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Becoming a good writer is not just about writing well — it’s about rewriting well. I know plenty of promising writers who positively fail at that essential skill. They are unable to move beyond their first drafts, to process feedback, and to shape their own raw material into production-worthy scripts.

This summer a resource for the self-aware among this set is being offered by Columbia University. Columbia’s Film School chair Ira Deutchman recently announced the Screenplay Revision Workshop, which is open to all. From Ira’s blog at Tribeca:

In all my years in the film business and my travels around the world, the one thing that consistently comes up is that aspiring filmmakers need help developing their stories. Within the studio system, there is an infrastructure consisting of agents, lawyers and studio executives that—for better or worse—are working with screenwriters to hone their stories to be...

Chicago – It’s difficult to think of a more appropriate film to be released on the first day of Black History Month 2011 than Anthony Fabian’s under-appreciated gem, “Skin.” First screened on the festival circuit in 2008 before being rolled out for a super-limited theatrical run in Fall 2009, this moving and important fact-based drama never got the exposure it so richly deserved.

The reason why Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus” failed to move many younger viewers was the fact that it never allowed audiences to feel the decades of struggle in South Africa that preceded the miraculous moment of unity explored by its story. The film never even bothered to explain the meaning of the word, ‘apartheid.’ “Skin” may in fact be the perfect companion piece to Eastwood’s film, since it literally puts a human face on the period of legalized racism enforced by the country’s ruling white minority for nearly a half-century.