Happy Independence Day

To one (likely reader) and all.

A Tale Of Suck

J. D. Shapiro cries while apologizing (not really) for writing Battlefield Earth, as well he should.

Walken

The 10 most memorable scenes starring the one and only Christopher Walken.

Greed

From end of one of the best monologues in film history, Michael Douglas in Wall Street:

Experience Vs. Memory

Fascinating:

This has some pertinent parts related to story telling.

Writing Shrugged

Mystery Man is one of my favorites to read.

Here’s a great article on good writing as exemplified by Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Quite!

Quite a lot of time has gone by without a post, and to those very few people who read this blog, apologies.
The writing bug seems to have been beaten out of me, but never fear, I'll be back writing about my interpretation of The Drama.
Thanks!

Humility

The meeting of the Idaho Screenwriter's Group is underway and a middle-aged man sitting to my left has just handed me a copy of his script.  I am to be the narrator, in charge of reading out the slugs and description while others in the group will be the actors.

At the end of 15 minutes, it was over and the inevitable critique session kicked in: what do we think, he asks.  Since I was reading, I thought I should skim the work again as before, I was busy concentrating on my diction and so on—I've been known to murder the pronunciation of words.

I liked a lot about it and in ten pages, the script was shaping up to be an intelligent comedy.  I didn't like the dialog of some characters, but the setting was real enough and the description was on-point.  I offered my analysis as such.

He offered me his thanks, told me I'd made a good point and the meeting went on ... cut to the end of the gathering when we were all to introduce ourselves and I found out that this guy whose work I'd been criticizing was a writer on Mr. Belvedere and a script doctor on The Two Jakes and The Honeymooners.

Ehem.

I blushed a bit, of course, but as he was so humble and accommodating, it was okay.  That's humility and more of us would be well-advised to adopt such a strategy.  If only to have an unknown admirer pen a praise post!

Outlining

As a new writer, I have only recently become involved in the spurious debate about outlining. I say it's spurious because eveyone who doesn't want to waste time outlines. In one way or another, they outline. This free-wheeling attitude about writing from the heart is fallacy and results, I believe, in disjointed stuff.

To quote from Alastair Fowler's new book, How To Write, “It is unprofessional to put finger to keyboard or pen to paper without any idea of the scale of a piece; no one has time to write words that will have to be discarded.”

So there.

About?

The Photo Dramatist, as a name, is based on what screenwriters were called in the early Hollywood years. I was inspired to create the blog while reading a book titled, How I Did it by H. H. Van Loan. It was written in 1922.

My aim with this blog is to write about drama, specifically drama as it exists in the movies. And by drama, I speak of theoretical drama, the drama of Aristotle's Poetics. The drama of conflict, rising tension, crisis, decision and action, resolution, etc.

I aim to discuss dramatic theory and practice, both mine and sometimes quoting from the work of others. Actually, a lot of the time, quoting from the work of others and providing an analysis.