Great piece at Miami.com from Rene Redriguez, including statements from Fincher on the New Yorker/Dragon Tattoo debacle:

This is not about controlling the media. If people realized how much thought goes into deciding at what point can we allow our movie to be seen, they would understand.

Then there’s this:

Nothing against film criticism. I think film critics are really valuable. But the most valuable film critics are usually those people who come see a movie with their Blackberry and then text their friends ‘It sucked.’ or ‘It’s awesome. You should see it.’ You know what I mean?

This may open up that whole “does criticism matter” can of worms yet again, but Fincher is right, to a point. The keyword here is “valuable,” by which he means quantifiable. Film critics don’t really make a movie money anymore. He does not mean they are worthless, but that word of mouth gets butts in seats.

Screenplay formatting has turned out to be one of the most enduring aspects of the filmmaking process. Can you think of anything else in the movie business that looks roughly the same as it did sixty years ago?

Screenwriting software has become a cottage industry. These applications aim to make it dead simple to write a screenplay, moving the onus of formatting out of the heads of writers and into computers. So why do most screenwriting applications suck?

Most of these apps have shifted focus away from writing and instead have become information managers. When was the last time a screenwriting application innovated in how we actually approach writing? Profanity count? Names database? Tagger? Please. We can do better.

My biggest writing fear has always been the blank page. With my iPad and iPhone always at arm’s length, that isn’t as much of an issue anymore. Most of my writings start with random notes I come up with when I’m out, on the subway or, ahem, in dispose. Gone are the days when I sit down at my computer, launch a new blank document and wonder “What am I supposed to do now?”

I moved my workflow to all plain text documents because of their portability. Screenwriters have no such luxury. Final Draft’s FDX format is good, but in order for other applications to use them they must either be exported or rewrapped as something else. It’s impossible to work on the same FDX file in two different applications, while I’m able to work on my text documents in literally dozens of applications. Why should anyone be stuck writing in one application forever?

Stu Maschwitz articulated the solution this past summer when he envisioned Screenplay Markdown:

So the ultimate mobile screenwriting solution may be, for the time being, your favorite among the many lovely Dropbox-based plaintext writing apps out there.

Are other screenwriters as dissatisfied with their workflow as I am? Is there a part of your workflow where you’d give up WYSIWYG and accurate pagination to just get words on the page in a way that freed you from a specific device, and specific software? Or do we expect that Final Draft, Inc.’s promised-but-delayed iPad app will be what we’ve been wanting?

Screenplays haven’t changed in who knows how long, but the needs of writers have. It’s time to turn the act of writing a script into as straightforward and simple a process as writing a note to yourself. That’s why I believe Screenplay Markdown may just take off.

Nikki Finke:

In my opinion, no film reviewer should ever agree to embargoes because doing what the studios want is a slippery slope. It’s just a short hop to becoming part of Hollywood’s publicity machine.

How does she really feel?

his “confession” that went up on The Fix today is the first I’m hearing about outed plagiarist Quentin Rowan. Under the pseudonym Q.R. Markham, he has been a rising star in the literary world culminating with the publication of his spy novel, Assassin of Secrets, a few weeks ago. It turns out that none of his writing was original, but lifted from a multitude of sources.

In his confession, Rowan tries to explain away his misdeeds, branding plagiarism an addiction that replaced his alcoholism.

They call a person like me a Plagiarist. It’s one of the harsher words we have in our language. Perhaps not up there with Pedophile or Rapist, but not as far behind as you’d think either. For years, I’d been dreading being called that word, and marveled all the while that I’d somehow avoided being caught.

Unsurprisingly, his original writing is pretty terrible:

Some months after my first [AA] meeting a poem I’d written in high school was picked for the Best American Poetry anthology. I was 19. My ego had already left the building. I should have been at my happiest, getting into my studies and rejoicing at the blowjob heaven of youth and possibility in those playground groves of academe. Instead, I spent sleepless nights trying to recapture whatever oddball inspiration I’d had that landed me in the Anthology. (Emphasis mine.)

My eyes don’t roll back far enough. I’ll concede that Rowan has a problem and is in need of help, but that’s no excuse for his actions. He committed a crime, a grave one. He will get no sympathy from me.

The whole affair got me thinking about a session I attended at SXSW in March called “The Blogger Centipede: How Content is Eroding Credibility.” I wrote a little bit about it back when it was fresh. The panel was an illustrious group of movie bloggers including Anne Thompson, Matt Patches and William Goss. In the audience was most of the top- tier online film writers working today. It was a formidable set of professionals who are deadly serious about this business.

The session was about how cribbing content hurts us all; it was basically an intro to not plagiarizing, or how not to be a jerk online. When things moved to Q & A, a woman in the front of the room, who apparently hadn’t been listening too well, asked, “If you could plagiarize anyone, who would it be?” The panel was aghast; the audience groaned. Was she for real? She kept trying to rephrase the same question: who would you steal from if you knew you wouldn’t get caught? The answer, of course, is no one. Plagiarizing other writers undermines the whole concept of writing, and those of us who attended the session were (mostly) people committed to foisting our own opinions on others.

