One of my great regrets is that I didn’t take a screenwriting class during my many years of studying, especially at film schools such as UCSB and NYU. While I don’t know how to construct a screenplay, I can read one, and I do know that most screenwriters use specialized software, such as Final Draft, that makes the formatting process much easier. But as an art form, it’s lost to me.
Last night, I learned about Fountain. To put it in "pitch" terms, it’s "Markdown for screenwriters."
The great thing about Fountain, and Markdown for that matter, is that it requires no special software. You can write a screenplay or a web document with a basic text editor. This solves a huge problem for fledgling screenwriters, who won’t have to buy any special software. Every computer operating system has a text editor. You can use the dreaded Notepad on Windows, the serviceable TextEdit on a Mac, and even the cryptic but powerful vi if you’re more of a Unix geek. If you want something more featured, text editors are relatively inexpensive. I like using iA Writer for Mac and iPad, or Writing Kit for iPad and iPhone. My all-time favorite text editor for the Mac, BBEdit, will set you back $50, and I hope they build Fountain support one of these days.
Another great feature is these languages are as future proof as you can expect. We who traffic in "media", specifically electronic and digital media, lose countless hours of sleep wondering how much longer will we be able to retrieve music, movies, and text stored on such media. I hadn’t worried about this danger until I visited a audio/video restoration outfit here in New York. One of the techs showed me a ball of tightly tangled, thin wire. I didn’t know what that was until he revealed that it was recording wire, which was a consumer recording medium available in the 1930s. This shop was one of a very few that had access to the playback machine for this wire. However, he said that the wire was so tangled that "there wasn’t enough money on this earth for him to physically untangle the wire." Preservation or restoration is basically impossible.
Whenever I write a document, I wonder when all my college essays, syllabi for classes I’ve taught, and reading will end up like that wire. When in the future will some tech look at my MacBook Pro or iPad, and say, "Oh man, there’s no amount of money in the biosphere for me to figure out these machines!"?
The only real way to preserve all these documents might be to just print them out and and keep them dry. It worked for our grandparents with paper, just like it worked for medieval Europeans with parchment, and just like it worked for Egyptians with papyrus. As I tell my students, "paper is permanence."
In the short term, one of the best ways to ensure access to your documents is to save them in a human-readable form. Plain text files ensure that, for as long as humans can read and can open a file on a computer, someone can read them. They won’t have to have the latest version of some proprietary software whose vendor went bust a decade ago. If you can retrieve the file from a disk, which is a big "if" in the long term, you can read someone’s screenplay.
The other thing that I really like about Fountain and Markdown is that it lowers the barrier of entry for fledgling screenwriters and web writers by using something easy, robust, and very inexpensive to use. When you open the gates like this, you get more work. Granted, the average quality if the work will decrease because there will be some very poor writing out there, but the true value lies at the margins. The quality of the greatest work will increase.
I hope this catches on with screenwriters as Markdown has with some savvy web writers.
Gee, how did Swedish films ever get a reputation for being more sexually permissive than, say, American films?
After class, two students brought up two good points about Persona.
The David Cronenberg film Spider (2002) has a similar narrative device of a character with a split personality. Watch it, although I might have just spoiled it for you. Sorry.
Here’s the trailer for the film.
On this note, I wanted to consider what the film would have been like had it been done in a more conventional manner. For example, what if we saw the woman becoming pregnant and then deciding to either abort the child or to have it and to hate it? Would you show scenes of a doctor’s office, or a string of scenes between the mother and son? I don’t see this having the same impact as what Bergman produced. Instead, we see the internal conflict playing out in a very externalized way.
There were several scenes that suggested that the two women were going to become romantically involved. There were many moments where the women embrace, but as you noticed, they never actually kiss or otherwise consummate their affection for each other.
This might suggest that the two women are inextricably close, and in fact they are as close as any two persons can become. This is an early hint that they are in fact connected. What do you think?
