Could there be Blood?

As I was watching the lowest rated Oscar telecast in history the other night a few things occurred to me. First off, no one has seen any of these movies. I am an avid movie goer and I had only seen four of the Best Picture nominees. I don't know anyone who has seen "There Will be Blood", and very few who have seen "Juno" or "No Country...".

I'm not saying that Hollywood should start pandering, but as the rating have demonstrated it is a big problem. If you look at years where the rating were high, 94, 97, 01 many of the best pictures were also box office smashes. This is actually a symptom of a bigger problem. Namely adults don't go to the movies any more.

The other thing that got me thinking was about the films themselves. If "There Will be Blood" was submitted by an unknown writer to a studio wold it get noticed? The complete lack of dialog in the beginning, the characters that don't seem to change at all over the course of the film, the abrupt ending...etc. Wouldn't these choices create red flags in the minds of the studio readers? Where are the three acts? This film doesn't fit into the checklist cookie cutter that so many films are measured by. Neither does "No Country for Old Men". Would these films get made in Hollywood with out big names behind them?

I say no and that's a big problem.

Listen very carefully

Right now, as you read these very words, fingers are typing away on keyboards. The fact that they are typing is not as important as what they are typing. SCREENPLAYS! A wave of newly inspired Diablo Cody clones have decided that being a screenwriters seems like a cool thing to do. God help us.

If you go to any of the big screen writing comps websites and look at the amount of entries you will see a spike shortly after the year 1994. This is the year that Tarantino exploded into the mainstream changing indie film forever(it seemed like forever at the time, but I think its over now).

QT's love of cinema, his nostalgia for the 70's, and his amazing dialog spawned countless imitators(almost ass bad) and motivated thousands more (myself included) to sit down and write our own stories (All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy).

This is all well and fine, but here is the bad part. When the volume of anything goes from a trickle to a wave it becomes harder to stand out and make it. Screenplay comps jumped from 1200 to 4000 entries in a single year, cold calls and query letters came flooding into agencies and production companies, Hollywood was deluged with screenplays. Most of them awful.

If I can give myself credit for one thing its this, I never send out my stuff until it's ready. By that I mean, typo free, formatted, and with the approval of at least two other screenwriters. I don't just crank out half finished scripts and immediately start spamming them all over the place.

Until yesterday all of this seemed like it was slowing down. Over the last five years poker had turned into the big shiny balls that the get rich quick idiots liked to chase. Why waste your time with all that typing when you could sit at a table and win millions at cards. Hey once you won the world series of poker you could write a movie about that anyway. Screen writing wasn't hip anymore. Poker and hip hop was the dream of choice for the unwashed masses.

Until last night! The story of an ex-stripper who writes a screen play in a month and won the academy award is going to draw a lot of attention. Reams of paper are flying off shelves as we speak. An avalanche if quirky, pseudo-edgy, pop culture referencing garbage is going to crush us all.

What to do, What to do? Well as I see it, we only have one thing going for us, time. All of these Diablo clones are going to write 30 pages and get tired, they need to buy supplies and screen writing software. They are going to need at least three months to ramp up.

This puts them past all of the major screenplay comps deadlines. We have one shot to place in these contests and secure some type of attention(representation/deals). After that it will be 10 times harder to get anyone to read anything.

The count down has started, the ship has sounded its horn, in t-minus 90 days things are going to get really crowded around here. Best of luck to us all.

HD-DVD, you are dead to me.

I just sold my XBOX 360- HD DVD drive on ebay for 50 bucks. Between that and the two discs I included, I wound up taking a 150 dollars bath. Until this very moment Sony hadn't won a format war EVER!

I really liked watching HD-DVD's and I think selling my drive was a mistake. Even if the format is dead, it was still a great up converting player.

I was going to use the money to buy a blu ray player, but they are too expensive and the current players(version 1.0) will not be able to play all the features on the new discs(version 1.1) that will be coming out soon. It's nice to see that Sony treats its early adopters so well.

Maybe physical media storage is dead?

STRIKE OVER!

Woooo whooooo! I feel like the Ewoks after they saw the second death star get blown up. Except I don't suck.

Congrats to the WGA for taking a stand.