A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Some questions, apparently, keep coming back, like kudzu...or a boomerang.  On Quora, Raivo Berkins asks: Will Han Solo come back in the final installment of the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy? My reply:  No, Han Solo, the iconic character played by Harrison Ford in the Original Trilogy and in  Star Wars: The Force Awakens,  will not come back in  Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.  His character was killed off in that 2015 film in such a way that only the dimmest and least observant person could possibly believe that he survived. Consider. In his last onscreen appearance in  The Force Awakens,  Han is: Stabbed through the heart with a highly unstable but deadly lightsaber blade wielded by his own son, Ben Solo, aka Kylo Ren Right after being stabbed through the heart, Han falls deep into a chasm under the bowels of Starkiller Base, a planet-turned-into-a-superweapon even more powerful than either Death Star used by the Empire Shortly t...

The Blu-ray packaging for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. © 2015 Lucasfilm Ltd. and Buena Vista Home Entertainment No. First of all, (and I’m tired of explaining this over and over),  The Walt Disney Company  does not, nor did it ever have, a plan “to have the audience focus on a new set of characters.” If anyone had such a plan, it would have been  Lucasfilm,  the Disney-owned subsidiary that is responsible for actually making  Indiana Jones  and  Star Wars. Second of all, creating a new set of characters for the Sequel Trilogy was always going to be in the cards, as the window for making a post- Return of the Jedi  trilogy closed sometime between 1983 and 1994, partly because of George Lucas’s divorce from Marcia Lucas and  Star Wars  burnout, and partly because when Lucas decided to go back to big-budget filmmaking, he chose to make the Prequel Trilogy instead. Meanwhile, as Steve Perry noted in his foreword to the  Shad...

Image by  Lukas Bieri  from  Pixabay   I was going to take the rest of Sunday off, but I received a series of encouraging texts from my New York City-based collaborator and friend, Juan Carlos Hernandez, about my recently-completed screenplay for Happy Days Are Here Again.  Juan and I have been working on our most ambitious collaboration to date since he and his wife Adria completed the post-production phase of A Simple Ad in May. As I've said in previous posts, Juan had originally asked me for a comedy rather than what he got in A Simple Ad, which was a brief but poignant rumination about loss and grief. And although Juan and Adria liked the script well enough to devote time and effort into making it into a short film, they still wanted a comedy script from me. This time, though, Juan wanted a longer, more elaborate screen story that included a part for his son Anthony, who is studying drama in college up in New York State. I eventually settled on...

Photo Credit: Pixabay I could be just a writer very easily. I am not a writer. I am a screenwriter, which is half a filmmaker. … But it is not an art form, because screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art. – Paul Schrader After a couple of days of anxious waiting, I finally heard from my friend and writing partner, actor-director Juan Carlos Hernandez, about the revised screenplay for Happy Days Are Here Again.  Juan sent me a couple of texts yesterday; they were not very long or detailed. but overall they were rather encouraging. Basically, he said that he had spent several days breaking the script down to determine how to best interpret it. At first, he had a bit of difficulty trying to understand the third act, but he added that after a second read-through, "I finally got it." I don’t think screenplay writing is the same as writing — I mean, I think it’s blueprinting. – Robert Altman Juan is a guy of few...

Does Disney own the movie Titanic now? James Cameron’s 1997 film was the most expensive motion picture of its day; its unprecedented $200 million budget was so large that Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment had to team up with two major studios to get his film made and distributed. The two studios that stepped up to the plate were Paramount Pictures (a subsidiary of Viacom) and 20th Century Fox Film Corporation (a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation). Though it might seem strange that two rival studios would join forces to produce and release a major motion picture, it has happened several times, most notably when Universal Pictures and Columbia Pictures bankrolled Steven Spielberg’s  1941  back in the late 1970s. What usually happens in these deals is that one studio gets the rights for domestic distribution, while the other gets the foreign distribution rights. In the case of  Titanic,  Paramount Pictures got dibs on the lucrative North Amer...

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...

If The Walt Disney Company acquires Fox, will Disney own the TV rights to Batman? The purchase of 21st Century Fox by The Walt Disney Company (TWDC) was finalized in the spring of 2019 after the relevant government agencies in various nations, including the U.S. and China, signed off on it. It’s therefore no longer a hypothetical question (“if”); it’s a done deal. However, your question from 2017 reflects quite a few misconceptions that need to be cleared up. Let’s begin, shall we? First, you have to understand that before the Disney purchase of 21st Century Fox was set in motion, Rupert Murdoch and his fellow owners had to spin off several divisions from the company that was the parent of the legendary film studio 20th Century Fox and its in-house labels, Fox Searchlight and Fox 2000. None of the “Fox”-branded TV networks that were formerly part of Murdoch’s old News Corporation/21st Century Fox were included in the deal. TWDC already owns ABC and ESPN; it can’t own a...