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How creator and showrunner Sascha Penn ensures ‘Raising Kanan’ sticks to its roots as a family drama

January 4, 2022

Kanan Stark (Mekai Curtis) sits at a diner table along with his friends and family, joking around and smiling. As they step outside, a car slows down and gunshots fire. Just as quickly as they could smile inside, they duck.

Rising Through the Ranks: Sam Pavich on becoming a writer’s assistant on '4400'

January 3, 2022

Sam Pavich accumulated plenty of experience as an assistant throughout four years in the Echo Lake Entertainment offices before getting staffed as a writer's assistant on 4400 last March.

Auntyland Film Festival's founder and director Sylvia Wong Lewis on flipping the script

January 3, 2022

The new Auntyland Film Festival (AFF) is accepting short-length indie films by and for women and BIPOC artists for its inaugural film festival now through January 30, 2022. The film festival touts itself as the only film festival that "embraces matur...

5 Screenwriting Takeaways: Nicolas Cage is full of empathetic quiet rage in 'Pig'

January 3, 2022

Pig created quite the stir this year. With its strange premise: Nicolas Cage plays a hermit in the woods who is forced out of hiding to recoup a stolen truffle-hunting pig, one may expect from the trailer they are getting John Wick meets Tarantino, b...

5 Screenwriting Takeaways: How ‘Nightmare Alley’ creates a mind-bending neo-noir thriller

December 31, 2021

Nightmare Alley is one of those movies that keeps you guessing from the first frame. Essentially everything about the movie is both familiar and completely foreign to the audience, making it an enticing and curiosity-filled ride. Set at the end of th...

5 Screenwriting Takeaways: 'Licorice Pizza' is weird, wonderful, and full of hope

December 30, 2021

Licorice Pizza is about as Paul Thomas Anderson a flick as they come. Anderson somehow makes the sprawling San Fernando Valley feel manageable as kid actor and entrepreneur Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) makes his part of town a little smaller by fr...

Ragged Heart' is a haunting and engrossing look at regret

December 30, 2021

Ragged Heart is a raw journey through the heart of a grieving musician who loses his gifted daughter after an unexpected phone call. Filmmaker Evan McNary has crafted a haunting narrative, which drifts through the secret lives of the artists of Athen...

History of TV: 'The Golden Girls' golden era

December 30, 2021

What would the world do without Betty White? The famous actress perhaps originally became that way for her role in The Golden Girls, though these days she might be better known for that meme about Captain America finally dating someone his own age — ...

Writer-director Craig Pryce and 'The Marijuana Conspiracy'

December 29, 2021

In Toronto, Canada circa 1972 when marijuana was still considered highly controversial, young women looking for a fresh start in life endure isolated captivity in a true 98-day human experiment studying the effects of marijuana on females — a manufac...