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Bri Castellini, TVWriter™’s favorite starving young indie filmmaker, has a few very choice words to say about the biggest cop-out “test” in showbiz. This is something we all need to know:
As a female TVWriter™ minion who regards this post as a kind of conversation between Bri, myself, and all of you who are reading and watching this, I have a question:
Does this, our current convo, pass the Bechdel Test?
Thinking about characters? Or just thinking about your story?
Consider the films you’ve seen and the scripts you’ve read, novels too. Whether the story you present is character driven or action driven, the story centers on the characters.
It’s a simple truth many like to forget while they’re debating the virtues of character driven vs. action driven tales.
Bri Castellini, TVWriter™’s favorite starving young indie filmmaker, strikes again:
We find this video interesting because there are so many even dickier things that reliable sources have reported about Brando over the years that Bri didn’t list here. Instead, she very professionally stuck to what appears to be her professional pet peeve – of the moment, anyway – thereby making this the perfect video for TVWriter™ to post as a public service to new filmmakers.
Thanks for your service, Bri!
Of arms and the man I sing • Virgil
If high-flyin’ kick-ass jelly is your pleasure, sir or madam, and you haven’t yet seen Wonder Woman, well, skedaddle. Plenty of action there and you can still see it on the big screen, the way god – Zeus? – intended it to be seen. The USA Today movie maven wrote that during the last battle, the CGI seams were showing. Maybe, but I didn’t see them.
But there’s more to the film than excellent mayhem, seamless or otherwise. Melded into the reinvented mythology that constitutes a lot of WW’s backstory is an advocacy for peace. It doesn’t take much screen time and it’s played gently – this isn’t the kind of story that grabs you by the lapels, shakes you and snarls listen to me! But the message is there and it’s one that seldom encountered in mega-entertainments. War is not glorious. Violence is a last resort.
Alex Kurtzman is in the news right now, obviously, because he’s the director of the much-reviled “The Mummy” reboot. For what it’s worth, I kinda liked the movie, probably because my expectations were lowered by awful reviews, possibly because I generally like popcorn movies, and possibly because I worked for a year with Alex and his former partner, Bob Orci, when we were a lot younger and far less grey. But I’m not here to discuss the merits of The Mummy. I’m here to relate a story about Alex Kurtzman at 25 which proved to me that he and Bob were (and are) blessed by the Goddess of Good Luck.
In 1998 I’d been working in TV about nine years, and had experience as a mid-level producer on a number of network TV shows, most recently, at that moment, on an NBC show called “Players,” which introduced Ice-T as an actor in the Dick Wolf universe. I’d worked on the pilot for the show, though I ended up receiving no credit, and as a result I developed a relationship with the head of TV development at Universal TV. When the show ended, Universal wanted to keep that relationship alive, so they offered me a pilot deal, along with a role as consulting producer on “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.”
Ostensibly, the reason I was hired as consulting producer was to provide “guidance” to the two new, and very young, co-executive producers who were acting as writer-show runners: Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci. This was ridiculous on several levels. First, at that point, Alex and Bob had been on the show for several years and already knew more about it than I ever would. Second, though I was older than Alex and Bob, and had worked in TV a few years longer, I was by no means better qualified than they were: Alex and Bob had been to film school, knew the technical end of filmmaking much better than I did, and Alex, at least, had been part of the film community his entire life– his father was an agent. Third, while I’ve always been realistic about my particular set of skills (I’m a skilled craftsman possessed of moderate talent), Alex and Bob were extremely bright and talented, and already as skilled at the craft of TV writing as anyone I ever worked with. So, despite my ostensible “leadership” position I recognized immediately the only guidance I could provide Alex and Bob was the reassurance that yes, indeed, they knew exactly what they were doing.