There used to be a Hollywood standard in formatting. I used to hear that if you stray one inch from the format, you would be crucified on the script readers post. It used to be said that you could only get away with differing from the norm if you were a Soderbergh, a Tarantino, or a Lucas. But there’s a new trend in town and that is what I would like to call the “bold standard.”

If you can punch up your action with  the formatting, do it! When capitalizing once did the trick, now you’d better add an underline. And why not bold and italicize while your at it, just to get the point across.

The first time I really noticed this was with Shyamalan. He sometimes had a rare sentence in all caps, just to get the point across. Now, I’m seeing it on every page. Check out this page from Transformers.

Bold scene descriptions are all the rage, for action scripts. It used to be that you were only supposed to capitalize Character introductions and sound effects. Now you can throw them in whenever you want. And these days,  many other writers are following suit. Whose to blame? I say JJ Abrams with his now infamous use of the F Word in his lost scripts.

Mel Gibson’s next project is going to be a doozy.

Variety reported last week:

Mel Gibson will star in “The Beaver” for director Jodie Foster.

The script, written by Kyle Killen, topped the Blacklist in December.

Gibson will play a depressed man who finds solace in wearing a beaver hand-puppet. On top of helming, Foster will play the role of the man’s wife.

Foster boarded the project and brought it to Gibson, with whom she co-starred in 1994’s “Maverick.”

Anonymous Content’s Steve Golin and Keith Redmon will produce the film. Producers are pushing for a September start date in New York.

Financing for the $18 million-$19 million pic has yet to be finalized. A studio could pick up the project or it could go the indie route, as Golin did with Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s “Babel.”

Project had several star and director combos circling — including Steve Carell and Jay Roach — over the past several months.

Pic brings Foster back to feature directing for the third time, after 1991’s “Little Man Tate” and 1995’s “Home for the Holidays.”

Variety really doesn’t do the premise of this film any justice. What it’s actually about is a depressed man who finds a hand puppet. When he puts it on, the puppet, a beaver, begins to speak to him with a life of it’s own, going on to give him advice about his career and family. “The Beaver” is one of those scripts that scriptshadow reviewed a while back, and this is what he had to say about it:

The Beaver is a pretty solid little script. It’s a thinly veiled (albeit dark) version of “Guy drinks magical potion. Life changes for the better.” What separates it from the rest of these types of films is that it’s not a comedy. Well, it is, but not really. It’s actually a serious look at how depression ruins families and how distraction and denial may work as temporary lifeboats from the disease, but sooner or later, you’re going to have to deal with the real issues.

What I’m really curious about is why on earth Mel Gibson, considering all of his recent negative media attention, is playing a non-comedic role about a man who talks to a puppet on his hand. It sounds to me like easy fodder for those who just went to continue labeling Gibson as crazy. I haven’t read more then twenty pages of the script yet, but so far it still fits the description. The link is still up and you can actually download it here. Check it out, let me know what you think!

People are already geeking out about this all over the place. But honestly, the last time I saw Willem Dafoe as a villain the result was underwhelming. Green Goblin anyone?

Willem Dafoe will star alongside Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins in “John Carter of Mars,” the Walt Disney Pictures fantasy epic to be directed by “Wall-E” helmer Andrew Stanton.

Dafoe will play the role of Tars Tarkas, a fierce green Martian warrior, who’s unusual among his savage race for his ability to love. Tars develops an alliance with John Carter in the first film, which is based on “A Princess of Mars.”

He fights battles alongside Carter through the entire series of Edgar Rice Burroughs books, so he will be hanging around for sequels.

Kitsch, who’s coming off “The Bang Bang Club” and the TV series “Friday Night Lights,” was set in June to play the title character, a damaged Civil War vet who finds himself mysteriously transported to Mars. Collins, who acted alongside Kitsch in “Wolverine,” will play the Princess of Mars.

In continuing with my series on why reading scripts is so so so important, I would like to bring up an interesting question. What kinds of scripts should I read? The availability of scripts online is growing immensely and I am finding more and more sources each day. They offer a wide range fromblockbusters to small indie projects to even some in development with major players attached (not sure how these make it online, but they do). So which should you read Bad scripts, good scripts, old scripts, new scripts? My answer… all of the above.

