Griffith's techniques of cross-cutting and parallel editing changed the cinema forever. A lot of people cite The Birth of a Nation (1915) as his most important film, and that may be true. But Broken Blossoms (1919) is by far my favorite.

D. W. Griffith was born on this day in 1875.

Strombo shows us how his interviewing chops have improved by asking Maestro Cronenberg some very tough questions. Cronenberg's favorite Romantic-Comedy? Wonderful answer. As for Freud and Jung's Bromance ... I guess that's one way of putting it!

The three fundamental oppositions of Western Narrative that are so essential to understanding other concepts in genre are: Reason vs. Passion, Innocence vs. Experience and Body vs. Soul.

These reviewers of David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method mention that this film about Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Sabina Spielrein was based on a play, but they don't discuss Christopher Hampton's film script specifically. As I mentioned in my own review of the film, the dialogue's emphasis on psychoanalytical concepts and terminology is perfectly in keeping with the kinds of characters the screenplay deals with. Just imagine David Cronenberg, David Lynch and David Fincher hanging out together - of course they'll be talking about writing scripts and making films. Why should Freud, Jung and Spielrein be any different with respect to their passions when it comes to giving them a cinematic afterlife? The point is that Hampton's script dramatizes all of the psychoanalytical lingo heard in the film and puts that fascinating language in the service of each character's driving ambition. With psychological, and for Jung, spiritual health at stake, what the characters say doesn't matter nearly as much as how their dialogue motivates their actions. And it is very clear that the characters of Jung, Freud and Spielrein are driven by some very deep psychological and spiritual suffering indeed. In fact, the narrative presentation of their needs falls perfectly in line with the stories Cronenberg has been telling all along.

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A short talk on director David Cronenberg's film about Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Sabina Spielrein exploring the relationship between A Dangerous Method (2011) and the rest of Cronenberg's cinematic oeuvre. Discover the deeper ideas embedded in Christopher Hampton's script as brought to life by Cronenberg, himself a master screenwriter.

_In this video I respond to Corey Anton's thoughts on Forrest Gump by discussing the military's response to the script as written by screenwriter Eric Roth. His screenplay faced quite an interesting challenge from a production standpoint before it was realized on screen.

_A short talk on Film Theory: What it is, what it does, why it matters and how we can use it to understand the screenwriting principles that form the life-changing scripts we all want to see realized on the screen.