✍🏼 Writer’s Quotes to Live By
“Five more pages. It’s like climbing a mountain every day... just keep at it, and you’ll reach the peak. Stick to your screenwriting schedule – even if it’s only a few pages. The goal is finishing.”
✍🏻Black Coal & Death in Your Christmas Stocking
Creators Sophia Takal & April Wolfe have been tapped to write/re-imagine the classic 70’s slasher flick Black Christmas. The original and remake takes place in a college sorority house over Christmas break, when someone begins to murder the sorority sisters, one by one. Hold on for deer life….get it..cause Rudolph/Christmas… oh, just never mind.
Blumhouse Productions will be bringing this to theaters this time around, with Takal set to direct a remake which is shooting in New Zealand.
Imogen Poots (Green Room), Aleyse Shannon (Charmed), Brittany O’Grady (Star), Lily Donoghue (The Goldbergs) and Caleb Eberhardt (Broadway’s Choir Boy) are set to star.
This is the second project between Takal with Blumhouse after their collaboration on New Year, New You, a film in Hulu’s Into the Dark anthology series.
Let’s hope they nail the tone this time around, because the 2006 remake from Glen Morgan was all over the place, and a bit of a mess.
Black Christmas will slash it’s way into theaters December 13th 2019, better watch it or yule be sorry… again… no, didn’t work—just forget it. (Must be too early for Christmas jokes!)
✍️RelationSCRIPT Advice from Richard Curtis
Oscar-nominated screenwriter Richard Curtis (Love Actually, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill) recently shared some tips on tackling some of the most common obstacles writers face.
Do what you believe in:
His main piece of advice being to stand by your ideas, even when others might not understand, or outright shoot them down. He insists that trusting in yourself, and your sense of taste, are essential to overcoming (that sinking feeling of being a fraud, or that you’re "getting away with something") imposter syndrome.
Write about what you know:
Encouraging up-and-coming writers to draw from their personal life experiences to get the pen rolling right over any chunk of writer's block that may come your way. It's also great for injecting some authenticity and sincerity into your story.
He also stressed the importance of keeping one's options open. Curtis has a technique of mulling over multiple ideas at once, instead of obsessing over one, and works on whichever idea inspires him the most.
Being willing to compromise:
Curtis' final tips are arguably the most important to a writer's success in the industry. He emphatically stated the importance of compromise. In this field of work you will have to cooperate with others, who may or may not agree with your opinions. A strong work ethic is just as necessary as knowing when to pick your battles.
If an idea feels too premature, or you are at a loss on how to expand upon it, then DO NOT be afraid to keep it in the incubator until it's ready.
You can catch Richard Curtis' next movie, "Yesterday," a romantic comedy about a struggling singer-songwriter waking in a world that knows not of the genius that is, “The Beatles”.
✍🏾Animation Goes “Primal”
Genndy Tartakovsky the animation genius that has birthed such hits as Samurai Jack, Dexter’s Laboratory, and Star Wars: Clone Wars…or if you have kids Hotel, Transylvania.
Genndy is returning with his latest work of art; the overly ambitious upcoming Adult Swim series “Primal.” Primal is set in the violent, primordial world lead by one rule: survival of the fittest.
It follows a prehistoric man who’s left alone when he tragically loses his family at the same time a neighboring T-Rex loses hers. The two forge an unlikely bond in that harsh and lonely time period of T-Rex & Man!
The series has no dialogue, and uses graphic imagery and fundamental themes such as disease or hunger to lay the foundation of its narratives.
“You know how when you watch a nature show and you see a polar bear and a seal. The polar bear is cute and charming, and the seal is so cute, but for one to survive it’s gotta eat the other, and it’s horrific,” Tartakovsky said in a conversation with Variety ahead of the presentation. “We have an episode like that. We like all the characters in the show but they have to kill each other. It’s primal.”
The “Primal” rollout will be on Adult Swim/Cartoon Network this fall.
If you were tasked with being forced to write the current story you’re working on with no dialogue how would you go about creating, showing or evoking the story?
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