Finally, all those references to the materiality of the film medium are there to remind us that we are watching a film. Bergman is using film to explore human psychology in a way that language is incapable of doing. That’s perhaps why we understand, on a visceral level, what the film is trying to explore, but we can’t quite put into words. Recall the Bergman quote I read before we screened the film.
wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover
I hope you see how the new waves were pushing the limits of what film could do and what it can explore. Persona makes it seem like no topic is impossible.
Groupon received the 60 Minutes treatment last night. The report was a primer on what Groupon is and an explanation on what it does, meant for a national television audience who may not know anything about the Internet except that it runs on computers. It mentions the biggest issues that Groupon is facing, such as the caustic relationship it has cultivated with retailers, its troubled IPO, its even more troubled balance sheet, and the challenge of emerging competitors.
As someone who has bought several of these “daily deals,” and more than a few offered by Groupon, I can say that I have been reluctant to buy a Groupon deal simply because their deals are not very good. When I first used the service in 2010, Groupon regularly offered deals that were 50% off at places that I would like to go. In a one-month period, for example, no fewer than four restaurants in my nook of Long Island City offered excellent 50%-off deals. But in the last year or so, the deals have been less impressive. The deals are at places that I wouldn’t want to go, in neighborhoods I never travel to, and the discounts aren’t very good. The problem seems even worse when for their Groupon Now deals.
In the morning, when the deluge of “daily deal” emails arrive, I don’t pay much attention to the Groupon offers. It’s not because I have anything against them per se, but it’s really the deal that is going to make me take action. The same goes for Gilt City, Travelzoo, Living Social, and Thrillist.
However, Groupon has insisted that one of the things that sets it apart from its competitors is the “Groupon Voice,” the punchy blurb included with each deal. I’ve considered these little else than poor attempts at humor, filled with a lot of impenetrable references. Take for example today’s featured New York deal at the Village Pourhouse:
Microbrews are lauded for their craftsmanship and distinguished by the tiny medals draped from their every molecule. Sample the finest of particles with today’s Groupon to Village Pourhouse
Where’s the humor?
The joke is supposed to link beer with chemistry. I get it, but I don’t see how it’s funny. Is it because medals are bigger than molecules? Is it, because since it would presumably take a lot of molecules to make a glass of beer, that there would be medals everywhere? These blurbs would be better if they explained how a friend and I can taste good beer, not just yellow, American-style corn swill, for cheap. And that they wash down all kinds of savory snacks.
60 Minutes devoted a ninety-second web extra clip to the “Groupon Voice,” without posing any skepticism. Instead, we just let Editor-in-Chief Aaron With insist that the “distinct, unusual, unique” voice is a competitive advantage for the company. This was the same subject in a May 2010 New York Times article about how Groupon’s “funny” words set it apart from its competitors. When I read this article, it was the first time I had thought about those blurbs because I deliberately ignore them. No one I know ever mentions those blurbs, and I doubt that any in my peer groups reads them or looks forward to reading them in the daily email.
As I come to Bobst Library during the intersession period, the lower level study area looks wonderfully deserted. During the last week of the semester, there were people in these seats throughout the entire day. Some were studying, but a good number of them were sleeping.
Bobst Library will remain calm for another week, until classes begin in the third week of the month. At that point, the spring semester will begin again and the bustle will return.
While scholars debate when the auteurist New Hollywood movement ended—it was either Apocalypse Now or Heaven’s Gate—Hollywood began to abandon the auteur centered film for the big blockbuster in the mid 1970s. No film represents that shift more than Jaws.
The film’s theatrical trailer sets the tone using the conventions of the horror film. The trailer also mentions the best-selling novel by Peter Benchley, which was the basis for the feature film. It was also curious that the film was released during the summer months, which was rare for a high profile motion picture in the 1970s. The fact that the film was about a shark attacking beach-goers undoubtedly resonated with audiences looking forward to summer recreation.
