Elba Kroop : The Writer's Block

In my ongoing attempt to achieve what would ultimately be my...

Sun, 19 May 2013 00:40:00 -0400

In my ongoing attempt to achieve what would ultimately be my wildest dream come true: having Steven Spielberg read a script of mine. I am putting my own Indiana Jones, original screenplay, up for all to read.

I know, I know, the chances are preeeeeettttttty slim. And by slim, I mean anorexic. And by anorexic, I mean starving in the dessert alone with no one in sight.

But I gotta try, amiright?!

What Orci and Kurtzman did with Trek was unbelievable. It reinvented the franchise for a new generation of Trek lovers. This is something that I am attempting to do here with Indiana Jones. Not Indiana Jones and the something of the something something. It’s just Indiana Jones. He hasn’t earned his “and the something of the something something”.

And so I give unto thee, one of my best scripts. Ever.

Should you read it and should you like it, please, mention it to someone. Have them read it. Maybe they’ll get a kick out of it too. If you are bold enough to click the links, the log line is with the script.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/123711621/Indiana-Jones

fuckyeahmovieposters: Star Trek by Matt Ferguson Submitted by...

Mon, 13 May 2013 18:41:18 -0400

fuckyeahmovieposters:

Star Trek by Matt Ferguson

Submitted by Crome Yellow

I have finished my World War 2 action/adventure movie. I...

Sat, 11 May 2013 23:27:31 -0400

I have finished my World War 2 action/adventure movie. I encourage any and all to take a look and let me know what you think. This movie isn’t based on historical events, this a complete work of fiction.

“Two weeks after the landing at Normandy a group of US Marine’s survive a crash landing in the middle of Nazi Occupied France and are forced to fight the wilderness, cannibals, Nazi forces coming from all sides and each other to survive. “

For any Terrence Malick diehard

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:54:58 -0400

For any Terrence Malick diehard:

A short but sweet look at the brilliance that is Terrence Malick looking at his obsessions with Fire and Water.

fuckyeahmovieposters: Armageddon

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:33:17 -0400

fuckyeahmovieposters:

Armageddon

Would you look at that... a review for my movie...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 17:36:37 -0400

Would you look at that... a review for my movie...:

Hey it worked…. Check out this, actually POSITIVE, review of my movie “Ball’s Out!”, the short I made about a billion years ago.

rcjohnso: New Beverly Cinema projection room Los Angeles

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 16:32:11 -0400

rcjohnso:

New Beverly Cinema projection room

Los Angeles

cinephilearchive: Cameron’s underwater epic was a shoot so...

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 04:12:34 -0400

cinephilearchive:

Cameron’s underwater epic was a shoot so torturous it not only almost sunk the director’s career but turned some of the crew’s hair white — literally. Take a deep breath: The Making Of The Abyss.

This binder contains countless production used storyboard copies of the complex Special Visual Effects shot for James Cameron’s undersea science fiction epic The Abyss. Also included is a Film Crew contact list, a two page prop inventory, and two humorous documents, one a memo written in the voice of a southern person from Gaffney, South Carolina where The Abyss was filmed and a cartoon of an Alien NTI mocking the I Want My MTV with “I Want my NTI” instead. The binder is dated 9/26/88 and is an interesting look into the production of the film.

This is one of the best motion picture documentaries I have ever watched. It is right up there with Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, the documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now. James Cameron opens the documentary by talking about something he feels is cold, dark and made up of unrelenting pressure: the movie business. The documentary really gives the viewer a good idea of how The Abyss was a challenge on many different levels. Not just on a technical level. The documentary also shows how it was a challenge, both emotionally and physically, for all the cast and crew involved in the project. It would soon be considered by many to be one of the toughest shoots in film history.

It was interesting to learn about the innovative underwater equipment developed just for the film, plus seeing how some of the best underwater photography for a motion picture to date was accomplished. James Cameron has a reputation of being difficult to work with and this film shows why this may be the case. It is up to the viewer to decide whether or not this is true once the viewing experience is complete. If you have not seen the film you will have a great appreciation for what went into the making of this underwater epic. If you have seen The Abyss, you will enjoy the movie even more than you did before.

shirtoid: Why Did It Have To Be Snakes? by Mandingo is...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:49:17 -0400

shirtoid:

Why Did It Have To Be Snakes? by Mandingo is available at Redbubble

The Master interview with Paul Thomas Anderson

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:37:41 -0400

The Master interview with Paul Thomas Anderson:

Anderson has been a big influence on me, personally, as a filmmaker. His sense of composition and the way he elicites performances from his actors/actresses is consistanly amazing to me.

