In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have to tell you what WriterAction is. You’d just know. Either you’d be a member of the WGAw or WGAE and thus, be a member of WriterAction…or you’d be someone looking forward to the day you could join it.

Unfortunately, things haven’t quite worked out that way.

WriterAction was started by a woman named Alex Sokoloff back somewhere around 2002, shortly after the last WGA credits referendum. Alex and some of her likeminded writer friends (Clifford Green, David Hoag, Katherine Fugate, David Odell and Steve Chivers) decided that what our union was missing was any real opportunity for a collective meeting place.

Sure, there’s the “writers’ lounge” in the WGAw building, but it’s about as conducive to discussion as an operating room.

Alex and her cohorts believed that writers did want to reach out and form a real community where experiences could be shared, information gathered and debated, and maybe most of all, where union members could democratically participate in and influence their union.

On the other hand, writers didn’t necessarily want to leave their respective caves either.

And so, they created WriterAction on the web, and restricted it to WGA members only. In the beginning, it was a fairly crude site hosted with the free virtual community provider EzBoard. EzBoard pretty much sucks, but it’s free, and it served the basic purpose.

I joined it about two years after its conception.

In early 2004, I didn’t really know who was running the WGA, I didn’t know who stood for what, I didn’t know how a union worked…

In other words, I was an average Guild member.

I attended an outreach meeting on the upcoming negotiations, and the host suggested that I might enjoy WriterAction (because, I suspect, I’m an opinionated bigmouth).

I joined WriterAction on April 7th, 2004. At the time, I think there were about 80 members in total.

I loved it. In a very short while, simply by participating in that very tiny community of writers, I learned an enormous amount about how my union worked, how my fellow writers thought, and how we could actually change things for the better.

Shortly thereafter, I was asked to help administer WriterAction. And after that, I was recruited to run for the Board of the WGAw.

Everything was lovely.

Except that I haven’t posted a word on WriterAction in a half a year now.

What happened?

Well, for starters, Alex Sokoloff and I really started to hate each other. Rather than get into the personal issues there, let’s just stipulate that we had personal issues, I resigned as an admin in part over those personal issues, but I continued to post long after that.

Therefore, we can elminate that as a reason for my exit.

Was it out of boredom? Perhaps. The WriterAction community has never really expanded the way it should have. There are about 7,500 current active members in the WGAw (with another 3,500 in the WGAE, but since WriterAction continues to be a mostly-WGAw meeting place, let’s not consider them in the following equations).

Out of those 7,500 members, WriterAction currently boasts a membership list of 2,106 members.

Not bad.

Except that 1,590 of them have never posted even once. Always a bad sign.

There are 516 members that have posted at least once, but 81 of them have posted just once. There are only 284 members who have ten or most posts to their name, and only 360 members have shown up at all (to lurk or post) within the last two months.

From that, figure there’s about 350 regulars. Unfortunately, of those regulars, roughly half post at a rate of less than one post a week.

Even worse, the top 59 posters (which still include both myself and Josh Olson, neither of whom post there anymore) are responsible for a full 72% of all posts made in the whole history of the place!

In short, WriterAction really hasn’t grown significantly since the days when I found it on EzBoard.

Okay, so…why? Maybe it’s meant to be small.

No, it’s meant to be big. Its entire purpose, I think, should be in its inclusiveness.

Unlike this website, which is an extension of my will and personal philosophy, WriterAction exists to build community. You can’t build community unless you get some numbers, particularly when you’re trying to mirror a pre-existing community of 7,500 people.

At its best, WriterAction was considered a rising force in Guild politics. A number of active participants ran for the Board and were elected (including myself, Ted Elliott and Alex Sokoloff). Candidates visited the site to promote their platforms. In the Board room, people would say, “This issue is playing well on WriterAction” or “We’re getting killed over this on WriterAction.” There was a sense of accountability to the constituency for once, instead of the business-as-usual “no one’s paying any attention, so let’s just do what we what” brand of Guild politics.

