THE man who wrote the script for Martin Scorsese’s classic films Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, will be the star guest at a brand new annual festival in Nottingham.

Paul Schrader, who also wrote the screenplays for The Last Temptation Of Christ, City Hall and American Gigolo - which he also directed — will be attending Screenlit at the Broadway Cinema, June 29 to July 5 along with David Morrissey and Jimmy McGovern.

The week-long event is designed to celebrate the art of writing for film and TV.

It will include the screening of new films, including the UK premiere of Anne Fontaine’s Coco Before Chanel and the award-winning Unmade Beds by UK-based Argentinean filmmaker Alexis Dos Santos.

This first year also sees the launch of ScreenLit’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Screenwriting which will be given to Paul Schrader, who will present a Screenwriting Masterclass.

read more…

ComingSoon.net just got off the phone with filmmaker Harold Ramis, always a wonderful and charming interview subject for sure. We talked a little about his new movie Year One, starring Jack Black and Michael Cera, which hits theaters next week, plus he’s also being honored with a Screenwriting Tribute and taking part in an All-Star Comedy panel at this year’s Nantucket Film Festival. (Oh, and we should mention that panel includes Ben Stiller, Peter Farrelly and John Hamburg, too!)

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the planned Ghostbusters 3, as the original movie celebrates its 25th Anniversary and having been twenty years since the last installment. Ramis has been developing the three-quel along with his Year One writers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, best known as part of the writing staff on “The Office,” so we asked him for a brief update.

read more…

…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.

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.

…Read More