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+--- Thread: Scriptnotes podcast: Donnie Darko / Groundhog Day (/showthread.php?tid=2276)
Scriptnotes podcast: Donnie Darko / Groundhog Day - El Gordo - 09-03-2014
I've been listening to the Scriptnotes podcast for a long time (though bear in mind that the March 2014 exchange rate is 1 Internet Month = 1.189 Real World Years).
It's not a perfect podcast, but if you're a film enthusiast it's interesting. The two presenters, John August and Craig Mazin, are working, mainstream screenwriters. Not exactly right at the top of the pile but successful enough to have written things people will have heard of -- Big Fish, Hangover 3, Charlie's Angels etc. If you're a Kermode & Mayo addict like me, you may be interested in a different perspective on the medium. They don't review films; they talk about writing them.
Anyway, they've had a couple recently that I found particularly interesting. One was an interview with Richard Kelly, the writer of Donnie Darko --
PODCAST 118 and the most recent -- PODCAST 133 which talked in depth about Groundhog Day, following the recent death of one of its writers, Harold Ramis. I had to watch the film again for the first time in years, and was reminded -- or perhaps realised for the first time -- what a perfect movie it is.
As for Donnie Darko, I'd not heard of it until the illustrious MLCMM tipped me off about 10 years ago. I promptly fell under its influence like many before me. The Richard Kelly interview is a fascinating insight into the process of trying to get a film from the page to the screen. It's a remarkable story. He wrote the screenplay just after he graduated from college which, to anyone who has seen it and enjoyed its youthful insights, won't come as a complete surprise.