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.

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.

…Read More

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 week’s special guest is screenwriter and former Director of Motion Pictures for TV Mini-Series for NBC, Lew Hunter. Credits include “The Execution of Private Slovak,” “Born Innocent,” “The Law,” “The Red Badge of Courage” and “Centennial,” as well as his classic book “The Secrets of Screenwriting”. His book, Screenwriting 434 is consider to be one of the best books ever written about screenwriting. Please join us for the show:

Also, get Script Sales and Development news from Script Girl!

Listen to this show now:

David Benioff’s Epic Adaptation, TROY

Interview by: Daniel Robert Epstein

I couldn’t imagine the daunting task of adapting a work like The Iliad to the movie screen, but at the age of 34, David Benioff has already adapted Homer’s The Iliad and is now working on the screenplay for Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. It’s a good thing all those writers are dead. Otherwise, Benioff might feel some pressure.

Benioff’s work first hit theatres when Spike Lee had him adapt his own novel, The 25th Hour, for him to film. The film received wide critical praise. But already, Benioff was in the weeds with writing his multiple drafts of Troy. It’s unusual for a $200 million production to only use one writer, but Benioff worked closely with director/producer Wolfgang Peterson and even worked with Brad Pitt on making his character of Achilles more human.

Besides The Iliad what sources did you draw on?
Of course there are more source texts than just The Iliad. I mean The Iliad was the pivotal one in the telling of the Trojan War, but it starts from the ninth year of the war and ends in the ninth year of the war. We wanted to tell the entire story from before the beginning when Paris seduces Helen and triggers the entire war through to the fall of Troy, and you don’t get all of that in The Iliad, so some of it comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and some of it comes from The Odyssey, actually. There are little bits from Eneid. There are bits of things from Bulfinch’s Mythology, and some of it was just imagined.

Was there a tendency not to write too contemporary?
Yeah, that’s one of the big challenges in screenplays. You don’t want the characters to sound contemporary. You don’t want them to sound like California boys in 2004, but at the same time it won’t work effectively if they sound exactly as they do in Homer because Homer is not really dialogue. It’s more of these dueling monologues, which are beautiful, but they are at least ten minutes long.

Agamemnon will launch into this long speech, and Achilles will respond with his very articulate rebuttal, and it just goes on. I don’t really want to sit there watching one character make a speech for 15 minutes and then have the next one do the same. It’s trying to find some kind of happy medium between contemporary lingo and the Homeric, ultra-exalted dialogue.

How many writers had their fingers in the screenplay?
I was the only writer the whole time. It started with the pitch that I made, and I was lucky enough to not be replaced, which I’m incredibly happy about; I would’ve been heartbroken, and it happens most of the time. So it’s partly luck and I think partly because [director] Wolfgang [Peterson] and I work well together.

When I started the screenplay, I had no idea it was going to be a $200 million movie. I think that would’ve been incredibly intimidating because this was only the second script I wrote. I was kind of dumb about the whole thing. I mean I didn’t really get nervous until after I had written it. I didn’t really understand how intimidating it was until I actually went on set and saw the size of these sets and saw the thousands of extras running around. It was a massive undertaking.

How do you pitch a faithful retelling?
Well, I didn’t pitch a faithful retelling. I pitched kind of a ruthless retelling where I really wanted to concentrate on the human story. For me, what I’ve always loved about The Iliad is the story of Hector, Achilles, Paris and Helen but particularly Hector and Achilles. These are the two great heroes on either side, and inevitably, they are going to fight, but it’s not a good-guys-and-bad-guys story. It’s not the epic battle of good versus evil. It’s not humans versus orcs. It’s humans fighting humans, and that’s why I think it’s the great tragic war story. Every time you see a soldier fall, it’s not some villain falling. It’s a human. It’s some mother’s son, and that’s what’s brilliant about Homer’s telling of the story. Each time, he always gives you one moment with that character, even very minor characters you’ve never met before, at the moment of their death. It’s a very humanistic way of telling a war story.

When you sat down to write this story, did you have the talent in mind?
I did not, and actually I’m glad of that because it would be hard for me. It is harder for me to write knowing the face in some ways because then you tend to write for the actor, and I really wanted to just let the characters exist in my imagination or the characters from the original text. I’m not writing lines for Peter O’Toole or for Brad Pitt or Eric Bana but for Priam, Achilles and Hector. Why did you change the way Agamemnon died? The ruthlessness is there. In the myths, Agamemnon can’t get the right winds to get to Troy, so he sacrifices his daughter, and this irritates his wife. So at the end of the war, when he sails home, his wife ends up killing him. We didn’t have time to tell all the different stories. My first draft of the script came in at 180 pages, which is a monster script, and there still wasn’t a way to tell all the different strands. Eventually, it was cut to 140 pages, and there was a certain ruthlessness involved. We had to pick the stories that we could follow all the way through. If we weren’t going to have the whole story of Agamemnon and his daughter and his wife, we had to figure out a way we could allude to his death the way that it’s depicted in the myth. He was knifed by a woman, so that was the way it was handled there, but there were certain changes made, sometimes for efficiency and sometimes because I had to choose what I thought was best for the movie. As for being absolutely faithful to the source material, I’m always going to pick the project.

Were there any other endings?
Yeah, from the original pitch, it was meant to be the story of Achilles and Hector, these two great heroes. Hector is killed 25 or 30 minutes before the end, and then Achilles is killed. Once your two main guys are dead, there’s not much more story to tell there. I think we could have an eight-hour miniseries that goes through all the different phases of the characters, but if you’re going to try to do it as a feature, you really have to cut many different things. The ending we have now was pretty much always the ending, and we are lucky in that we have Sean Bean doing that final voiceover with his magnificent voice. This is a tragic story in many ways, and I love the image of the ending with the smoke rising to the skies. I don’t know if that was originally in the script or if it was Wolfgang’s idea.

Was it a coincidence that Brian Cox was in two films you wrote, The 25th Hour and now Troy?
Total coincidence. I mean, when they were looking for Agamemnon, I remember talking to Wolfgang about what a marvelous actor I thought he was, and Wolfgang was already aware of him. It ended up being a happy coincidence for me because I just thought he was terrific and loved him as James Brogan in The 25th Hour.

Read more…

ScreenwritersUtopia is proud to announce with the coming year a new feature, “SU’s ScreenTalk” radio program broadcast via BlogTalkRadio with a potential audience of millions! Er, yeah right.

Devin (M.) Watson and myself (Chris) will be the show’s hosts, we will cover all sorts of topics related to screenwriting, movies, and Hollywood.

For those of you who do not know, Devin Martin Watson is a professional screenwriter with his first film TENEBROUS a.k.a “The Cursed” (the scum sucking producers changed the name) due to be released by Spring 2009.

As for myself, I am Chris Wehner and I am an author and professional screenwriter. Currently my screenplay, EL CAMINO, is in pre-production. Also my book, Screenwriting on the Internet: Researching, Writing & Selling Your Script on the Web was a Top Seller at The Writer’s Store.

Anyway, we will feature How To Tips, Marketing Advice, Share our Knowledge, and hold interviews with other professional screenwriters.

Our first show: 9pm MST (8pm LA time), January 14, 2009 will feature an Academy Award Nominee and much more!.

You can access the show via this link or by listening below >