…that we were not able to get to on the show.

Unanswered Questions from John August on Vimeo.

O.K. I have not been able to access the ASA website for days, are they done? Did they go belly-up? Anyone know…. anyone care?

-XC

According to The Guardian he is:

Synecdoche, New York opened in America last October, and it has already appeared at several UK film festivals, so you may judge the hopes for its commercial success that it is only just opening commercially next week. That may prove a generous use of the word “commercially”. Still, you may love the film and be changed by it. Sometimes the wistful voice of a website posting says it all, like this letter addressed to Charlie Kaufman, the man who wrote and directed Synecdoche:

“Charlie i hope you read this and only posted it in the hopes that you would. i live in birmingham, alabama and had to drive to atlanta, georgia to see your movie in theatres. i want to say this is the greatest film experience I have had all year. your film touched me in the deeps depths of my heart in the most wonderful way. i love your films and want you to keep making them and despite all the dumb ass critics I think that synecdoche new york is a masterpiece of cinema that humanity doesn’t deserve.”

To which I would add this: a few critics raved about the picture; several others welcomed it. I’m urging you to see it - if only to discover what the writer of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation can do as a director. Plus the film cost $21m and has so far grossed $3m in its home country. All I want to know is how Charlie Kaufman, with this story and his hangdog shyness raised even $21, let alone millions.

Harold Ramis and Ben Stiller will participate on a comedy panel and Ramis will receive the annual Screenwriters Tribute at the 14th Annual Nantucket Film Festival, set to run from June 18-21.

Peter Farrelly and John Hamburg will also feature on the panel and discuss the evolution of comedy.

Ramis’ upcoming comedy Year One starring Jack Black and Michael Cera will close the festival and there will be a 25th anniversary screening of Ghostbusters, which Ramis starred in and co-wrote.

Festival artistic director Mystelle Brabbee said that without Ramis “the landscape of comedy in movies would look entirely different” and called him “the father of modern comedy.”

In keeping with the festival’s mission of spotlighting writers, organisers will announce the winner of Showtime’s annual Tony Cox Award for screenwriting at the annual awards brunch. Jury members include Fisher Stevens, Jessie Nelson, and Lili Taylor.

The film line-up includes Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, Cheryl Hines’ Serious Moonlight, Cherien Dabis’ Amreeka, Sophie Barthes’ Cold Souls, Louie Psihoyos’ documentary The Cove, Lynn Shelton’s Humpday and Sebastian Silva’s The Maid.

(Source: http://www.screendaily.com/festivals/harold-ramis-to-receive-nantucket-screenwriting-tribute/5000879.article)

Helped bring “Bonanza,” “The Twilight Zone” to life.

According to the Associated Press, John Furia, Jr., the scribe who helped bring Bonanza and The Twilight Zone into America’s living room during the 1950s and 1960s, died Monday. His passing was confirmed by the Writer’s Guild of America West. Cause of death is not known.

Born in 1929, Furia first got his feet wet as a singer performing in dance bands in New York City. But a chance move to Hollywood stoked his interest in the written word, launching his screenwriting career as the brain behind some of the most popular movies and TV shows of the post-war era.

“John had an old-world dignity about him that seems in such short supply in our world today,” Jack Epps, Jr., chair of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts Writing for Screen and Television Division, said in a statement.

Though Furia’s main portfolio was as a writer, he was a fearless advocate of his fellow scribes, serving as president of the WGAW from 1973 to 1975. In his free time, he helped found USC’s Writing for Screen and Television Division, becoming the division’s first full professor.

In a statement, the current president of the WGAW, Patric M. Verrone, expressed his sorrow following Furia’s death.

“John’s character and dignity touched and influenced generations of writers from the founders of the Guild itself to the newest of student-associates,” he said. “For those of us who relied on his knowledge and his counsel, John was more than an eminence grise; he was pure eminence.”

Furia leaves behind a spouse, Mary, and 7 children.

CHARLIE KAUFMAN IS A WORRIED man. Ever since making his screenwriting debut with Being John Malkovich, the New York-born writer has enjoyed the “weird, atypical and lucky” experience of having his idiosyncratic scripts filmed.
However, now that parts of the film industry are feeling the pinch along with the rest of us (some ex-bankers and politicians excepted, of course), the creative force behind Adaptation and the Oscar-winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is confronting an uncertain future.

“I’ve been able to do the things I want to do, pretty much, and I don’t know now,” he says gloomily. “Just based on what’s happening in the independent world, and what’s happening in the economy, I think it’s going to be trickier.”

Kaufman knows that his experience to date has been extraordinary. Instead of churning out easy-to-market sequels, prequels or riffs on the last big thing, he has built his reputation on works that are so singular, they have actually given rise to an adjective: Kaufmanesque. To the writer’s amusement, a commentator even used it recently to describe his ambitious directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York.

“That’s kind of amazing. I mean it’s actually Kaufmanesque to describe it as Kaufmanesque.” Then again, he once saw a news report where a shipwreck was referred to as a “real-life Titanic”. “I swear to God!” he says, laughing.

Suggesting that Kaufman has become his own genre causes the writer’s mood to darken. “I don’t write genre stuff in any form,” he says irritably. “I’m not interested in it. I always try to do the opposite of that.”

His screenplays eschew the classic three-act structure slavishly adhered to by many of his peers – he once declared: “I don’t know what the hell a third act is”. “I have something I’m interested in and then I decide I’m going to explore it,” he says. “I don’t know where the characters are going to go or what the screenplay’s going to do. For me, that’s the way to keep it alive and make it interesting and worthwhile.”

It is easy to see why he slyly sent up Hollywood screenwriting guru Robert McKee in Adaptation. Kaufman’s approach is organic, not rule-bound; his narratives often take sudden and unexpected turns. “Realistic and naturalistic are not the same thing,” he says. “And I think it’s interesting to play with surrealism or dream logic and try to create a poem, a metaphor, something that conveys a feeling or makes something happen in your gut that you don’t necessarily intellectually understand.”

No wonder he was disappointed by George Clooney’s conventional direction of his script for Confessions of A Dangerous Mind. Kaufman had enjoyed close collaborative relationships with the directors Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) and Michel Gondry (Human Nature, Eternal Sunshine) but Clooney, stepping behind the camera for the first time, did not want him around. “I wasn’t really involved. So I feel disconnected from that … product,” he says, sneeringly.

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