In other words, you agree with Vonnegut. (Who calls for better/wiser stewardship.)

I have found that creating a very detailed outline in advance really helps. It means that I never lose my sense of direction and purpose; I always have a "reason" to write the next sentence.

I think the trick would be not to write a whole half-novel before you start editing. It makes sense to me that "sticking with the garbage" too long would start to have a cumulative effect on the whole, since everything is building on what came before.

Co-operative games fascinate me; any info available online for this game yet?

Thoroughly enjoyed it and found it quite coherent.
Next!

No, he says "fly" in the films too.

Ah, brings back happy memories of Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach. That book was such a lifesaver back in junior high.

I suspect they are actually from Tethys the moon.

Hey, thanks for posting this. She is totally delightful to listen to.

I wonder (though again, I haven't seen the film, so I don't know) if the exposition-heaviness is the result of Goldsman's attempt to get as much of Helprin's prose into the film as he could manage. Most people who are fans of the book like it for its sumptuous and energetic prose, and since this was a passion project…

I love that Goldsman basically comes up with not one, but two Magic Negroes: a good one and an evil one.
From what I can infer from the reviews, this script seems to be suffering from a terminal case of "first thought, best thought." (In screenwriting, I've found, the first thought is almost always the stupidest, most…

Of course Scorsese's recent Hugo has a pretty major Helprin vibe. Both in terms of general atmosphere as well as some concrete details: kid lives up in the clockworks much as Peter Lake lives in the ceiling of Grand Central Station.

Haven't seen the movie yet, but one interesting thing about this review and other similar ones is how the woolly-headed fantasy mythos they're all pointing out as especially egregious and incoherent is actually similarly egregious and incoherent in the book — it's just well-hidden under Helprin's very attractive…

Great to see those Foss spaceships getting special attention. Some of his most magical work.
(I too would immediately grab a book collecting the Foss / Moebius / Giger artwork for this film.)

Quite an intelligent and thoughtful interview, it seems to me. Actual execution is a whole other matter, but Goldman gets major points for how he seems to have personally engaged with the material.

I would argue that it was actually X-Men that truly got comics right. The tone of that film was just spot-on.
(For the record, Burton's Batman left me completely cold. Felt like an empty exercise in derivative production design and canned emotions. The '80s in a nutshell.)

It was ingenious how Jackson & company re-threaded that romance back into the main body of the story. Elrond's monologue to Arwen in The Two Towers, straight out of the Appendix, is one of the best moments in the entire movie trilogy. (But they push it too hard in ROTK. There's way too much forced drama in general…

Amazed no one's posted one of the helmets from Alien.

Not crazy about the big bar/sign in front of the cacti. Distracts from the action.

"This city has ALWAYS been "unaffordable" and it gets unaffordable every year."