January 16, 2004

On Adapting for Film

[via IFP] New York Women in Film and Television is sponsoring a panel titled The Art of Adaptation on Jan. 28 in New York, thank you. In fact, it's at the Alliance Francaise/French Institute, East 60th St, so even I can stumble out of bed and wander on over by, um, the 6:30 start time. IFP members and others get $5 off the $20 registration fee. NYWIFTies get in for a mere $10. Related: Jason Kottke made a sweet weblog...
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Posted by greg allen at 12:37 PM | Comments (0)

November 09, 2003

On Scripts

Salon is not only still publishing, they're publishing the shooting script of the Ronald Reagan TV movie that the conservative closet cases wanted to see on Showtime (the Queer as Folk Network). It's an 8Mb pdf. Of a TV Movie. Starring James Brolin. About Ronald Reagan. You've been warned. [For an invigorating Reagan text, try Joan Didion's prescient 1997 review of DiNesh D'Souza's Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader. It costs money, but it's worth it....
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Posted by greg allen at 11:53 AM | Comments (0)

September 22, 2003

Choire on The NY'er Festival and Wolfowitz

Absolutely hi-larious then rousing reportage from this weekend's New Yorker Festival by Choire G. Sicha on The Morning News (the G is for Gawker). He too-generously covers the frenetic irrelevancy of Dave Eggers, ("Eggers sold out in 30 minutes (his reading, not his career).") and the frenzied apologia of Paul Wolfowitz at the New School (who lorded on a stage occupied very recently, it should be noted, by ex-Razorfish founder and ersatz New School instructor Jeff "Big Idea" Dachis):1:26 p.m....
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Posted by greg allen at 11:27 AM | Comments (0)

August 27, 2003

Things I want to write about, given world enough (or time)

Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycling through the red states. C1's playing in Boise, where it was shot (and Barney's hometown), and C3 has apparently won the Strangest Movie Shown In Nashville Award. (Heads up, bootleggers: The Tennessean's Kevin Nance has a screener tape!) Gerry reviewed in the Guardian ("If you can imagine Dude, Where's my Car? by Samuel Beckett"). Casey Affleck writes about working--as an actor, editor, and writer--with Gus Van Sant. Net net, this means the DVD is still...
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Posted by greg allen at 03:01 PM | Comments (0)

August 23, 2003

On Writing A Screenplay About A Writer

In the Guardian, British docu maker John Brownlow tells about the tricky business of writing a screenplay about Sylvia Plath, one of the most fought-over writers of the modern era. With duelling critics, conflicting biographies, testy literary estates controlling the rights to Plath's and Ted Hughes' poetry, and an ending even Hollywood can't spin, it sounds like an impossible task. Oh, and "there had to be humor." Humor and a head in the oven. Brownlow ended up completely re-researching Plath's...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:55 PM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2003

Ugh. It should be called "American Publishers Yawn at Foreign Fiction"

In the NYT, Stephen Kinzer easily pulls some horrible quotes from major publishers about how Americans don't want to read books translated into English. From a marketing hack at Harcourt: "We [Americans] are into accessible information. We often look for the story, rather than the story within the story. We'd rather read lines than read between the lines." And from a hack at Hyperion: "The hard fact is that given the reality of the world, we [Americans] simply don't have...
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Posted by greg allen at 06:15 PM | Comments (0)

June 10, 2003

On Taste Tribes

via Boingboing: On Mindjack, Joshua Ellis writes at length about what he calls Taste Tribes, friendship by cultural affinity--liking people who like the same stuff. Blogs are the engines for the smarter artist/chiefs of their own taste tribes. I cooked something up along those lines in 1999 at Shagpad, which was based on the Austin Powerish, Abercrombie & Fitchy theory that people bought stuff in direct relation to its ability to get them laid. Or as the VC-Powerpoint presentation-ready slogan...
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Posted by greg allen at 09:32 PM | Comments (0)

April 28, 2003

Adam Gopnik's Metropolitan Diary

Dear Diary: To be filed under "T for That's New Yorkers for ya": Setting: The M4 Limited. Dramatis Personae: the commuting population of Manhattan, and a male writer of a certain age, wearing an insouciantly knotted ascot, who appears to have recently traveled to France. The population throws off dozens of make-your-day anecdotes, which the straphanging scribe strains to sample. Writer [thinking out loud]: "Oh-la-la, this is great material! Certainement, I could get 3,000 words out of this, pas de...
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Posted by greg allen at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)

April 27, 2003

I Like Sites We Like

Daily Script is an excellent-looking archive of html/pdf screenplays. I'm reading the Three Kings shooting script. I got Daily Script from the Guardian film section's Sites We Like, an excellent mix of the entertaining and useful, the mainstream and obscure. Marc Forster's first film, Everything Put Together, is on Sundance right now, but I can't watch it right now. With a tremendous DV transfer, it looks great while it bleeds all hope for suburban humanity from your system. Monster's...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:39 PM | Comments (0)

