Blueprints: "August: Osage County"

Happy Thanksgiving! In these days of family forcefully gathering around for a meal, Jorge takes a look into “August: Osage County” to remind you that your relatives perhaps aren’t so bad after all.

 

Not unlike Thanksgiving itself, Tracy Lett’s August: Osage County is about a broken family that is bound to be around each other as past secrets, tensions and grievances slowly rise up to the surface.

The emotional climax of both the 2008 Tony-winning play and its subsequent 2013 Oscar-nominated adaptation is an almost 20-minute dinner sequence after the funeral that brought them all together. Matriarch Violet Weston (Meryl Streep) asserts her toxic matriarchal power over her family. And slowly but surely, tensions escalate to the point of explosion...

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Blueprints: "Jackie"

In this week’s edition of Blueprints, Jorge takes a trip to the brief shining moment known as Camelot to look how a script can transmit mood.

There can sometimes be a common misconception that what a writer contributes to a script is limited to story structure, action description, and dialogue. These are in no way small feats; after all, it’s the creation of an entire world, the people who inhabit it, and what they do. But it is often thought that his or her job stops there, and it is everyone else's job to fill in the blanks with textures.

Many of cinema’s most deep, emotional, and transcendental moments are a marriage of sound, image, and performance; devoid of any substantial plot or dialogue. So much of what makes cinema powerful is about mood. And while there may be the belief that this is the work of the director, cinematographer, actors, and musicians, mood is also born on the page.

 

Let’s take a look at Jackie, a movie that is more a collection of feelings, images and sounds than a straight forward narrative...

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Blueprints: "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"

This week on Blueprints, Jorge Molina takes a drive to the pride of the inland empire to talk about musical numbers in screenplays, only two hours from the beach. 

Fundamentally, scripts serve as a blueprint for what has to appear on screen, hence the name of this series. A blueprint that some people choose to follow more closely than others. However, there are instances where following a script meticulously is vital not only for the benefit of the story, but for the costs and efficiency of an entire production. There are times when a script is a literal choreographed dance, gigantic pretzel and all.

So let’s take a look into the idyllic suburban fantasy of the The CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, where if every location, note, and twirl hadn’t been precisely mentioned in the script, there may have never been a show...

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Blueprints: "Scream"

In this Halloween edition of Blueprints, Jorge Molina looks at one of the most iconic opening sequences in horror film history. Do not hang up...

Creating and building tension is one of the most important things a successful horror movie has to accomplish. It’s done, among other tools, through a combination of music, camera angles, and juxtaposition of light and shadow; that is to say, it’s done almost entirely audio-visually.

But every successful horror movie was first a successful horror script.  How does a writer project escalating tension, that dreadful atmosphere so vital in horror, in the page, with nothing but words as a weapon? Let’s take a look at our favorite scary movie to find out.

 

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Middleburg Day 1: Delightful Fest / Darkest Hour

by Nathaniel R

Thursday. Though a cab accident* and a missed flight threatened to derail day one, somehow The Film Experience's second annual trip to Middleburg, VA commenced just in time for the opening night festivities. The Middleburg Film Festival is now in its 5th year and growing each time.  It's still small enough, however, that it feels like a discovery.

This year's fest kicked off with Joe Wright's Darkest Hour which holds up incredibly well to a second viewing. It's both muscular and fabulous, so it feels like a blend of impulses that, say, Scorsese and Baz alike might thrill to. And in place of their shared muse Leo DiCaprio a fat-suited bejowled Gary Oldman...

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