And The Winner Is...

OK, I'm sure you've watched the Oscars or read a re-cap online or read this morning's paper to see who won or heard about it at the water cooler or... You get the idea. You've heard the winners. If, somehow, you've managed to avoid learning who took home statuettes at the 81st Academy Awards, here's the list of winners.

Picture: "Slumdog Millionaire"
Actor: Sean Penn, "Milk"
Actress: Kate Winslet, "The Reader"
Director: Danny Boyle, "Slumdog Millionaire"
Foreign-Language Film: "Departures," Japan
Original Song: "Slumdog Millionaire"
Original Score: "Slumdog Millionaire"
Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award: Jerry Lewis
Film Editing: "Slumdog Millionaire"
Sound Mixing: "Slumdog Millionaire"
Sound Editing: "The Dark Knight"
Visual Effects: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
Documentary, Short Subject: "Smile Pinki"
Documentary Feature: "Man on Wire"
Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger, "The Dark Knight"
Short Film: "Spielzeugland"
Makeup: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
Costume: "The Duchess"
Art Direction: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
Animated Short Film: "La Maison en Petits Cubes"
Animated Feature: "WALL-E"
Adapted Screenplay: Simon Beaufoy, "Slumdog Millionaire"
Original Screenplay: Dustin Lance Black, "Milk"
Supporting Actress: Penélope Cruz, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona"

No real surprises... sort of. WALL-E was a given (though part of me felt it was wise to expect a Kung Fu Panda upset). Screenplay categories contained no real shocker or disappointments. Slumdog, as Zombie just pointed out, took a TON of awards, with Curious Case of Benjamin Button taking a very large share of the remaining ones. Heath Ledger got what everyone expected to be his award for his awesome work as the Joker.

Where I got pissed, though, was with the Best Actor category. Yes, Mickey Rourke might have played Mickey Rourke, and Sean Penn's win (along with Dustin Lance Black's) provided the industry with a platform for gay rights, which is fantastic. But I was pulling for Mickey despite both of those reasons. Even if he did play himself, you know what? That takes balls. He went into some of the darkest parts of his life and his screw ups, unearthing much of what has happened behind the camera to him in his life. It takes a lot of courage to accept and reveal your own faults the way he did, and I have to give anybody who can do that major props. Maybe he didn't transform himself into a completely different person the way that Penn did, but what he did was just as emotionally charged and brave, if not more so.

You had my vote, Mickey.

Slumdog Millionaire screenplay now available

Motion Picture
Director
Adapted Screenplay
Cinematography
Sound Mixing
Original Score
Original Song
Film Editing

Congratulations to Slumdog Millionaire for cleaning house at the Oscars last night.

You can now download the screenplay for free by clicking here. (Thanks again to SimplyScripts.) Get it while you can!

Trailer Trash XXXV: The Screaming Skull (1958)

"The tortured ghost who claimed vengeance in the bride's bedroom!"

Quick summary: Ex-wife dies in freak accident. Man takes new wife to site of the accident on their honeymoon. (Worst. Honeymoon. Ever.) New wife is haunted by ghost of dead wife. Or is she? That's The Screaming Skull in a nutshell.

The title of this movie reminds me of one of Jack Handey's Deep Thoughts passages:

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

... which, in turn, makes me think of a much scarier version of this movie, where it's just shots of various skulls backed by a soundtrack of people screaming at the top of their lungs. That'd make me jump, at least the first few times.

You know, you could make any movie at least a bit scary with random quick cuts to skulls and screaming. (Something like this old YouTube video, actually.) This would even work for old movies. Take Casablanca:

Rick: If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your -


AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

See what I mean? Terrifying, right??

On to the trailer silliness:



Did people usually die during scary movies in the 50s? I'm curious if anyone was ever able to cash in on that free burial. And I'm glad they specify that the death had to be from fright. I'd hate to think very old, stingy people would go see it to save a few dollars on funerals.

1950s Guy #1: "Have you heard of that movie Screaming Skull?"
1950s Guy #2: "Yeah, I think so. Isn't that movie where old people go to die?"

I wonder if that offer still stands? Is there an expiration date? I can't see anyone dying of fright during this movie in this day and age, but I wouldn't rule out Death by Boredom.



