Todd Haynes’s Carol is simple, elegant, and devastating. It tells a story of pre-Stonewall gay love between two women, who become what they are using no specific societal blueprint (none existed for lesbians in the ‘50s), but through their love for each other. Carol (Cate Blanchett) is a mother going through a divorce…
An aspiring screenwriter put his script and laptop in a briefcase and dropped it off at an agent's office in Los Angeles. But the police thought it was a bomb and blew it up. If his script were half as good as this news story, he might have had a chance.
To the standard "Subway nightmares" list of being pushed onto the tracks, sitting on nasty seats, or just embarrassing yourself, we can add: leaning out over the tracks and having a train hit you in the head. It happens.
Of all the plagues visited upon Hollywood screenwriters, none is more onerous than the calls from every resident of your college dorm, and every distant in-law demanding that you read their script. But today one man fought back.
Recognizing that striking writers could really use a positive story to lift their flagging spirits after enduring so many disheartening months of marching in circles and dodging the occasional vehicular manslaughter attempt by lead-footed studio employees, this week's LAT Scriptland column relates the inspiring tale…
I've been on many a picket line, and what tends to happen is the whole community comes out in support of a strike: local bakeries offer free coffee and donuts, and area restaurants often stop by in the afternoon with foodstuffs. It's just the right thing to do. Taco Bell, that purveyor of food for harried workingmen…
Now that they're on strike, it seems like screenwriters are busier and more productive than ever. But left to their own devices, it turns out that they are a distinctly unfunny bunch. Put a bunch of 'em in a room and eventually they'll write Six Feet Under, but in the end they're just monkeys—monkeys writing for the …
Given that being locked in a room with 200 desperate, aspiring writers willing to pay $400 a head to have a representative of Legitimate Hollywood politely nod through their pitches for "Transformers meets Harry Potter, but where the transforming wizards are all animated woodland creatures" sounds like a…
After almost ten years of creative paralysis brought on by wondering when the Academy repo men would arrive to snatch the Good Will Hunting Best Original Screenplay Oscar from his mantel as punishment for every career-sabotaging choice he's made since 2002, Ben Affleck has decided to stop living in fear and take…
· Mike Myers is the latest star to try and take a whack at the long-gestating remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which has now moved from Paramount to 20th Century Fox, and to which Owen "The Butterscotch Stalliion" Wilson and Jim "My Career's Way Too Cold To Have A Decent Nickname" Carrey were once…
In any event, McMillan can't be a worse hire than WGA mole George "Scab Writer" Ellis, whom the Guild hopes will be snapped up during a studio's MySpace hunt for cheap, strike-insurance labor, and whose shoddy, non-union workmanship will doom any stockpiled project to instant failure. His video resume follows:
· John Wells Productions will house the Writers Co-Op, an all-star collective of high-priced screenwriters (David Benioff, Rob Bass, Scott Frank, and a cast of teens) who are willing to sacrifice huge bags of upfront money in exchange for greater creative control over their work and better profit participation. As…
We'll save you five minutes of reading and give you the Very Important Lesson from today's Scriptland column (motto: "Laboring under the illusion that screenwriters are people, too, since September 2006!") in the LAT about the plucky crusade of a writing team to save their opus from a straight-to-DVD fate: Before…
The LA Weekly's Nikki Finke reports that Sony is making Da Vinci Code adapter Akiva Goldsman, a man whose career highlights include depicting schizophrenics as people who spend their days scribbling on dirty windows while playing with imaginary friends and assisting in the destruction of the Batman franchise, the…
We ask that you steel yourself for the possibility that a recently filed copyright infringement lawsuit could prevent the release of Fox's Deck the Halls, throwing into utter chaos all of your cherished plans to spend the holidays watching Danny DeVito and Matthew Broderick driven to the brink of mutual homicide by…
This week's Scriptland column, the LAT's weekly spelunking expedition into the dark, dank caves where the little-seen, bizarrely bioluminescent creatures known as "screenwriters" can be found, follows up last week's feel-good, kicked-gambling-addiction-to-Hollywood-riches fable with another "It Writer" creation…
This week's installment of the LAT's Scriptland feature, the paper's weekly attempt at chronicling the hopes, dreams, and fears of the industry's institutionally disrespected, keyboard-pounding underclass, shares the uplifting story of Things We Lost in the Fire, Soon To Be A DreamWorks SKG Motion Picture With…
Today the LAT introduced Scriptland, a weekly love note to the Hollywood writing underclass so persecuted by the industry that they can be shot on sight if caught wandering a movie set without proper Directors Guild supervision. The new feature wastes no time messing around with well-paid, uncredited-rewrite hacks,…
