A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

I'm still over the moon about Ronnie and the Pursuit of the Elusive Bliss. © 2020 Popcorn Sky Productions Wow, gang! Man, it's been an amazing 10 months for me as a screenwriter. That's about how much time since my high school buddy Juan Carlos Hernandez first challenged me to write a two-minutes-long short film for him and his wife Adria to act, direct, and produce. I didn't quite manage to write a movie that brief; the short that is now A Simple Ad has a running time of 3:41, which is nearly twice as long as the requested length. Still, I wrote the script in early April of 2019, and it was uploaded to Juan 's YouTube channel a few weeks later. A relatively short time after A Simple Ad was shared with the world, Juan asked me to write a sequence for a film he was doing in the Big Apple with Adria and their son Anthony (a talented young man who I predict will have a great career on stage and screen). My contribution was modest, but it complemented what ...

Screenshot from Movie Magic Screenwriter 6 with a page from A Simple Ad. (Photo Credit: Alex Diaz-Granados. ©2019 Alex Diaz-Granados) Hello and welcome once again to another edition of Bloggin' On , the blog-within-a-blog where I post stuff that doesn't fall under the reviews-or-political commentary content categories of A Certain Point of View. I'm glad to see that you're reading and I hope that you are enjoying my blog. Right now it's early evening in my corner of Florida; right now it's 66℉ (19℃) under cloudy skies. A line of thunderstorms and strong rain showers passed through the area earlier, so our outing to rewatch Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was canceled and we stayed home instead. My Significant Other has been busy doing household chores while I - at her suggestion - took most of today off to, as she says, "sloth." Rainy days almost always sap the energy out of me, so I didn't argue and sat on the couch in the common room and...

Map of Cuba. (Credit: Wikipedia) “Film’s thought of as a director’s medium because the director creates the end product that appears on the screen. It’s that stupid auteur theory again, that the director is the author of the film. But what does the director shoot—the telephone book? Writers became much more important when sound came in, but they’ve had to put up a valiant fight to get the credit they deserve.” – Billy Wilder This week has been a busy one for me; since Monday, my focus has been on making revisions to my second original screenplay of 2019, a comedy-drama titled Happy Days Are Here Again. Happy Days Are Here Again is a project that I started working on almost as soon as my filmmaking partners Juan Carlos Hernandez and Adria K. Woomer-Hernandez finished post-production on my first produced short, A Simple Ad. As with that project, Happy Days Are Here Again (no relation to the 1970s-era sitcom) began as a request for a comedy script; however, A Simple Ad ended up be...

Hello, there, Constant Reader.  As you know, I have been collaborating with my high school friend and (now) actor-director Juan Carlos Hernandez on some of his new short-film projects. We have, in fact, been trying to join forces creatively for a decade now, but after I co-wrote a screenplay ("After the Ball") with Juan in 2009, my mom's last illness caused me to shift priorities and I had to stop working on another project ("Gym Rats") because I had way too much on my plat e at the time. "After the Ball" never got made; Juan and his wife Adria couldn't get financing for it, so that, folks, was that. Same happened to "Gym Rats." So Juan decided to focus on his acting career (which is not as glam or fun as it seems to outsiders), as well as being there for his wife and son, Anthony. Long story short, this year Juan decided to get back to making films, this time with a digital camera. This year, we have collaborated on...

Well, so now I have two writing credits on my Internet Movie Database page. (Here it is...my modest IMDb.com reference page: Alex Diaz-Granados: Writer ) Last week, my actor-director friend Juan Carlos Hernandez finished post-production on Clown 345, a short comedy film about a young clown (Anthony Fernandez) and his attempt to tell a joke to his parents (Adria K. Hernandez and Juan Carlos Hernandez). It was written mostly by Juan; I was asked to write the "bridge" between Acts One and Three, which had mostly been filmed by the time I came on board the project. Clown 345 is now complete and "live" on YouTube, so Popcorn Skies Productions, my friend Juan's New York City-based production company, has listed it on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), complete with a cast and crew list. For my modest contribution, I earned my second credit as a screenwriter for a produced work in my career. My first one, of course, was for A Simple Ad, an original screenp...

Hello, there, Gentle Reader, and welcome to the 1,000th post of A Certain Point of View.  A lot of water has passed under the bridge since we began this journey on July 4, 2011, which is when I wrote the first post on this blog. On that occasion, I wanted to introduce myself to...well... you, explain why I named the blog A Certain Point of View, and to share the story of how and why I became a Star Wars fan.  The famous Star Wars logo designed in 1976 by Dan Perri. ™ Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)  In First Things First... , I wrote: Welcome to A Certain Point of View, my new blog here at Blogger.com. My name is Alex Diaz-Granados and I'm a (a) writer, (b) budding screenwriter, (c) single guy, (d) online reviewer and (e) die-hard  Star Wars  fan of the "1977 Generation" who still remembers when the first movie was simply titled  Star Wars  and not, as it has been known since 1981,  Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope. ...

How do you come up with writing ideas? It depends on the circumstances, really, as well as my current state of mind. As it stands, other than my blog and my answers on Quora, I can point to three things that I have written for public consumption: Save Me the Aisle Seat: The Good, the Bad and the Really Bad Movies: Selected Reviews by an Online Film Reviewer: Alex Diaz-Granados: 9781475075045: Amazon.com: Books Reunion: A Story: Mr. Alex J Diaz-Granados: 9781722120474: Amazon.com: Books Each of these projects had a unique “point of origin.” The oldest of these is  Reunion: A Story.  Although I self-published it last summer, it began life as a creative writing assignment in my sophomore year in college, circa 1987. I don’t remember what the assignment was now, but I do remember that I wrote a dream sequence set during the protagonist’s last day as a high school senior. It only earned a B, but I kept it in my college work files with the intention of...

A Simple Ad  is a short film directed by Juan Carlos Hernandez from a screenplay that I wrote in late March of 2019.  Juan had asked me for a script for a two-minute short, but the best that I could manage was a screenplay that, when filmed, ended up becoming a film with a running time of 3:42...not quite four minutes in total. I based the script on an apocryphal story - a legend, really - about Ernest Hemingway. (Supposedly, in his days as a young writer in Paris, Hemingway was having drinks at a bar with some of his friends when someone made a challenge - perhaps in jest, perhaps not - to see who could come up with a complete story using the fewest words. According to the myth (for that's all it is, really), the group of writers, now reasonably sober, reunited at the bar with their short stories, some of which were two pages long, others just one, but all of them were at least two or three paragraphs long. Hemingway reputedly read them all, after which he said, "I...