How to “Do” the Austin Film Festival(Taken from an interview of Heather Hughes conducted by Aadip Desai.) When is the festival? The Austin Film Festival Screenwriting Conference is October 16-19, and the Austin Film Festival runs from October 16-23. What is the focus of the Screenwriting Conference? As John Arends said to me in an email, “The hallmark of the Austin Film Festival is that it’s a WRITER’S festival. It celebrates screenwriters and scripts like no other film festival on the planet. And that’s why it’s so beloved by, and attended by, so many of our writer and writer-director heroes. And that’s why everyone you meet will have something of value to say about the craft of screenwriting. That’s right – EVERYBODY!” http://www.austinfilmfestival.com/new/conference_festival Where is the festival held? The Austin Film Festival and Conference takes place in Austin, Texas at the Driskill Hotel and the Stephen F. Austin Hotel. Why should I go? Aside from being the premiere screenwriting conference in the country, the best reason to go is that all the panelists - filmmakers, agents and big screenwriters - who are the very best in the world -can’t go home at night (like they can at Pitch Fest and other LA based conferences). They usually attend most of the parties and sit around the Driskill bar at night. You can listen to their wisdom during the day and hang out with them in the evening. This conference gives you unprecedented access to amazing screenwriters and filmmakers. Which badge should I get? How much are they? If you want to do the Festival on a budget, there are some other options. The Festival offers a Conference Badge that gets you into all four days of the Conference and all the films, but only 3 parties. The Lonestar Badge gives you access to Saturday panels, the Pitch Finale Party and all the films. If you’ve entered the contest and advance to the “Second Round” (Austin’s term for quarter-finalist) you will get a discount. As you advance in the contest, the discount becomes larger. Even if you buy a badge before you go, they will refund the added expense if you advance in the contest. It’s too late to enter now, but keep it in mind for next year. Which days should I attend? I always arrive Wednesday night and stay until the Hair of the Dog party on Sunday. How do guests get into events without having to pay for a conference badge? (i.e. how can our spouses/partners/friends go to parties with us?) You cannot get into any event or party without a badge. There are discounts for spouses ONLY if you advance in the contest. You need to weigh the cost of a Producer’s Badge against how much your spouse wants to be with you. My husband isn’t a writer or filmmaker, but he considers the Producer’s Badge well worth the money because the parties are so much fun. It is expensive though. Just a warning - don’t think you’ll skip the badge and try to sneak people in. Security is tight and they do check that you’re wearing your very large and distinctive badge as you enter any panel or party. Where does all the action happen? Where should I stay? I love to stay at the Driskill, and this is one reason we buy our badges early. The conference helps you book discounted rooms at the Driskill and the Stephen F. Austin hotels, and the Driskill usually sells out first. The Driskill is a beautiful old hotel, much like the Sorrento, and it truly is where everything happens. If you can’t get a room, the Stephen F. is right across the street and is very nice, and nothing prevents you from hanging out at the Driskill. The Driskill and the Stephen F are my first choices, but AFF offers a variety of discounts at downtown hotels. Check out the website for prices that best fit your budget. As I mentioned, the Driskill Bar is the place to hang out in the afternoon and evening before and after the parties. The Driskill Hotel (604 Brazos) and the Stephen F. Austin Hotel (701 Congress Avenue.) Do I need to rent a car to get around? No. We take a cab to and from the airport. Everything else is within walking distance and/or they have shuttles to events. Which events are a “must attend”? Conference: I wouldn’t miss it. See details below. Festival: Screenwriters from Seattle tell me that the buzz of the conference is over and they felt a little lonely when they stayed. I haven’t stayed for it, so I can’t speak from my own experience. I have heard that if you want to stay and explore Austin that week is a perfect time to do it and watch movies starting in the afternoon. The movies during the week tend to be films that get Oscar buzz later and you never know what screenwriter will be in attendance with their film. Last year AFF screened films like: Lars and the Real Girl, Juno, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The