I'll be honest, folks, I got a surge of work this week and at the moment, I'm lacking in the free time necessary to compose an interesting and insightful post. But, I've seen a lot of really great posts this week, so why not put in a few plugs?
First, Scott over at Go Into The Story is running an interesting series, posting excepts from a Wrap article on Up director Pete Doctor, entitled "Pixar Movies Are Lousy... A First." Check it out if you haven't already. It's a fascinating look inside the Pixar creative process.
Nichols fans should check out Scriptshadow this week, as he appears to be reviewing a few of this year's finalists. I confess, I spent the time I usually spend writing my blog on composing a post for Carson's review of Victoria Falls, which he calls "a competition script. Plain and simple. You could send this logline to a thousand agencies and you'd probably get 999 rejections."
This provoked me to write the following comment:
Carson, you hit the nail on the head when you called this sort of script a "competition script." I haven't read this one, or any of the other Nichols Finalists this year, but I have read Finalists and Semi-Finalists from previous years and - as is pointed out in other comments - they tend to be dramas. HEAVY dramas. Yet the amazing thing is that within the industry, the perception is "drama is dead."
It seems like there's a serious disconnect between the scripts that get purchased and the scripts that win contests. Any theories on why that is, especially since so many contests boast judges that work within the industry? Do you think these contests feel obligated to reward scripts that might otherwise be tossed into the PASS pile practically on principle? Are they out to give an edge to overlooked scripts rather than single out one that is likely to be "discovered" anyway?
I just find it interesting that the conventional wisdom is that the Nichols is one of the ONLY competitions that anyone in the biz takes seriously... and yet it's winners are consistently of the unmarketable "competition script" variety. Makes one wonder if winning these is little more than a Pyrrhic victory.
Anyone here have any thoughts on this?
