Showing posts with label scripts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scripts. Show all posts
Friday, June 28, 2024
Two milestones!
Within the last five weeks, two unexpected things happened in my online life.
I first got on YouTube in 2009; four years later, I started putting my own videos there...most of them turned out to be music videos (olay, me doing the music on most of them).
Nothing spectacular...nothing viral.
For the next ten years, I was content with having 40-50 subscribers to my YouTube channel.
All this time, I'd wanted to digitize my VHS tapes...tons and tons of VHS tapes.
And do it without tying up my TV set.
So...this past March, I sent in for a VHS-to-DVD converter in order to do the work at my computer. Then I started going through my VHS videocassettes to see which old TV shows I'd taped would be suitable to put on YouTube.
Well, late last month, after putting up six telecasts from the 1990s (one a rerun of a 1970s show), I received an email from YouTube saying I'd reached a hundred subscribers.
No, it's not a thousand...but I'm still very happy with a hundred.
In October 2019 (nine months after I joined Stage 32), I joined CJ Walley's outstanding screenwriting/TV writing platform, Script Revolution. (The philosophy was: "It really shouldn't hurt to get as many eyeballs on these scripts I've written as possible.")
At the time I joined up, I'd written four feature-length screenplays. I'm now up to 27 full-length scripts and a TV pilot.
I'm proud to follow 298 other Script Revolution writers...and I'm humbled to say that earlier this week, I gained my 200th follower.
Thank you so very much, YouTube subscribers and Script Revolution followers.
And I'm going to continue to try my best to come through for you.
Monday, April 27, 2020
Lookbook #1- "Really Old School"
Things have gotten to the point in the movie-and-TV industry where writers trying to break in (and those who've already established themselves) need to put together a collection of photos serving as an expression of the writers' vision of how a movie or TV series is supposed to look. (Directors have been using this tool for quite some time.)
This collection of pictures is called a lookbook.
Well, anyway...here's my very first attempt at a lookbook, and it's connected to my very first attempt at a screenplay since 1994, "Really Old School."
This collection of pictures is called a lookbook.
Well, anyway...here's my very first attempt at a lookbook, and it's connected to my very first attempt at a screenplay since 1994, "Really Old School."
The screenplay's logline:
Inspired by a piece of 1910s sheet music, a modern-day Omaha, NE teenager wants to honor and emulate the tune's author: Her newly-deceased great-grandmother, a ragtime-era composer-musician-bandleader-arranger.
Hope you like this lookbook...and wishing you all the very best!
Saturday, February 9, 2019
"Jim Boston, how could you skip a month from your own blog?"
Well, here's how:
Last month, I stumbled onto the world's biggest social network and educational center for creatives in movies, television, and the stage.
And I got hooked!
It's none other than Stage 32, and right now, it's up to 500,000 members worldwide...more people than live here in Omaha (by itself, not counting the suburbs).
For almost three years, I've been trying to kickstart a pursuit that hooked me from 1980 to 1994: Screenwriting.
When I was still attending Iowa State University, I bought a paperback copy of the script to the 1973 classic "American Graffiti." I really liked the way George Lucas (the movie's director...that's right, that George Lucas!), Gloria Katz, and Willard Huyck wrote the story.
Bought a couple of handbooks on writing for TV and for movies...and I've still got one of them to this very day: "The Television Writer's Handbook," a 1978 publication Constance Nash and Virginia Oakey teamed up to bring to the world.
Then in 1979, as an elective, I enrolled in a screenwriting class Joe Geha conducted. The chief project for each class member was a 30-minute script...and I ended up concocting a TV sitcom pilot called "Long Way," about two women who drove a truck for a Central Iowa soft-drink bottling company. (I worked at such a company during the summers of 1976 and 1978...and liked it!)
The next year, I moved here to the Big O, where I tried and tried and tried to come up with movie scripts (when I wasn't working for a local inventory service). I subscribed to Writer's Digest as well as something called Hollywood Scriptletter, a newsletter that, in the mid-1980s, was renamed Hollywood Scriptwriter.
Through WD, I found out about the Peggy Lois French Agency. Armed with another TV sitcom pilot ("Edna's Garage," about a New Orleans auto mechanic and her crew), I tried to get representation through that Sun City, CA firm...but I was told: "You haven't had enough life experience."
Not even working for my dad at his own Des Moines auto-reconditioning firm during the summers of 1969-72 and 1977 (as well as most Saturdays from 1969-72) supposedly counted to the PLFA staff.
Well, in the middle 1980s, I joined a screenwriters' support group. In those pre-Internet days, we mainly wrote letters to each other. Things were fine...until a letter from a Phoenix member named Willi Waltrip stated that I should give up trying to write scripts and, instead, peck out novels.
OUCH!!
I dropped out of the group, stopping trying for a few years to write scripts, then got back into it by 1990- two years after I'd moved from Omaha to Sioux City, IA.
Between 1990 and 1994, I'd typed out four more screenplays...then packed it in as I started hitting the unemployment lines as the used-record-and-tape-and-CD store I moved to Sioux City to help launch got ready to call it quits.
I was through trying to cook up screenplays. That was it.
Until 2016.
