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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Paul Haggis’ appearance Monday evening at the Mondavi Center no doubt will draw plenty of aspiring filmmakers from UC Davis.

After all, Haggis directed and co-wrote “Crash,” named best picture at the Academy Awards in 2006, and scripted “Million Dollar Baby,” honored as best picture the previous year. Winner of a screenplay Oscar for “Crash,” Haggis also was nominated for “Baby” and “Letters From Iwo Jima.”

All of this would seem to render him uniquely qualified to offer advice to young people.

“I think I am qualified to tell people what not to do,” Haggis, 56, said with a laugh. “They can look at my career and say, ‘We should be smarter than that.’ ”

He’s being modest, of course, but he did take a circuitous route to becoming one of the most sought-after screenwriters and directors in Hollywood. For much of his career, Haggis worked in television – on cartoons, sitcoms, dramas and however you choose to classify “Walker, Texas Ranger,” the long-running Chuck Norris series co-created by Haggis.

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Scott Frank will be joining us on ScreenTalk Radio in the coming weeks and after finding this “video” interview with Scott when he had written and directed his screenplay, THE LOOKOUT. I have interviewed Scott for Creative Screenwriting Magazine and several times for this website (click here). So anyway, this is great interview and worth 8 minutes of your time!

Third Acts are your race to the finish line. Everything has been setup and the final payoff(s) are coming in. Remember, your Third Act is buried in your First Act. You’ve raised a question about your Protagonist, placed an obstacle (the first of many) in his or her way, you’ve setup something that has to be resolved and usually has to be in such a way it is the final act by the Protagonist to signify their transformation.

Typically Third Acts are not more than 15 minutes long. (There are always exceptions to the rule). The event that sends the Second Act hurdling into the Third Act should be the emergence of the Protagonist overcoming his lowest point. The Final Action is taken by the Protagonist. Now it’s a race to the finish. The suspense, tension and drama are at the highest point here.

You often will expose the theme o f the story with this final act or redemption, resolution. How and why the Protagonist has acted tells us something about the character.
Your Third Act must do the following:

1) Resolve the central action line;
2) reveal the final image of the Protagonist: has he changed, into what? What is this new identity;
3) all that which is setup must be paid off.

Finally, the pace and tempo must be at its highest point here. The 3-Act structure is a building process of emotion and tension. Even with dramas and comedies, there is something going on. The Protagonist is heading towards this Third Act deliverance where the final decision is made and the action is resolved thereby allowing the theme of the story to be revealed.

Good luck and keep writing

Chris Wehner
www.4screenwriters.com

This is just too good to not be true. Fellow writers, you have to keep accurate records on who reads your screenplay.

By Gina Carbone
gcarbone@seacoastonline.com
February 05, 2009 6:00 AM
PORTSMOUTH — “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” is currently the top grossing film of 2009. It’s about to break $100 million at the box office. And allegations have surfaced that a local man wrote the original script without receiving credit.

Alfred Thomas Catalfo, a Dover attorney and Seacoast writer/director known for his films, “The Norman Rockwell Code” and “The Stag Hunt,” is not prepared to make any accusations of his own right now. However, he did write a comedy script called “Mall Cop” in 2000. Between 2002 and 2005, it was a winner and/or finalist in 12 major screenwriting competitions, receiving the Best Screenplay Award at the 2004 New Hampshire Film Expo in Portsmouth.

“It was also submitted to various people in the film industry and it was submitted on at least two occasions to Happy Madison,” Catalfo said Wednesday.

Happy Madison Productions is a film company founded by actor and former New Hampshire resident Adam Sandler. Happy Madison produced “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” along with Columbia Pictures. Shooting began in February 2008 in Burlington, Mass., and the film was released on Jan. 16. The Writers Guild of America has given script credit to star/producer Kevin James and co-writer Nick Bakay. Catalfo wouldn’t comment on when he sent the script to Happy Madison. Questions are being raised now that an e-mail reportedly from a “Paul Blart” crew member to the film site indieWIRE has been made public.

The e-mail sent Monday to indieWIRE reads, in part:

“During production … the film’s title was mysteriously changed to ‘Untitled Kevin James Project’ before being changed back to ‘Paul Blart: Mall Cop’ a couple of weeks later. The story going around the set at the time was that a writer from New Hampshire was claiming that Kevin James stole his script, which he apparently previously submitted to Happy Madison, and that he also registered the title with the Motion Picture Association, preventing Columbia-Sony from using it.

“One guy there who was definitely in a position to know said the studio was so shocked when they read the scripts side-by-side … that they immediately sent a Sony bigwig to New Hampshire with an apology and a check to ‘work it out’ in typical Hollywood fashion. I also remember hearing that the writer was a lawyer and was really giving the producers a hard time. Kevin James looked pretty sheepish for a few days, too.”

The writer went on to say he found and read Catalfo’s “Mall Cop” script on www.scriptghost.com. “… It’s the same script and the same story! Kevin James just changed Catalfo’s mall cop character ‘Art’ to ‘Blart’ and changed a jewelry store to a bank. It’s still about a mall robbery with hostages being rescued by a mall cop who can’t get into the police academy and lives at home with his mother. Both scripts even have robots and scenes set in the Rainforest Café!”

To read the Screenplay: MALL COP

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Frances Kavanaugh, who was raised around ranching, cowboys and riding horses, wrote more than 30 western scripts for numerous cowboy stars in the 1940s and ’50s.

Kavanaugh, who was called ‘the Cowgirl of the Typewriter,’ was one of the few women who wrote screenplays for B-westerns in the 1940s and early ’50s.
By Dennis McLellan
February 4, 2009

Frances Kavanaugh, one of the few women who wrote screenplays for B-westerns such as “Song of Old Wyoming” and “Wild West” in the 1940s and early ’50s, has died. She was 93.

Kavanaugh died Jan. 23 at her home in Encino after a long battle with lymphoma, said her husband, Robert L. Hecker.