quade's blog

I would say my usual line about guaranteeing no spoilers, but seriously, I can’t in all honesty recommend this film anyway, so I am going to toss in a couple.

You've been warned.

Normally when an independent film is in limited release, I can either drive up to Los Angeles to see it or hope it’s somehow found its way on the only two screens in all of Orange County that plays “art” films.  The trouble is, there are more art films than screens in OC and that means quite a few great independents get squeezed out and I have to make the drive into LA.

I hereby promise no spoilers follow.

To me the one thing a protagonist needs to be is somebody the audience can identify with. The audience absolutely has to be able to put themselves into the shoes of the protagonist and walk around in his dream world for a couple of hours.

I hate stupid protagonists.

I can forgive a lot of character flaws. The arrogance of Tony Stark in “Iron Man” I think is a good example. Frequently those flaws add depth to the character, however, as Ron White says, “you can’t fix stupid.”

I hereby guarantee, no spoilers follow. 

Harlan Ellison has had a career spanning decades in multiple writing disciplines with over 1,000 published works. Extraordinarily prolific. As a stunt, one morning he sat in the front window of his publishing company and solicited a random topic from the crowd passing by. He then began to type. By the end of the day, he had a finished novel.

Harper Lee, sat down at her typewriter and after two and a half years finished her first and only book; To Kill a Mockingbird. As far as anybody really knows, she never wrote a word before or since.

First things first; gratz to all the nominees!

oscar.go.com/nominations/nominees

Extremely happy with all of this.

I am a little surprised by a couple of nomination in a couple of categories, but won't begrudge any.  Some of these are going to be extremely difficult to predict winners.

 “Up in the Air” is a character study. No car crashes. No giant robots. No space marines fighting aliens. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

 I don’t know about you, but when I went to see "Speed" I wasn’t thinking it would be great art. I thought to myself; “Sure, it’s going to be stupid, but I can tune out for a bit and be entertained.” And really, that’s all the movie was supposed to be anyway. Just a bit of fluff in your life to take your mind off of the insanity. Then, somewhere in the third act, they decided to ratchet up the action a bit and do something that was, well, so incredibly stupid that it took you out of the action and made you say; “Oh come on! Really?

Need to beat up and outline a story before writing your screenplay?  Yeah, I think you do and now there's an App for that.  At least there is on the iPhone.

I just downloaded and installed it with no issues.  I'll be working on a script tonight so will report if I find any.

Here are the minor improvements in the update:

Send to Script: Send content from your Index Cards (Summary Side) right to your script with a simple mouse click.

An exercise used in screenwriting classes is to split the class into A and B groups and pair each A student with a B student.  The A student then has five minutes to pitch his story to the B student, the B student then has five minutes to critique the story.

You can love or hate Starbucks for a lot of reasons.  I love it because for the price of a cup of coffee I can rent office space for an hour or two to work on a project while waiting for an appointment.  It's also a great neutral place to meet people to talk about projects or whatever.

I recently saw a series of commercials for Starbucks' new instant coffee.

Starbucks Postal Workers

Starbucks Three Men

 If you've never seen the movie "A Face in the Crowd" I'm going to be spoiling a few things here. If you'd like to not have the experience ruined in any way, please stop reading and start watching. It's available on Netflix and these words will be waiting for you when you get back. If you continue reading, don't blame me!

As a freelancer that lives in Santa Ana and books work in Burbank, I luck out sometimes and get an entire week of days at one particular location that I'll call "The Tower."  What this means is that even though I have this horrible, long commute no matter what, I can sometimes buy a Metro Link ten trip pass and ride the train in.  It still takes roughly two hours door to door, but I can spend that time reading, watching a movie or even writing.