"See! The revisionization of a woman scorned! See! The vengeful violence of the undead!"

Trailer Trash is a weekly tribute to oddball, cheesy and often just plain terrible movie trailers. Writers: These movies got made... so can yours! You can read through our archive by clicking here.

What, When, Where this Weekend - Katyn, The Oscars!

What, When, Where is a weekly guide to select screenings, discussions and events in the NYC-area of interest to screenwriters. Have an event you'd like to see listed here? Give us a heads-up at info@screenwritersleague.com.


A slow week for movie openings, with only Fired Up! and Madea Goes To Jail getting any sort of wide release (did I mention this weekend was slow?), but at least we can catch up with out Netflix queue and prep for this Sunday's Academy Awards.

Haven't seen all of the nominees? You can still read many of the screenplays for free. Check out the links here, here, here and here.

Opening this weekend...

KATYN, written by Andrzej Mularczyk and Przemyslaw Nowakowski, dir. by Andrzej Wajda


Premise: An examination of the Soviet slaughter of thousands of Polish officers and citizens in the Katyn forest in 1940.

Playing: Film Forum

Ashes and Diamonds and Kanal are absolute classics. Far from a feel-good movie, but I'm sold.

What are you doing/seeing this weekend? Doing anything special for the Oscars?

Oscar Showdown: Kung Fu Panda versus WALL-E

Everyone has his or her favorite Oscar category, or at least one in which he/she invests the most interest. Usually, for me, that's either Best Picture or Best (Original) Screenplay. This year, though, while I am strongly rooting for certain nominees (Mickey Rourke for Best Actor, Slumdog Millionaire for Picture) come Sunday, I'll invest my most intense watching abilities in the Best Animated Feature category.

Ok, I'll come clean - I haven't seen Bolt. I don't really plan to. It just didn't capture my interest the way that the other two did. I have seen both WALL-E and Kung Fu Panda (WALL-E kept me up during past the 9th hour of and 18 hour flight I was on; I just watched KFP this past weekend).

It's hard to tell which of these will win. I say that, because though KFP is a really terrific animated movie, one which I laughed with throughout, WALL-E is (dare I say it?) ground-breaking in its accomplishments. I know that there was an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to nominate WALL-E for one of the five coveted Best Picture slots, so the industry clearly recognizes that it's an incredible film. Any writer should be able to appreciate the clear mastery of craft throughout it, with a particular focus on the wordless first act. It deserves to win, if you as this cake fan, but does that mean it will?

Unfortunately, we can all cite examples of the movie that should have won. A loss to Kung Fu Panda would not be the worst upset in Oscar history, but one that would piss me off a bit nonetheless. I was completely caught off-guard by WALL-E, which I believe I can take lessons from as a writer. I just want to see it get what it not only deserves, but has definitely earned.

What do you think - who will the Best Animated Feature Oscar go to?

The Writing Week (Vol. 2) part 59 - The 60-70 Slump

You've done it. Act One is a tiny spec behind you. You've coasted through the first half of act two. You nailed the midpoint; the intensity is building and the end is starting to appear on the horizon. And then it happens. The 60 to 70 Slump.

Ask most screenwriters, and they'll probably tell you that those ten pages, coming right off the high of the midpoint, are some of the most difficult to write. Act One is often a breeze. For me, it's typically the part of my script that requires the least rewriting after the first draft. The first half of Act Two is usually an OK write, though can require more attention later. But there's something about working through pages 60-70 that just makes me want to pull my hair out. I think a large part of that is the degree to which the stakes have been raised and the action is building, a huge climax has just been hit, and everything is moving quickly. Both the writer and the audience need a short breather before Act Three, which will be intense. Those ten pages in the middle of the script have to keep the pace, come down off the midpoint, and give the audience time to both recover and brace themselves for what's next.

You can probably tell that I just dealt with these ten pages. As I write this, my cursor blinks somewhere toward the middle of page 71. I know that I'm going to do some major reworking of the pages before that. Yet, I have to remind myself that this is a first draft I'm working on. First drafts are a foundation. Granted, it's nice to write a great first draft, and I don't try to write anything unreadable, but sometimes it's important to just get the skeleton of the story out and build the rest of the body later. It just sucks that pages 60-70 are a part of that body.