You’ll see him grow as a director/writer from ~~Hard Eight~~ , Sydney to The Master. He will always get me into a movie theatre seat with just his name, regardless of what he makes for the rest of forever.

strikingtheset: David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly on the set of...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:14:53 -0400

strikingtheset:

David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly on the set of Labyrinth (1986)

cinephilearchive: A truly magnificent scripts series, please...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 21:22:24 -0400

cinephilearchive:

A truly magnificent scripts series, please read and study: Hard Eight (also known as Sydney) screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson [pdf]. (NOTE: For educational purposes only.) With thanks to buenotrafeilio.

Paul Thomas Anderson on the set of his film Sydney during the 1993 Sundance Institute Directors Lab. Sydney renamed Hard Eight later premiered at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival.

The next summer Anderson came back to the Sundance filmmakers’ lab to work on his first feature. Although he was starting to avoid interviews and leave old friends like Stein and Conrad behind — which has left many of them hurt and puzzled — he was a great presence at Sundance, open to everything and friendly to everyone and completely absorbed in the entire history of movies at a level far beyond most other young filmmakers. He liked to tease the box-office lady about all the films he was going to sneak into. He would make people list their favorite directors and then defend their choices, Cooper says, arguing so fiercely they spent days questioning their judgment. There was no question where he was headed. And this is where the story of Paul Thomas Anderson becomes almost mythical, a parable about the necessity of real art. The evidence is in the scenes he shot that summer at Sundance, now available in the supplemental material on the DVD that was eventually released under the title Hard Eight. (But the working title, the title he still prefers, is Sydney, just as he told Carole Stevens back in high school.)

Although Anderson would soon become famous for some of the most dizzyingly ambitious sequences in the history of film, the DVD scenes are mostly just Philip Baker Hall and John C. Reilly sitting in a coffee shop and talking. There are no tracking shots, no fancy cuts. He barely moves the camera at all. Despite his youth and seemingly endless ambition, he already knew that a real story is about people talking around the things inside their hearts — in this case, an older gambler who speaks in an oddly formal diction while becoming a father figure to a lost young man. It seems inevitable that the fools who financed it locked him out of the editing room to cut it faster and more commercially, that Reilly and Hall faked sore throats to avoid dubbing that edit, that Anderson recut his original version from scraps and got it accepted into the Cannes Film Festival, that the resulting acclaim launched his career, that his next film (and first masterpiece) was a three-hour remake of something he shot on videotape when he was seventeen. An artist whose great theme would be the destiny coded in the seemingly random fragments of our lives was already standing in the doorway to his future, pulling together the fragments of his past, furiously fulfilling the person he already was and imagining the person he would become — anything so he wouldn’t have to go back. —The Secret History of Paul Thomas Anderson

Here’s the snippet of Paul Thomas Anderson discussing his horrifying experience on his first directorial feature, SYDNEY (aka HARD EIGHT), and how he survived and overcame (source)

Before you made Hard Eight I presume that this wasn’t the first script you wrote. How come you chose it to be your first one?
Yes I had only written maybe one or two other scripts that I didn’t really like that much and I liked this one and it seemed that I could do it. It seemed that I could make a movie which was small with only four characters in Reno, Nevada and that I could raise money for it. It was really all I had.

You had no choice!
Yeah but I really didn’t need any other choice. It was that movie that I wanted to make. I got very lucky on that movie just to start making it but I got in a lot of trouble when I made the movie. There were some producers that fired me actually after I… It was my movie. I mean I wrote it and directed it and then I found these guys to finance it and they were real criminals.

(Laughing)

I put the movie together. And they had all these ideas for cuts that I wouldn’t make. Some of them were actually good ideas but I was too arrogant to like see that they were good ideas and they were kind of dicks too. But they ended up taking the movie away from me. It was like this amazing lesson very early on where I was hit fucking repeatedly over and over again and I fought and I desperately tried to get the movie back and it was just a long, long battle. And eventually I got the movie back but there was a period where I did get beat up enough and where I was swimming in the darkest depression and I thought my career is over and I will never get another chance. But I pulled my self out of it somehow and the only way that I could get things going again is if I go to work again. So I went and got Boogie Nights made and the amazing thing in doing that was I went to get Boogie Nights made and that became kind of easy, getting money for it and at the same time I reinvestigated the fight to get my first movie back. And I got that movie back so I was in pre-production on Boogie Night while I was re-cutting and finishing off my first movie. And it was kind of a this great lesson that I learned just having gone in this really deep and dark depression where I couldn’t get out of my fucking bed and the only thing that I could do is just get up and attack, attack and attack. And I am happy that that happened. So it was kind of a great first lesson on my first movie. And I was able to learn right then and there all kinds of mistakes that I have made. All that arrogance where I wasn’t seeing anything and where they were right and I was just too blind to notice it. But I also learned that I was right on a lot of stuff and I should have fought for what I believed. So it’s just kind of a great lesson on my first movie.

