Films

Books and magazine articles have long provided the IP Hollywood depends on, but until recently, authors played little role in the process. Now, lit agencies and publishers are changing the rules and shortening the page-to-screen pipeline.

There is more than one devastating murder in my debut novel One Night, New York. It would, of course, ruin the book to reveal who dies at whose hand, but what I want to do here is poke around a little bit in the who and the when and the how of writing these murder scenes.  Read more

There are few commercial principles more reliable than this: there will always be another James Bond movie.

It isn't always easy to see how he'll get to where he's going next - and the franchise's producer, Barbara Broccoli, isn't sure either.  Read more

It was author David Finkel who taught me to "report cinematically." This was key, he argued, to writing a story that feels like a movie, using the variety of camera angles available to the cinematographer, from wide establishing shots to extreme close-ups.  Read more

Much has been written about the style and mood of William Friedkin's The French Connection (1971). Commentators are fond of identifying influences ranging from Costa-Gavras' Z and the Maysles brothers work, to the more recently noted Kartemquin documentaries of the 1960s.  Read more