Jaws is also the first major Hollywood film to use television advertising. You can see the television spot below.
The television spot is not only a full minute in length, but it also warns the audience that the film might be “too intense for children,” taking advantage of the eight year-old MPAA ratings. Television ads such as this one ran on national television for a three-day period on an all three broadcast networks, when there were only three channels to watch on television, and bombarded audiences with such advertising. This blockbuster marketing helped to “front-load” attendance in the first weeks of the film’s release.
In my American Film Industry class, we voted on what film we would screen for our discussion of New Hollywood, or what I call “The American New Wave.” The class voted, among a list of six films, for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorcese, 1974).
Aside from talking about the cinematography in the film, I mentioned that the use of sound in the film is quite innovative, especially how the film blurred the boundary between diegetic and non-diegetic sound. You can see the mixing of the two in the clip below.
Alice’s cry functions as a sound bridge between her on the telephone and the scene of the accident. This is not something you saw in Classical Hollywood films, certainly not the back and forth between two spaces, but it was an innovative stylistic device in this film.
As I mentioned in class, the varied use of focal lengths is another technique that Scorcese manipulates, even in the same scenes. This is in addition to the heavy use of handheld camerawork, which itself was not widely used except in news and documentary filmmaking.
I mentioned that the scene with Alice and Tommy in the motel room in Phoenix contains shots with two very different focal lengths. One is a wide angle lens, which distorts the image to expand the distance between objects on the left and right of the frame. The other shot uses a telephoto lens, which distorts the image to compress the space between foreground and background objects.
The image above is the wide-angle shot, where Tommy on the left appears very distant from Alice on the right. This might have been used to visually represent the distance between the two of them as they fight.
In the very same scene, there’s the telephoto shot. Here, they have (somewhat) reconciled as Alice reassures Tommy that she will find a job and that things will (somehow) be okay. The telephoto lens compresses the space between Tommy, Tommy’s reflection, and Alice’s reflection. The framing is of course also interesting as it uses a mirror to put Tommy and her in the same plane and within a common frame.
It’s a rough but touching moment between mother and son.
One of the reasons I like the film Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is the self-referential nature of the film. Here, the film literally stops the story and breaks into a “commercial break” so that the television viewers won’t be too alienated.
Clearly, this was added to the film version that was not in the stage version. It works to poke fun at the new media of television. It literally represents the philosophy behind making the movies an entirely different experience than television and to win back the audience.
As I was flying to Los Angeles today and watching the episode of 30 Rock that comes on between the inflight safety video and the feature film, I saw the episode, “¿Que Sopresa?” where Jack Donaghy pitches the idea of a voice controlled television set to his new Kabletown bosses. The demonstration doesn’t go well.
When I saw that scene, it made me think of how Steve Jobs reportedly said that he had finally “Cracked It” when it came to an Apple TV. If the rumors are true, the new integrated television set will take advantage of Siri, Apple’s new voice-activated personal assistant.
So did Jack Donaghy “crack” television before Jobs and Apple?
I lost a book that I needed for research, and it’s checked out of my library. They do however offer access through as an electronic book, but it’s through the web based Ebrary service. It’s almost unreadable.
First, the interface requires you to be connected online so you can read it offline. Second, the text is way too small to read at 100%. You basically have to read it at 200% to be able to sustain reading for any particular amount of time. Third, if you try reading it on any screen that’s not at least 1200 pixels high, then you can’t fit the whole page. And if you’re reading a book on an iPad, something that ebrary touts, then you are out of luck because you can’t scroll. It’s just an example of poor HTML coding and failure to adhere to web standards.
I am going to continue the search for my lost paperback or recall it from someone.
Update: You can actually scroll on an iPad. You have to swipe on the contents section on the right of the text. It’s not the most intuitive gesture since you’re use to swiping on the actual content not the side of it.
