THE OBENSON REPORT

Covering Cinema From All Across The African Diaspora
Showing posts with label screenplay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label screenplay. Show all posts

Wanna Read The Script For Charlie Kaufman's Latest Opus?

Posted on 12:55 PM comments (3)
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I'm sure most of you are familiar with Mr Charlie Kaufman's work - Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and one of my favorites, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, amongst a few others. He of course wrote the screenplays for all of those films, while someone else directed them. With Synecdoche, NY, he not only wrote the screenplay, he also directed the film, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and stars notable thespians, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, and Tilda Swinton.

What's it about?

As his nervous system shuts down, a theater director (Hoffman) struggles with his work, and the women in his life, as he attempts to create a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse as part of his new play. Catherine Keener plays his first wife, Michelle Williams his second wife, and Samantha Morton his lover. Like previous Kaufman films, this one is said to exist in a blurred reality/fiction, and it's described by Kaufman himself as being ""creepy" but not a traditional horror movie!"

One critic who saw the film at Cannes said this about it: "... two hours of mental-mindf*ck... everyone is way too fried at this point to really sink their teeth into a film requiring this level of intellectual attention, and most of the folks I talked to after the screening felt they really need to see it at least once more to really wrap their minds around it."

Reviews of it have been mostly positive, but, to my knowledge it has no American distributor, which is a surprise given the talent involved. It doesn't sound like it'd be a hard sell! It already has foreign distributors (go figure, right?). So, no word on when the film will make it to American theatres.

Anyway, Kaufman is a master scribe, in my humble opinion. Everytime I watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I always wish I was the one of came up with it! So, this should be well written and an interesting read, at the very least, and I'm looking forward to digging into it!

Help yourselves to it if you want to read it as well, before it disappears.

Here's the link: SYNECDOCHE, NY SCREENPLAY.

Thanks to "zdenek" for the connection.

I've Got The Script For Tarantino's 'Inglorious Bastards!'

Posted on 8:16 PM comments (5)
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NICE!

After much digging and emailing, I finally got my hands on the official 165-page screenplay of Inglorious Bastards, of course written and directed by fanboy and girl favorite Quentin Tarantino, starring Brad Pitt, and other yet to be named actors (although one rumor I'm hearing is that Samuel L Jackson could have a major role in it as well).

This will be Tarantino's next film, which he plans on debuting at the Cannes Film Festival next May. I wrote about the film previously on this blog. See RELATED below to read both posts.

I've read a few reviews of others who have read the script, and their excitement over it is palpable! Aside from the obvious grammatical errors, which many think were done intentionally, the consensus is that it's a hell of a script and should make a hell of a movie - a Tarantino movie of course, and all that being a Tarantino movie means.

However, as I've previously stated, I've never really been a big Tarantino fan. His brand of cinema isn't necessarily my cup of tea. But, I'll admit that the man knows how to entertain an audience, and has certainly won a lot of people over with his work behind the camera.

So, I'm going to read this baby - all 165 pages of it - hopefully before the end of the weekend, and I'll post my thoughts on it afterwards! And don't be fooled by the cover above left - it's not a handwritten script. Just the cover :o)

If you'd like to get a copy of the screenplay for yourself, follow the links below. Although they may not be available for very long for obvious reasons, so if you click on them and you aren't able to download the files, that means they've probably been removed. If that happens, post a comment here letting me know and I'll upload my copy somewhere online for download!

Here are the links. The script is split up into 2 parts:

1. http://rapidshare.com/files/128794613/INGLORIOUS_BASTARDS_1_1_.pdf

2. http://rapidshare.com/files/128795912/INGLORIOUS_BASTARDS_2_1_.pdf

Enjoy!

RELATED:
- Someone's Already Read Tarantino's 'Inglorious Bastards Script
- 'Inglorious Bastards' - Another WWII Movie

Original 'Hancock' Screenplay!

Posted on 12:15 PM comments (7)
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You can read my thorough analysis of the script here: TONIGHT, HE COMES SCRIPT REVIEW. I actually liked the script more than I did the movie.

Thanks to Sergio for the heads up on this!

What we've got here is the original 126-page script for Hancock, initially titled, Tonight, He Comes.

The film in its release form is roughly 90 minutes long. The original Vincent Ngo-written script is 126 pages. For those of you who went to film school, or know a few things about the relationship between the written word and the visual image, you'd immediately notice the discrepancy here! In short, one industry standard page of a screenplay is equivalent to 1 minute of screen time. Obviously that formular isn't entirely exact, but if you compared most completed films with their screenplays, you'd notice that, for example, a 90-page screenplay will almost always produce a 90-minute film, or thereabouts.

In Hancock's case, we've got a 126-page screenplay, but ended up with a 90-minute film, which immediately indicates that a solid 30+ minutes was gutted somewhere in the production process, and I am certainly interested in knowing what that 30-minutes contained!

Skimming the pages of the script, I immediately noticed several differences from the film I saw - notably the use of profanity. As we already know, Sony wanted to deliver a PG13-rated movie, not an R-rated rump, hence all the reshooting we heard about (You can read my post on that HERE, in which director Peter Berg was quoted as saying about a previous incarnation of the film, "Hancock has remained surprisingly sexual, violent and true in spirit to an original script that was viewed as brilliant but unmakable.").

This should be an interesting read. I plan on going through the entire script this weekend, and I'll post my thoughts on it afterwards, making comparisons between what was written and what was filmed.

Courtesy of Hollywood Elsewhere, here's a link to the PDF script (get it while it's hot): TONIGHT, HE COMES.
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