Director, Producer, Writer Eva Saks [evasaksmovies.com] notes in this clip, “You want to be acknowledged, you want to participate in the reward. It’s kind of unprecedented to even question whether a writer should have the right to participate.”
This video in support of the WGA strike is from a new series hosted on aworkingwriter.com, and on United Hollywood.
Also see related site SpeechlessWithoutWriters.com
At the 2007 Toronto Film Festival, “Lars and the Real Girl” received a standing ovation. Screenwriter Nancy Oliver was recently interviewed for the Los Angeles Times by Jeff Goldsmith, and expressed her perspectives on a number of challenges facing writers and other artists. Here is an excerpt:
When Alan Ball offered you a staff writing job on HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” you were literally getting ready to leave town and give up on your writing career. Why is that?
When I moved out here I decided that I would give it five years because I’m not a kid anymore. When Alan called, I was moving because my five years were up. It was very difficult because I was doing it at a later time in life than most people.
The movie based on his story The Golden Compass is about to open.
On his site, Philip Pullman addresses a number of questions about his life and work as a writer:
Were you encouraged to be creative?
No, I was ignored. When anyone took any notice it was to point out what a twit I was, and laugh at me.
This was the best possible preparation for the life of a novelist. If you have grown-ups fussing over you and encouraging you and taking an interest, you begin to think you’re important, and furthermore that you need and deserve their attention.
After a while you become incapable of working without someone else motivating you. You’re much better off supplying your own energy, and writing in spite of the fact that no-one’s interested, and even learning to put up with other people’s contempt and ridicule. What do they know, anyway?
“The people who love their craft and see themselves as artists, and carry that identity through and study each day… are the people who thrive. … Successful people are able to sustain their identity as separate from their profession and what’s happening to them. That’s particularly important in the arts, where what happens to you bears only faint correlation to your talent.” Robert Maurer, PhD [From one of the pages on identity.]
That perspective seems appropriate at any time, but perhaps especially with a Writers Guild strike on, and writers suffering a lack of respect for their talents.
In his recent LA Times The Big Picture column Come on, writers, script your futures, Patrick Goldstein writes, “As the writers strike enters its third week, I think the future belongs to a tantalizing new hyphenate: the writer-entrepreneur.”
He notes that Tony Gilroy, the writer-director of “Michael Clayton,” had a script “that was dead in the water until a total outsider.. said if Gilroy could get a star and stick to a budget, he’d bankroll the film.
Gilroy didn’t see himself as an entrepreneur. He just had a script that was burning a hole in his pocket. ‘I’d say the experience was more about my wising up than becoming a visionary,’ he explained the other day. ‘But the moment I started chasing private-equity money, it didn’t take me long before I’d realized that I’d short-circuited the formula for getting a greenlight. I didn’t need studio approval. All I needed was one guy who believed in the movie.’”
[Photo: Tony Gilroy (left) with George Clooney]
Also see the site The Inner Entrepreneur.
Actor David Thewlis‘ films include Naked (1993), the Harry Potter series, and many more. His first novel, The Late Hector Kipling, has just been published, and screenwriter William Monahan interviewed Thewlis for a BlackBook magazine article [Fiction (With a Twist of Lennon)].
William Monahan: I find that when you’re writing a character, you are that character. It’s probably no joke that Shakespeare was an actor. Dickens, famously, was a brilliant performer of his invented people, not only when he was reading in public but also when he was creating them on the page. Do you see any connection yourself between the ability to act and the ability to write?
David Thewlis: I think there is a very strong connection. One of the most pointless questions I seem to get asked over and over is, “Do you think you may now give up acting?” as though I am condemned to choose one or the other.
“The writers I know, or whose lives I have read about, have one thing in common: a stressed childhood. I don’t mean, necessarily, an unhappy one, but children who have been forced into self-awareness early, have had to learn how to watch the grown-ups, assess them, know what they really mean, as distinct from what they say, children who are continually observing everyone - they have had the best of apprenticeships.”
Doris Lessing [contemporarywriters.com]
~ ~ ~ ~
Britain’s Lessing wins Nobel for literature [News story]
By Sarah Edmonds and Niklas Pollard Thu Oct 11, 12:11 PM ET
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - British novelist Doris Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature on Thursday for a body of work that looked unflinchingly at society’s ills and inspired a generation of feminist writers.
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