Yesterday, I saw the following tweet that I just absolutely loved.  

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I burst out laughing when I read this and can absolutely confirm it. And so can almost every fellow-screenwriter I know.  In fact, I also sent the tweet to the producer on my current film project, and he thought it was a hoot and far too true.

The amount of time spent trying to make any sort of break-in believable and, ideally, fresh (even as simple a break-in as a character locking himself out of his house) can bring the writing process to a screeching halt.  I once wrote an intricate scene of a character breaking into a patrolled mansion -- not even a structure nearly as protected as a secure government building with video cameras, motion detectors, fingerprint entries, electronic alarms, heat sensors, and army guards -- although I kept it short to save screen time, since the break-in wasn't the point of the sequence, but what happened after she got what she was after and left.  However, when the director read it, he thought it was too quick and should be a significantly-more elaborate and convoluted scene, and he wanted me to make it much more believable and fun and fit the meticulous detail of the rest of the script.. Even when I explained that it might had 3-5 minutes to the film, he didn't care.  Even though the break-in wasn't important, and yet had a clever plan to get inside and a lot of meticulous sneaking around, it was still too quick for his taste, and he wanted audiences to understand it was as difficult, as near-impossible to get in as possible and believe all the effort it took.

So, I went back to the drawing board, made a lot of convoluted notes, set up an overload of hurdles and reversals, and did just that.  And in the end, added five adventurous pages to the story.  And I think it's a lot of fun.  But if I wrote the scene today, I might have just had the character walk in, get what she needed and wander out.  And if anyone complained it was too simple, I'd insist on its believability and would fight to keep it as is.

The only thing I wouldn't do is have the character stop to take a selfie with a butler.  Not because I didn't think it was believable, but when the story takes place, mobile phones hadn't been invented yet.  But other than that, yeah, I'd stand by saving myself time and making it simple.

Because on Wednesday, they just...walked right in.

On this week’s episode of 3rd and Fairfax, the official podcast of the Writers Guild of America, the guest is writer-director Julie Taymor who is perhaps best-known for directing the adventurous Broadway musical of The Lion King.  However, she has also written and directed such movies as The Tempest, Titus as well as the story for Across the Universe.  Upcoming she co-wrote and directed The Glorias, about Gloria Steinem.
 

Okay, this is a bit weird (with "a bit" being an understatement), though really quite wonderful.

Netflix says it commissioned a fellow named Keaton Patti to run 1,000 Christmas movies through a bot and “created our own mathematically perfect Holiday film made entirely by bots.”  Now, of course, it’s possible that this is just a terrible video that they created to be funny.  But it’s really SO nonsensical in insignificant ways that I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s on the level.  In fact, the only thing noticeably missing is a bakery, department store and Christmas tree farm.  But otherwise, they've given Hallmark a run for its money...

No, that's not just a holiday greeting, but something else entirely.  Let me explain...

I’ve remembered to mention this a few times previously, but usually not until a week before Christmas.  So I wanted to be sure to bring it up well in advance this year.  And that's to recommend one of my favorite, little-known holiday films, Joyeux Noel. It was nominated for a 2005 Best Foreign Language Oscar, based on a true story in WWI.   Since the holiday is still three weeks away, that should give folks time to perhaps get it from Netflix or whatever online service you subscribe to before the season is out.  Though it's great any time of the year.

I really thought Joyeux Noel should have won the Best Foreign Language Oscar they year it was nominated, but the award that year went to a South African movie, Tsotsi.  That was quite good, but for my own taste Joyeux Noel stood out as a substantially better film.  Tsotsi told an important story, in an important country at an important time in its history.  And it told its story well, though it wasn't special filmmaking.  I suspect its "importance" helped a lot.  But Joyeux Noel was just...joyous.  And wonderful.  And beautifully made.

The film tells a fictionalized version of a famous story you may have heard -- how in World War I, four armies faced each other on Christmas Eve, ready for battle, but among themselves decided to call a truce for that one night.  The movie isn't just "feel good," there's a great deal of drama and intense tension, and it's all told superbly.

It was also the first movie I'd seen Diane Kruger in, though I didn't realize it at the time, since she wasn't a well-known star in the U.S. then.  She plays an opera singer, and interestingly her singing is dubbed by a soprano who was one of my folks very favorite, Natalie Dessay.

(I should note for those wary of foreign language films that one of the armies at the crossroads is British, so a good part of the movie is in English.)

Here's the trailer.  It doesn't remotely give a sense of the rich, especially-tense drama at stake and tends more to focus on the warmth, coming across like nothing more than a feel-good movie of the holiday season.  It's much more than that.  But you should at least get an idea of it all, most especially how exceedingly well-crafted the movie is.

