Word: scripting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Best Friends Or: They're Playing Our Script. Richard (Burt Reynolds) and Paula (Goldie Hawn) are successful screenwriters who play out the new Hollywood romance. Boy lives with Girl, Boy marries Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy meets Girl and realizes that amity is as important to their relationship as ecstasy. As it happens, the film's real-life writers, Valerie Curtin and Barry (Diner) Levinson, are married. The picture is a skewed documentary about two professionals working hard to be both witty and romantic. This time they worked too hard. In an attempt, perhaps, to place a discreet distance between...
...perhaps predictable. Ever since he finished Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979, Hoffman had been looking for a script that would permit him to explore the questions "What makes someone a man? What makes someone a woman?" He batted the theme around with a friend, Playwright Murray Schisgal. By the time he and Pollack (who followed Dick Richards and Hal Ashby as director) joined forces, he had acquired not only various draft scripts but a ferocious proprietary interest in the film. Says Hoffman: "The great scripts don't drop out of the sky; you have to invent them...
...part, Pollack (whose 13 films include The Way We Were and Absence of Malice) was "very apprehensive about doing comedy." He was especially worried about directing the first script of Tootsie that he read. He recalls that it was hard to know "if it was an homage to actors, a sophisticated comedy examining sexual mores or a story about the rehabilitation of a sexist." As the production began, tempers were tight. At times during the first month, only one shot a day was completed, as Hoffman's complex makeup literally slid down his face under the lights. Eventually...
...hard to say where all these inventions, and the wit with which they are stated, first appeared. There was an original script by Don McGuire (Bad Day at Black Rock), rewritten by Robert Kaufman (Love at First Bite). Thereafter, Schisgal and Larry Gelbart, of Movie Movie and TV's MASH, each did new versions. A large contribution was made by Elaine May and smaller ones by Valerie Curtin (Inside Moves), Barry Levinson (Diner) and Robert Garland (The Electric Horseman). After arbitration, screen credit finally went to Gelbart and Schisgal. But it was Pollack who "sat in a room with...
...stars are cool and funny in these passages. But in the reach for psychic novelty, the script exceeds its grasp on persuasive reality. Neither jokes nor fast, flashy action can completely distract audiences from the failure to establish an authentic, rather than a purely conventional connection between Nolte and Murphy...