Ed Gray's Blog, page 2

This is epic

The epic is back:
Game of Thrones. House of Cards. Breaking Bad. Downton Abbey. Harry Potter. The Hunger Games. Twilight.
Modern storytelling is reverting, all the way back to the Canterbury Tales and Beowulf. Episodic long form is taking back the ground it lost to the three-act play.
Your flat screen is fast becoming the new village square, Netflix and HBO the new traveling bards. This is a big deal.

How to Watch a Movie

It isn't that many of the movies we see are similar -- it's that they all are. Virtually every movie produced these days tells its story in the same way, following a rigid structure that, like the hidden image in a Magic Eye poster, becomes obvious only when you change your focus and look past the surface complexity to take in the larger whole. In an (only slightly) abbreviated form, here is the standard outline.

How to watch a movie, Part Two

Art thrives wherever it can find a niche audience. Live theater has escaped the shackles of required artistic conformity for the simple reason that each production doesn't need a very large audience to be successful. An off-Broadway show can be happy with 50 paid seats a night. But the audience needed to recoup a hundred-million-dollar movie budget is, what? Twenty million ticket purchasers? More? That’s nobody’s niche.

The traditional publishing house. Going, going…

But not yet gone. Soon, though. Maybe very soon.

Deep Throat is still in the garage

But the garage is to be torn down. Literally as it turns out, but that's not what I meant. I meant metaphorically. It's been a long time coming. Nothing's changed, but I bring it up now because another metaphorical wrecking ball is on its way. Not from me. From someone else. I planted my charge back in 2005 with the publication of INW and calmly walked away.
Stay tuned. The inevitable explosion is getting closer.

Writing screenplays is like playing golf

Writing screenplays is like playing golf. This is actually a really good analogy, so stick with me here.

Everything you know is a story.

Everything you know is a story. That’s how human consciousness works.