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Tag: producer
The Well-Respected Software You Need To Finish Your Screenplay

The Well-Respected Software You Need To Finish Your Screenplay

Even A-list Hollywood screenwriters need some help getting their complex ideas into cohesive script form. That means more than just proper formatting of stage directions — and Final Draft 10, the industry-standard screenwriting program, gets that.

The list of Final Draft devotees includes exalted film luminaries like Aaron Sorkin, James Cameron, JJ Abrams, Sofia Coppola, and many more. That alone is proof positive that the latest program version, Final Draft 10 (now on sale for $149.99, a $100 discount from The National Memo Store), is the pro tool system to help get your script idea camera-ready.

As it’s done for 25 years, Final Draft 10 helps you shape your script to all the entertainment industry protocols and odd nuances that other pros recognize, including pagination, stage directions, and more. You get over 100 different templates for screenplays, teleplays, and stage plays. You can store multiple script variations and line changes with ease, collaborate with any number of other screenwriters in real time, and even dictate your script for hands-free writing.

In addition to all that power, Final Draft 10 also boasts one of the coolest makeovers ever for this perennial best seller. Story Map allows you to outline scenes, then actually view each individual script scene as a graphic representation within the complete work. At a glance, you ‘ll know if your scene is running too long or whether a significant plot point is falling into the correct place in your story.

While Story Map helps shape your story, fellow new feature Beat Board focuses on sharpening your characters. Beat Board helps you chart each character’s individual actions, emotions and motivations while making sure they sync up and track with your script’s plot.

Even with a $100 savings, we want to sweeten the pot. So for a limited time, you can pick up Final Draft 10 at an additional 15% off. Just add the coupon code FINALDRAFT15 at checkout and save even more money.

This sponsored post is brought to you by StackCommerce.  

Stanley Rubin, Prolific TV And Movie Writer-Producer, Dies At 96

Stanley Rubin, Prolific TV And Movie Writer-Producer, Dies At 96

By Bob Pool, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — There was a 69-year gap between the time Stanley Rubin enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, in hopes of launching a writing career and 2006, when he actually graduated.

And during that seven-decade break in schooling, the prolific film and television writer and producer left his mark at nearly every studio in Hollywood, helped run the Writers Guild and Producers Guild, and took home one of the first Emmys ever awarded.

Rubin, 96, died Sunday in his sleep at his home above the Sunset Strip, said actress Kathleen Hughes, his wife of 59 years.

Born Stanley Creamer Rubin on Oct. 8, 1917, in the Bronx, he was a teenager when he took a Greyhound bus across the country to enroll at UCLA in 1933. After working as the editor of the school’s newspaper, the Daily Bruin, he was a few units shy of graduating when he dropped out in 1937 to work for a weekly Beverly Hills newspaper owned by Will Rogers Jr.

From there he went to work in the Paramount Pictures mailroom, where his radio, TV and film career was launched. In 1949, the first year the Emmys were awarded, he accepted the statue for best film made for television for an episode of the dramatic anthology series “Your Show Time” called “The Necklace.”

By 1940 he had become a writer at Universal Studios; in 1946 he switched to Columbia Pictures, and in 1948 he moved to a producing job at NBC. Rubin worked as a theatrical film producer for a variety of movie studios in the early 1950s before returning to television producing at CBS. He moved back to TV production at Universal Studios in 1960, took a TV producing post at 20th Century Fox in 1967 and then at MGM from 1972 to 1977.

Along the way, he wrote 19 movies and produced more than two dozen feature and TV films, including a 1955 Francis the Talking Mule comedy and 1967’s The President’s Analyst starring James Coburn. Producing River of No Return in 1954, Rubin turned into a diplomat when he mediated between strict director Otto Preminger and mercurial star Marilyn Monroe.

After leaving MGM, he worked as an independent film producer. His last screen credit in 1990 was as co-producer of Clint Eastwood’s White Hunter Black Heart.

Hughes said her husband’s favorite movie was The Narrow Margin, a 1952 thriller about assassins stalking a woman taking a train from Chicago to Los Angeles to testify against the mob.