Savages, Before the Devil Knows Your Dead and festival circuit favorites like Shot Gun Stories and In Search of a Midnight Kiss. Parties: I love the parties, and that’s saying a lot since I usually stay far away from parties. The bar-b-q is fantastic. It’s outside and lots of fun. The Hair of the Dog party is at a little diner and is really great. All of them are wonderful. Awards Luncheon: Most panelists don’t think to shell out the extra $45 for the luncheon, but I’ve made some amazing contacts and friends there. The conference arranges that each table has at least one panelist, industry executive, filmmaker or screenwriter, so it’s another great way to casually network while the screenwriters and filmmakers are receiving awards for their work. The Awards Luncheon is where you get to meet the festival’s honorees, like this year’s Sam Shepard and Greg Daniels. Last year Award recipients included Oliver Stone, John Milius and Glenn Gordon Caron. How does the pitch competition work? How should I prepare? The pitch competition is $15 per ticket with a limit of two. Judges who are AFF panelists listen to pitches and pick a winner from each round. The top 8 winners go on to pitch at the Pitch Competition Party on Saturday evening. Last year registrants had a chance to pitch in front of Terry Rossio, Robin Swicord and executives from Red Wagon, Groundswell Productions, The Montecito Pictures and many others. How do the roundtables work? How should I prepare? The roundtables are my favorite part of the conference. There is a conference room set up with about six round tables. When you enter you choose a seat at one of the tables. Each table has a chair with a little sign that says “speaker (or something like that, can’t quite remember). When everyone is seated the speakers come in and take seats at each table. They do their spiel about their companies and what their interests are, and then there’s usually time for questions. After 10 minutes or so, the moderator rings a bell and all the speakers switch tables. You don’t change places, but you have each speaker come to your table. This is not a time for you to pitch your script, but often producers will say what they’re looking for. How to sign up: When you get to the conference, you must go to the second floor of the Driskill (unless you arrive at night) and sign up for the round-tables. You will get your pick of one roundtable and it pays to have studied the bios of the speakers. You will be given a colored dot to put on you badge and that will let you get into the round table you picked. TIP: If you stand in line at the roundtable door, you can usually get into all the roundtables you want even if you haven’t signed up. I’ve never not gotten into a roundtable when I’ve been willing to stand in line. (There are some that are only for finalists or second rounders that may be restricted.) What should I bring with me to the conference (business cards, leave-behinds, etc.)? I would bring it all. You never know who you’ll meet. I wouldn’t bring scripts, of course. I would create a system for keeping track of contact info, cards, etc. I scribbled little notes on the back of producers’ cards and slipped them into my badge holder. That way I could refer back to them during the conference and I had them all in one place when I got home. What can our guests do while we’re in panels? My husband brings me lattes between panels. He attends panels for me when there are two going on at the same time that I’d like to attend. Austin is a beautiful city to wander around in, so walking is fun. The shopping is great. We wandered over to the beautiful Four Seasons hotel one afternoon and had lunch and walked by the river. Austin is famous for its music and there is always something playing - again, to quote John Arends, “Austin’s 6th Street scene is a mix of college dogtown, Sunset Strip in cowboy boots, and a Nashville-meets-Seattle music scene. The film festival runs during the conference so there are some unbelievable films playing. Of course, no trip to Austin would be complete without going to see the bats. The Congress Avenue Bridge in downtown Austin is home to one of the largest bat colonies in North America. Sunset is bat viewing time and they actually have a Bat Hotline you can call which will give you the best time to go down. The number is (512-416-5700, ext 3636) What’s the weather like that time of year? Warm to hot. How should I dress? The dress code is almost non-existent - flip flops and jeans or shorts. Even the parties are very casual. Austin is a lot like Seattle in that everyone is very unpretentious. There are some beautiful fancy restaurants, so if you want to dress up there are opportunities. Just remember that it will