Friday the 13th - Not Dull, Not Sharp

American horror’s favorite son is back yet again. In Friday the 13th, fans of the franchise will quickly recognize the grisly craft of Jason Voorhees as he uses many a sharp object to dispatch the meddling youths who wander onto the abandoned property of Camp Crystal Lake. Pretty faces meet the wrong end of an arrow, an axe, deer antlers, a screwdriver, and the signature machete. It’s a decent arsenal, and horror fans young and old will be filling the seats to see how Jason uses it, and more importantly, they’ll want to get a good scare. Unfortunately Friday the 13th is everything you would expect and doesn’t deliver enough on both counts. You can see the lazily thought out scares coming a mile away, and there won’t be any memorable kills to write home about, assuming you write home about memorable kills.

Director Marcus Nispel opens his film with what you might as well call a fun twenty minute horror short. A group of attractive young adults enter an abandoned camp ground in search of the bounty of marijuana that is rumored to grow there. I know, it took me a minute to adjust to weed featuring so heavily in a Friday the 13th movie. Stoners beware, because if you read into it the wrong way it might seem like the Office of National Drug Control Policy is pushing Jason as a consequence of marijuana use, which would be terrifying. But that’s not the case. By the end of the twenty minute intro you’ll have a fine sense of Jason’s work and understand that he’s really motivated by the commands of his crazy slain mother. Flash forward six weeks to another batch of Abercrombie & Fitch models who arrive at Crystal Lake. Jared Padalecki plays Clay Miller, a young rogue in search of his sister Whitney (Amanda Righetti), who went missing with the previous group of Crystal Lake wanderers. Clay eventually unites with a group of weekend partygoers and the rest is murderous mayhem.


If you’re a big slasher horror fan, the scares won’t do much for you. The movie has all of the standard thrills. You’ll see characters pull back curtains to find nothing there, but wait, the killer suddenly appears behind them. You’ll see someone kneel down to pick something up and rise to find the fright waiting for them. There’s nothing new here, and once I accepted that, I was hoping the characters would shine in some way, maybe even just twinkle for a moment, but this movie is not an appropriate study of character. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. If I had a nickel for every Friday th 13th movie I’d have sixty scents, but if I had a nickel for every poor decision a character has made in this franchise, I’d be rich.

It’s hard to feel bad when movie characters die because of a stupid decision they made. During the brisk 95 minute run time you’ll see characters try to escape by knowingly running to Jason’s home. You’ll see a character abandon the relative safety of the middle of the lake for the shallow water beneath a pier, after she’s seen a machete wielding Jason waiting for her on the shore. Safety in numbers seems to be common knowledge, except in horror movies. The characters run off on their own when they know there’s a killer on the move. One of the characters finds a gun, a perfect find when you have a killer after you, except he spends all of his ammunition shooting at creaks in the wall. Stupid, stupid, stupid, but it got me wondering. Could writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift truly believe their characters would act this way, or are they consciously providing us with the sort of character choices that make audiences cringe in their seats as they wait for the sure kill?

Friday the 13th is not a good movie, but there’s something effective about it. Every time I saw one of those stupid decisions being made, the audience collectively cringed and lowered in their seats, but with a smile on their faces. They were being primed for the kill situation, which I’ve determined involves 1 - The poor decision. 2 - The moment of false peril. 3 - The moment of true peril. And 4 - The kill. The whole experience felt amazingly similar to a roller coaster. On the ride, you see the big drop coming, you brace yourself as best as you can, and then the thrill hits you. Immediately after the a big drop, there’s a period of relative relaxation as you prepare for the next drop. The rhythm of Friday the 13th, and perhaps most horror movies, is similar. I think that’s why the movie will make bank and doesn’t need to be great. People are addicted to that rhythm and the formula for these movies. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t leave with a smile on my face, as did everyone else. And like a roller coaster, we passed the smiling faces of everyone waiting in line to get on the ride. You know what you’re getting into with this one. If you want the cheap thrills, a few laughs, and a good helping of nudity, Friday the 13th is for you. If you want the next great horror movie, proceed at your own risk.