Act One

Screenwriting 101: A Step by Step Guide to Achieving the Impossible, by Christopher Riley

ActOneHollywood — Thu, 10 May 2012 18:31:14 +0000

A great article from one of Faculty and the former Act One Writing Program Director, Christopher Riley, best known as the author of The Hollywood Standard: The Complete and Authoritative Guide to Script Format and Style. Chris spent 14 years in the script department at Warner Bros. as well as writing for Paramount, Mandalay, and Touchstone Pictures. More recently he produced the thriller Red Line, directed by Robert Kirbyson and starring Nicole Gale Anderson and John Billingsley, and taught in Pepperdine University’s MFA program in Screen and Television Writing. Chris and his wife Kathy wrote the psychological thriller Crawlspace, currently in development at Yellow Line Studio with Amardeep Kaleeka to direct.

The good news is there is a process to finishing your screenplay The bad news: the process doesn’t make the shoe easier to chew…

Read the rest…

Is Consumerism Killing Our Creativity?

ActOneHollywood — Mon, 07 May 2012 18:23:22 +0000

Great article from www.the99percent.com.

Have you ever fallen into a black hole of comparison shopping? You’re looking for a new digital camera, for instance. You head over to Cnet.com and read some reviews of various cameras, watch the video demos, identify the model you want. Then perhaps you employ Google’s shopping search to price out the options and find the best deal. All of the sudden, it’s four hours later. You’ve found the perfect camera, but your purchasing triumph is tainted by a creeping feeling of, well, disgust. Couldn’t that time have been used better?

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SCREENPLAY COMPETITION

ActOneHollywood — Tue, 01 May 2012 19:00:09 +0000

DEAD POETS SOCIETY’S TOM SCHULMAN ON THE ART OF SURVIVING HOLLYWOOD

ActOneHollywood — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:28:03 +0000

This post is a little dated (2004), but still good. Here’s an excerpt:

Screenwriter Tom Schulman (WHAT ABOUT BOB?, WELCOME TO MOOSEPORT) had a confession to make at the latest edition of the Writers on Writing Series, sponsored by the Writer’s Guild Foundation. As far as the craft of screenwriting goes, “nothing came natural” to him. After all, he only “fell into writing because [he] wanted to direct,” and he felt he needed material to leverage the studios. So Schulman had to work long and hard on story, character and dialogue to become a “natural.” This from a guy who won an Academy Award for DEAD POETS SOCIETY (1989), his first feature script! Schulman had many other bracing, no-holds-barred comments about the art of writing, and the equally important art of surviving Hollywood, during an interview and later Q & A at the Writer’s Guild of America in Los Angeles.

Read the rest here.

Christians in Hollywood: A Treatment by Ron Austin

ActOneHollywood — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 15:50:23 +0000

A great article from Ron Austin, a former child actor, a screenwriter who worked on TV shows like Mission:Impossible, Charlie’s Angels, and Matlock, that deals with Christians at work in Hollywood. Printed in IMAGE Journal:

There has always been a Christian presence in Hollywood . In the so-called golden age, the thirties and forties, a Christian sensibility was clearly evident in the films of John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Frank Capra—to name only the most prominent examples. There were also stars whose professional personae reflected spiritual values, such as Irene Dunne and Loretta Young. I once had the pleasure of introducing my late friend, Father Ellwood “Bud” Kieser, to an audience as “the best known Catholic priest in Hollywood since Bing Crosby.” Bud liked that. Crosby and others such as Pat O’Brien had that kind of positive image.

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C.S. Lewis on Writing

ActOneHollywood — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 15:09:50 +0000

From the website Letters of Note:

Considering he wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, one of the most popular collections of children’s literature of all time, it’s no real surprise that C. S. Lewis received thousands of letters from youngsters during his career. What’s admirable is that he attempted to reply to each and every one of those pieces of fan mail, and not just with a generic, impersonal line or two.

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2012 Programs

ActOneHollywood — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:31:14 +0000

Ira Glass On Creativity (or, The Gap Between Our Taste And Our Work…)

ActOneHollywood — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:56:57 +0000

Ira Glass of PRI’s This American Life talks about creativity, and absolutely kills it (via these wonderful transcriptions from the Design Talk blog):

“What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.”

From one of our esteemed teachers and Mentors, Tom Provost: Justice Issues and “Chinatown”

ActOneHollywood — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:25:53 +0000

”You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of anything.” – Noah Cross

We all have archetypes that spur us individually. Our backgrounds, our struggles, our loves, loyalties and rivalries combine to create passions, positive and negative, that charge us. These are passions that energize rather than enervate. Because of these personal experiences and passions, each of us have genres that are intensely meaningful, story types to which we return again and again.

Haynes Brooke’s Web Series, “Think Tank”: Episode 3

ActOneHollywood — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 21:29:47 +0000