Global Screenwriting Today
Drink Locally and Write For the World

4) Increase your global contacts and film knowledge by attending at least one International film festival a year.

Film festivals are the hope for keeping much of global cinema alive. By attending Toronto, Montreal, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Palm Springs, Telluride, AFI Los Angeles and other international festivals in North America, or the festivals in Cannes, London, Berlin, Moscow, Tokyo and other film centers, you can begin to catch on to what a rich variety of talents exist in the world even if many of them never make it into the multiplex cinemas of your neighborhood.

The point here is that attending such a festival should be built into your schedule for your own education, growth and satisfaction as a writer. This goes for making contacts too. I cannot count the number of times I have seen friendships started and business deals conducted through contacts made on the festival circuit. Of course this assumes you get over being shy and introduce yourself to that Bulgarian director whose film you saw at 9 AM that knocked you out, or that Australian documentary filmmaker whose stirring film made you ready to move to the Outback. Think too, of the practical side of it all: a yearly visit to at least one festival is cheaper than going to the 15-20 countries where the films you enjoyed are made.

For a complete list of Festivals, check out Steven GaydosÌ The Variety Guide To Film Festivals (New York: Perigree Books, l998).

5) Use the Internet in ways that truly help you as a writer.

No one needs a lecture on why the "net" is important these days. Yet I simply want to highlight how "global" the net is, and instantly so, for script research, for staying in touch, and for letting the world know about your work.

Yes, there is e-mail, for not only personal mail, but also for email "trees" of addresses to send out announcements. I am able, for instance, to inform a lot of writers by email about my seminars, such as my Greek Island script seminar next summer. Script chat groups are also multiplying by the minute.

And, as for research, the ability to be able to look up film and script facts as well as to download entire scripts is so important. So let us plug SCREENTALK once more here, for it is a leader in this area!

Web sites matter too, and if you do not feel you wish to take the computer courses needed to build and maintain your own web site, there are plenty of local college or high school geniuses, living just down the street, who will help you for a few dollars a month!

Finally, consider how the net is devouring short films and building careers overnight. Almost everyone has seen the six-minute film George Lucas In Love which was made as a class assignment at the University of Southern California, by then student Joe Nussbaum, who is now under contract to make a feature because of such instant global exposure and recognition. Yes, it is true that the sale of this film was Amazon.comÌs number one item for weeks on end during the summer of 2000.

Thus screenwriters need to grab hold of the amazing possibilities that the Internet has and is opening for us all. You can literally live in South Africa or Kansas, Hong Kong or Alberta and reach millions from your home with your film, your script, your projects.

FINAL TAKE
PULP FICTION MEETS BOSNIA IN LONDON

Allow me a final take on global screenwriting today as I sign off. If you have not seen Beautiful People (1999), the debut feature by Bosnian-British filmmaker Jasmin Dizdar (a Trimark home video released in the USA), check it out in your local video shop. If I were pitching the concept for this film, which Dizdar wrote as well as directed, I would say, "Well, itÌs Pulp Fiction meets Bosnia, but in London." In short, humor, horror and humanity mix in strange and wonderful ways in this imaginative tale, told in eight interwoven stories, as refugees from the Bosnian war try to adapt to their newly adopted home: Britain. Conversely, it is about the British peopleÌs efforts to adjust to this new wave of immigrants.

Dizdar clearly "drank locally" as he told the story he knew: what is it like to be a war immigrant in London. But even on the plot and character level, this is a global story for today. And the fact that it has played solid at the box office and now has high video rentals around Europe and America, is healthy testimony to the new possibilities of global screenwriting.

Andy Horton is an award winning screenwriter, the author of two very popular script books, Writing The Character Centered Screenplay, and Laughing Out Loud: Writing The Comedy Centered Screenplay (both from the U of California Press) and is also the Director of Film & Video Studies at the U of Oklahoma.

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