Seraphic Secret

Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Movie fanatic. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.

Screenwriting

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

by 7 Comments

“I was not a born actress. No one knows it better than I. If I had any latent talent, I have had to work hard, listen carefully, do things over and over and then over again in order to bring it out.”
—Jean Harlow

[Read more…] about Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

by 9 Comments

“I was lazy. I would have been a hell of a lot better actress had I taken it more seriously. I never had the proper respect for acting. Quite often, I learned my lines on the way to the studio.”
—Ava Gardner

[Read more…] about Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

by 6 Comments

Yul Brynner, 1949
“I am just a nice, clean-cut Mongolian boy.”
In fact, Yul Brenner (b. Yuliy Borisovich Briner, 1920 – 1985) was born in the city of Vladivostok in the Far Eastern Republic, a puppet state controlled by Soviet Russia before being merged into the wider USSR two years later. He enjoyed telling tall tales and exaggerating his background and early life for the press, claiming that he was born “Taidje Khan” of part-Mongol parentage, on the Russian island of Sakhalin. In reality of Swiss-German, Russian, and partial Buryat ancestry. Wikipedia

[Read more…] about Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

by 9 Comments

“Unlike writers or painters, we don’t sit down in front of a blank canvas and say, ‘How do I start? Where do I start?’ We’re given the springboard of the text, a plane ticket, told to report to Alabama, and there’s a group of people all ready to make a film and it’s a marvelous life.“
—Albert Finney R.I.P. 1936-2019

[Read more…] about Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

Screenwriting 101: The Two Biggest Mistakes

by 4 Comments

I’m frequently asked to read and critique screenplays.

Most scripts by inexperienced writers are pretty terrible. This is to be expected. The craft of screenwriting is demanding and it usually takes several years and quite a few scripts to master the form.

There are two central problems I see over and over again. And it’s worth pointing them out to those who aspire to write scripts that have any hope of being produced.

[Read more…] about Screenwriting 101: The Two Biggest Mistakes