probably be warm, so dress lightly. Any “don’ts” for attending the conference? This goes for any conference, but DON’T hang out with your friends. You’ll have paid a lot to get to the conference and you should treat it like the costly business expense that it is. You can hang out with your friends at home. Cultivate your own relationships at the conference. This interview was conducted by Aadip Desai with Heather Hughes. Heather is a producer, screenwriter and a board member of TheFilmSchool in Seattle. Woody’s roundupSome thoughts on the importance of a good screenplay taken from an interview with Woody Allen about his latest movie. “The cameraman was a Spanish cameraman, and he did a beautiful job. He was as good as any cameraman in the world, wonderful cameraman, and he didn’t speak English. It didn’t matter. I’ve made a number of pictures with a Chinese cameraman who didn’t speak any English in the past. I worked for 10 years with Carlos DePalma who spoke a tiny bit of English but not much. Those things are the easy things. That stuff is easy, but what is hard is getting a good script. When a project fails, 90 percent of the time, it’s that the script is no good. The actors are generally quite good. It’s rare that something doesn’t work because the actors have torpedoed you in some way. It’s rare that you directed it so badly that it doesn’t work. Directing is not rocket science. But if you have a bad script, then no amount of being Fellini, or a great stylist or anything saves you. In the end you have a flawed movie, a boring movie, or illogical story, or un-engaging story. Once I had the script, and it was decent, the fact that nobody could speak English didn’t matter. Penelope and Javier, I encouraged them to improvise all the time. They are great actors and they improvised all over the place. I had no idea what they were saying. No idea. I could tell from the body language that clearly it was the scene I wrote in some way. It was not the words I wrote, but they were breaking up, or arguing over the emotional life, it was something. I never knew what they were saying until I got back to New York City and I was putting the titles in the picture. The person who did the titles was bilingual and told me what they were saying. It was fine. It was not always what I wrote by any means, often flamboyant flights of fancy that they took, but it was fine. You can do it if you have a story to tell. As long as it’s a decent story, then everybody has common sense about how to tell the story, then you can do it. if the script is not good, then no amount of great acting, or flashy direction, great camera work, it will never bail you out. This I know from many years of being on both ends of these things.” Expo screenplay competition$90,000+ (So Far) In Prizes, Of Which $34,000 Is Cash! Five seminars by the world-renowned screenwriting teacher Robert McKee have been added to the prize list of the Expo Screenplay Competition sponsored by Creative Screenwriting Magazine. The McKee seminars bring the prize total to well over $90,000 in cash, screenwriting educational sessions, services, and software. To enter the contest or to learn more, go to this web page: Ideas may not be copyrightable . . .Ideas may not be copyrightable… but scripts are! Here are a few links to some good blogs and articles that encompass the idea that although ‘it’s all been done before’, you can do it differently. Also, a few good blogs and articles that illustrate the importance of copyrighting what exactly it IS that you’ve done: Writer’s Block and the Tooth FairyWriter’s Block and the Tooth Fairy. These are two things I don’t believe in. Sure, there is evidence to support the existence of both—that dollar bill under your pillow replacing the tooth you’d left there the night before, that daunting blank page where your Oscar-winning script should be. I don’t remember how I figured out that the Tooth Fairy was actually my mom—I think I finally noticed that the dollar bills always smelled exactly like her purse, that particular blend of Trident gum, Charli perfume spray and leather. The evidence was too strong. I think it was the first day of TheFilmSchool’s Warren Etheredge’s class ‘Such a Character’ that he raised the idea that Writer’s Block doesn’t exist. I initially bristled against this claim—Writer’s Block is such a great excuse! Finally, the evidence against Writer’s Block came to me in the form of a crime report in the ‘On The Record’ section of a daily published in Sequim, WA. Under ‘disturbances/suspicious’ for April 20th and 21st: “Someone left a jar of salamanders, W.Washington St.”, “Red Toyota ran over duck, E. Cedar St.” and “People in car in parking lot, been there for a week, Hooker Road.” Extrapolate on THAT!
