When Background Becomes Foreground: Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown
Chinatown comes to vivid life in Yu’s hands.
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Posts Tagged: screenwriting
The Rumpus Mini-Interview #210: Melissa Ragsly
“I am the salt; the stories are the food.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #192: Lara Vapnyar
“This novel is my most intimate and biographical.”
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Growing the Courage: A Conversation with Frances Badalamenti
Frances Badalamenti discusses her debut novel, I DON’T BLAME YOU.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #167: Josh Denslow
“It was a relief to be out of the confines of scriptwriting. I was having fun again.”
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Pulling the Thread Through: Talking with Tina Alexis Allen
Tina Alexis Allen discusses her memoir, HIDING OUT.
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The Reality of Love: Talking with Adrian Todd Zuniga
Adrian Todd Zuniga discusses his debut novel, COLLISION THEORY.
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The Rumpus Interview with Joe Ide
Joe Ide discusses his debut novel, IQ his writing process, and why he enjoys fly fishing.
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The Rumpus Review of Bridget Jones’s Baby
Perhaps Bridget fans who watched the movies but never read the books might not find this movie to be such a hard blow… But those who read the books—and those who loved the pilgrim soul in Bridget—will feel the loss more keenly.
...moreTime Risk in Hollywood
Screenwriters do the bulk of their work prior to the green light. Cameras not rolling. Trying to get films made. They toil at the wrong end of the time risk curve, taking on time risk in a myriad of forms. In a column for Wordplay, screenwriter Terry Rossio explores the notion of “time risk” as […]
...moreIt’s Real Dangerous
…the verbiage comes to seem obsessive: a compulsion to name, label, and caption which, in heightening the absurdity of words, strips them of their power. In an excerpt from his new book published in the New Yorker, Dennis Lim analyzes what (and why) David Lynch leaves unsaid.
...moreFighting Age and Gender Bias in Screenwriting
Meryl Streep announced that she is funding The Writer’s Lab, a new program dedicated to supporting and mentoring female screenwriters over 40—directly in response to the gender and age bias against female writers. Twelve writers have been selected to attend the first retreat and develop their scripts.
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The Rumpus Interview with Austin Bunn
Austin Bunn talks about his new story collection, The Brink, his latest script for a short film, In the Hollow, working in multiple mediums, and why some novels read like early drafts of screenplays.
...moreWomen Are More Interesting
Nick Hornby often ends up fielding questions from fans eager to understand why he frequently writes about women, especially since he’s a man. Many of his novels feature female protagonists, and his second career as a screenwriter includes what he calls the “young girl trilogy.” It’s not a coincidence that women are the center of […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Ariel Schrag
Screenwriter and comic book artist Ariel Schrag discusses writing for different media, identity politics, and sympathizing with a straight male teen pretending to be trans in her new novel Adam.
...moreThe Loneliest Art
Does screenwriting qualify as “real” writing? Over at the New Yorker, Richard Brody wonders what F. Scott Fitzgerald’s failed shot at Hollywood reveals about film as an industry and as an art: Fitzgerald was undone by his screenwriting-is-writing mistake. It’s a notion that has its basis in artistic form. Look at Fitzgerald’s books: they are […]
...moreThe Un-formulaic Life of the Man Who Invented the Movie Formula
Wycliffe A. Hill is the grandfather of the cookie cutter Hollywood movie. Author of Ten Million Photoplay Plots: The Master Key to All Dramatic Plots, which was published in 1919, Hill created an assembly line approach to writing screenplays: character + dramatic situation + setting = movie. For example: “An old man wrongfully accused of […]
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