And that’s all gone now.

Patric Verrone knew pretty early on that numbers are numbers. If the community doesn’t grow past 200 or 300 attentive eyeballs, it’s not going to make a real difference in the big game of Guild politics.

Mind you, the whole point of WriterAction isn’t to promote one idea over another. Rather, it’s to inform the membership, inspire the membership and hopefully hold the leadership accountable to the membership’s concerns.

A half a year ago, I stopped posting. I became fed up with the following:

• Seeing the same faces, day after day
• The belief of some of the admins that frequent posters were the problem, rather than the lifeblood of the place
• The inability of the admins to bring in new frequent posters
• The kudzu-like proliferation of forums and sub-forums
• The buzzing mess of the general politics forums, which are completely off-message
• The site’s technical stagnation
• The insane way the admins disciplined problem members

Most of those are self-explanatory, save the last two.

The site’s technical stagnation is one that definitely bugs me. Denise Meyer and I (who, together, run the Artful Forum), found vBulletin and migrated WriterAction to it from EzBoard. Before we did that, poor Alex had to literally approve new members by answering individual emails to her AOL account.

While vBulletin isn’t exactly rocket science, you do have to keep up with it. There’s no reason that WriterAction shouldn’t have simple things like spell-check or the ability to embed videos. Would those things save WriterAction? No.

On the other hand, if the admins over there encouraged people to use the “warn admins” feature and then installed one of the various “warning reports” mods, they might have a better time handling the problems that crop up…and that brings me to…

…the insanity.

Every board will have problems. Even a board like WriterAction, which doesn’t accept just anyone in off the virtual street, will have its share of cranks, jerks and miscreants.

The basic WriterAction rule is “don’t engage in ad hominem attacks.”

Here’s the problem.

First, they have some whacked-out definition of ad hom, which basically changes from circumstance to circumstance.

Second, they have this weird tic where they refuse to delete offending posts. Instead, they publicly post in the thread asking you, the member, to delete your own post…or they’ll do it for you.

Huh?

And then, and here’s where they really jumped the shark, they decided that once they made a decision and implemented it, that decision could not be discussed at all.

This is just stupid. When I get into my little fights with Olson, or when a couple of commenters start going at each other, I do my thing. I delete posts if they deserve it (with special care to avoid deleting attacks on me unless they’re really out there), and if people complain, I answer back. If I don’t feel like talking about it, I just don’t.

But I don’t ban people from questioning me. That’s ridiculous.

Even worse, unlike this site, which is my own personal domain, WriterAction is supposed to be about the community of WGA members…not any one writer’s philosophy…

Ah, but there’s the rub. See, when you run a community, you inevitably start to feel like it reflects on you…and that it’s yours.

In my case, this place is mine. But does the community part…the part where other writers express themselves…does that reflect on me?

Hmmm, tough to answer. Probably not, although I have to struggle against that from time to time. I think that’s where the admins of WriterAction have gone wrong.

Well, that, and the fact that they don’t really do anything. I mean, here’s a short list of stuff they should be doing.

• Hosting live chat events with leadership, and advertising them via email blast to all 2100 members, lurkers or not
• Eliminating forums that are underused or redundant to other forums on the web
• Establishing post icons for thread-starters who want that discussion to remain serious
• Creating a forum for newbies (and limiting posting in that forum to members with fewer than 50 posts)
• Creating a forum where disputes can be hashed out between users and admins
• Publishing the Board minutes each month
• Publishing the Board agenda each month
• Creating a “featured debate” section where two members can have at each other in a civilized fashion
• Asking each new member to bring two more WGA members to the site to increase active participation
• Actively pursuing A-level writers, who tend to attract lots of other writers

What they should stop doing:

• Debating every decision endlessly
• Splashing tacky and pointless banners on forum pages
• Intimidating users who “post too much”
• Denying users the right to publicly question them
• Adding forums that no one uses
• Resisting active leadership
• Engaging in passive leadership (e.g. meetings where they ask users to “give us ideas on how to make this a better place”)

Do I think the current administrators are up to this task? No. Not the majority of them, at least.

