About film. Things you should know (or think about).
From the book Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade, the basic rules of pitching. In case you are not familiar with William Goldman (1931-2018), he’s been one of the best screenwriters Hollywood has seen. He was…
Continue reading William Goldman’s Ten Commandments of Pitching
And How the Classic Western High Noon Became a Response to the Wave of Extreme Anti-Communism which Swarmed the American Film Industry. What we Mean by Red Scare? National Geographic summarises it very well here and below: The Red Scare…
Continue reading Witch Hunt in 50s Hollywood: The Second Red Scare
During the first key 10-15 minutes of any movie, the audience takes a fundamental decision: they make their minds about going with the film or just disengaging. 10-15 minutes is the amount of time that filmmakers, in general, have to…
Continue reading Video-Analysis: The First Ten Minutes of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
During the first key 10-15 minutes of any movie, the audience takes a fundamental decision: they make their minds about going with the film or just disengaging. 10-15 minutes is the amount of time that filmmakers, in general, have to…
Continue reading Video-Analysis: The First Ten Minutes of BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID
How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror. Jason Zinoman‘s Shock Value is a seminal book on modern horror films if ever there was one. In the same way that I would recommend you…
Continue reading SHOCK VALUE, the Essential Book about America’s 70s New Horror Films
Movie posters are complex entities. Occasionally they are works of art, but this is not their main goal. The mission of a film poster is another: to sell a concept, an image, a title, a tag line, a movie to…
Today we are going to travel in memory lane, but we’ll do so real, real fast. The 70s was a great time for car chases in American movies. Possibly the film with the most famous car-chase ever, though, was made…
Film blocking and staging mean choreographing the actors and the camera in a given scene in a way which develops and pushes the film narrative forward. It’s never guided solely by aesthetics, and if it is, it’s wrong, That’s why…
Like the books they are based on, the film adaptations of Frank Herbert’s Dune are an ever-expanding story in themselves. At the very beginning, they were a few mild shots at adapting Dune, which involved names like David Lean (because…
Continue reading All DUNES before DUNE (TV and Movies, from Jodorowky’s to Villeneuve’s)
Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Peter Mayhew rehearsing a scene on the Star Wars‘ set, aboard The Millenium Falcon, and having a laugh. Alec Guiness, our beloved Obi-Wan, is there too, but he seems to be thinking “What the hell…
Continue reading Fantastic Material from the Original STAR WARS + Great Parody Stuff