Here is a list of blogs and sites of the bizarre that should be food for inspiration, if not for your next great script, at least for a writing exercise to get the ball rolling. Emphasis on INSPIRATION as, remember, these are real stories about real people! Enjoy!
This is the best…this magazine specializes in notes, photos, grocery lists, etc., that people find on the street and send in. The ‘Find of the Day’ is a source of endless entertainment and wonder:
For seriously strange news tidbits from around the world:
Need inspiration for a crime drama? File this link under the category of you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up! http://discovery.blogs.com/bizarre/
This one has a list of what they call ‘Lunatic Blogs’, in other words, endless ongoing craziness available at this link:
Yeesh…some of these stories are not for the faint of heart. This site is for the most intense battles you find yourself fighting with Writer’s Block: Stay sharp!One of the best ways to improve your mad skills and stay inspired to write is by reading script after script after script. Not only will you start thinking (and even dreaming!) in script format, you’ll start to pick up the cadence, the rhythm and the patterns of successful screenplays. Here are just a few great resources for free downloadable scripts that will keep you on your toes! For movie and TV scripts alike, and a great links page full of resources for screenwriters: This one focuses on classic movie scripts like Cool Hand Luke and Annie Hall: Beyond its tons of scripts, this one has other fun things like wallpapers and screensavers so you can completely geek out: And finally, this source for free scripts makes you feel like you’re in a trendy New York club! Turn on those speakers! How to (continue to) WriteOne thing that was a challenge after finishing my stint as a student at TheFilmSchool was figuring out how to maintain the momentum for that mixture of creativity and hard work that a student of TheFilmSchool experiences during the 3-week program. TheFilmSchool instructor and legendary writer of ‘A Rebel Without a Cause’ Stewart Stern referred to the program appropriately as ‘a vacation from oblivion’. True that! It was a dreamy and exciting hideaway where I was able to forget bills, laundry and my day job and concentrate on writing, my voice and my future vision for myself. It wasn’t all kittens and lollipops, of course. The days are long, the work is intense. Funny thing, though, my sleep-starved brain was always up for another day of it. Now that I’m back in my real-ish world, I’ve done a little googling on the writing practices of others to see if anyone has a magical recipe for success. Some come close. Here’s a very brief list of ideas, and some sites that have given me help with budgeting time and with keeping my writing fresh. Now I’m going to go heed #1 on the list and get to work. Jenni’s favorite blogsHi all, I’m Jenni, guest blogger for TheFilmSchool. We’re getting dangerously close, not prohibitively close, but very very close to the final date on which applications for the Summer Session of TheFilmSchool will be accepted. If you are interested in filmmaking, storytelling, finding your voice and/or most of all, as was in my case, just getting excited and inspired about being creative and genuine, you absolutely must apply for this program. I am not usually the type of person that envies…but I envy anyone who is about to embark on this journey. The 3-week Session I took at TheFilmSchool was, literally (literally literally) life-changing. Now I’ve got this bug and I can’t get rid of it. Alumni screenplay reading this Sunday (4/13)“Complicated Lullaby” by Amelya Hepner This event is by invite only, but is open to any graduate of The Film School. You must RSVP to Amelya at amelyadawn@yahoo.com. (Amelya hopes to have a bigger, public reading sometime soon. Stay tuned for details.) Good luck, Amelya! Austin Film Festival calls for entrieshttp://www.austinfilmfestival.com/ “The 15th Annual Austin Film Festival is announcing a call for screenplay/teleplay/film entries. The festival, to take place October 16-23, 2008 in Austin, Texas, screens entries in six competitive categories: Narrative Feature, Narrative Short, Narrative Student Short, Documentary Feature, Documentary Short, and Animated Short. The festival is recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as an Oscar Qualifying festival for Short Films. Submit your film with the new online form.” A few grads of TheFilmSchool have spoken very highly of the screenplay competition and the conference. I plan on entering myself. Good luck! |
