I saw the movie "The Road to Perdition" over the weekend. In the screenwriting seminar I took last fall, the visiting UCLA professor told the class that the screenplay was written by someone who he knew and who had taken classes at the screenwriting school where he was lecturing and had worked on the screenplay there.

The local San Francisco screenwriter received $125K from the studio for the rights to the screenplay, which is the standard Writer's Guild fee, and then when the script was made into a movie, the screenwriter received $350K, which is again the standard fee. The local screenwriter had since supposedly moved down to LA, and was hired a movie studio and was working on another screenplay.

It was quite a good movie, and I'm surprised it didn't get nominated for an oscar. It did however, lack a certain amount of emotional punch that I think you need to have be a really great movie and get nominated. The whole tone of the movie was very understated, but still quite dramatic.

I love that some schlub in a screenwriting seminar somehwere in downtown San Francisco was working on this script, and it became a movie that was well received. That's pretty cool.