By the way, here's a link to it on Netflix, by clicking here.  You'll note that it has four stars -- and a 7.8 rating on iMDB.  On Rotten Tomatoes, the critics rating is a high 74%...but the audience rating is even higher, at 89%.  So I'm not alone on this...

On this week’s episode of 3rd & Fairfax, the official podcast of the Writers Guild of America, the guest is screenwriter Scott Frank, who is the co-creator-showrunner-writer-director of The Queen’s Gambit, the most-watched limited-series on Netflix.  He talks about adapting Walter Tevis’ novel, as well as his other work, that includes Get Shorty, Minority Report, Marley & Me, Logan, the limited-series Godless (for which he wrote and directed all episodes) and more.
 

This is a Mary Poppins reunion of sorts.  It comes from 2004 when Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke and composer, Richard Sherman got together to reminisce about the film and sing some of the songs.  There's even a small snippet of a song not used in the movie.

One quibble.  Richard Sherman tells a story about how he and his lyricist brother Robert came up with the word of “Super-cali-fragjil-istic-expial-idocioius.”  And it's not true.  It may be something that after 50 years he thinks is true.  But it's not true.  And I know it's not true because I not only recall hearing a near-identical word several years before the movie was released in 1964, but the story became part of family lore.  And making it more fun, it tangentially relates to the oft-mentioned here Nell Minow.

Not directly, though.  It actually involves Nell's husband -- attorney and art historian David Apatoff, who among his many talents is also the art critic of the Saturday Evening Post..  David and I grew up together, just a couple of blocks from one another in Glencoe, Illinois, about 40 minutes north of Chicago.  (I note this to make clear we were nowhere near Hollywood, where the Sherman Brothers lived and worked.)  In fact, I not only knew David before I met Nell (though I met her at a fairly young age because our parents were friends, and my dad was even her father's doctor)...but I'm pretty certain that I met David before Nell did, since I think David and I knew each other from when were were about five years old and went to grade school together.  I believe that Nell and David met in junior high -- and have been together pretty much since.  Now, that's a love story.

Anyway, one year when young -- still a few years from Mary Poppins hitting the theaters -- David taught me a funny word he'd learned, as kids tend to do.  The word was "super-cadge-a-fradge-ilistic-expia-lodge-idocious."  (Not exactly the same as the word used in Mary Poppins, but clearly almost identical.)  It was a fun word that I'd toss into conversation around the house every once in a while.  And when two or three years later when the movie of Mary Poppins was released, with its wonderful score -- I thought it was pretty cool to hear "that" word as the song, “Super-cali-fragjil-istic-expial-idocioius”  which became wildly popular.  And my older brother John would always refer to it as "David Apatoff's word."  And did so for decades after.

So, whatever Richard Sherman's memory of coming up with the word was -- it's just not conceivable that he thought of it two or three years earlier to use in a song that wouldn't be released for several years and it somehow made its way to Glencoe, Illinois.  More likely, it was just one of those "kid's words," not unlike slang, that got passed around the country as part of the zeitgeist, and Sherman or his brother heard it from their children.

But I just wanted to clarify a story that, if anyone deserves credit for the word, it's not the Sherman Brothers but David Apatoff.  And even since he never claimed coming up with it himself and heard it from someone else, possession is nine-tenths of the law, so I'm giving him squatter's rights...

By the way, I don't know how carefully he used it word, or if, in fact, it changed his life.  But I suspect once he said it to his girl, and now Nell is his wife.

On this week’s episode of 3rd and Fairfax, the official podcast of the Writers Guild of America, the guest is Billy Ray who most-recently wrote and directed the two-part Showtime movie, The Comey Rule.  Among his many credits, he also wrote and directed Breach and Shattered Glass, and wrote Captain Phillips, The Hunger Games State of Play, Hart’s War, Volcano and Richard Jewell, among many others.
 
I actually have a funny story about one of his films, the wonderful, though little-known Shattered Glass (based on the true story of journalist Stephen Glass who wrote a wide range of admired articles for The New Republic magazine – only to have it turn out that most were fictitious).  During the Writers Guild strike a few years ago, I arrived for my assigned time and went to sign in.  As I was eating a bagel, I overheard a few people talking about actor Peter Sarsgaard.  Because he’d been Shattered Glass – as the editor, who begins to suspect his reporter – and I loved the film so much, I decided to intrude myself into their conversation.  “Excuse me,” I said, “but I heard you talking about Peter Sarsgaard.  Have you seen the movie Shattered Glass that he’s in?  He’s so good in it, and the movie is really great.”  One of the group turned to me and said, “I wrote and directed that.”  It was, yes, Billy Ray!  I can assure you, as a screenwriter, that is about the best praise a writer can get.  And as you might imagine, he was very pleased…