Three years before that,
Nick Holle (who teamed up with Michael Zimmer to helm a 2012 documentary about the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and Festival, "The Entertainers") gave me his Power Mac G5 computer...originally purchased by a former OTPP contestant,
Brent Watkins (who teamed up with his wife Jackie to help produce the documentary).
This Power Mac had- and still has- a copy of Final Draft 6. (Yeah, I know...that was five Final Draft iterations ago.)
But since 4-18-2016, I've been using that copy of Final Draft 6 to get back in the screenwriting race, cooking up a fresh-out-of-the-box, 2010s effort and refurbishing three others (two from the 1980s and one from the 1990s).
I've learned a lot from logging onto Richard Botto's claim to fame
...especially when it comes to how a spec script should look. First of all, I learned that, in today's screenwriting, you don't refer to camera angles in a spec script. You keep character descriptions to, basically, age and traits.
And every scene, in addition to being "EXT." or "INT.," must also be labeled "DAY" (if not "MORNING" or "AFTERNOON") or "NIGHT."
I've never been more fired up about writing scripts than I am right now, thanks to Stage 32 (named after Paramount's Stage 32, a property that previously was in the hands of the old RKO Studios; in fact, "Citizen Kane" was filmed on that very stage).
And I can't wait to pitch my stuff, either. Stage 32, matter of fact, has a page full of listings for pitch sessions.
Well, all I can say after that is: Log onto stage32.com to see what all the hoopla is. And if you'd like to see any (or all four) of the screenplays I've loaded onto Stage 32, just visit stage32.com/profile/673680/scripts_screenplays.
Thanks, thanks, thanks for reading "Boston's Blog!"
Last month, I stumbled onto the world's biggest social network and educational center for creatives in movies, television, and the stage.
And I got hooked!
It's none other than Stage 32, and right now, it's up to 500,000 members worldwide...more people than live here in Omaha (by itself, not counting the suburbs).
For almost three years, I've been trying to kickstart a pursuit that hooked me from 1980 to 1994: Screenwriting.
When I was still attending Iowa State University, I bought a paperback copy of the script to the 1973 classic "American Graffiti." I really liked the way George Lucas (the movie's director...that's right, that George Lucas!), Gloria Katz, and Willard Huyck wrote the story.
Bought a couple of handbooks on writing for TV and for movies...and I've still got one of them to this very day: "The Television Writer's Handbook," a 1978 publication Constance Nash and Virginia Oakey teamed up to bring to the world.
Then in 1979, as an elective, I enrolled in a screenwriting class Joe Geha conducted. The chief project for each class member was a 30-minute script...and I ended up concocting a TV sitcom pilot called "Long Way," about two women who drove a truck for a Central Iowa soft-drink bottling company. (I worked at such a company during the summers of 1976 and 1978...and liked it!)
The next year, I moved here to the Big O, where I tried and tried and tried to come up with movie scripts (when I wasn't working for a local inventory service). I subscribed to Writer's Digest as well as something called Hollywood Scriptletter, a newsletter that, in the mid-1980s, was renamed Hollywood Scriptwriter.
Through WD, I found out about the Peggy Lois French Agency. Armed with another TV sitcom pilot ("Edna's Garage," about a New Orleans auto mechanic and her crew), I tried to get representation through that Sun City, CA firm...but I was told: "You haven't had enough life experience."
Not even working for my dad at his own Des Moines auto-reconditioning firm during the summers of 1969-72 and 1977 (as well as most Saturdays from 1969-72) supposedly counted to the PLFA staff.
Well, in the middle 1980s, I joined a screenwriters' support group. In those pre-Internet days, we mainly wrote letters to each other. Things were fine...until a letter from a Phoenix member named Willi Waltrip stated that I should give up trying to write scripts and, instead, peck out novels.
OUCH!!
I dropped out of the group, stopping trying for a few years to write scripts, then got back into it by 1990- two years after I'd moved from Omaha to Sioux City, IA.
Between 1990 and 1994, I'd typed out four more screenplays...then packed it in as I started hitting the unemployment lines as the used-record-and-tape-and-CD store I moved to Sioux City to help launch got ready to call it quits.
I was through trying to cook up screenplays. That was it.
Until 2016.
Three years before that,
This Power Mac had- and still has- a copy of Final Draft 6. (Yeah, I know...that was five Final Draft iterations ago.)
But since 4-18-2016, I've been using that copy of Final Draft 6 to get back in the screenwriting race, cooking up a fresh-out-of-the-box, 2010s effort and refurbishing three others (two from the 1980s and one from the 1990s).
I've learned a lot from logging onto Richard Botto's claim to fame
And every scene, in addition to being "EXT." or "INT.," must also be labeled "DAY" (if not "MORNING" or "AFTERNOON") or "NIGHT."
I've never been more fired up about writing scripts than I am right now, thanks to Stage 32 (named after Paramount's Stage 32, a property that previously was in the hands of the old RKO Studios; in fact, "Citizen Kane" was filmed on that very stage).
And I can't wait to pitch my stuff, either. Stage 32, matter of fact, has a page full of listings for pitch sessions.
Well, all I can say after that is: Log onto stage32.com to see what all the hoopla is. And if you'd like to see any (or all four) of the screenplays I've loaded onto Stage 32, just visit stage32.com/profile/673680/scripts_screenplays.
Thanks, thanks, thanks for reading "Boston's Blog!"
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