“Julie D’Aubigny was a 17th-century bisexual French opera singer and fencing master who killed or wounded at least ten men in life-or-death duels, performed nightly shows on the biggest and most highly-respected opera stage in the world, and once took the Holy Orders just so that she could sneak into a convent and bang a nun. If nothing in that sentence at least marginally interests you, I have no idea why you’re visiting this website.”
There’s also the bit where she and her nun girlfriend escaped by burning down the convent to fake their own deaths. And her habit of flashing anyone who didn’t believe such a good swordsman could actually be a woman. And the boyfriend she picked up by driving a foot of sharpened steel through his shoulder.
Basically, what I’m saying is that if she weren’t real, I’d accuse Steven Moffat of making her up.
WHERE IS MY TV SHOW ABOUT THIS LADY
“The narrative in Truffaut’s film is episodic it tells the story in different episodes, it’s sort of a mosaic of small pieces that work together. Truffaut’s films are character > story. The two most important elements in Truffaut’s films are camera movement, aesthetics, dialog and characters. It’s a different way of story telling and it isn’t narrative, a narrative story is for example Casablanca, beginning, middle, end. In that order with focusing on plot that way.”
— cinyma
La Celeste Praline: What To Do When You Have No Plot
Sometimes you want to write, but you have no plot ideas. Perhaps your fingers are itchy to write, you want to meet a submissions deadline, a character is bugging you to tell their story, or a single image, phrase, or scene is sitting heavy in your head. But you still can’t find…
Certosa di Pavia, Italy (by gianva)
“Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.”
— Joss Whedon (via moriarty)
(Source: metricaprovince)
Villon
Villon through the café window: still
present in Paris, under the carnal
pomegranate, the piercing stars?
Make your stand, if you wish to know,
the the rue des Mauvais Garçons, and con
the priceless ballads of this lyrical bad lad.
Say over, where the sun still blinds the road
with blade-cold shadow, the things an ageing
delinquent knew, time and again,
by sinking up to his neck in truth:
wary pinch-bellied wolves, his pals,
forgiveness lurking in dangerous corners,
exact sins beating in the marrow
of the mind, conversion of the soul
in a turn of phrase, “I am his”,
and girls with bodies soft and smooth.
Can any good thing come out of gang-land?
Frenchie Villon, apache with a pen,
seated by freezing ink among
inveterate grudges, garret humours
(and every line a nice piece of work),
rehearses enough misdoings to ground
an angel, with more than enough unique
unsleeping honesty to bleach the devil.
Say what you like, he’s not one of us;
he had the balls to let himself
be struck forever with perpetual clarity.
“Irony ruined everything. I wish my movies could have played at drive-ins, but they never did, because of irony. Even the best exploitation movies were never meant to be `so bad they were good`. They were not made for the intelligentsia. They were made to be violent for real, or to be sexy for real. But now everybody has irony. Even horror films now are ironic. Everybody’s in on the joke now. Everybody’s hip. Nobody takes anything at face value anymore.”
— John Waters (via banal-echo-gee)
Avoid the bad habit of overwriting your screenplay...
I find too many times in my screenplay consultation beginning screenwriters suffer from the bad habit of overwriting. It detracts from your screenplay and will immediately brand you as an amateur…
This is just a reminder to all you writers out there that if you think you’ve written a great paragraph, you are wrong. You are so wrong. There is only one great paragraph and it was writen by O. Henry and it is this paragraph.
There can be no more. Literature has peaked. It peaked in this paragraph in 1906 and you and every other writer you know are just aftershocks of the One Great Paragraph. Sorry, writers who think you’ve written a great paragraph.
You haven’t.
