Archive for April, 2008

My Sundance screenplay, All of Creation, featured among its themes the importance of science to understanding our world and finding meaning in it. In fact, the slot I took at the Sundance lab (talked about in this post) was created by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which advances science and science understanding in the popular media. I've always loved science, but only recently realized that it is under systematic attack by religious fundamentalists posing as scientific thinkers. I still remember watching Inherit the Wind as a kid in the late 1980's, thinking what a great movie it was and how lucky the world was to have outgrown such astounding stupidity as Creationism. It's still one of my favorite films–and favorite plays–but it's since come to my attention that the rabble-rousing inanity has resurged under the laughable sheen of Intelligent Design, or ID for short.

These IDiots, like the obscenely rich coiffed televangelists of our nation, leverage the great wealth they've accumulated from hoodwinked believers and spend it on very professional public-relations efforts to garner public sympathy for opinions which get laughed out of courtrooms and scientific journals because they are so effortlessly demonstrably false.

I've had some success with my screenplay about science, and have begun writing another and have already applied for one grant on its behalf (as documented in this post), so I think I have a certain responsibility to counter this tent-revival of infectious ignorance. I'm going to write about the new farce of a film, Expelled, and to do so I wanted to do a little groundwork to provide one small example of the kind of IDiocy I'll be referring to therein. So here goes my first crack at the debate, in the form of a rebuttal to an excerpt of a piece of ID propaganda: (more…)

It's become popular to make fun of Hayden Christensen. And why not? He killed Anakin Skywalker. With brow furrowed in angst and lightsaber blazing as blue as his poster-blue eyes, he destroyed the Anakin we once knew and replaced him with Darth Emo.

For those of you unfamiliar with his performances in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, I will summarize some notable comments by critics:

"Christensen plays Anakin as if he were a brooding, whining brat forever on the verge of a teary-eyed tantrum." –Christopher Smith, WeekInRewind.com

"Anakin, as embodied by Christensen, is the kind of needlessly moody kid you might see getting punched out in a Dairy Queen parking lot." –Paul Tatara, CNN.com

"Part of the problem is Christensen, whose breakout role was playing the young Anakin Skywalker in the recent execrable 'Star Wars' installments, and who has never managed to project anything but a sullen air of lazy entitlement." –Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

Before I talk about Stop-Loss, I have to talk just a bit about Hayden Christensen. First of all, let me be fair. The problem with Star Wars was the lack of directing and writing talent, not the lack of acting talent–poor Hayden wasn't the only one George Lucas humiliated onscreen. Nevertheless, for some reason Hayden continued his misunderstood writhing in other films, like Jumper, which was best described by Andrew Pulver of the Guardian as being a series of "tortured love scenes for Hayden to glower through." You know how Michael Jackson is the guy who started everyone moonwalking? How Marlon Brando is the guy who introduced believable performances into film? Well, Hayden Christensen is the guy who brought emo to Hollywood.

It may well be that you can't fully understand Stop-Loss until you understand this. It may be different for you, but for my own part, if it hadn't been for Hayden, I might not have seen why Stop-Loss was such a terrible movie. I would have hated it without the important step of knowing why. Fortunately, I do know why, and I'm gonna tell you.

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This morning I woke up to my phone ringing. I'd been up late working on a new website–I haven't been writing on the new screenplay lately because I decided to make some money for a few months first so I could afford to concentrate on it. The call was from Lacy Pearman, the vice-president of development at Dreamworks. She was calling to offer me $180,000.

When I was at Sundance, I met a guy, Renardo, who worked at one of the little coffee shops in Park City where all the famous people go in between screenings. He was on break and had picked up a flyer for my movie Moving which I'd strategically left on tables in shops and lounges and screening rooms. I got to talking to him about it, and we struck up a conversation about movies, which he loved as much as I did and wanted someday to make himself.

Well, Renardo eventually made his way to LA and became a script reader, then a member of a development team, then a producer, then an assistant to Lacy back when she was with Universal, around the time they were working on "Charlie Wilson's War," written by one of my favorites, Aaron Sorkin. When one of their subsidiaries offered us our $20,000 distribution deal I mentioned in an earlier post, word filtered up and it jogged his memory. He asked for some of my stuff and I sent it, not expecting anything in response.

Well, Lacy was out in New York pulling together some East Coast talent for a sequel to "Charlie Wilson's War" about the repurcussions in Afghanistan of America's intervention there against the Soviet Union in the 1980's–a theme strongly hinted at in the ending of the film but never actually addressed. Apparently, Aaron Sorkin wanted to do it himself but is busy working on a West Wing feature film idea, and is having trouble getting Martin Sheen onboard, because (and this is just scuttlebutt) he is working on some bigger-budget projects to help pay for his son's legal bills over the past decade or so, which nearly bankrupted him. So my buddy Renardo sent Sorkin my screenplays, and he loved them and recommended me to Lacy personally.

This is Lacy's first big project at Dreamworks since leaving Universal, and I've been offered it! Plus the possibility of a three-film development contract if the screenplay hits certain milestones. I'll probably be moving in a few months.