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Pitching: or Hey Batta Batta Swing!.
Truth, Terrorists, and Turnaround.
This isn’t a sequel as much as it is a companion piece to last week’s A Funny Thing About Homage, where I recalled the late great John Frankenheimer’s brief attachment to a screenplay I’d developed with producer, Gary Foster. The script was initially titled Jackals. But maybe I should add a little context first. Gary [...]
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The Might to Remain Silent, Part 1.
Picture this. I’m on the fourteenth floor of a Century City high-rise, anxiously rocking in place before a bank of elevators, hoping to hell the lift arrives before I lose my temper. Behind me, I hear two familiar voices. One is a producer I’ll call Big Daddy. The other belongs to a former A-List movie [...]
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You’re So Dead to Me, Part 1.
A few years ago, a studio executive invited me to pitch a TV idea to producer David Zucker, president of television for Scott Free, Ridley and Tony Scott’s thriving production company. The studio said if David liked the story, they would buy it for us to develop together. David politely listened to my pitch. I [...]
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Congratulations, It’s a Bomb.
I don’t talk too much about Welcome to Mooseport. Not so much because it was a box office failure. On second thought, maybe so, because one needs to know the film actually exists before I can talk about it, right? The movie was born late one night while the War Department and I lay in [...]
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Misunderestimated.
On one of my early career assignments, I became acquainted with an older, gregarious producer who, by my count, had made nearly twenty movies without a single one having been a hit until his most recent. And but for one of the films that was considered a quasi-cult classic, the rest were as unremarkable as [...]
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Screwed.
Just a few weeks ago I was guest-speaking to young screenwriters at an L.A. film school. It was a theater stuffed with young alert faces. The future of American cinema spread out before me, all ears, hanging on my every word. Why? Because for some reason, I’m supposed to have learned a thing or two [...]
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The Chicken Suit.
With your permission, let me set the scene. The place was a casual-styled conference room at a movie studio. The characters in the room were the studio’s president of production, his younger executive VP of development, a pair of even younger creative execs marking on trademark legal pads, and yours truly, El Scribbelador. The subject [...]
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Dogfights and Rewrites with George Lucas.
Last weekend, the movie Red Tails opened nationwide to some pretty decent business. It was a long time in the making. And I’d noticed that a lot of press surrounding the movie had to do with the difficulty George Lucas had getting it produced and into theaters. No. I haven’t seen it yet. But some [...]
Read More »"Doug Richardson never disappoints. BLOOD MONEY is fast and intense and compulsively readable, populated by an unforgettable cast of characters and a plot that twists so many times you'll get dizzy. A great story from a veteran tale teller." J.T. Ellison
"Richardson delivers the goods in BLOOD MONEY with his uncanny ability to glimpse into the brutality and instability not only of the criminal mind, but also a darkness in the heroes." Maya Fleischmann for IndieReader
Doug’s Blog.
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A Bitter Pill, Part 2.
June 17, 2013“Did he offer you the franchise?” asked megabucks writer Charlie A-List. As you read last week in (A Bitter Pill, Part 1) I’d just landed in Charlie’s office after a meeting with a Paramount executive who’d offered me the plum gig of writing the next installment of its blockbuster franchise based on a series of [...]
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A Bitter Pill, Part 1.
June 10, 2013Here we go again. The names have been changed for the most obvious of reasons. I met Charlie A-List just inside the threshold of his Paramount office. He was riding high on his mega-hit, which he’d adapted from one of a series of bestselling books penned by Mr. Superstar Novelist. For that and other work, [...]
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Truth, Terrorists, and Turnaround.
June 04, 2013This isn’t a sequel as much as it is a companion piece to last week’s A Funny Thing About Homage, where I recalled the late great John Frankenheimer’s brief attachment to a screenplay I’d developed with producer, Gary Foster. The script was initially titled Jackals. But maybe I should add a little context first. Gary [...]
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Funny Thing About Homage.
May 27, 2013What’s wrong with this picture? I was an unproduced screenwriter standing at the threshold to my antique, valley domicile. It was my tiny, first-timer bungalow measuring barely eleven hundred square feet. Across from me, standing on my front stoop, was none other than movie director, John Frankenheimer. You don’t know his name? Maybe you’ve heard [...]
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Big Bad Bruce.
May 20, 2013It was our first morning at the location. The set, a neo-modern house the art department had dressed up into looking more like a comfortable fortress, would serve as central focus for the next four weeks, most of which would be long and cold nights. The geography was pretty steep, a hillside high above Malibu, [...]
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