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THE SHOOTING SCRIPT
My first job in film was reading scripts for New Line Cinema. When I got rid of my old Epson desktop computer, which was a couple of years after I stopped reading, I counted the coverage files and realized that I read 1,300 scripts for the company over the few years I worked for them. And though that gig was some years in the past, I constantly hear news about writers whose name I recognize from decade-old scripts.
One such writer is Tom Benedek, an early script of whose I remember reading and liking. The New York Times has this piece in today’s paper detailing Benedek’s recent screenplay accomplishments. Using drafts of his 20-something unproduced scripts as his raw materials, Benedek is firing live ammunition into them and exhibiting them as art:
“After 20-plus years of a middling career as a Hollywood screenwriter, Mr. Benedek, 56 — the brother of Peter Benedek, a partner in the United Talent Agency — is forging a new path in the field of fine arts, using the raw material of his past failures for a canvas. Having shot the >Ivory Joe script, which he wrote in 1992, Mr. Benedek will make it into a bronze sculpture, or take photographs with a special camera for striking jumbo prints. He will show these and other pieces this month in an exhibition at the Frank Pictures gallery in Santa Monica titled ‘Shot by the Writer – Works on Paper: 1982-2004.’