For these many months I’ve given this questioner the benefit of the doubt, assuming that what she meant to say was, “If you had the ability to write as well as any one writer, who would it be?” Now, though, reading Quentin Rowan’s lame defense, I wonder if she meant exactly what she said. Perhaps she was voicing a point of view that comes from the scuzzy underbelly of internet culture, the same place that led to the panel in the first place. Is the taboo of plagiarism eroding? Is it actually becoming hip to do a veritable super-cut of other writers’ words? If you can tweet a quote and a link, why not blog a quote instead? Why not the whole article? It’s just aggregation, right?

The gap between the standup internet citizen and the internet plagiarist is getting smaller. Rowan is now the poster child for plagiarism, but how long until he is viewed as a rock star? He was anything but lazy, which is why his crimes went unnoticed for so long. Sadly, I wonder if there isn’t a surge of new writers who will be comfortable lifting work from writers far better than themselves.

That woman at SXSW may be one of many who have had right and wrong jumbled up for them. I hope that’s not the case, that everyone can see Rowan and his ilk for what they are: charlatans and thieves. The gift of the Internet is that so many voices can contribute to an unending international conversation. There’s no room left for copycats.

Mark Harris for Grantland:

There’s a problem here, but it’s a problem with the Academy Awards only insofar as the Oscars reflect a self-perpetuating catastrophe within the movie business: The belief that men star in movies, but women star in “women’s movies.” Treated as an irksome niche by their own industry, actresses have to settle for lower budgets and shakier financing, which means that the films for which they get nominated are more likely to be underdeveloped performance showcases than richly conceived and produced movies with top-of-the-line talent in all creative and technical areas.

I disagree with Harris’s take on some of the films he’s talking about, but this piece contains some fine data points regarding women in movies before it unravels into general awards season punditry. He fails to conclude anything, but rather leaves the question open to the rest of us.

Redditor WhatACrocodile:

Why is it that when a writer, like Quentin Rowan, cobbles together a story from other peoples work, it is plagiarism but when a filmmaker, like Quentin Tarantino does it, its pastiche?

This is what Im talking about. Read the comments.

Jeff Roberts for Paid Content:

The FBI and Homeland Security announced the latest seizures in exultant [press releases](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/28/feds_seize_130_sites_ in_cyber_monday_crackdown/) lauding the eighth phase of the “Operation In Our Sites” campaign under which the federal government is seizing the names of websites that sell counterfeit merchandise.

In short, the Feds are cracking down on film piracy by seizing Web sites that seem to have nothing to do with film piracy based on a 1970 anti-drug law. Also, they’re redirecting to a dubious PSA instead of unloading the seized URLs. Here it is.

{% youtube 6YScoXn31Mg %}

This is a gross misrepresentation of who piracy hurts. Film piracy hurts the executives at multi-national conglomerates and above-the-line talent with residual contracts. A boom operator? Gimme a break. This distorts the matter to the point of disbelief. They’re screwing it up.

(via Brooks Review.)

As you may know, I love playing with text editors. Information Architects’ iA Writer has been one of the more mesmerizing apps available for both iPad and the Mac. Its core feature is a beautiful monospaced typeface from Bold Monday called Nitti Light. Beyond that, Writer sells itself based its lack of features. You can’t change the font size, color scheme or page width. It’s the distraction-free writing software worth a Merlin Mann lampoon.

Though I own both versions of Writer, I rarely find myself writing in it because of its many limitations.¹ However, there’s a new feature that is pretty damn cool in the latest update: iCloud syncing. Only a handful of developers have figured out how to implement Apple’s new iCloud service and iA Writer is the first writing app to add it. For as long as plain text editors have exploded into a cottage industry on iOS, Dropbox has been the de facto file syncing solution. Writer proves that iCloud might, might give Dropbox a run for its money.

Here’s how it works. On your iPad, you’ve got three storage options: iPad, Dropbox and iCloud. The iPad option is basically local, un-synced storage. One new feature of Writer’s Dropbox syncing is that you can now access any folder on your account, not just the “Writer” folder. You can create new documents directly in any of the storage buckets or move them between one another. The iCloud option doesn’t support subfolders, but instead acts as a root folder on for your synced Writer documents.

On your Mac, you can still access any text document in your file system, including in your Dropbox folder. The difference is that now, under the File menu, you have an “iCloud” option. Hover over it and all of your available documents are there ready for editing. If you want to move another document into iCloud, you can use the same File>iCloud menu to “Move to Cloud.” Clicking that on any open document, no matter where it is, makes it accessible in your Writer iCloud storage.