Seriously, do not edit what you read, just so long as you are reading. I have a stack of agency scripts on my shelf that I get from a friend at [deleted]. The ones I’ve read are stacked on the right, and I simply move through them, grabbing the next one. Whenever I stop to think about it too much is when I’m bound to be disappointed. I prefer not knowing what to expect.

For a long time, I had a sort of disdain for unproduced scripts. Why should I read them? They weren’t good enough to get made after all. Then I discovered www.scriptshadow.com . Somehow, this guy finds some of the biggest spec scripts out there, and throws links to them for you all to enjoy. How he gets I do not know. How he doesn’t get shut down is an even bigger mystery. But he always posts up a review, so you can get an idea of the script before you read it. In the past month he’s posted up two scripts with George Clooney attached and one with Mel Gibson attached. Not too shabby, huh? Definitely check otu scriptshadow and definitely add it to you blog reader if you do that thing (I prefer Google Reader). Some of his script links get taken down within an hour or two of being posted, so you have to be on it.

Scott Meyers (K-9) runs a great blog called Go Into the Story. He updates probably more than anyone else I’ve ever seen. Anyway, there’s tons of stuff I could post up from his blog, and I’m sure I’ll do more later, but to continue my kick of linking good places to find scripts, I thought I would hook you up with this post of his.

To learn screenwriting, you must read scripts — lots of them — all the time. He recommends to his students that they read 14 scripts in 14 days to kickstart the habit. Not only that, but he has provided a list of great movies to start to start you off.

Here’s his list. Probably the only one I wish was on there is The Sixth Sense. I studied it in one of my college directing classes (thank you Lisa Swain) and have been in awe of it ever since.

• Day 1: Back to the Future
• Day 2: Witness
• Day 3: Alien
• Day 4: Some Like It Hot
• Day 5: Body Heat
• Day 6: Fargo
• Day 7: The Shawshank Redemption
• Day 8: Die Hard
• Day 9: Thelma & Louise
• Day 10: Dead Poet’s Society
• Day 11: The Matrix
• Day 12: Network
• Day 13: Memento
• Day 14: Toy Story
  

I found a script library through the artful writer forum the other day that has literally the largest collection I’ve ever seen, including some rather large films that aren’t even in production yet. So check it out here.

Reading scripts is probably one of the best habits you can develop as an aspiring writer. I try to read about 3-5 scripts a week. Bobette Buster, who teaches for the Pixar University, says that you need to read 1,000 scripts before you can really be “fluent” in that language. I think most of us  have a bit of work to do then, huh?

The Vuze Network is giving “The Black Dawn” some major promotion on their site. Please help us return the favor by checking them out.

Also, Tubefilter has been kind enough to do a very favorable write-up on our show. Check it out:

What would you do if you woke up one morning to find a mysterious black cloud descending on top of the city of Los Angeles, killing everyone around you?

If you’re a real Angeleno, probably nothing – you’ve probably been taking smog for granted for years already. But this isn’t real life, this is The Black Dawn, a new sci-fi web series from New Renaissance Pictures that debuted January 31st on WebSerials.com and YouTube and has followed a weekly release schedule.

… The first few episodes feel a bit like Jericho in a college setting, but it begins to establish its own path shortly thereafter.

Read the rest of the article here.

“The Crown of the Forest” was a production almost as epic as the film itself.

Sophomore year, spring of 2005, myself, two other actors and a crew of only five (including the director) drove 12 hours to the northernmost reaches of California. Our primary location was about a mile from the nearest road, as you can see in the map (just south of JH ranch).

View Larger Map

We had to lug our equipment down to the southern edge of that valley and quite a bit of it we hid under tarps for the entirety of the week. Because there was only a director, three producers, and a DP, all of the actors had to help drag sandbags, generators, dollies, and jib arms across the mile of marshy (because it was springtime) valley floor (see the picture below). Not to mention the two days of shooting under a waterfall.

We battled snow, an equipment truck stuck in mud for days, an integral actor dropping out at the last minute, (the part was taken over quite admirably by our producer Marlene Velius) and yet still we finished the shoot both happy and ahead of schedule.

But it was worth it. The town embraced us. The local church treated us to an Easter dinner and a local reporter bought us a steak dinner at a local restaurant. Our last scene was a firelight dialogue scene (in part two on youtube) and we finished the shoot all of us lounging around our fire and reminiscing about the week. The sky was so dark that night that when I stood and the valley and turned off my flashlight, I literally could not see my hand in front of my face.

Paradise Hollow stands out as one of the few places that I would love to go back to one day. With the snowy mountains in the background, the trickling brooks, and the old farmstead straight from the 1800’s it would make the perfect location for a horror film, don’t you think!

Anyway, here’s the film in three parts. I hope you enjoy it!

A few years ago at Sundance I watched a film  called On the Road with Judas. It’s a very postmodern kind of  film about the artists relationship to the art and things like that. However, ne part that stood out to me was a moment in which a writer in the film says that all writers are liars.

I think many of us carry this sentiment when we watch films. It’s just a story, we tell our children. It’s not real. In fact, the more fantastic the story, the more likely we are to brush aside it’s “truth value.” For some reason “realistic” films like Crash and Slumdog Millionaire (to a degree) touch us and inspire us because they feel so true. Yet fantasies and fairy tales do quite the opposite, don’t they? We watch them and think, that’s make-believe. That’s fun. But it need not affect my life in any important way.

Tolkien, the well known author of The Lord of the Rings was well aware of this sentiment. He writes in his essay On Fairy Stories about a young man who strongly disbelieved in the ability of myth to tell the truth.

I will say no more than to quote a brief passage from a letter I once wrote to a man who described myth and fairy-story as “lies”; though to do him justice he was kind enough and confused enough to call fairy-story-making “Breathing a lie through Silver.”

This young man was actually C.S. Lewis who went on to write the classic children’s fantasies The Chronicles of Narnia. What led a man who called a myth “lies breathed through silver,” to become one of the most influential fantasy writers of our century?

In the collection of Lewis’s essays God in the Docks Lewis gives a shockingly different view of myths.

The heart of Christianity is a myth, which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history… By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle…Those who do not know that this great myth became Fact when the Virgin conceived are, indeed, to be pitied.

The myths in our libraries and history books are then not simply imaginative explorations into fancy. They follow a sort of order. We imagined men like Gods, because there was a man who in fact was and is God.

But what C.S. Lewis is talking about sounds more like prophecy then the hard work of any salt of the earth arist. “Breathing a lie through silver” is not a very shocking phrase to someone who makes his living working for the “silver screen.”

Myths, it seems, were once like prophecies. If our culture has resorted to willfully telling lies, then where is the spirit of this culture headed? Can we become prophets again?

We are halfway through “The Black Dawn” and I have to say that I am really pleased with how it is turning out. I certainly am not the creator of the show, but I wrote nearly a third of it and did some extensive rewrites as well.

Here’s episode one, which was written almost entirely by William Hellmuth, the director, then rewritten quite extensively by myself, and then changed again on set due to location restrictions. The dialogue between Adam and his roommate was meant to take place in their dorm room. We couldn’t get access to one of the rooms, so we changed it to the stairwell on the day of the shoot.

Episode 11 I am also quite proud of. It is supposed to be a “breather” episode. A sort of departure from the drama of the show. The characters get to have a “time out” and unwind a bit. The bit on the soccer field was a hundred percent my writing, and the dialogue between Adam and Julie ended up on the screen exactly as I had re-written it from Abe’s original draft. So naturally, I feel fairly attached to this episode because I wrote so much of it, but I also love the finished product. The score by Jeff Swingle (or was it Curtis, not sure who did this episode) came out beautifully and really helped give the entire episode a very haunting feeling.

And of course, their is episode 12. This is the midpoint of the series, and is naturally the game changer. The first half of the season moves a bit slow. Now that I have learned a bit more about storytelling, I admit I would have structured the entire script a bit differently. But from here on it should be pretty awesome.