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Ophidiophobia on a Plane
From: www.writerswrite.com

" The Word of the Day is ophidiophobia: a fear of snakes. And, for those of you who love the little slitherers, there's always ophiophilia: a love of snakes. And why, might you ask, are we highlighting ophidiophobia? Because today Samual L. Jackson and Snakes on a Plane hit theaters. And so far it looks like the critics are going to be rather kind to the film. Screenwriter Sebastian Gutierrez discusses his latest ouevre.

I wrote the American remake of The Eye, the Pang Brothers movie, and one of the producers called me up and said "I'm doing this movie at New Line called Snakes on a Plane," and I laughed and asked what it was about, and he said "that's it, snakes on a plane." So I read the script, and basically New Line was ready to make the movie, budget was in and director was in, but they asked if I could help out with character and dialogue.

I think it will be a really fun movie, but you definitely have to get past the ridiculousness of the concept. It's a movie that isn't in any way pretentious. My job was to try and do a dialogue and character pass that was never campy and keep a suspense tone, which is hard because you have a movie called Snakes on a Plane.

Director Pedro Almodovar has crushed speculation he plans to quit his native Spain for Hollywood. The maverick movie-maker, responsible for films such as Volver and Bad Education, feels he is too old now to change his ways and that the Hollywood method of working would not suit him.

He says, "I'm an artist. I'm part of every decision in a movie. This is not how they work in Hollywood. There the director is part of the crew, not the main creator. "I'm too old to change now. I wouldn't know how to do it." The director also laments the worsening standard of Hollywood screenwriting, adding, "They forget the most important thing is the script, and the scripts get weaker and weaker. Technical effects advance, but the literary quality is worse."

Nobel literature laureate Gunter Grass, 78, has rejected calls in Poland for him to renounce his honoured-citizen status of Gdansk as a storm continued Wednesday over the writer's Waffen SS service. The revelation is a centrepiece of Grass's new book about his conversion from a keen Nazi teenager to a pacifist leftist. The publisher lifted a sales embargo on the book, Peeling the Onion, which had not been due to go on sale for another two weeks.

German newspapers printed images Wednesday of an official 1945 US document, signed by Grass, that confirms he was in the Waffen SS from November 1944. The war ended on May 8, 1945 and he was interned by US troops. Former Polish president Lech Walesa says the Polish city of Gdansk, known in its German period as Danzig, should strip Grass of his honoured status because of his association with the atrocity-ridden Nazi Party force.

'I see no reason to renounce this honour on my own,' Grass told Germany's ARD television in an interview to be aired Thursday evening. 'If the city of Gdansk were to decide so, I would accept the decision.' The storm over Grass has focused on why a writer who denounces Nazi-era holdovers in modern Germany and flays US presidents as warmongers has taken six decades to tell the truth about himself.

'I was called up into the Waffen SS. I was not involved in any crimes. I've always had the urge to one day describe all of this in its wider context,' he told the interviewer. 'In addition, I thought that what I had done as a writer, as a citizen of this country, which amounted to the very opposite of what shaped me in my youth in the Nazi era, had made up for it.' The book title, Peeling the Onion, refers to the author's exploration of the layers of self starting with a Nazi childhood.

Q. Do you know how a book is going to end before you start writing?

A. Yes I do. It's like going on a trip, you know where you're going. Plus before I start writing I have to send something like a summary on the book I want to write to my publisher and I have to include the ending in that.

Q. Do you have any rituals you have to go through before you start writing?

A. I don't really have rituals, I mean I have conditions, like I have a hard time writing without music, and I like to write in bed. I've written on planes before, but I don't feel as comfortable.

"Jane still retains the sense of excitement about writing she had when she started," said Jeff Greenstein, who ran the writing room at "Will & Grace" for seven years and worked with Espenson at "Jake in Progress." "It's very easy in this business to become cynical and jaded, and fear and revile the new people coming up through the ranks. But Jane has really embraced the neophytes."

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Last January, as the John Stamos comeback vehicle "Jake in Progress" was winding down for the season, she told Carlson she'd like a place on the page for a blog. Her idea was to write tales from the writers' room and, because of her built-in fan base, it didn't take long before she was getting 40,000 hits a week. Then "Jake" was getting canceled or not getting canceled and was finally placed on a seemingly permanent hiatus. "At this point, I was standing in the middle of the stage and everybody was going, 'Dance, dance, dance,' and I was getting all these hits, and ... I have to do something," said Espenson. So she decided to start blogging about how to write specs. "I thought I would just give little nuggets of writing wisdom until I ran out, and I figured it would probably take at least a month, but I haven't run out yet."

During the past eight months, Espenson has told her readers about the importance of such minutia as using sturdy brads ? the metal clips that hold a script together ? rather than the cheap ones that indicate a newbie. She's blogged about how to use analogy in stage directions and how to bypass a quirk with the dual dialogue option on Final Draft, the computer program most television writers use to format their scripts. She's given techniques for differentiating silent unnamed characters from each other (thug #1, thug #2), and written three entries just on coming up with titles for a spec.

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Beyond the insider tips, Espenson also gives her readers entr?e to the television writing world, a weird and contradictory place where writers stay at the office until all hours, hard at work trying to be funny, and where a person can get a "written by" credit regardless of whether any of his or her original dialogue made it into the final script. By dropping insider lingo like the "A-story line" or "beats" in a script, and talking about "the room," Espenson is arming fledgling writers with the ability to talk like they know what they are doing.

Video clips of Carroll describing her experience in detail.

Video interviews with Carroll's family members and Monitor staffers who worked for her release.

A map of where she was held throughout her captivity.

Information about a fund to help the family of Alan Enwiyah, Carroll's translator who was murdered when she was abducted.

Atom is one of the more popular?though perhaps under-the-radar?entertainment brands to have sprung up on the Web in recent years. Its properties claim a total of 17 million unique monthly users, according to officials. The company owns Shockwave.com, an online hub for a wide variety of free ad-supported games, ranging from classic puzzle and card games to action titles like 4 Wheel Fury. Sister site AddictingGames.com is also included in the deal.

In addition to gaming, Atom also runs both AtomFilms.com and AddictingClips.com, both outlets for short films and user-generated viral videos that generally appeal to a younger, MTV-like demographic.

"Atom Entertainment is a best-in-class and dynamic property, with brands that have dedicated, passionate followers and content that resonates with our global audience," said MTV Networks chairman and CEO Judy McGrath in a statement. "This acquisition is in line with our business strategy of being a leader in the digital space and connecting with consumers on every platform and device they use."