Dressed for Success: "Devil Wears Prada" screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna

From Creative Screenwriting Magazine Podcasts:

Aline Brosh McKenna talks about how, when a gazillion other screenwriters were after the job of adapting The Devil Wears Prada, she landed it. (Audio player required.)

 

Screenplay stealing epidemic: run for your lives!

From various sources

Wow, there's sure a lot of screenplay purloining going on these days. This writer, who claimed Warner Bros. stole scenes from her script and put them in Syriana, lost her case and had to fork over $4,400. But that didn't stop this guy from suing Disney for supposedly using his "drawings, screenplays, outlines, blueprints, storyboards, and other original materials" to create Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Disney, of course, denies it. Then there's this guy, who says Jim Jarmusch ripped him off to make Broken Flowers, although this other guy thinks that's a crock, and guess what? Jim Jarmusch denies it.

But the one we feel sorriest for? The guy who had three screenplays deleted from his computer by the phone company employee who came to hook up his DSL line.

 

Richard Linklater: From "Slacker" to "Scanner"

From Salon.com and Prisonplanet.com

Have you noticed how screenwriter-directors are a whole lot more loyal to their hometowns these days? M. Night Shyamalan has his Hollywood mansion, only it's in his native Philadelphia, and Richard Linklater continues to shoot his films in Austin. Here, he and a lot of buddies talk about how life in the Texas city gradually coalesced into his indelible first movie, Slacker. And in conversation with fellow Austinite Alex Jones, he reveals why he felt obliged to keep the screenplay of his latest, A Scanner Darkly, faithful to the original novel, and how he screwed around with Bruce Willis's head while filming it. (Audio player required for the latter.)