Filmmaking

Years ago, when I was nothing more than a film fan with dreams of directing, and long before I even considered taking a stab at screenwriting and producing, I picked up a copy of William Goldman’s classic, Adventures In The Screen Trade: A Personal View Of Hollywood and Screenwriting. I expected a fluffy read, peppered with cute anecdotes of larger than life screen stars and cartoonish studio moguls. Man, was I off. Adventures pulled no punches. Sure, Goldman combed over the easy triumphs, but h...

  Doug Richardson ONE LAST TASTY MORSEL In Part V I stated a belief that hindsight was a gift. May I add that another gift was the opportunity to write this epic blog post for the good folks who occupy Stage 32. It's not just about the insightful and classy Richard Botto offering me this forum for which I'm so very grateful. It's also about having the chance to put some of my experiences on Hostage into words. Putting these selected pieces of the journey into words allowed me to cr...

  Doug Richardson WEEK #69 JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I WAS OUT... It would go like this. There would be a meeting of some sort. Be it at the editing room or during dialogue looping or after huddled moments following a test screening or on a five-way conference call. If Bruce and Florent were present, I had to be too. Director and movie star would be all smiles and adoration, parting always with a bro-hug, only then race to see who could be the first to call me. My cell phone would vibrat...

  Doug Richardson WEEK #28 - NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED Author Robert "Bob" Crais was the first to have a crack at adapting his novel. More often than I'd like to count, I've been the guy in his position. Adapting my own book to the screen or writing an original screenplay on assignment, only to have another word jockey take over my ride. Sure. It's part of the business. But it's never any fun to be outside the process looking in. Producer David Wally had expressed to me on m...

  Doug Richardson WEEK #22 - TWENTY FIVE NIGHTS AND NO END IN SIGHT It was late January, bitter cold, and the damned scene wasn't working. We were at the end of the first of five grueling weeks of night shoots. And that three week-favor had just turned the corner into a what felt like one long, endless, black hole. I was ignoring both my family and my other assignments. I was still working without a deal. Essentially, my labor was free. Like I said before. I could've walked. I had...

  Doug Richardson WEEK #18 It was January. That little three-week rewrite-a favor to Bruce Willis and his producing partner, Arnold Rifkin-was now entering fifth month. I had no deal. I hadn't been paid for anything beyond the initial three weeks. So you ask, why hell didn't I walk? That's the ultimate test in a negotiation, isn't it? Hit the door and see if the other side balks. If it were only that simple. Arnold and Bruce were producers on three other projects of mine that w...

It was supposed to be a quick rewrite. Three weeks tops. Not just that, but a favor at a discount price. Fix the dialogue. Crank up the tension and action. Three short weeks and I would be back to my comfortable life. Cue the theme song to the iconic TV show, Gilligan's Island. "Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful ship..." Yeah. That three-week-rewrite-as-a-favor morphed into a year and a half of my life lost to the making of a single movie. I know. That's a...

  Rex Pickett A couple things before I get started: When referencing films, I'm going to be relying heavily on Metacritic.com. They're a terrific Web site, unlike their lesser forebear Rotten Tomatoes. They cull film reviews from a select group of a maximum of 42 critics, assign a score of 0-100 to each review, weight the review in accordance to the prominence of the critic, then average the score. E.g., anything over an 80 would have a filmmaker leaping with joy. Over a 90 is stratosp...

Film Critics Awards dinner, the WGA awards ceremony, but that was it. Evidently, there wasn’t enough money in the budget for the novelist. The forgetfulness reached its nadir with the Indie Spirit Awards. Living only one mile from the venue – and being a writer/director of two indie films – I desperately wanted to attend. I begged the head publicist at Fox Searchlight to vouchsafe me a seat. I told her I didn’t even care if I got a plus-one like all the others. Just a fold-up chair in the back,...

In either January or February of ’03, I got word that Alexander and Jim had started the adaptation that would ultimately end up winning every single screenwriting award a film writer can win. Michael called about the same time and said that it was an embarrassment that my novel still didn’t have a publishing deal. Apparently, Brian Lipson had gotten a call from a publishing agent in New York wondering the same thing. I called the agent just to feel him out. He boasted that he could get me a d...