A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

When I began adapting Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken into its as yet untitled screenplay sibling, I thought that it would be a somewhat easy project because its source is a short story with a small cast of main and supporting characters and only a few settings – the narrator’s college campus office, his apartment, a cemetery in Miami-Dade County, and the high school he had attended back in the early 1980s. Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken (or, as it was originally titled, Reunion ) also has a very simple structure – it’s an extended flashback to the narrator’s final day as a high school senior in June of 1983, with a “present day” (1998) frame which serves to set up the main story and give it what I hoped at the time would be a poignant epilogue. However, because I have learned – from both watching movie adaptations of novels such as The Hunt for Red October and reading how-to books along the lines of Sy Field's Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting - that adapting a pro

Comparison: Prose Story Excerpt and Its Screenplay Adaptation For readers who are curious about the difference between prose format and screenplay adaptations, I present an excerpt from the short story I wrote in 1998 and its still-in-progress script version. (The formatting in the screenplay section may look odd so please bear with me on this.) Two girls, walking backward and waving their hands in leave-taking, turned around and saw me standing there, leaning against the wall with my hands jammed tightly in my jeans’ pockets. They smiled at me; one of them, a tall, pretty redhead whose name I didn’t remember, walked up to me and hugged me. “Well, fellow graduate, we’re finally outta here,” the redhead said when we were apart once again. “I haven’t had a chance to ask, but what are your plans, Jim?” I smiled sheepishly. “I’m going to college in the fall,” I said. “Where are you going to school?” asked the redhead’s companion, a blonde from my fifth period art class. Her n

At last! Where have you been?-- C-3PO to R2-D2, A New Hope Part One: A Fan's Dream Comes True at Last. On Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2004, Lucasfilm Ltd. and 20th Century-Fox Home Entertainment released -- some might say unleashed -- the DVD edition of one of the most anticipated movie collections since the invention of this increasingly popular format: The Star Wars Trilogy. And despite some opposition from fans who (a) wanted the DVD set to include both the 1977-83 versions and the 1997 Special Editions and (b) are unhappy with further alterations made to the "Classic" trilogy especially for the 2004 DVD editions, The Star Wars Trilogy four-disc set has been selling briskly. (It's No. 1 in DVD sales at Amazon.com.) I've been a Star Wars fan since 1977, so not only have I seen the existing five Episodes of George Lucas' space fantasy set "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" at the cinemaplex, but I've owned every VHS release since I pu

Once I made the decision to adapt my short story - Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken - as a no-frills, just-to-see-if-I-can-do-this screenplay, I had to start thinking about the story’s structure and how best to approach it so it works well as a movie. One of the reasons for choosing this story instead of, say, my thinly-disguised recollections about my first time with a woman, was its simplicity. It is, in essence, a long flashback (with a dream sequence tacked on for good measure) set in June of 1983 during the main character’s/narrator’s last hours as a high school student, with a frame story set in what was “present day” in 1998. Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken has several built-in advantages that make it fairly easy to adapt, at least in theory. It has only a small set of main characters. There’s Jim, the narrator, a college professor and best-selling author in the frame story, and a Harvard-bound high school senior in the main body of the story. There’s Mark, his best friend

Even though my writing career has taken many unexpected turns (such as my becoming a journalism student in high school and, more recently, becoming a regular online reviewer for such sites as Amazon, Epinions and Viewpoints), I’ve always dreamed about either writing a novel (doesn’t every writer?) or an original screenplay. Over the past 30-plus years, the biggest literary projects that I’ve successfully completed (other than reviews and online musings) have been a trio of short stories which I’ve submitted to a website called Literotica. Two of them, as you might have guessed from the website’s name, are about sex; I (rightly or wrongly) wanted to write a thinly-disguised account about my "first time" and share it with at least part of the world, plus I thought it would be a good “pushing the literary envelope” exercise. The third major story which I submitted to Literotica was not about sex at all but rather my first major stab at serious fiction, a short story titled

alexdg1's Full Review: Jaws 4 - The Revenge Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie''s plot. One of the unhappy realities of a moviegoer's existence is Hollywood's penchant of exploiting a popular and critically-successful film that was intended to be a one-time affair and makes unnecessary (to the audience, anyway) sequels that are (a) rehashes of the first film, (b) not as well-made as the original, and (c) so illogical and awful that they can't be even be considered "so bad that they are good" guilty pleasures. Jaws: The Revenge (also known as Jaws 4 ) is one of the best examples of totally worthless sequels. It makes More American Graffiti look like a masterpiece worthy of a zillion Academy Awards, and it is even sillier than Jurassic Park III (which doesn't even have a Michael Crichton novel to justify its existence on film). Written by Michael de Guzman and directed by Joseph Sargent, this movie asks us to

Ever since I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time in the spring of 1981, I have been a huge fan of George Lucas’s Indiana Jones, the fedora-wearing, whip-wielding, fast-quipping globe-trotting archaeologist-spy-soldier of fortune who risks life and limb going after “rare antiquities” imbued with supernatural powers. Like many Raiders fans of my generation – I was in my teens when that first George Lucas-Steven Spielberg collaboration was released – I loved that film and its two sequels partly because of the non-stop action set pieces, partly because John Williams had composed a kick-butt score, partly because they mixed elements of the old Saturday matinee serials and the James Bond flicks, but mostly because Harrison Ford was so likeable playing the Man in the Hat. Now, even though I own all four feature films and the three Adventures of Young Indiana Jones box sets, I only own a few of the novels and novelty books which fill in some of the gaps in Indy’s long car