Do I think I am? Hell no. I’ve already done my part for WriterAction, and I have my own site to run.

No, it’s time for new blood. Not mine, not theirs.

WriterAction isn’t a personal site. It’s meant to be a mirror community for the WGA. We need it more than ever right now, as we head into elections and negotiations and possibly even a strike. We need an educated, engaged, connected membership.

And for WriterAction to become that, I think it needs new leadership. The current folks have done enough, but I think they’re tired and burnt and defensive and possessive.

The admins need to turn over the reins to some new members. They need at least one technical admin who does nothing but work the vBulletin side, and then they need about five people to handle the rest. Those people should spend their time revitalizing the site, and their only benchmark for success should be a marked increase in the number of active posters and active readers.

Anything less, and WriterAction will slowly bumble along as it does now: limited, unrealized and ineffective.

When writing a narrative that jumps back and forth throughout time and events (ie. PULP FICTION, THE KILLING) is it standard operating procedure to write the story in a more traditional straight ahead format then re-arrange the script; or is the script written in a non-linear format as we see it in the movie?

–Matt Higgins

While there have been cases where a film’s timeline was juggled after-the-fact (HEAVEN AND EARTH was one), the vast majority of scripts are written with the non-linear elements in place. It’s a cliché, but screenplays are really blueprints for making a movie, so the two forms should match up scene-by-scene.

If you’re planning to write a story that will ultimately unfold in a non-linear way, such as GO or MEMENTO, it’s a good idea to make a second outline of the story as it happens in "real time," to make sure the logic tracks. In fact, this kind of outline is helpful with any kind of story, because even if a script moves forward scene by scene, inevitably characters will refer to things that happened "earlier," and it’s important to make sure all these events could have happened in the sequence you propose.

Personally, I find that non-linear structure is often just a flashy trick to disguise bad storytelling, or worse, a boring plot. It demands that the audience pay closer attention in order to figure out what’s going on, but rarely rewards the effort.

An analogy: When laser printers first arrived, they gave people access to calligraphy fonts like Zapf Chancery Italic, a typeface designed for wedding invitations. Suddenly, people printed entire newsletters in 9-point Zapf Chancery Italic, without any consideration of whether it was the right tool for the job. (It’s not. It’s almost unreadable.) Now I cringe whenever I see the font. It’s been ruined for me.

What these novice designers - and many novice screenwriters - failed to recognize is that just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. I wrote GO with three overlapping chunks because that’s the only way it made sense; to intercut between the plotlines would have slowed everything down too much and made it confusing. In short, I used a strange timeline because that’s what the story required.

Always ask yourself why you’re choosing a particular way of telling the story. Used well, and with the right material, non-linear structure can be a very powerful technique. Used poorly, it just makes a crappy movie harder to follow.

(Originally posted in 2003.)

He’ll never get to use an iPhoneA lot of people in the business ask me how it is that I find time to run this blog and our forums, when I’ve got deadlines and family commitments and the rest of life bearing down on me.

Frankly, I don’t know. For instance, right now it’s just about 11:30 PM Pacific time, and I’ve got at least another two hours of writing ahead of me.

I’m bleary.

And so, I turn to this as respite.

By the way, if you don’t understand why a writer tired of writing would write in order to take a break from writing, then you may not be a writer.

Admittedly, part of my bleariness is because instead of writing what I needed to yesterday, I spent time getting and setting up my new iPhone.

Before I add to the infinite instareviews available to you on the internet, I’ve finally got my working theory about the ending of The Sopranos.

Yeah, I know. Old news. But I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I’m not sure anyone else has forwarded this theory yet. I’m sure someone will dig up a link to something similar.

Like everyone, my first reaction to the final moment of the final episode was “Oh God, my TiVo…” Then I sort of reeled into a bit of shock. A bit of shock. It’s still a TV show, after all. Nonetheless, Chase managed to completely surprise everyone.

