I can recall only three times in my life when I’ve felt weak in the knees. One was on my wedding day. I’d made my walk to the front of the church. Then, as I turned and gazed back across all those over-dressed guests stacked in the pews of Boston’s Old South Church, I saw [...]

I’ve nothing against directors. The men and women who make magic with movie cameras have much to offer the civilized world. Skill, talent, vision. Some have an uncanny knack with those sometimes prickly artists we like to call actors. Others are technical wizards who find their primal purpose standing at the center of production chaos. [...]

A few nights back I was having dinner with some new friends when I was reminded of this story. I was describing a conversation I’d had with director Florent Siri during pre-production on Hostage. Most of the movie takes place in and around a very special mountaintop house I’d invented for the movie. Modern, architectural, and installed [...]

Behind the Lines with DR: The Smoking Gun, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Let’s review. The story for my legal thriller was stolen and resold for millions. The producing thieves had been caught. I’d negotiated a hard but wisely political deal that allowed the celebrity screenwriter to scribble the script while the company [...]

Behind the Lines with DR: The Smoking Gun, Part 1 Behind the Lines with DR: The Smoking Gun, Part 2 The perps had been nailed red-handed. One of whom had mistakenly faxed me a transcript of an audio recording that featured me pitching my legal thriller. This was the very same legal thriller they later [...]

Read part one of The Smoking Gun So here I am. Looking at a trade announcement trumpeting a multi-million dollar deal for Mr. Celebrity Screenwriter’s three-and-a-half page treatment that, based on the one-line description, sounded eerily like the legal thriller I’d concocted, pitched, and sold a year earlier. Making matters more suspicious were the attached [...]

I’ve written about theft before. Both stories and ideas nicked by scumbag producers without consequence. What follows is an epic tale. All true. With multiple endings that, to this day, still leave me and others gob-smacked. This sordid trip down memory lane begins like most in LalaLand. With a meeting. The sit-down was a “general.” [...]

Last week, I flew to L.A. to spend four days locked in Doug Richardson’s writing cave. It may seem extreme to fly cross-country to sit in a room full of cigar smoke with another writer, but he isn’t just any writer. He has 30 years of screenwriting experience, wrote box-office hits like Die Hard 2, [...]

Having written posts for The Worst Script Ever Written and The Ugliest Note… Ever, I thought it was about time that I told of this far more positive encounter. This story goes back about seven years to a screenplay adaptation I’d written for a book called Black Water Transit. You might have read it when it was previously posted [...]