It sounds confusing, especially after getting used to Dropbox’s “file system in the cloud” simplicity. Here’s the thing, though. The iCloud sync is fast and pretty rock solid. Editing the same document on my Mac and on my iPad updated quickly and smoothly. The changes propagated across both systems in that “it just works” kind of way. Better, if you want the file system advantages of Dropbox to do something like, say, open an iCloud document in another text editor, you can actually do that do. As a Google+ commenter notes:

You can save directly to iCloud on the Mac if you navigate to Writer’s iCloud ‘Documents’ folder located in ~/Library/Mobile Documents/~jp~informationarchitects~Writer/Documents.

From this folder, you can copy older documents you’d like to use on your iPad or open up any of your documents in any other text editors. This is still not the simplest solution for a tweaker, but it’s a pretty good one. You’ll need to keep your User Library visible and there are a [few ways to make that happe n](http://www.macworld.com/article/161156/2011/07/view_library_folder_in_lion. html). To go one step further, you could even use a symbolic link to make your iCloud Writer documents more accessible to you in another folder.

iA Writer is the first out of the gate on iCloud writing apps, but Information Architects have proven that it can be used as an alternative to Dropbox syncing. Their solution is more elegant than Apple’s own implementation in iWork. I can’t wait to see what other developers come up with next.

iA Writer is currently discounted in both the Mac and iOS App Stores. If you purchase with the links below you will be supporting the candler blog. Thank you and happy writing.

Purchase iA Writer for Mac | iA Writer for iPad

My favorite moment in Hugo didn’t even come from the film itself, but a different film altogether. As Harold Lloyd dangled high above Los Angeles from the hand of a clock in the 1923 film Safety First, the children in the theater I was in became dead silent, gasping along with Lloyd’s comedic feat. Silent cinema of yesteryear is, in fact, timeless. There is a magic that can happen when the lights go down. If nothing else, director Martin Scorsese wants to share this one lesson with a new generation in his 3-D fantasia. Boy, does he ever deliver.

Hugo is about a boy, Hugo Cabret, left to fend for himself running the clocks in a Parisian train station. It is also about a machine, a small mechanical boy, that he is trying to repair. But really, it is about the power and wonder of the movies. This isn’t too surprising coming from Scorsese, who has spent the years after his initial rise to prominence trying to understand and chronicle his chosen medium. From his epic “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies” to his more recent “A Letter to Elia,” to his appearance in seemingly every moviemaking documentary of the last decade, always in his signature plush screening room chair, he has made it his life’s work to pay homage to those who came before him. This latest film shows not only an impressive honing of the director’s own technical acumen, but also an expansion of his educational efforts. As it turns out, this love letter to early silent film is a kids movie, intended for today’s youth who have sensory stimulation coming out their ears. That’s why I was blown away when my audience, who might be as comfortable watching Transformers or Real Steel, perked up while watching an 88 year-old Harold Lloyd clip.

The film itself isn’t perfect. It suffers from being a bit too precious, with a plot that sometimes lumbers along too slowly, puzzle pieces fitting into one another too perfectly. Overall though, this story of a boy and an aging, forgotten filmmaker provides sturdy scaffolding on which Scorsese is able to play with light. The 3-D is astounding, very different from the one-note eye- pokery that has served as the technology’s making and undoing. Bobbing and weaving through the train station feels natural, enhanced by the addition of 3-D instead of bogged down by it.

If I had to pick a shot to point to that proves the legitimacy of 3-D (besides those in Noel Paul’s excellent 2010 short Annie Goes Boating) it would be the moment we enter the library of film studies. The geometry of the establishing shot, which is fleeting, is impeccable even for 2-D work. We view the room from above, soaking in an enormous amount of depth even as the floor is soaked in fresh sunlight. Screen right, the expanse’s perfection is broken by a wooden banister that shoots off along the z-axis into oblivion. This upper level banister is the 3-D element that makes the scene something more than can be accomplished with traditional filmmaking processes. It is Hitchcock’s lamps in Dial M for Murder; it is Grace Kelly’s outstretched arm. This and so many other flourishes in Hugo justify the format. I only hope it stays around long enough for more artists to come along and take advantage of it.

Scorsese has made so many films in so many styles, it is hard to say where this one falls in his canon. Is it a masterpiece? Probably not. But is it a 3-D masterpiece? Yes. In fifty years when repertory theaters (may they still exist) do 3-D retrospectives, Hugo will be on the program. Maybe even some teenage movie buffs will say, “Whoa, Martin Scorsese, who, like, was famous because he made The Departed, made a 3-D movie?” It’s a film that moves us forward. Better yet, it gets young audiences today a reason to revisit the great early filmmakers of the silent era. That is a feat only a master could pull off.

Don McLean talking to Thomas Dimopoulos at the Post- Star about “American Pie”:

“Was the song written in Saratoga Springs? The answer is no. The song was written in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” McLean said.

He also clarified that the first time the song was performed on stage was not at Caffe Lena, but at Temple University, where he was billed to perform with Laura Nyro.

Legend had it that the seminal song was written on cocktail napkins in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Not only was I smitten to find out that the song was actually written in Philadelphia, where I hail from, but the song’s first performance was at my alma mater. Take that, New York.

(via Gothamist.)