A lot has happened since my last post, in February of 2018. First, I changed out the Judgment of Parrish page for Advocate + Guardian. Back in 2015(!), I paused production on Judgment of Parrish when it won the FadeIn grand prize and was being circulated among producers, none of whom want a movie already in the works. Nobody […]

Sunday marked the death of Idrissa Ouédraogo, Burkina Faso’s most renowned filmmaker. If you haven’t heard of him, that’s okay. Most people haven’t heard of Burkina Faso. I wouldn’t know Ouédraogo’s work either if not for a free film series I attended faithfully when I lived in Richmond. Even though my degree is in film […]

So this happened: R.I.P. for the spec script, long a source of some of Hollywood’s most beloved films I suppose you won’t get published (even in the LA Times) without some clickbaity premise or all-embracing headline. I tend to look askance at any “analysis” that claims one talented writer invented, then killed the spec script, only […]

My kids have been haranguing me for a PlayStation 4 for years now. I’m fed up. So they’re getting this, courtesy of their former packaging designer dad. Yes, I’ve worked with quite a few Chinese vendors. No, the game titles on the back aren’t “real.” (But yes, there’s a real “PS4” in there.)

I sent this to my (occasional) writing partner in California, as we often parrot these cliches in jest: 35 Most Overused Lines of Dialogue in Screenplays Just because.

It’s a rare film that sends me straight to the keyboard to sing its praises and search for its flaws, but that’s what La Promesse has done. I finished watching it for the first time not more than thirty minutes ago, and the movie impressed me more and more with each passing second. It’s no […]

The internet is not the truth, but sometimes it exhibits a common grace. A sampling of websites and forums, for example, will teach a writer the proper form of address for a female superior officer. (If you don’t know, it’s ma’am.) If instead you relied on television writers, you would think sir was proper. I […]

I have worked as a journalist and a documentarian, and I can attest the worst thing either can do is to approach a story with an agendum*. I can also attest that this is exactly what the majority of journalists and documentarians do. Agenda have worked well for Barbara Kopple and Michael Moore, but journalists […]

“Comparison is the thief of joy” – attributed to Theodore Roosevelt I’m writing a book. It started as a screenplay, but on draft three, I realized it bore a fundamental flaw that wrecked the entire story. So I started writing in prose form the thoughts and observations of the various characters in order to get […]

For the first five films, click here. The Son and The Child (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne) The Belgian Daredenne brothers, who made Kid with a Bike, also crafted these two movies with similar titles. The Son (Le Fils) is about a man (Olivier Gourmet in a masterful performance) who ends up tutoring the youth who murdered his young child years ago. Who […]




