Saturday, March 17, 2007

What You Really Should Do Is Direct...

Just some weekend reading tidbits...first a couple good quotes from Creative Screenwriting:
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats. " – Howard Aiken

"You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success -- but only if you persist." – Isaac Asimov

Also from CS, some nice blurbs from writers turned directors...

The good news, according to writer-director David Koepp, is that "directing is easier than writing." As he explains, the director's day during pre-production is a series of rigorously scheduled meetings, each with a specific goal and a finite number of decisions to be made. Principal photography follows much the same pattern, with scrupulously scheduled plans coordinated by an army of film professionals. "You have three-and-a-half pages you gotta get and everything is finite and actually shown to you on a piece of paper," Koepp explains. "Writing is just the tyrannical blank screen with this very accusatory cursor blinking at you. That's hard."

For a writer directing his or her first film, the set quickly becomes a completely different world. "When you're a director standing on a set and you mention to someone that you like apple juice, you hear walkie-talkies clicking all around you as people are scrambling to get you apple juice," explains Breach's Billy Ray. "If you mention, as a writer, that you like apple juice, someone points you to the nearest 7-11."

Indeed, the respect for the director even follows hyphenates back to their writing-only gigs. "Once you've directed," says Ray, "you're even treated differently on movies where you're only the writer. All you have to do is be a director, even if you're not the director on that movie - they still treat you better."

Sad, but true. Sad but true.


Next, courtesy MediaPost, a good article on networks trying to find a way to work with YouTube, and why they really want to stay friends.

And two more good pieces from MediaPost - one details Nielsen ratings first real snapshot of the amount of time people are playing video games, time that they used to be watching conventional television. And then another story with this quote...

"'Live only' and 'live plus same day' data streams are critically important to advertisers, due to the short-term business requirements of most marketers."

...is from an interesting article about advertisers wanting live, same day ratings from Nielsen, and that's all they want...or is it - all they need.

And the Apple TV ships this week, which this CNN Money article thinks might spell the end of the 'thirty second tv spot'...

Oh, it all makes the head swim...who wouldn't really just want to direct?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

best quote I came across recently is

"Never, never, never, never give up."

Winston Churchill