Wow, I didn't post all weekend and I didn't realize it until I was reading my own blog. Sometimes the weekend goes by in such a blur.

I took a seminar on Aristotle's Poetics for Screenwriting in Palo Alto. I'd studied Aristotle's Poetics before in college, and it was interesting to reread it and apply it to screenplay writing. The guy who wrote the book and who flew in from NYC to teach the class also introduced the theory of Semiotics and applied to story analysis. Semiotics is some french structural theory of storytelling which came about in the 1950's. I'll have to read up on Semiotics because I don't know much about it, and it sounded like a good way to analyze stories.

I give the guy creds because he was a paid story analyst for Miramax in NYC, and is a filmmaker who got hired to be a story analyst after showing his independent film to movie execs. He even gave the class a handout on what how to do "coverage", which is what a story analyst does. A coverage is just a word movie execs use to say "summary of a written screenplay". The movie exec says "give me the coverage" of that screenplay, which is what you thought, short summary of the story, and whether you think it should be moved on in the process or "passed".

For his coverage example, the guy handed out his summary of "Nurse Betty". It was fun to read what he thought of the screenplay, because I really, really thought the movie was very good and interesting. "Nurse Betty" wasn't your typical Hollywood film, but it was still very, very enjoyable to watch.

Then on Sunday, I went to church, worked out, and ran errands. A typical Sunday for me.