On Landing My First Job in the Business on Martin Scorsese's 'Mean Streets'
November 26, 2013 In Indiewire By nancynigrosh

On Landing My First Job in the Business on Martin Scorsese’s ‘Mean Streets’

10 pm. NYU Film School, The East Building 8th floor, Editing Room.

“Who wants to work on a movie?” a voice pitched, over the din of old time moviolas. We worked on the same ultra durable film sewing machine used by all the studios in their heyday. (It now occurs to me that maybe these are what inspired “Star Wars Episode V’”s AT Walkers.) We used a form of scotch tape to make temp edits, and carefully scraped the tape with razor blades to carve the film sprocket holes, a frustrating and messy business. Hours melted away. Time stood still.

Every wannabe filmmaker in the editing bay just wanted to finish and be done. “I need two camera assistants… a gaffer and…a script girl,” announced the voice I now recognized as Mitchell, our TA. Groans were heard. “OK, there’s coffee in it, on me,” definitely sounding like Mitchell. Heads poked out. Five guys plus me, the only girl around, threw on our coats and shuffled past the purple walls trimmed with bright yellow paint, yawning and stretching. We piled into a station wagon parked in a red zone.

I asked, “Is this your car?”

“No,” Mitchell answered, “It belongs to the bank, it’s a lease car.”

“What’s a lease car?,” I wondered.

Around eleven, we pulled in front of the Gramercy Park Hotel, a seedy place in those days. The lobby couldn’t have been creepier. But the elevator, an old fashioned cage, was. It occurred to me as we were being yanked up a few flights, that maybe I‘d made a mistake. The cage opened onto a fairly well lit hallway. But that wasn’t a good thing. A door opened and light spilled out like the sun just came up. Guys were pacing around as far as the phone chords would take them. Things settled down, however, when the eye of the storm, a dynamo with shoulder length black hair and a dark but smiling countenance, became the center of attention.READ MORE

Memo to Screenwriters #3: Being Solely Identified by Your Scripts Leads to Permanent Identity Crisis
September 12, 2013 In Indiewire By nancynigrosh

Memo to Screenwriters #3: Being Solely Identified by Your Scripts Leads to Permanent Identity Crisis

Like so many others, Elmore Leonard, god bless him, praised writers for their “perseverance to just sit there alone and grind it out.” Of course writers might think he was only referring to writing, especially when coupled with his memetic 10th rule: “if it looks like writing, re-write it.” Taking this credo too literally is certain to drive writers even further into the ivory tower of the introvert. Justified, indeed.

Elmore Leonard’s fans don’t have to have read his work extensively or at all, to uh, “know” him. He presents himself as a look-us-in-the-eye type, not some remote artist alone in a tower being celebrated from afar. In other words, Leonard exists to us as a man, not solely as a writer. His appeal extends beyond what’s on the page — the other half of the career equation. Even an opposite icon like J.D. Salinger’s controlled seclusion and rejection of immortal author conventions are just as famous as the characters he created. We know what these writers look like. We can even imagine what their opinions on various topics might be. Even though they are no longer alive and writing, they still speak through the media in identities separate and apart from their work.

I was recently asked about the difference between a screenwriter’s identity and a screenwriter’s voice. Simply put, in a screenplay it’s the “voice” collected into pages that’s put up for sale. If the writer’s persona has been left behind embedded in the pages, versus used portably as a sustainable tool the writer can re-use, then the writer has to start from scratch with every screenplay to gain back any kind of self referral as an artist. Imagine if the DIY self-published authors of today followed the technique traditionally used by screenwriters to simply type their name under the title as reference to authorship with no personal outreach to their readers.READ MORE

Memo to Screenwriters #2: Like E.L. James, You Can Change the Game
July 16, 2013 In Indiewire By nancynigrosh

Memo to Screenwriters #2: Like E.L. James, You Can Change the Game

In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan emphasized the value of message and the medium the message uses over its creator. This idea flies in the face of the modern era’s printed book as the ultimate expression of the writer, who toiled in glorified isolation as the big publishing house distributed it magically across the universe. McLuhan went on to predict a wireless world, where all messages are accessed instantly to and from a collective brain–what we now call mobile media.

Ever since authors shed the fantasy of a big publishing house model, many midlist and novice writers have opted to write speculative books delivered to reading tablets–print on demand–once they realized that they had the distinct advantage of having a product they solely owned that could be bought directly online. Now writers manage not only all creative decisions but also their own metadata, including ISBN number and price.

The most successful among them, “Fifty Shades of Grey” author E.L. James, strategized with aggressive genre mastery. She identified and directly engaged with present and future readers in social media hangouts. She insured that the upload to Amazon, iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Sony Reader could truly pay off. Big publishing houses had long overlooked such popular fiction genres as romance and science fiction. Now big houses along with the public (and movie studios), scout for bestselling indie authors.

Which prompts the question: what can screenwriters learn from this?READ MORE