J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis struck a cultural nerve when it was published in 2016. In the book, Vance details his personal journey from the poverty of Appalachia, to his service as a Marine, and then his achievement of graduating from Yale Law School. His story is one of grit and financial ...
Clark Duke is best known for his comedic acting roles like Jacob in Hot Tub Time Machine, Clark on TV’s The Office, Marty in Kick-Ass and the voice of Thunk in The Croods. But he admits he’s wanted to direct a feature film since he was 12. An Arkansas native, Duke optioned the novel Arkansas by John Brandon a decade ago, and ...
Back when I was in film school at UCLA, a friend told me about a real woman named Ada Lovelace who lived in the 1800s. She was a mathematician and worked with inventor Charles Babbage to create programs for the world’s first computer. I read several biographies about Lovelace’s life, and though I went to film school to write broad, female-centric comedies, I decided I would try my hand at a biopic.
You probably know British writer Ian McEwan best for his award-winning novels like Atonement, Black DogsandThe Comfort of Strangers. But he also writes plays and screenplays, and his novella On Chesil Beach has now been adapted for the screen by none other than McEwan himself. Dialing in from England, we chatted about the film, and the differences between writing a novel and a screenplay.
We usually think of Shakespeare as one of the most uniquely gifted writers of all time. But the truth is that very few of his stories are "original" in our sense of the word. In fact, only two of Shakespeare's thirty-eight plays have no known source. The rest were stolen -- that's right, stolen -- from specific, identifiable sources.
ScreenwritingU looks at how one writer adapted an ESPN article about a child prodigy from Uganda, traveled to African and played a little chess along the way.
Writer/Director Jocelyn Moorhouse, best known for such films as How to Make an American Quilt and A Thousand Acres, describes her new film as “The Unforgiven with a sewing machine.”
From the Pages of a Book: Five Successful Adaptations
When I was in film school at UCLA, the head of our department, Richard Walter, gave a lecture in which he asked the question, “What does a screenwriter owe the original material?” Immediately, he answered his own question, saying “Nothing!”
While this is a great point—as a ...
Writer Robert Carlock has a long list of TV shows that don his name. They include Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Saturday Night Live, 30 Rock, Joey, Friends and The Dana Carvey Show. But his new film, Whiskey Foxtrot Tango starring Tina Fey, is his first produced feature. It's the story of a naive journalist who takes an assignment in ...
More that 60 years ago novelist Patricia Highsmith wrote a controversial book about a relationship between two women in New York City in the late 1940s. The book’s title was The Price of Salt, and the author used a pseudonym due to the story’s content. Finally, after a long battle by one of the author’s friends, the book has been adapted ...
Carey Mulligan plays Bathsheba Everdene in Hollywood’s fourth official screen adaptation of the popular Thomas Hardy novel, Far From the Madding Crowd. Set in in Victorian England, the film follows Everdene’s character as she comes into a large inheritance and suddenly finds herself with three possible suitors with whom she could make her ...