A prisoner within the heart of the Alliance seat of power, Varok Saurfang is confronted not only by King Anduin Wrynn, but the choices that lie before him.
“This weekend was Blizzcon 2018, where we premiered my latest World of Warcraft short, LOST HONOR,” says writer/director Marc Massenger. “We got a thunderous response on the show floor – I’m always so grateful to the Blizzard fans for their enthusiasm.”
Finding a metaphor for a problem is what legendary writer/director Paul Schrader sets out to do. This is one of the lessons he imparted to the crowd gathered for his masterclass at Cinéma Impérial for this year’s Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, which rightly awarded Schrader the 2018 Louve d’honneur prize and treated festival-goers with a retrospective of his oeuvre.
We like to think we’re pretty writer-centric at the agency. And it came as no surprise to hear Schrader say he’d read two books twice before embarking on the writing of mythical Travis Bickle’s journey through New York City in a taxi.
The two books are The Stranger by Albert Camus and Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre. Tackling French existentialism in big doses is apparently life-changing. The metaphor for crushing loneliness is indeed embodied by a lone yellow cabbie roaming New York city streets. It would appear the Ethan Hawk character in Schrader’s most recent outing, The First Reformer, is cast in the same mould, in what is yet another spiritual film for this writer/director, which steers us to the heart of every Schrader conversation, transcendentalism style in film. Best described as creating dead time. He gave the example of holding the shot of a character’s exit and “holding on the closed door longer than you normally would. You’re not going to cut. Dead time transfers the action to viewers, engaging them to be moved. It uses the power of cinema against itself to get the viewer to participate.”
Using boredom as technique, subverting the viewers’ expectations and consistently withholding action activates the audience, according to Schrader. Most films today lean into you and give you all the action you desire and ask nothing of you. Transcendental style works the opposite way. You lean back and take your time. “It creates something much more powerful,” he says.
The transcendental style is clearly not for all audience members. Asked what he thought about the change US cinema has undergone since he penned Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Last Temptation of Christ, he said that it was really the US audience that had undergone the biggest change. “It was much easier to get a conversation going around something than it is now. People are much more fragmented now. Films using the transcendental style are still getting made but it’s increasingly hard to get them seen.”
Paul Schrader the film critic turned to spiritual films after seeing Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, a true exemplar of the transcendental style. His early period as film critic and budding script writer, he wrote about in a four-year correspondence with his brother Leonard, newly published by Film Comment. It captures what Film Comment calls an “extraordinary and perhaps unrepeatable era” in world cinema.
We are proud to announce that Dan Shea’s Screenplay has won Shriekfest’s Horror Screenplay competition.
Shriekfest is celebrating 18 years in horror and sci-fi!
CGF is the largest visual effects studio in Russia.
They started out in 2004 as a small community of visual effects enthusiasts. Now CGF has grown to 18 departments of 150 visual effects professionals and made 3 feature films in co-production.
Their work consists of the blockbusters Flight Crew and The Age of Pioneers, receiving the Golden Eagle national awards for the Best Visual Effects while the film Going Vertical became the highest-grossing film of all time in Russia.
On top of their VFX work, animation and VR projects enjoyed much attention and praise at international festivals. Their animated short film Tweet-Tweet was acclaimed by animation and VFX experts for its artistic and technical mastery. Among the awards Tweet-Tweet received, are Best CG Animation – Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia (Japan), Best Animated Short Film – Shanghai International Film Festival (China), Best Animation Movie – Festival du Film Merveilleux et Imaginaire (France).
And their VR experience The Space Walker, based on the feature film of the same name, is a sight to be seen.
It goes without saying that we are happy to be working with them.
This is one of our favorite works from the recently Oscar nominated duo, Tiny Inventions.
It’s an animated dark comedy about a vacationing couple’s encounter with a man they believe to be the Zodiac Killer.
Based on a true story.
Techniques and tools:
After Effects, Stop-Motion, Pixilation, Drawn on Paper, Flash, & Live Action puppets.
The Grand Prize Winner will meet with the Stage 32 judges: Daniel Beckerman (Producer, Scythia Films, The Witch, Rememory), Korey Pollard (DGA, Halloween, Salem, Deadwood), Dan Ingram (Executive, Dino Di Laurentiis, Hannibal, Dune, Red Dragon), Rudy Scalesce (Producer, New Nightmare, 6 Souls, Ritual), Christian Taylor (Producer, Taylor Lane Productions), Shaun O’Banion (Ravenwood Films, Scream 3, Dark Wall).
Congratulations to Kevin Bachar.
André Aciman is doing a book tour eleven years after publishing Call Me By Your Name. On February 20, 2018 he stopped in at the American Writers Museum in Chicago.
by: Renée Stock
On adaptations: While film adaptations are rarely as good as the books they are based on, Call Me By Your Name is a rare exception. Like the lovers in the book, the novel and the film are not rivals, but perfect companions—each formed from entirely different raw materials, but sharing the same atoms at their core. Both are forensic examinations of the small moments between the big moments of life, but how they each carry out those examinations is vastly different. It was thrilling to be able to sit and listen to André Aciman read from his book and then hear his thoughts about the film that resulted.
