Software may identify blockbuster scripts

Now a team at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, has developed an algorithm to keep scriptwriters ahead of the game. The algorithm assesses how good a script is as it is being bashed out on the keyboard (F. Murtagh, A. Ganz & S. McKie Pattern Recognit. ; in the press). Computer scientists Fionn Murtagh and Stewart McKie teamed up with screenwriter Adam Ganz to find an objective way to compare new scripts with successful ones in their genre. They analysed a selection of scripts from films deemed successful by critics to find common patterns.

“On the crudest level, we could distinguish action films, such as Die Hard , from a drama such as Casablanca just on the frequency of verbs compared with character names,” says Ganz. “We wanted to see if we could find a more sophisticated way to uncover deeper structural patterns.

For full article (including a fab quote from me!) read on here

scriptgeist

From Stewart McKie - the creator of scriptcloud comes a new ideablog for those who have ideas about improving screenwriting and want to get more involved in online idea sharing. Click here.

Click the big orange New Idea button then signup as a new user to post and track your ideas and vote/comment on the ideas of others. Although in its infancy, it may work as a forum to share opinions on scripped, zhura and other online scriptwriting tools.

growing clothes

My sister once bought a beautiful, grey wool sweater which she wore only once before casting it casually into the washing machine. When she took it out, it had shrunk to the size of a tea cosy. Thinking it might fit my daughter (who at the time was only two) she posted it here airmail - and it was exactly the right size!
The weird thing is over the years the jumper has actually grown with my daughter - so now that she is nearly six - it still fits - with room to spare.
Hmm - maybe I should send this in as a tip somewhere - how to use your children to grow shrunken clothes back to their original size..slowly....

Amarna princess

Here's one for the cuttings file (which I'm sure will be turned into a TV drama soon) - the story of the family from Bolton who successfully conned the art world for more than two decades.

In 2003, the local council used grant money to buy a stunning translucent alabaster Egyptian statue from them for £440,000 only to later discover it was a fake. Shaun Greenhalgh created the Amarna Princess from a block of calcite using an ordinary mallet and chisel.

For successful forgers, the Greenhalgh trio 'had an unremarkable lifestyle.' Despite having £500,000 in the bank they lived "in abject poverty", said police. 83 year old Olive had never even left Bolton.

Read the full story on the BBC website here and see a slide show of all the various forged art pieces here.

circles and spirals

So on to 'the stories we tell and why we tell them.'

Some people say that we all only really have one story, which we tell over and over again in different forms. Sometimes it’s a circle and sometimes it’s a spiral. *

I read an interview somewhere, ages ago with the Weinstein brothers who spoke about how their Jewish experience informed the stories they wanted to tell ‘We make films about the outsider who comes in and changes things’.

The stories I tell are often about 'the insider who doesn’t fit in and wants to run away.’ A different migrant experience. When I look over vastly different scripts I've written - it is a theme that keeps popping up.

So here's an interesting exercise - try and sum up what you write about in a short phrase or a single sentence...

* sometimes it's simple and sometimes it's a bit more complicated

Superstition

One inspiring book which I picked up on the Charing Cross Road in 1989 and return to time and again is 'The Fragrance of Guava' ( Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza in conversation with Gabriel Garcia Marquez.) My copy has two Freetown addresses scribbled in the back so I must have taken it to Sierra Leone. Anyway it's basically one long conversation with Marquez organised into short chapters. There's one each on his two most famous novels, then one on Origins, Family, His Craft, Education, Readings and Influences, Work, Waiting, Now, Politics, Women, Superstitions Mania and Tastes and (lastly!) Fame and the Famous. It is thought provoking and I took it out again yesterday when I started thinking about superstition.

I'm not that superstitious though I detest Friday 13th. Early this year it fell in the middle of holiday school so I kept my daughter home. In a month there's another - in holiday school again so I'll do the same. That's one of my few concessions. My mother holds this 'reverse superstition' thing where she almost goes out of her way to disprove it. She wore green when she married for the 2nd time on Friday 13th (and no - it didn't last).

Everyone seems superstitious here, in one way or another. One of my hub's female relatives will get up in the middle of the night during an electrical storm to cover all the mirrors with a sheet to prevent bad luck.

© F Jason
In this photo a sangoma (witch doctor) is interviewed by a journalist. Her beliefs don't allow her to look in the face of a white man. Instead he must direct his question to the small circular mirror she is holding.

