Whirlwind

Well, the past few weeks have been pretty insanely busy for me. Last Friday, I graduated from UCLA’s MBA program and my whole family was in town. It was great to have my sister here from Barcelona, and a few other friends from college. I was also happy that my girlfriend took a short video of me receiving my diploma (just in case I need to use it to verify that I actually graduated – just kidding of course).

The weekend before, I was in Las Vegas with my classmates celebrating our last weekend as students. We stayed at The Palms, and the entire time I was looking for the Carl’s Junior, but I couldn’t find it (there’s an advertisement with the Maloof Brothers about a “6,000 dollar burger.”). Not that I would have spent the $$$, but I had to check out the Carl’s just to see what it looked like. I guess the simple pleasures in life keep me happy.

I was in Maryland the weekend before for a wedding of a good buddy of mine from college. Chelsea Clinton was there (see picture above), and I had the chance to run Scripped by her , which was pretty cool. The wedding itself was in St. Charles (which is where The Wedding Crashers was filmed), and it was an extremely beautiful location…. I’ve just been all over the place lately.

The big news is that Zak, Ryan and I are all grinding away at Scripped and we’re going to be making more exciting announcements over the next month or so. We really want to help every single member of the site have a shot at making their Hollywood dreams come true! If you’ve written your screenplay, the hard part is already over…. In any event, free screenwriting software is cool, but we want to give you guys more than that!

Email us and tell us how your screenplay is going.

More Screenwriting Tools

I’ve been trying to learn as much about screenwriting as possible, though I doubt my knowledge will ever rival Zak’s. That being said, I’ve been surfing around for experts’ advice on screenwriting, etc, and came accross this site: http://thedialogueseries.com.

Here is what they have to say:

THE DIALOGUE: Learning From the Masters is a groundbreaking interview series that goes behind the scenes of the fascinating craft of screenwriting. In these 70-90 minute in-depth discussions, more than two dozen of today’s most successful screenwriters share their work habits, methods and inspirations, secrets of the trade, business advice, and eye-opening stories from life in the trenches of the film industry. Each screenwriter discusses his or her filmography in great detail and breaks down the mechanics of one favorite scene from their produced work. To purschase these DVDS visit www.thedialogueseries.com.

Looks interesting!

thoughts on business

It’s interesting how throughout my life “just business” has implied impersonal or mechanical interaction. Like the person to whom the phrase, “Calm down; this is just business.” is directed to is not really a person at all. He or she is instead an object to be acted upon.

In my experience, and especially with Scripped, the contrary is true. Business is people and business is personal. In my last business-y post I described a little bit about the emotional and financial investment we, the founding team, had to make to put Scripped together. That makes it personal. And the recent surge in writer interest in Scripped makes the other people side relevant.

And here I find that some interactions with people can be impersonal, and that’s okay. I think that’s why we have this blog. There are people coming to the site, poking around, and probably thinking, hmm, why is this free? There must be a catch. And who are these guys, anyway? Then they go to the About Us page which says amazingly little about who Zak, Sunil, and I are.  And so they go to the blog.

And then it becomes a little more personal, but not for us. I don’t know who reads this and what they think about it. No one leaves us comments. Maybe it’s a little charming to see that we’re pretty regular people, certainly not professionals, and aren’t really bad. And, obviously, we like to write. We just don’t get that much time to do it. And maybe, just maybe, it is compelling enough to take the plunge and try out a script. Maybe having a blog and taking a web-based glimpse into our souls makes some people feel more comfortable. Whatever it is , sign ups recently have been fast and furious! This is good because it keeps Zak excited about perfecting our new import function.

To summarize, whoever first made the implication that business is purely transactional probably didn’t stay in business very long. Or if he did, he died a wealthy man with no friends. Instead, be nice but play safe. And if you do what you love the money will come.

You don’t need business school to learn that.