Screenwriting

Animating Live Action:
Philip LaZebnik, a hugely successful screenwriter in Hollywood animation, gives his views on his craft, onwhy that craft includes live action, and on a bright future for European filmmaking. Bríd Conneely reports.

People may not know his name but everybody will recognise his scripts. LaZebnik won the Nanie Award for Best Animation Screenplay for Mulan in 1998. He wrote Prince of Egypt and co-wrote Pocahontas. He was story consultant on Antz and El Dorado, and he worked on the early development of the phenomenally successful Shrek. Although now known in Hollywood as Mr Animation, he has also written extensively for television and the stage. LaZebnik knows what he's talking about. Though still very much connected with Hollywood, he and his family moved to Denmark in September 2002.

Television Sucks:
Whether you call it 'audience-directed programming' or 'dumbing down', TV programmers have been coasting along the middle of the road for some time now. Screenwriter Tony Philpott pulls them over to check their tax and insurance.

Television Sucks. Or does it? Several years ago the science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison wrote a critique of the world¹s most ubiquitous electronic medium. It was called The Glass Teat. His premise in this two-volume work was simple: Television does not suck, but is sucked. We take sustenance from the images flickering just behind the surface of the household cathode-ray tube, they are a source of comfort drawn from a vitrified mother's breast. Funnily enough, Ellison wrote The Glass Teat in the late seventies or early eighties - a time when television was still interesting, a time when television still had a little fizz left in it, a time before it became the Glass Teat dispensing the one-flavour-only breast-milk it does today. Ellison could see it coming, but even his prescience could not have anticipated I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here. He was writing at a time when television was still flavoured with a variety of tastes, a time before reality television, before home-decorating shows, before B-list celebrity shows, before the fly-on-the-wall camera in The Salon started feeding us riveting images of leg waxes and nail-biting cuticle enhancements.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 96