April 15, 2003

Useless Screenwriting Tip #1: Write When Ronin's On

According to the little-known Osmosis Theory of Writing, while trying to write a tight, sharp, crime thriller, you should watch a tight, sharp crime thriller, like, say, Ronin (directed by John Frankenheimer, screenplay by David Mamet on JD Zeik's story). It helps if it's got insane chase scenes over roads you used to travel regularly (Paris, Nice, La Turbie). If you do this, the doors will fly open, and your screenwriting muse will spray you with inspiration, like so...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:44 PM | Comments (0)

April 05, 2003

Baltimore Is Burning

Iraqi troops aren't puttin' up a good enough fight for you? Your teams didn't make it into the Final Four? Your need to engage, even vicariously, in tales of the life-consuming urge to win is going unmet? Read Anna Ditkoff's under-the-skirts, behind-the-scenes look at the Miss Gay Maryland pageant. [via Romenesko's Obscure Store][Doing sultry, smoky ballads instead of the more common, flashy, diva dance numbers] is a risky gamble, and in the four times that Jenkins has gone to Miss...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)

February 12, 2003

When Do You Cry Reading The Home Section?

Hardly ever, frankly. But William Hamilton's wonderful story of the Kellams, a couple who lived alone, together, on an island off Mount Desert Island, really got me for some reason. Hamilton mentions David Graham's book about the couple, Alone Together, published by Ponds Press"What did he read to you," Mrs. Kellam was asked... "It was always the right thing," she answered... Kippy Stroud, a summer resident who runs an arts camp on Mount Desert Island, said, "We just admired...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:55 PM | Comments (0)

February 07, 2003

Bill & Nada's Cafe

Bill & Nada's Cafe was where I had my first script idea. It's not that the Salt Lake dance clubs were cooler than the ones in Provo, there were no dance clubs in Provo. (Don't talk to me about The Palace; that was like a church dance in Orange County). So we'd drive to Salt Lake to go out. Finding a designated driver was never a problem (think about it). Then after the clubs closed, we'd go to Bill...
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Posted by greg allen at 08:00 PM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2003

Rollin' With My Homi

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over Triboro Bridge, so many, I had not thought the MLA had undone so many. - apologies to T. S. EliotThe MLA Convention was in town, "but now they're gone." (apologies to Blue Oyster Cult.) Thankfully, the Observer did the painful hanging out for you, capturing the employment angst that haunts the event. So why do 1,000 or so fresh lit crit PhD's ("talking loudly about post-docs and Homi...
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Posted by greg allen at 03:41 PM | Comments (0)

December 18, 2002

LIVE@WTC DESIGN PRESS CON. PIX ...

LIVE@WTC DESIGN PRESS CON. PIX ETC 2 FOLLOW...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)

November 08, 2002

Reading::Writing Drinking::Driving?

In the Casino resaurant, not the slightest impedance at all to getting in, no drop in temperature perceptible to his skin, Slothrop sits down at a table where somebody has left last Tuesday's London Times. Hmmm. Hasn't seen one of them in a while....Leafing through, dum, dum de-doo, yeah, the War's still on, Allies closing in east and west on Berlin, powdered eggs still going one and three a dozen, "Fallen Officers," MacGregory, Mucker-Maffick, Whitestreet, Personal Tributes...Meet Me in St...
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Posted by greg allen at 03:39 PM | Comments (0)

November 05, 2002

I See Harrison Ford As The Daring Writer...

Film critic Anthony Lane is writing the diary at Slate. So far, it's been torrid accounts of the perils of writing. It's pretty suspenseful stuff, journaling as a pitch/plea for giving Lane the Charlie Kaufman Treatment. (Kaufman wrote the screenplay adaptation of Susan Orlean's book, The Orchid Thief, which became Adaptation, starring Ms Meryl Streep as Ms Orlean.) Vivid imagery, action movie material, even. Tuesday, rewrite day, for instance: "If this [my Tuesday as a New Yorker writer] were...
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Posted by greg allen at 01:29 PM | Comments (0)

October 07, 2002

Readin', Ritin'

Took a couple of short breaks from writing the as-yet unannounced animated musical (henceforth, AYUAM), just to read the paper: David Kehr's profile of Paul Thomas Anderson. "[In Punch-Drunk Love, Emily] Watson plays one of the many guardian angel figures who populate Mr. Anderson's films: those caregivers who seem to appear out of nowhere and offer protection and redemption." Should all of one's movies be about similar things? Or have readily identifiable common themes or threads? Or is that just...
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Posted by greg allen at 12:33 PM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2002

Joseph Epstein: send me your manuscripts

The way I read this NY Times article, Joseph Epstein is secretly hoping his advice is wrong. "As the author of 14 books, with a 15th to be published next spring..." he writes, "...don't write that book, my advice is, don't even think about it. Keep it inside you, where it belongs." [via camworld] Send as-yet unpublished manuscripts; self-published books; slim volumes of verse; literary or creative labors-of-love of all kinds, whether yours or not, to: Prof. Joseph Epstein (author,...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)