The quick theories were: it’s a meaningless surprise for surprise’s sake, Tony dies, it’s a cliffhanger for a movie…

I don’t think so.

I don’t think Chase invested so much time and energy and transparent deliberation into the final scene just to lead up to a “Ha ha, here’s something you never expected, it doesn’t mean anything but at least I didn’t do any of the dumb crap you predicted” moment. It just doesn’t seem within his creative character.

I don’t think Tony was killed. Yes, Chase wanted to ratchet up the tension to lead to what might be a whacking (and more on why when I get to my theory), but if the cut to black signifies Tony’s death, then why cut out on his face? Shouldn’t it cut to black off his POV?

Cliffhanger for a movie? That’s just dumb. An uncompromising master like Chase isn’t going to pimp his entire series out just to set up a first scene in some theoretical film that might or might not happen.

So why?

Why did Chase do that?

My theory.

Remember when Carmela saw her own therapist for a single session, back in the 3rd season? A blunt man, he basically told Carmela that her problems weren’t psychological as much as they were crassly circumstantial: she’s married to a ruthless killer, and all of the money Carmela spends is blood money. The only advice a reasonable person can give is to take the kids and get away from Tony.

That was the truth.

Still, season after season, we the audience found ourselves rooting for Tony, particularly when inter-mob stories were introduced.

In the final season, Chase begins to really hammer home just how pathetic and evil Tony is. Tony kills Christopher. Tony celebrates Christopher’s death. Tony turns a session about A.J. into a whine-fest about himself. Tony cheats on his wife for the millionth time. Tony thinks about killing Pauly because he’s getting old and mouthy.

And yet, the audience (and by audience, I mean me and apparently many others) were mostly interested in how he’d make his way out of the mess with New York.

Would Tony win?

Chase seemed to recognize this. The federal agent once assigned to Tony but now on a terrorism beat apparently shared our problem. He slips Tony info to use in Tony’s war with Phil. “We might win this one!”

We?

As awful as Chase made Tony, we kept loving him. When Chase would scold us for loving him, we would nod, then love him some more.

We’re Carmella.

And our marriage to the show was a bad one. It had to end, because Tony isn’t a good guy, he doesn’t deserve our respect, and frankly, we shouldn’t give a damn what happens to a sociopath like him.

I think Chase’s finale ending was a message to the audience, and a bit of a punishment as well.

“You want to know what’s going to happen? Will he die? Is this just another day in his miserable life? Will he run the whole mob? You know what? Screw you. I’m not telling you. In fact, I’m pulling the plug on this relationship in the most vicious, unsatisfying manner just to rub your nose in your own sick need to care about this jerk.”

That’s my theory about Chase’s intention.

Tony’s intention? That’s easy. He picked it on the jukebox. “Don’t stop believing.”

Those are his last words to us. “Don’t stop.”

But Chase hit “stop” anyway, because Tony is a bad man, and we should take our TiVos and get as far away from him as possible.

So…that’s the old.

Here’s the new.

The iPhone is AWESOME. It’s everything Apple promised, and then some. If you can afford it, buy it. If you appreciate elegance in technology, buy it. If people say, “I don’t get it, it’s just a phone, Apple’s a cult, blah blah blah” then make a note that those people are idiots, and then get the iPhone.

It’s wonderful.

I’d write more about it, but it’s a quarter to midnight now.

And there are pages to go before I sleep.

When you start writing, or right before you start writing, what do you know? What do you know about the story and characters before you start putting words on paper?

–Dustin Tash

Although I don’t do it on every project, I’m a big fan of writing off-the-page, which means creating character bios, alternate scenes and sequence chronologies to help me figure out the story and the characters. For example, I’ll write out the whole story from the villain’s point of view, both to track that the logic works, and also to gain insight on why they’re doing what they’re doing.

