DEC Film School Tour

Classes start February 5, 2009

June and October semester starts are also available.

Click the link below to watch a tour through the amazing environment at Douglas Education Center, guided by Tom Savini.

http://www.moviemaker.com/mailinglist/lt.php?id=N0sAD1VZBQYCS1cBBEoLAglV

� 2008 Douglas Education Center

130 Seventh Street Monessen, PA 15062 1.800.413.6013

'Dark Drama or Gritty Thriller Scripts'

SQuid Brothers, INC. is looking for a completed, feature length dark drama or gritty thriller scripts which involve a hardened male character (24-28 preferred but not required) who interacts with a young, “quirky but bright” 11-13 year old female character,

i.e. Something in the vein of “The Professional,” “Sling Blade,” “Taxi Driver,” or “City of Lost Children.” The male character in the story should have enough moral sense to not hurt the child, and should learn something from the kid as the story unfolds, perhaps even becoming a mentor to, and then later becoming mentored by the child character. We especially favor stories where the communication between the main characters takes place more through body language than dialogue, such that the acting is more in the eyes and less in the conversation. And we’re especially interested in a hard, gritty, dark role for the female character. Budget for this project will not exceed $1.5 million. WGA and non-WGA writers may submit.

INSTRUCTIONS to SUBMIT:

Email a QUERY LETTER or SYNOPSIS ONLY to:

NetworkISAQuery@gmail.com

CUT AND PASTE TEXT INTO BODY OF EMAIL - ALL ATTACHMENTS WILL BE DELETED

11th Annual International Scriptapalooza Screenplay Competition

Early deadline: January 5th

• Grand Prize: $10,000
• Two writers got scripts made into movies by LifeTime Network
  in 2007
• All the reading done by 90 production companies
• Entertainment Weekly calls it "One of the Best"
• Scriptapalooza promotes the winners, runners-up, finalists and
  semifinalists for a full year
• Each year dozens of production companies and literary representatives sign on as participants to read Scriptapalooza's winners, resulting in many scripts being optioned, sold or bought outright.

Questions? Comments? Call the Scriptapalooza office at 323/654-5809
or e-mail info@scriptapalooza.com.

CS Weekly - 12/12/08 - Frost/Nixon Author Interview

The Limelight and the Wilderness: Peter Morgan on Frost/Nixon
BY AMY DAWES

The famous interviews on which it's based take up very little of the screen time -- it's mostly about the context and the machinations leading up to them. You structured it like a prize fight. How did you hit on that approach?

I had the idea to do it this way, before I wrote either The Queen or The Last King of Scotland, from the minute I saw Frost talking about it in one of those dreadful biographical TV pieces. Watching him talk about the interviews, I thought, "That would be like a verbal Rocky." You've got the outsider who takes a shot at the champ. It's a David and Goliath story. But when I first met with Frost, he painted a picture of it going terribly smoothly, so I thought, "I haven't got anything (to work with) after all." It wasn't until I met the real James Reston that I realized how chaotic and calamitous it had all been. And far from putting me off, that immediately inspired me.

And the inciting incident was?

They paid Nixon $600,000 to do these interviews. It was a breathtaking amount -- something like $5 million in today's money. This is a leader who had abused his power and completely devalued the American democratic process. Some people wanted to indict him for war crimes. That these payments were made -- the American networks were so angry, and Frost was vilified. [I imagined] the pressure he would have felt. And that he skated into it with no real comprehension, as an outsider, of how important this was to Americans. So I really thought this was a great, great idea, but I didn't have the confidence to write it. And then at a certain point, I had this hiccup with (director) Stephen Frears, where he postponed shooting The Queen for a year, and I thought, "I'll actually try that idea that I never had the courage to write."

Read Amy Dawes' entire interview with Peter Morgan in the latest issue of Creative Screenwriting.