scop (noun): Old English – bard, minstrel, storyteller
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Writing & Resilience
Later this morning, I’m leaving for Milford, the town where Damon Knight, James Blish, and Virginia Kidd helped establish science fiction as a respected literary genre and where The Virginia Kidd Literary Agency still operates out of Kidd’s former residence. Blish and Kidd dubbed their residence Arrowhead, and during the 1960s it served as a…
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Writing in Private
“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.” So said Ernest Hemingway when accepting the Nobel Prize in 1954. And yet, a few decades earlier (according to his recollections in A Moveable Feast) he wrote many of his short stories in public—surrounded by (and occasionally taking inspiration from) the strangers who came and went as…
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Cabrini Opens
I haven’t posted in a while. There’s a reason. It’s one I’ve written about before, most recently in a piece titled Walking and Talking, in which I wrote about my inclination to focus on one thing at a time. That’s what I’ve been doing. Focusing. Following a round of meetings on a new film project…
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Happy Holidays
I first posted the above photo for a Christmas 2016 installment titled Santas, Wizards, & Life behind the Curtain. But the photo is older than that. From back in the 90s, when my father was enjoying a successful third act as a professional model. I believe the Santa gig was part of an ad campaign…
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AFM: Breaking the Boundaries of Today’s Film Marketplace
We used to have to go out for our entertainment, but today it’s piped into our homes, taken for granted as just another utility. Given that reality, how can we make storytelling special again?
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AFM: What Do Audiences Want?
It used to be said that laughter was the universal language. So what are we to make of the fact that American comedies don’t do well world wide, and that horror appears to be the only genre that consistently performs?