He began the evening by reading from a passage that he said was the most difficult for him to write. It is a confessional scene where the protagonist Elio, a seventeen-year-old boy, finds the courage to speak about his desire. The object of his desire is Oliver, the twenty-four-year-old graduate student, who is living with his family in Italy for the summer. Elio’s words are a test balloon sent out in an attempt to prove his flimsy hypothesis that if he feels something so strongly for Oliver, Oliver must also feel something in return. It is a brave and bold move for someone so young, but Aciman wanted to write about someone who took action and went after what they wanted.
The film is directed by the astonishing Italian filmmaker, Luca Guadagnino. Guadagnino mentioned to Aciman that the scene in question in the book goes on for pages and pages and he would need to find a way to compress the text. As Aciman sees it, directors essentially have two tools they can use to distill long passages down to their essence. One is through voice-over, which can feel heavy-handed and rarely accomplishes anything interesting. The other is to have a great actor take all of the information off the pages and put it on his face. That is exactly what Timothée Chalamet did in that scene, and what takes many minutes to read in the novel takes two minutes of film. You can watch the scene here, while listening to Guadagnino discuss the incredible amount of thought that went into filming those precious two minutes. For Aciman, that is the genius of cinema, and his feelings for the film can be boiled down to this: “It’s not an adaptation. It does on film what a book cannot do. To recognize that each modality has its own strengths that the other cannot even imitate… that’s fine. I’m good with that.”
On desire: Aciman talked about some words that were specifically omitted from the book, like love and gay. He explains their omission this way: “I wanted to write a novel that was extremely fluid. I wanted it to be the most perfect relationship that two individuals can have.” The only secret he was concerned about was the secret he himself has lived with all his life. “The secret of desire.” When you desire someone else you are automatically inhibited. You might tell your friends about your desire, but you never tell the object. Exploring that internal conflict became the basis for the novel.
On inspiration: La Princesse de Clèves, a French novel written in 1678, is a book that no one reads, but everyone should. It was a big influence on Call Me By Your Name.
On the title: It was not the first title and the whole idea started as a joke. He knew a couple with very similar names. Do they call each other by the other’s name, he wondered to himself? But as the idea of identity switching became a vital theme of the story, so the title was born.
On the structure of the novel: The book is divided into four parts. The Basilica of San Clemente has four levels. Identity works like layers of a building. It’s interesting, but he doesn’t want anyone to write a dissertation about it.
On time: “Time is a criminal in our lives.”
On peaches: He knows what you’re wondering. And, no, he hasn’t. But he does highly recommend eating a peach in Italy in the middle of the summer. (That sounds like excellent advice.)
On a personal note: As a writer myself, I know it takes courage to write a book like Call Me By Your Name. Not because of the subject matter, but because it is impossible to read it and not understand how it exposes some very personal parts of the person writing it. I am grateful for his courage because I have fallen hard for books before in my life, but never quite like this. For some reason I felt embarrassed to tell him how much his book meant to me, but while waiting in line for him to sign it, I, like Elio, decided it was better to speak. And it was.
Woolf+Lapin’s Katy Dore is part of 15 writers whose “scripts will be sent to participating partners for staffing season consideration. They will also move onto the next round of ATX’s pitch competition, in which 10 will have the chance to pitch their shows live at this year’s festival in Austin, Texas.”
“Out of the pitch competition, one winner is paired with a mentor to polish the script and take meetings at various studios and networks to pitch it more formally with the goal of a sale. Past winners of the pitch competition have gone on to receive managers and work in writers’ rooms such as “Life in Pieces.”
Her pilot “The Unsung” (Badass American Heroines You’ve Never Heard Of) was a Blacklist Featured script.
This is not the last we will hear from Katy. Congrats!
A resident of Boston and a senior medical writer at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, Diane Hanks makes the 2017 Hit List. She broke onto the scene last year when her pilot CHANGELINGS won the 2016 Page International Screenwriting Awards Grand Prize. Continuing her success, PARAGRAPH 175 was recently featured on the Black List website and was a 2017 Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship semifinalist.
“SOME OF THE HIGHLIGHTS FROM HIT LIST 2017:
In 2016 we saw Netflix making its first appearance on the list (behind only Fox) with 3 projects on the list, and this year they not only returned, but they tied Paramount and Sony for the top studio spot with 4 projects apiece. Still sitting atop the eight year overall list however is Warner Bros. who added 2 more projects this year to watch their total projects accounted for at time of release jump up to 31. Beyond just individual studios, the 2017 list would also set records for the most projects set up at both studios (29) and production companies (60).
After becoming the first annual ‘best of’ list to have a female writer land the top spot in 2014 (Catherine The Great – Kristina Lauren Anderson), we’d seen the number of female writers breaking a new record year-over-year since, and 2017 is no different, as one up last years record of 22 with this years record of 24 female writers. Additionally, the number of returning writers on this years list would tie last year’s record, with 22 projects being written by 26 Hit List alums.”
We are happy to collaborate with Nicholl semi-finalist Enrique Posner. His script 13 EAST got our attention among the over seven thousand entries.
13 EAST is based on the true story of the maverick doctor who in the 1960’s developed the first breakthrough cures for cancer, but whose life then takes an unexpected turn when his young son is diagnosed with a rare condition for which he became known as The Boy In The Plastic Bubble.