Notebook
how to write a movie
steve lickteig
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4. Forget the three-act structure
All the manuals insist on a three-act structure. I think this is a useless model. It's static. All it really means is that your screenplay should have a beginning, middle and end. When you're shaping things, it's more useful to think about suspense. Suspense is the hidden energy that holds a story together. It connects two points and sends a charge between them. But it doesn't have to be all action. Emotions create their own suspense. In American Splendor, the film about comic-book creator Harvey Pekar, you hope till it hurts that his relationship will work out. Secrets are good at generating tension, too. In A Knight's Tale, you fret all the way through that someone will discover that William is not really Sir Ulrich von Lichtenstein.
A delicate art. If a setup is too obvious, it can announce a payoff. I remember watching Se7en in a multiplex. When Morgan Freeman said he was going to retire in a few days, someone shouted: "Gonna die!" (For once, it wasn't true.) On the other hand, if the setup doesn't signal something, it doesn't generate any suspense. The trick is to create an expectation but fulfil it in a completely unexpected way. I'm going to give the Oscar for this to Geoffrey Chaucer for The Pardoner's Tale, where they go looking for Death but find a pile of money instead. And the twist is ... they scheme over it and kill each other.
southpaw president
Both Obama and McCain are left handed, and so have been four of the last six presidents.
"Studies have shown that whereas righties favor the left hemisphere of their brain, which controls language, left-handers are more likely to have bilateral brain function, which could allow them to visualize problems more broadly and with more complexity. A higher percentage of mathematicians and scientists are left-handed, and the same is true for artists."
marketing genius
To demonstrate their product's ability to remove tough stains, the makers of Breeze Excel washing detergent sent product samples wrapped in t-shirts through the regular mail with instructions to wash the shirts -- significantly dirtied in transit -- upon receipt.
(via kottke)
home ownership
Paul Krugman writing in today's New York Times:
First of all, there’s the financial risk. Although it’s rarely put this way, borrowing to buy a home is like buying stocks on margin: if the market value of the house falls, the buyer can easily lose his or her entire stake.
This isn’t a hypothetical worry. From 2005 through 2007 alone — that is, at the peak of the housing bubble — more than 22 million Americans bought either new or existing houses. Now that the bubble has burst, many of those homebuyers have lost heavily on their investment. At this point there are probably around 10 million households with negative home equity — that is, with mortgages that exceed the value of their houses.
Owning a home also ties workers down. Even in the best of times, the costs and hassle of selling one home and buying another — one estimate put the average cost of a house move at more than $60,000 — tend to make workers reluctant to go where the jobs are."
the itch
From this week's New Yorker, a fascinating and occasionally disturbing story on itching. Here is an excerpt about a woman who itched compulsively, often in her sleep:
"One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain."