Jeff York is an optioned screenwriter, film critic, illustrator, and ad man. He’s also a member of the Chicago Indie Critics, SAG-AFTRA, and a cat lover.
These days, anyone with a cell phone and a TikTok account can be a celebrity, so maybe our adoration of movie stars, recording artists, and athletes are going to suffer when fame seems so accessible.
Even if you’ve got a winner, endorsed with great notes from a pro, or some wins in a contest or two, what else can you do to give your work traction?
The worst of mankind is more sellable to the American public than the best, it would seem, so anyone attempting to tell a tale of romance is up against a burgeoning trend of nastiness.
Nothing is certain, so why not take the risk and be as bold or unusual or as personal as we want to be in whatever we are creating?
Have we gotten to the point where we need our hands held so continually?
An ensemble movie and its script must recognize why such an ensemble is needed and what’s at stake in such a story.
We can’t recognize escapism any more when hard truths are staring back at us every morning in the mirror.
At his age, he had plenty of wisdom to draw upon and apply to the characters he was auditioning to play.
Sticking the landing of a script is tricky. It can’t be too predictable, yet it needs to feel wholly appropriate, justifiable, and even inevitable in its way.
One has to hand it to a show like Severance as it’s not only chock full of metaphors about the dumbing down of America and the corruption of information sharing, but it's doing so on a platform run by those they are critiquing.
Why is Oscar season, the time of year when Hollywood has to do nothing but laud themselves, wrought with such silliness, offensiveness, and controversy?
If a writer is going to present his POV in those big, neon letters, becoming almost strident in his or her moral clarity, then one should hope to be as clever as Sorkin.
It’s a bumpy journey, full of twists and turns that you won’t see coming, but the last thing you should do is stop.
By sanding off the edges, these new versions wholly sacrificed most of the fun and audacity that made the originals so popular in the first place.
To a global community of creatives.
All Pipeline Artists members are eligible for monthly giveaways, exclusive invites to virtual events, and early access to featured articles.