This is a second great tip of the season. Beat depression by breaking it!
Yeah! Absolutely!

Previously on Cinephilia and Beyond:

Hard Eight Audio Commentary (1996) with director PT Anderson and actor Phillip Baker Hall

strikingtheset: star-wars-daily: http://star-wars-daily.tumblr....

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 23:10:45 -0400

strikingtheset:

star-wars-daily:

http://star-wars-daily.tumblr.com

Quite right

How to tell if one of your friends is becoming a writer.

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 22:41:12 -0400

authorlife:

strikingtheset: Overnight (2003) is a documentary about the...

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 05:52:30 -0400

strikingtheset:

Overnight (2003) is a documentary about the rise and fall of filmmaker Troy Duffy. An aspiring writer-director who got the dream of a lifetime when he sold The Boondock Saints (1999) script to Miramax as his first feature to direct. But beneath the seemingly happy deal that made Duffy the man of the hour, was an arrogant egomaniac whose ambitions alienated friends, and burned bridges in the film industry. Overnight is a movie about how one director ultimately ruins a promising career that could have been from an overnight success.

Written by Mystic80

myfroggylife: Image via. You can also see the cards here at the...

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 20:19:06 -0400

myfroggylife:

Image via. You can also see the cards here at the Trading Card Database.

cinephilearchive: Exhausted: John C. Holmes, the Real Story...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 18:27:21 -0400

cinephilearchive:

Exhausted: John C. Holmes, the Real Story (1981) — Boogie Nights laserdisc commentary with writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson (scene-selected – 34 mins.)

Boogie Nights screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson [pdf]. (NOTE: For educational purposes only)

A conversation with director Paul Thomas Anderson about his film “Boogie Nights”, which looks into the gritty world of the adult film industry of the 1970’s.

It will always boggle my mind that Paul Thomas Anderson made Boogie Nights when he was 27 years old, but it is a fact — one that’s hammered home when you watch old interviews of a young, nerdy-looking Anderson discussing the movie. Here’s a great two-part interview Anderson did with Charlie Rose around the time Boogie Nights arrived on the scene. During the chat, Anderson talks about Leonardo DiCaprio turning down the lead role in order to make Titanic, and how it was DiCaprio who suggested Anderson go meet with Mark Wahlberg. Years later DiCaprio would call that decision his “biggest regret” even though Titanic turned him into a megastar. “My biggest regret is Boogie Nights,” he said back in 2010. “I’m a huge fan of Paul Thomas Anderson but the first time I met him for that role I hadn’t really seen much of his previous work. Now I love that movie.”

The interview also touches upon Anderson’s fondness for shooting long takes, why he thinks film school is a waste of time, and, my favorite part, the origins of Rollergirl. Turns out Rollergirl is based on a character Anderson watched in a real porn movie that was hidden inside Robert Redford’s private stash. Wait, Redford has a porn stash? How Anderson wound up watching Redford’s porn movies is a funny story, and you can watch the filmmaker tell it below. —Erik Davis

Charlie Rose: What was the most important thing you learned from Robert Altman?
Paul Thomas Anderson: How to giggle and give in.

fuckyeahbehindthescenes: In the asteroid scene, one of the...

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 15:15:58 -0400

fuckyeahbehindthescenes:

In the asteroid scene, one of the asteroids is actually a shoe. The rumor is that George Lucas asked the SFX people to redo the scene so many times that they got annoyed and one of them threw in their shoe. Another of the asteroids is actually a potato

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

strikingtheset: Steven Spielberg and George Lucas having fun...

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 15:11:45 -0400

strikingtheset:

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas having fun during a break in filming on the location of Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom (1984)

strikingtheset: The rope bridge used during the final fight...

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 22:40:07 -0400

strikingtheset:

The rope bridge used during the final fight scene was actually suspended up a couple of hundred feet across a gorge on location in Sri Lanka. Acrophobic Steven Spielbergwould never walk over it, and had to drive a mile and a half to reach the other side.Harrison Ford on the other hand had no such fear, and would run across it at full speed.