You don’t have to stop doing this once you begin writing the screenplay, either. If I’m getting frustrated with the script, sometimes it’s much more helpful to write up related pieces than to bang out another scene I don’t think is working.

Just make sure this prep-work doesn’t keep you from actually starting your script. You don’t have to know everything about your story and characters before you begin. Discovery is the best part of the writing process.

(Originally posted September 10, 2003.)

Over the next two weeks, you’ll notice a bit of deja vu at this site: old articles suddenly popping up on the front page, with new dates and old comments. It’s not a technical glitch. I’m putting the site into reruns while I’m out of the country and off the grid.

I’m going to Africa — specifically, Malawi. I’ll be working with an organization called FOMO, which runs programs to help the orphans of Mulanje, a district in the southern portion of the country. U.S. Doctors for Africa is one of their partners, and the trip is somewhat under their auspices. While there, I’ll be teaching English and helping repaint a school.

“Why?” is a fair question. A few months ago, I was talking with a student who was just graduating from college. When I asked her about her summer plans, she enthusiastically described an upcoming trip to Uganda. I said something like, “Wow, I wish I could do that.”

Not more than 10 minutes later, I realized there was absolutely nothing stopping me from doing that — other than a bit of fear and inertia.

This isn’t research for any particular project, but it’s homework just the same. Part of a writer’s job is to imagine. I can imagine giant chocolate factories, conjoined chanteuses, and epic sky battles. But I honestly can’t imagine what it’s like to be an orphan in a landlocked country that’s lost a generation to HIV/AIDS. So I’m going to see what that’s like. I’ll end up writing about it here and in other publications, but the main reason I’m getting on the plane is to get some grasp on a situation that is, to me, unfathomable.

While I’m gone, Matt will be minding the store. Please be nice.

What exactly do you discuss at Sundance? They’re entering with completed scripts, which I assume are perfect to them at the beginning, so where to next? And if you participate in the Screenwriting Lab are you automatically given a Directors Lab spot, if that is what you so choose to do with your completed work?

– Christina Shaver

The scripts the Fellows are bringing to Sundance are completed drafts, but they’re still works in progress. The advisor meetings aren’t notes sessions, but rather a chance to talk through ideas with experienced writers, whose fresh eyes can identify problems and opportunities. It’s like therapy for your script.

Over the last two days, I met with Braden King and Dani Valent, whose script HERE is a road movie set in Armenia, and Sophie Bartes, whose COLD SOULS is an existential comedy.¹ Both projects went through the Directors Lab, so the filmmakers had a chance to see how the scenes worked when put up on their feet, which left them with new questions and ideas.

Over the course of the lab, each writer has five meetings with different advisors. In some meetings, I’ve gone page by page with the fellows, looking at how this line on page 19 is setting up an expectation that never really pays off. In other meetings, I’ve left the script in my backpack, instead talking in broad terms about character POV, balancing tones, and the rewriting process. It’s a conversation, and all based on what the Fellow needs. One of the smartest innovations in the Sundance Labs experience is that the advisors meet each morning to talk through the previous day’s sessions, thus building on each other’s work.

I screened THE NINES last night for the group. It was strange to see it in one of same theaters as January, but with a completely different crowd and set of expectations. (And a new, vastly better digital projector.) Atom Egoyan had screened THE SWEET HEREAFTER the second night, and it was terrific to finally be able to ask him questions about his movie and his process.

Sundance doesn’t change much year-to-year, but there have been a few adjustments this time:

• There’s a documentary lab running concurrently, so we’ve gotten to mingle with some editorially-oriented folks.
• There’s wireless, and thus blogging.
• In an effort to reduce waste, they handed out water bottles and coffee mugs upon arrival to use instead of paper cups and disposable bottles. It’s been remarkably effective. Because you’re at altitude, you have to drink a lot of water, and having a container with your name on it makes it simple.²
• They got rid of wine at dinner, but added receptions to (partially) make up for it. Again, you’re at altitude, so it doesn’t take much.

