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    Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?


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lunarchick - 09:45am Aug 23, 2001 EST (#8037 of 8047)
lunarchick@www.com

On endings: from The Australian 22Aug a few points:

Aussie author Ms Aronson has won literary prize for 'Scriptwriting Updated: New and Conventional Ways of Writing for the screen' putting her in demand on the international film school lecture circuit.

She says film audiences reared on interactive computer games are much more demanding than those who were capitvated by classics such as Casablanca.


(Showalter -- She's surely missing something re this comment?)

"Scriptwriting is like being an architect and a builder. My book sets out some tricks of the trade for creating a good structure, but that is only half the the story." said Aronson.

"The three-act structure is not dead. Parallel narrative stories take the three-act structure, chop it up and put it back together. But you need to know the three-act structure before getting into the tricky stuff."

Her theories about plot structures have been praised in the US.*

After repeated viewings of films which successfully used complex narratives and dissection of serveral that flopped. Aronson identified four plot structures and the components that made them effective.

"I have pinpointed some very practical guidelines as to how you write complex plots. It all seems terribly obvious but a lot of films fall short becasue they miss one element."

Trained as a classical musician. she likens her thories to the mathematical structure of the symphony. ---------

Raises a question re getting to an ending in The Cold War. The script has been complex. The ending has to be 'take down the weapons - before they take us down'. So how will the script be written, the ending play out. Has everyone been reading from the same page ... with comparable levels of understanding - weapons are dangerous - with a mind of their own, plus subjected to the minds and whims of power brokers.

  • Australian readers had to be reassured that she'd made it in the USA. (Hits NY Goldsmiths College October+)

    lunarchick - 09:50am Aug 23, 2001 EST (#8038 of 8047)
    lunarchick@www.com

    3act structure:

    While the prolific, practical and innovative Lope de Vega was meeting the need for changing techniques necessitated by changing times and audience interests; he also was combating a barrage of criticism from the traditionalists. His 1609 Arte nuevo de hacer comedias is addressed to the Academy of Madrid, that bastion of Aristotilian authority that had chastised him for failing to observe the unities, for reducing the five classical acts to three and for shamelessly mixing comedy and tragedy in the same play. He retorted that of course, he knew the rules, that he put them under a lock and six keys and shut Plautus and Terence out of his study when he started to write. He was writing for today's public, a public with its own language and its own tastes. The mixture of comedy and tragedy, he claimed, was true to life; his dual plot lines kept the public in suspense until the very end and the three act structure allowed him to introduce the characters and their situations, tie the knot and build the action to the denouement. Echoing Horace and eschewing Aristotle, the father of the Spanish Golden Age comedia explicated his views of plot, character, diction, thought, song and spectacle as he had practiced them in all but six of his 483 plays. That number--483-- he added, included the play he finished that very week (11-19). http://www.msstate.edu/dept/cas/wiltrout.html

    lunarchick - 09:54am Aug 23, 2001 EST (#8039 of 8047)
    lunarchick@www.com

    The cold war hasn't finished its 3rd Act. It has peaked (Bay of Pigs), and now reached the "take down" point .. the end is almost in sight!

    lunarchick - 09:58am Aug 23, 2001 EST (#8040 of 8047)
    lunarchick@www.com

    Casablanca was a wwii film .. and that war was visual and more interactive than Nintendo - surely! And scarey too!

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