I am a compulsive, obsessive swimmer. I swim 1700 meters (just over a mile) seven days a week at UCLA’s incomparable Sunset Canyon Recreation Center. Since joining the film faculty in the ‘70s I have swum (literally) eleven thousands miles in the Donald K. Park Pool. That’s like swimming to New York and back, and […]
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The nation continues to reel in the face of the horror at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which at the time of this writing is still only a couple of weeks old. Surely there can be no experience more dreadful than to lose a child. To contemplate the senselessness of the events in Connecticut, however, provides […]
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At my house we’ve been watching the screeners that the studios send to Academy and various Guild members. As always, there’s more bad art than good. That is, alas, art’s way. Several of the films I’ve not yet seen and I already hate them because of their length. I say sight-unseen that The Master is […]
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This seems to have been a reasonably good year for films. Lincoln blew me away! I saw it at a Writers Guild screening with writer Tony Kushner in attendance doing a Q & A after. I generally avoid seeing movies at the Guild because I don’t like the audiences. Half the group loves the movie […]
Comments Off on A Look Back at Films of 2012
Another summer season of Hollywood blockbusters comes to an official close with the passing of Labor Day. Earlier in the summer, the Los Angeles Times reported a story entitled “Film jobs for screenwriters fall for second year,” which painted a picture on how screenwriting jobs and wages in Hollywood were on the decline. Reflecting, according […]
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Why write screenplays, in particular comedies, when the political season is hard upon us? Who can compete for laughs against Newt and Rick and Mitt and the whole sorry crew? They long fervently for a sweet and serene time that never was. And, if it had been, would we want to return there? – Richard […]
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According to political online news site The Daily Caller, HBO lurches leftward with its programming. As Christian Toto writes: Take a peek at HBO’s programming slate and you’ll find a plethora of left-leaning content. Each Friday, Bill Maher brings his brand of liberal fury to the channel’s late-night lineup. But Richard Walter isn’t convinced – […]
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Many have noted that when the new congress convenes it will be the first in sixty-four years without a Kennedy. I preach to my screenwriting students that fantasy is for their movies. For their lives: reality. No political name in the last half century has been more romanticized and idealized than Kennedy. In October of […]
Comments Off on The Huffington Post Publishes New Commentary – “The Kennedy Myth” by Richard Walter
After copping a quick degree in a jackpot, giveaway, draft-dodge of a Masters program in Radio/Television at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications in 1966, I piloted my VW beetle to California for what I expected to be a visit of three weeks. At the time there were only about eleven people in the […]
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In cinema writer Judy Abel’s new Boston Globe article, “The Sweet Sound of Success,” she writes: In one corner we have a lofty British film about a stammering monarch who struggles to communicate and reluctantly opens himself to friendship and trust. In the other, we have a brassy American movie about a generation that “friends’’ […]
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