1. My final project is Richard Montoya’s WATER AND POWER, adapted from his acclaimed play. I lucked out this year in that all of my assigned projects feel like Actual Movies I Would Pay to See. ↩
2. We recently banned bottled water at home. Our water cooler was using $145 worth of electricity each year, and that’s not counting all the energy wasted packaging and delivering the giant bottles. It’s surprisingly easy to adjust. ↩

Elias Davis’ opponentAh, summertime, ‘07. The weather’s heating up, the Yankees are struggling, Paris Hilton something something jail something something…but most of all, there’s pre-strike panic in the air.

When Entertainment Weekly starts covering a possible writers’ strike, we’ve finally hit the big time. As we head deeper into summer and approach the October 31st deadline, there will be plenty more hand-wringing to be seen.

Before then, though, we’ve got the little matter of a WGA election.

And before I talk about that, I want to wax positive about our union.

I know. Shock of all shocks. I’m a vocal and public opponent of our current leadership’s policies, but something really good happened recently, and they deserve acknowledgement for their good work.

This month, following on the heels of a successful effort to bring The Daily Show under a guild contract, the WGAw and WGAE worked together to bring four more Comedy Central shows under union contracts: Mind of Mencia, The Sarah Silverman Program, The Showbiz Show With David Spade and the upcoming series American Body Shop.

Those contracts sound like good ones, and they include credit protection, salary minimums, pension & health and residuals.

Why is this so important?

Representation of labor is what unions do. The more labor they represent, the stronger bargaining position they’re in…at least in theory.

My personal theory is that in a union like the WGA, it’s not the numbers that matter, but rather the quality of employees that matter. It’s nice to imagine 1,000 reality editors in our union as “storytellers,” but it’s much better to have 30 people-who-write-words-and-get-paid-for-them types.

You know. Writers.

I was critical of Patric Verrone’s reality organizing effort for two main reasons.

First, Patric insisted on “union standards,” which require the signatory company to not only agree to do all its own shows union, but to force any subsidiary production companies to also go union. It’s a great theory, but since it’s never happened in Hollywood before and the film studios and networks don’t apply union standards to guys like me, something told me that they wouldn’t ever apply it to someone writing lines for Tyra Banks either. Insisting on union standards only gets in the way of actually achieving something.

Second, Patric was leapfrogging past basic cable to get to reality, and while there’s a large argument about whether or not many reality producers and so-called “preditors” are writers at all, no one questions the bona fides of actual writers on a ton of basic cable shows that aren’t under WGA contracts. Why not target clear-cut cases first?

It looks like the Guild is swinging around toward my view of things.

Here’s what the WGA didn’t do this time.

• They didn’t run a corporate campaign against Comedy Central.
• They didn’t attack Comedy Central’s advertisers.
• They didn’t insist that every Comedy Central show get organized at once.
• They didn’t insist that all future Comedy Central shows be under guild contracts.
• They didn’t hold rallies.
• They didn’t strike the shows.
• They didn’t fight with another union.
• They didn’t attempt to organize through the press.

And lo and behold…success. Four shows under Guild contracts. 30 writers getting P&H and residuals and credit protection…all of which are moral imperatives for employers to grant writers (in my humble opinion).

Now, compare that to the ANTM debacle!

Well done, WGA. I don’t know if this is a slight course correction or a signal of greater shifts to come, but I hope this trend continues. This is how you go about the business of representing writers—not through posturing and public aggression, but through quiet, private and leveraged negotiating.

Okay, that was the Good. Here’s the Strange.

The WGAw constitution requires the Nominating Committee to submit two candidate names for each officer position prior to an election. This is a somewhat rare quirk for unions. Most allow “white ballot elections” in which candidates can run unopposed. Not us, though. And that’s led to some weirdness in the past, particularly when no one but one person wanted to run for an office, so, well, patsies were recruited. Allies who were willing to fall on their sword.

