Films

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Films

	War of the Words

"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft." — H. G. Wells

	Screenwriting

It used to be you had to use a word processor to write a script, which was an ordeal, with all the changing margins. Nowadays, there are specialized programs that do the work for you (all except for plot, action, and dialogue!). I prefer MovieMagic Screenwriter ($200). If you're serious about writing a screenplay, it's well worth the cost.

	He Would Know

"Planning to write is not writing. Outlining a book is not writing. Researching is not writing. Talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing." — E. L. Doctorow

Outta the Kitchen!

"Each book purchased for motion pictures has some individual quality, good or bad, that has made it remarkable. It is the work of a great array of highly paid and incompatible writers to distinguish this quality, separate it, and obliterate it."
— Evelyn Waugh

	Death From Above

In CRUCIFIXION OF INNOCENTS, the conspirators plot to kill Hitler with an exploding brandy bottle while he is traveling in his private airplane back to Berlin. But when the bomb doesn't go off as planned, the colonel who planted it must retrieve the brandy to sort out why. When he can find no private place at the airport to examine the package, he must take it on a train clear back home, with the armed bomb on his lap the whole time!

I Told You So . . .

"Nothing moves without the script. It is the acorn from which the oak of a movie grows. A screenplay starts the process of budgeting, casting, hiring of key personnel. Offices are redecorated, monster Winnebagos are leased, trucks loaded with equipment roll to locations, artists feverishly create scene sketches. Following the shoot, the post-production crews, the music and sound technicians and the marketing mavens come aboard. A hundred million dollars may well be spent based on 120 pages or so of a screenplay by someone who might not even be invited to the set, the dub, the mix, or the scoring session, although the hundreds of men and women, including the director and stars who have worked on the picture, owe their jobs to the culmination of the writer’s work."
— David Brown

	You, Too?

"I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn’t like it." — Samuel Goldwyn

FEDORA & WILDEST DREAMS -- now on one DVD!

Fedora: The true story of a man who discovers--almost too late--that he's rich beyond belief. Beautiful, funny, and moving, this award-winning film will delight the entire family.

Wildest Dreams: A young composer's writing efforts are blocked by a recurrent nightmare that crosses over into reality with terrifying results.

Details

DOWNHILL
Don "Downhill" Hill has lost his way, but when his millionaire father dies and leaves him $1 million, Don has a chance to redeem himself. He invites his estranged son Jake, a skateboarding phenom, to go with him to Las Vegas to pick up the money, which Don secretly plans to give to Jake. The plot thickens when they are tailed by brutal loan shark Frank Bristol, who has other plans for the money.

I HATED HEAVEN
When Tom Waring promises his wife April on his deathbed that if there really is a Heaven, he'll come back from the afterlife and tell her, he doesn't imagine a problem. But Heaven isn't harps and halos--it's more like a cross between IBM and the DMV. And when his request to return to Earth is routinely denied, Tom must make a fateful decision: should he risk everything--even his immortal soul--to keep his promise to April?

WHAT THE BEAR SAID
Based on Aesop's fable "The Bear and the Travelers," this short film updates the action to the late 1800s and places it in the Rockies. A simple mountain man attempts to give safe passage to two ne'er-do-wells who take unfair advantage of the good-natured guide. But everything changes when they encounter a bear on the trail, to hilarious results.

AMERICAN SCARLET
Cole Furay has come up with a great thriller idea: an Egyptian-influenced serial killer. But when the events in his screenplay--which no one has read
--start happening for real, Cole knows he's in trouble. He teams up with Vicki Owens, whose sister was killed by the notorious "Necktie Nick," a serial killer who was never apprehended. Now it appears that Nick is somehow using Cole's writing as...well, a script. And when Cole is accused of Nick's latest killing, he knows he's got to do something--even if it means getting himself killed.

PAST PERFECT
Jacob Evans, a perfectionist surgeon, has a perfect life until his wife and child are killed in a car accident in Paris. Jacob returns to L.A. and begins drinking himself to death. Enter Anna Merrill and her deaf and dumb daughter Emily, who takes a shine to Jacob and pulls him into their chaotic, albeit happy, lives. But a great, dark secret is buried in Jacob's past and when it comes out, it threatens to ruin everything.

CRUCIFIXION OF INNOCENTS
The remarkable true story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran cleric in war-time Nazi Germany who left pacifism behind, joined the underground, and was a key player in the conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Arrested, jailed, and tortured, he nevertheless kept his own faith, inspired inmates and jailers alike, and wrote a number of powerful, timeless books about how to be a Christian in an evil world. Truly, a modern Man For All Seasons.

FULL CIRCLE
Danny Hamerling is kidnapped by Two Bears, an old Indian shaman, who takes Danny to a sacred arch where he is transported back in time to the old west, where Two Bears, now a young Indian brave with no knowledge of the future, is commanded by the tribal chief to help Danny defeat the plans of evil railroad Donald Hamerling
--Danny's great grandfather. Oh, and Danny also has to find a way to return to the present.

DOWNLOAD
What would you say if someone told you you could live forever, but in another's body? What would you do with the awesome ability to transfer knowledge directly from one mind to another? And what would you do if someone murdered you for use as a guinea pig? Ask Buzz delaRue. It's one thing to battle a psychotic adversary. It's something else entirely when the psycho is inside your own head. What happens when we discover a key to immortality? What always happens: all hell breaks loose.