writing? Of course. Is it productive to scold young up & coming writers for having a different frame of reference? Well...

This article isn't new but it's wonderful--in a corner of the Bolivian rain forest, the indigenous people play a homegrown version of Baroque music on classical instruments they make themselves, a legacy of the Jesuit missions of nearly 3 centuries ago. nytimes.com/2018/05/08/wor… The story of the Jesuit missions in South America is known to most people through the 1986 film The Mission, but when Ennio Morricone composed his beautiful score, the indigenous Baroque pieces were thought to be lost, so the soundtrack is his imaginative reconstruction instead.

I'm realizing I am using every trick I learned writing for syndicated action hours and The Flash to try and deliver spectacle on a...shall we say constricted budget for this script. Zack's spectacle on a budget tips.
1: It's all a game of Jenga. Do all the VFX shots you like in the first draft, then see how many you can get rid of & still tell the story.

2: Play stuff on displays & characters' reactions wherever possible.

3: Do one big shot, then go tight.