Authorship and art are inextricably tied, so what can we do when we love the art and loathe the artist? — Manhattan is objectively one of the greatest films ever made. It’s well written, well acted, well directed, well shot and well edited. There’s just one problem with it. I feel dirty watching it. Why? Because the film’s author is a credibly accused pedophile and, even if that’s somehow not true…

On the comic masterpiece that is ‘Crimes of The Future’ — I love Videodrome. No. No. You don’t understand. I love Videodrome. I saw it as a student and it transformed what I considered narratively possible. Videodrome was prescient, yet it remains destined to come up within the context of any conversation about media. If you haven’t seen Videodrome, do yourself…

My orders for The USA and NATO — In the first half of the last century, the world reinvented itself. World War One threw off the shackles of empire. World War Two confronted what would come after. In the ashes of war, the world decided what it wanted to become and plotted a course. It did this largely…

Never try to con a conman — Being a magician is usually a pretty square job, in the sense that magicians aren’t usually doing anything remotely illegal. That said, there are occasions when you have to walk over to the wrong side of the tracks to learn something. This exposure to methods often brings with it exposure…

He’s not a chess player. He’s a wrestler. — When the western media discusses Vladimir Putin, it often relies on tired tropes about Russia in order to characterize his manner of “leadership”. This is in keeping with the western media’s habit of waxing cinematic about any subject on which it can conjecture. As Russia has a long association with…

And there’s more than one way to skin the cat you saved. — Here’s a question I can’t answer: Is it “Story Structures” or “Stories Structure”? I fell into writing when I least expected it. I was studying to be a director. I took a course on screenwriting because I felt a director who doesn’t understand writing is like a race car driver…

I love a good tool I can carry every day, so long as it makes my life better. I’ve gone through lots of pocket knives, pens, you name it. When I find something I truly love, all instincts to find the bigger better deal vanish. When I got my Pilot…

On the surprising truth about research — Writing is all about research. A nugget of advice I was lucky enough to hear before going to college was to study things outside of my major, film, in order to have subjects about which I might make a movie. I made it a point to study a variety of…

A theory on why the Republicans stumble to the right — Have you ever gone on Google Earth and looked at satellite photos of mountains and thought they look like ripples of sand or dried mud? Isn’t it crazy that such huge things are in fact made up of billions of instances of such small items as ripples of sand and…