My Latest Tweet
Fatal error: Call to undefined function set_option() in /home/andyconw/public_html/wp-content/plugins/really-simple-twitter-feed-widget/really_simple_twitter_widget.php on line 86
Tag Archives: genre
How Amazon categories can get you a movie deal
As regular readers of this blog will know, I’ve got a bit of a thing for time travel stories. It’s my guilty pleasure genre and this year I’ve been lucky enough to publish three of my own time travel titles. The Very Thought of You has had an option offer from a Hollywood producer, which is pretty amazing for an ebook novella that had only been on sale a month and sold about 25 copies when he got in touch …
The crime is in your mind
The cries go out every week in the filmmaking community: everything is being dumbed down, there’s no space for complexity any more, films aren’t as demanding as they used to be, we’re all going to hell in a flatpack assembled handcart. It would be a matter for grave concern if it wasn’t total bollocks. Last night I went to see Inception at my local multiplex. As I bought my ticket, the ticket teller warned me that the film was three …
You make my dreams (come true)?
In the romcom everyone loves to hate, Notting Hill, floppy-haired beta-male Hugh Grant bemoans his mid-point split with out-of-his-league movie star Julia Roberts with the words ‘It’s as if I’ve taken love heroin, and now I can’t ever have it again.’ We then see a montage of him depressed and lonely without her, mocked by memories of her. If they turned that montage into a move all of its own, its name would be (500) Days of Summer. They would …
Love me one time, baby
Anyone who’s ploughed through this site will know that I’ve got a bit of a thing for time travel stories, as well as a penchant for romcoms and tragic love stories like Somewhere in Time. So it’s no surprise that I was pretty eager to see the long-delayed movie adaptation of Audrey Niffeneggar’s smash hit faux-lit novel The Time Traveler’s Wife. And, despite the sickly trailer, it doesn’t disappoint. Bruce Joel Rubin has done a great job distilling the novel’s …
Blake Snyder : 1957 – 2009
It is with great sadness and deep shock that I learned today of the loss of Blake Snyder, who died from cardiac arrest on August 4, 2009. Blake was a screenwriting teacher and author of the brilliant Save the Cat!, a manual that offered a fresh approach on screenwriting structure and laid out a revolutionary template for genre. I’ve referred to his work frequently on here* as he so often nailed the concepts I was struggling to formulate. His 10 …
Love like blood
I’ve always had a thing for vampire films. From the age of 11 I was allowed to stay up late and watch Hammer’s brilliant Dracula movies. I was obsessed for years with a comic adaptation of The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires. I even love Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and no one loves that. There’s something about vampire mythology that hits the spot in a way that werewolves, zombies and all those other members of the supernatural bestiary just …
No sex, please, we’re British
She’s the scarily young theatre writer who created and wrote her own TV series by the age of 26. Lucy Prebble took a blog about the life of a London escort and turned it into a TV series for ITV2, the first original drama the channel had ever commissioned. The second season of Secret Diary of a Call Girl has just started, but I caught up with Lucy at the Cheltenham Screenwriters’ Festival this summer to interview her for the …
A team, a road, a prize…
There are people in the world who believe that film and television fall into two distinct camps: on one side is the noble documentary and its upstart sibling the reality show. On the other side there’s all that made-up stuff. But as a fiction writer who worked for years in factual TV, I know that the best documentaries mimic fictional story structures. And nowhere is this more obvious than Man On Wire, which is a heist movie pure and simple. To …
People are strange
Alfred Hitchcock once famously predicted that in the future there would be no more need for movies: audiences would be hooked up to electrodes that would give people jolts of various emotions: suspense, fear, sadness, love. He was wrong. We just started making movies that replicated that process. We see this most obviously in the big genre staples like action/adventure, thriller and horror. Many of which play like a piano-roll of random key notes with a few cardboard characters to make …
The turn of the screwball
There was a time when the word ‘screwball’ conjured up a plastic cone of cheap ice cream with a ball of chewing gum at the bottom. Mine were served to me by Anita, the young woman who once got bollocked by our headmaster for exploiting us kids by parking her ice cream van at the school gates every lunch time. He didn’t know we wanted to be exploited by Anita… and that it was more about her hotpants and pigtails …