Last year was sent The Travelers - a book of photographs by Elizabeth Heyert taken at a Harlem undertaker. Macabre and fascinating - it is a series of huge colour photographs of dead black Americans of varying ages - dressed up in their Sunday best for their journey to heaven.
Anyoldhow sometime ago, this book was lying on the sofa when the 'light bulb people' came round. (South Africa is becoming more eco-friendly and so light bulb people were despatched to every house in the land to exchange the old light bulbs for the new two-prong low energy ones - bulb for bulb - totally free. While hub was up the ladder unscrewing bulbs all over the house, the Xhosa light bulb official started looking through this book with great interest. Then she took out a notebook and started writing things down. Of course being a nosy writer, I had to ask what she was writing. She said 'the birth dates and death dates of the people in the photos - to use to play the Lotto!

Dead people have great powers...

Later

daft ideas

Onwards and upwards. Ok today I thought I'd chat a bit about blogging and writing and self-consciousness and daft ideas all kind of rolled in together. Maybe a train of thought will emerge.

A while back I did something which I hardly ever do - which was talk about one of my scripts on the blog and I even posted part of a statement. It was all to do with the local TV drama news story here. As it turns out that 4 part TV drama series was pulled completely (despite a re-edit) That was after the story had gone wide - even being reported in Variety here. Anyoldhow this blog received a fair number of hits from people googling it. Then my script came 2nd somewhere (I'm fond of slipping that in). Since then I've had a few requests for reads (even though I've now re-worked it for radio.) Maybe this disproves the whole self-conscious karmic blog thingy.

But what I really wanted to talk about today was 'daft ideas'. I'm sure all scriptwriters get them sometimes. At the time, the idea appears to be the most stupendously, magnificent one imaginable.

Once I wrote up a film synopsis about a 'dancing minotaur'. Yes you read that right. (OK so I went to Art College.) I even submitted it and received an ever-so-pleasant letter which must have been typed by someone fighting to keep a straight face. 'While this is certainly an unusual and original premise, we do not feel that in the current climate there is a huge demand for a movie about a dancing minotaur'.

Ha ha.

So that's mine - what's yours?

dancing

Was driving through Heideveld yesterday when T Rex - Cosmic Dancer came on the radio. Eish - not heard that in years. Now the lyrics are stuck in my head

I was dancing when I was twelve
I was dancing when I was twelve

Taboo

I do love a bit of taboo. Every so often I read a news story that, in my opinion would make a fantastic film and which I'd love to write the screenplay for. So in a first for this blog, I've decided to declare my interest in this news item - "75 year old Granny & her 25 year old Gambian lover" here .

I know that there are all kinds of legal issues with scripting a real story (about real people.) But aside from this and in the unlikely event that anyone has managed to snap up the film rights from this duo, I'm your writer.

How I'd love to get right inside their heads. She - sedate, reserved, well travelled and now 'livid' with her granddaughter's betrayal in a revelatory article in the Guardian earlier this week. He - the softly spoken black outsider, forced to smoke out of a bedroom window and with no one else to talk to.

It's not just the obvious age and cultural differences that attract me but the whole idea of 'impropriety' in middle England and the subtly embedded prejudices at play within and outside the family. I know this 'type' of story pops up fairly frequently but this particular tale resonates with me.

The 'family values' sub text of the Daily Mail's story here focuses on why a gentile, respectable elderly lady of means from the 'picturesque village of Buriton' should embark on such an 'unsuitable' and (probably) doomed relationship. No one seems too interested in imagining what the young man may be thinking.

Yes there have been other films about supposedly 'mis-matched romance' notably The Mother brilliantly scripted by Hanif Kureishi and Vers le Sud (Heading South) with Charlotte Rampling and my all time favourite: Harold and Maude but this story seems to offer even more fascinating possibilities.

What do you think? And have you come across a news story you'd love to script?

scriptcloud

Another day, another way to procrastinate. Here you can create a scriptcloud (for no obvious reason - and that's good enough for me.) Have a look at potdoll's. Below is one of mine - not naughty at all is it?

arms belongings bends biscuits buses canteen caravan colour countryside daughters depot doorway draws drives falls foreman furiously gathers gazes glances greet grey grins horn hush kisses laughs leaps love mum nasty nods pauses peers photographs picks playground pretend pulls quiff reads registrar roadside satchel scowls shakes shocked shouts shuts sits slams smiles sob squeal stare stops strides sucks tea teacher throws thumb tries whispers