The movie’s release was delayed when RKO Radio Pictures head Howard Hughes became enthused by the film and asked Rubin to reshoot it with an A-list cast instead of Marie Windsor starring as the woman and Charles McGraw playing a police detective trying to protect her. Rubin refused on grounds that the whole film would have to be recast and reshot.

Rubin could be stubborn when he stood up to studio chiefs, recalled a friend, film historian Alan K. Rode. He once refused when another studio head insisted that a fictional movie about Adolf Hitler escaping Nazi Germany and hiding in the U.S. be changed to a film about communists making nerve gas in the Midwest, said Rode, director of the Film Noir Foundation.

During World War II, Rubin served a stint with the Army’s First Motion Picture Unit. He hammered out contracts for the Writers Guild and spent five years as president of the Producers Guild.

Rubin’s decision to return to UCLA to make up his missing 14 units found students in a 2006 School of Theater, Film and Television history class in awe of him after they discovered who he was. They were shocked to learn that the grandfatherly man who always sat near the front of the class had been a genuine pioneer of radio, television and film.

Rubin’s 20-page term report was about how advertisers determined the content of 1940s radio shows.

“Most of the scripts I wrote ran about 120 pages,” he confided to one of his young classmates. “So this was a piece of cake. But don’t tell the professor.”

Besides his wife, he is survived by daughter Angie, a film music editor; sons John, a documentary filmmaker, and Michael, who formerly worked in postproduction. Another son, Chris, died in 2008.

Photo: geminicollisionworks via Flickr

‘They’re Going To Kill You’: Why Norman Lear Founded People For the American Way

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the founding of People for the American Way by Norman Lear, the legendary “All in the Family” producer, who still bristles when anyone insists on “progressive” instead of liberal. In a conversation with The National Memo, Lear recalled how he became increasingly furious watching TV evangelists like Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell. What could he do?

“I started to write a film, titled ‘Religion,’ a satire, like Paddy Chayefsky’s ‘Network.’ But then I heard Jimmy Swaggart one morning, calling on his listeners to pray for the ‘removal’ of a Supreme Court Justice — and it scared the shit out of me.” He wanted to do something more, and fast.

“I’ve got to find my replacement,” Lear soon told associates at his production company, because he intended to focus all his creative energy on the threat to freedom represented by the religious right. “I’m going to do some commercials.” Somebody warned him, “Norman, you’re a Jew from Hollywood. They’re going to kill you if you go after the religious right.” Perhaps that spurred him to go ahead and make the original TV spot featuring “a middle-aged guy,” a forklift operator who is troubled because “here come these ministers telling him he’s a good Christian and his wife is a bad Christian, based on political criteria…and he says, ‘That’s not the American way.'” The commercial ran only on a local Washington, D.C. station, but as Lear anticipated, it was swiftly featured on all of the network evening news programs, and CBS ran the entire spot.

For all the achievements of People For, as his group has come to be known, including the defeat of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and the defense of Sonia Sotomayor, Lear understands that the nation faces an even more implacable brand of conservatism than when Reagan was president. “The chief contender for the Republican nomination is Mitt Romney,” he says, “and there is Romney on a stage with Bryan Fischer,” currently a powerful figure on the religious right, who has said, among other outrageous remarks, that gays were “responsible for the Holocaust…he’s a lunatic!” And of course the Romney campaign has brought Bork on board, to benefit from his dubious wisdom on the judiciary.

Back in those days, Lear believes, decency was more likely to prevail between political opponents. He was quite friendly with the Reagans, despite political clashes during his presidency, and flew up to the recent debate at the Reagan Library with the late president’s widow Nancy. “The fact is, I had some very positive dealings with him,” said Lear, something he can scarcely imagine with today’s aggressive Republican leaders.

Now working on a personal memoir and other projects, Lear is no longer at the helm of People For, which is led by president Michael Keegan and a board that includes Alec Baldwin, Kathleen Turner, and “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane. But the exceptionally vital 89 year-old seems proud, if mildly astonished, that the group he founded in fear and frustration has grown into a preeminent liberal presence, spanning three decades. “I would never wake up any morning in my life thinking that this is what I would be doing,” he said. Today Americans who cherish liberty can be thankful he did.