Until this time, apparently. Elias Davis is running unopposed for Secretary-Treasurer. I think this may be a first. I’ll check with Tony Segall (WGA General Counsel) on this one, and report back.

And the Predictable?

Kathy Kiernan is running for President against Patric Verrone. Now, I know Kathy. She’s a very good person, but she’s not a serious candidate for President, and I don’t mean that in any disrespectful way.

Kathy was elected to the Board last year, and she was on a slate of candidates endorsed by…drumroll please….

Patric Verrone.

She’s an ally of Patric’s, not a real opposition candidate. And so, in order to go through the motions here, we have the obligatory “contest” that isn’t a contest. Both candidates will write lovely statements about where we are and where we have to go, and neither will take swipes at each other.

In fact, both will praise each other and talk mostly about how they both want the same things.

Then Patric will get re-elected.

It’s not really offensive. It’s just silly. It’s a little strange that Kathy’s the one running against Patric, particularly because she’s a newswriter, and as such, she doesn’t even work under the big contract that’s up for negotiations this fall.

Heh…you know…if she won and then we went on strike, our President would still be working while we all walked a picket line.

That would be amusing.

But she won’t win. She’s not in this to win, but to fill a slot. Personally, I hope her candidacy does at least a little to educate our membership about the fact that we do have newswriters in our union. They’re terribly served by the WGAE, whose Executive Director Mona Mangan has managed to beat her own dismal record for incompetence by bungling the CBS newswriter negotiations for over two years now.

Yes, they’ve been working two years without a contract.

Way to go, Mona. You’re a real labor hero.

I hope Kathy uses her platform, obligatory thought it may be, to shine a light on that sad story. For all of our obsession with internet residuals, there are people out there who aren’t even trying to get any residuals for anything.

They just want a halfway decent contract.

We won a nice victory in basic cable.

Maybe the news will be next.

I’m up at Sundance for the summer filmmakers’ lab, where I’ve worked as an advisor for the past seven years.

For those unfamiliar with the labs, it’s a workshop in which newer filmmakers (generally writer-directors) meet with established screenwriters in one-on-one sessions to sort out issues in their scripts. There’s a winter lab, which occurs right before the festival in January, and a summer lab, which includes a three-week directing component before the week-long screenwriting portion. Many notable films have come out of the Sundance labs, including PARADISE NOW, BOYS DON’T CRY, and HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH.

This year, there are 13 projects, five of which I’m reading. This morning, I met with James Ponsoldt on his script REFRESH, REFRESH. In the afternoon, I met with JJ Lask on THIS IS NOT A PIPE. They were both challenging projects, and great meetings.

What I love about the labs is that it’s a completely safe place. There are no agendas, no secret motivations. The advisers all genuinely want to help the fellows make the best movies they choose to make, with no “shoulds” or “oughtas.” There’s not a single movie up here that I would have written, yet they’re all fascinating, original, and deeply personal. You end up learning as much about the filmmaker as the script.

I have a hunch that an unusually high percentage of the films in development at this year’s lab will make it to the screen. You can see a complete list of the projects here.

Hearty congrats to Dana Fox, who shows up in Variety’s Ten Screenwriters to Watch feature this morning. Dana was my assistant between Rawson and Chad, and has worked steadily since. Her latest script, What Happens in Vegas, goes into production soon.

In the picture which accompanies the article, you can see her with the SafeType vertical keyboard which looks like a joke but has saved both of our wrists. If conventional ergonomic keyboards aren’t working for you, the SafeType might be worth a try.

We got a nice mention in the Times today.

For those of you who are new to the site, the menu bar at the top of the screen breaks everything out into categories. If you want to search for particular topics, SEARCH is to the right.

Of special note is our forum, which is our general discussion area for all things screenwriting. You can access it through the menubar, the link under the search box or…hell…

…just go here to register. Like everything else on this site, it’s cost-free and ad-free.

So go ahead, look around. Kick the tires.

I’ll have a new article up later about the Writers Guild…and for the first time in a long time, it’s going to be a positive one.