You’ve probably read over the past several days that Francis Ford Coppola’s computer has been stolen. The computer includes the script for Coppola’s next movie, Tetro, not to mention “many years of work,” and photographs of his family, as the auteur told the Associated Press.

Coppola is currently in Argentina, and his offices there were robbed by four armed thieves. They broke down the front door, tied up four of Coppola’s employees, and ripped off four computers, cell phones, and camera equipment. One of the thieves was carrying a knife and reportedly cut one of Coppola’s employees during the scuffle.

Without question, this is a writer’s worst nightmare. If my worst enemies were writers, I still wouldn’t wish this on them. We all do whatever we can to make sure our data is safe, but who could imagine a scenario like this?

To be sure, there are many writers who have had disaster scenarios where data was lost, or just barely retrieved from being lost in cyberspace forever. Having a computer that crashes a lot, and having one nightmare scenario of my own where a major file went lost forever, I don’t press SAVE after I type every single word, but close enough (in fact, I just pressed it right as I finished this sentence).

At a press conference for Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino recalled one time when he left his notebook where he writes his screenplays in the back of a cab, and once his publicist realized he left it there, they went chasing after the taxi down the street, and got it back just in time.

Screenwriting great Robert Towne (Chinatown) recalled the first screenplay he ever wrote was for B movie king Roger Corman, who gave the script to several people to rework. Towne recalls, “They took scissors to it to try and rearrange the scenes, then they lost all the pieces! That was it for that screenplay.”

And how about James Toback taking six years to write the screenplay for Bugsy, and right as he was about to Fed-Ex it to Warren Beatty, he lost it. As Toback told Premiere, “Of the 5,000-odd pages I had by then written, the last 200 presentable, playable, shootable pages-were the only ones that were lost…Of course I could tell no one-Beatty least of all-that I had lost the script because no one would have believed me. Even I didn’t entirely believe me.”

As Toback continued, “With passages and scenes from the various drafts decorating the floor, I dictated a mix of improvisational brusts and what I hoped were breakthroughs of memory and invention to my assistant…” Finally the script was reconstructed, Beatty liked it, and the movie was of course made.

You may have heard the urban legend about muggers in New York who once they’ve taken someone’s wallet would keep the money, but also mail the victim’s I.D. and cards back to them. Here’s hoping Coppola’s data, work, and memories will also similarly return to him safe and sound.

Okay, it’s confession time: I liked Halo 3.

That might not be a huge confession for most folks, since the game has gotten strong reviews and made millions of dollars in less than a week. But I’ve never been a Halo guy. I never fell under the mystique of the original Halo. I wouldn’t call myself a “Halo Hater,” but I am a Halo skeptic. In fact, I’ve frequently referred to Halo: Combat Evolved as one of the most overrated games of all time. Yes, it’s a good game, but it’s not a great game. For all the achievements Halo possessed with its graphics, visuals and surprisingly slick first-person-shooter gameplay for a console, the game suffered from redundant, uninspired level design and recycled action sequences.

First Francis Ford Coppola’s computers got stolen from his offices in Argentina where he’s planning his next movie. Then Tyler Nelson, an actor in the new Indiana Jones movie gave away the entire plot to a newspaper in Oklahoma, causing Steven Spielberg to hit the roof (he’s threatened to cut all of Nelson’s scenes from the film). Then before the dust from that catastrophe could settle, Spielberg’s computers, and photos from the next Indy installment were stolen.

Is this a weird case of serendipity, overzealous fan boys getting desperate for information, or the next episode of the world’s dumbest crooks? Spielberg has always gone to great lengths to protect the storylines of his movies from being leaked. Trying to get a copy of a Spielberg script before the film’s release? You’ll have better luck getting access to missile launch codes, which is why this current leak of info and computer theft must be Spielberg’s worst nightmare come true.

Just as I was finishing this blog, Reuters reported that a suspect has been apprehended in the Spielberg theft. He’d apparently been advertising the Indy info for sale in e-mails he’d been sending to Hollywood gossip sites. I was really hoping for Coppola and Spielberg doing an O.J. style citizen’s arrest. Imagine them breaking down the door of a hotel room in Vegas, seeing copies of their scripts everywhere, screaming: “Look at this sh*t! You think you can steal my sh*t?!?”

In what has to be one of the most oddly-timed divorces in the history of business – or otherwise – Bungie announced today that it will officially split from Microsoft, its parent company since 2000, and become a privately held independent game developer once again. This comes on the heels of Halo 3’s mega-launch, which brought in $300 million in its first week and a whopping $170 million in its first 24 hours. So why did Bungie and Microsoft split up? And who gets custody of the vaunted Halo franchise?

PC gamers were left out in the cold forced to stare longingly through frost-covered windows as some lucky Xbox 360 owners battled endlessly in the Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat multiplayer beta, but now their day is here. It's not a multiplayer demo but the single-player demo for Call of Duty 4 is now available at Yahoo! Games and ready for you to test your system against it.

I played the 360 multiplayer beta for Call of Duty 4 extensively - click here for the article - and if the PC version is anything close to the Xbox version this game is a must-have. I loved Call of Duty and Call of Duty 2 as much as the next guy but by the time it came to Call of Duty 3 - not to mention that it didn't even come to the PC - I was a little tired of Nazis and Thompson machine guns. Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat takes the excellent cinematic action and gameplay from the first two games and drops it squarely in the twentieth century.

As good as the multiplayer is I'm looking forward to getting my hands on some single-player action. The Call of Duty games are always great about capturing an action movie vibe and scripting situations that go beyond the typical run-and-gun gameplay of shooters. The demo promises a full level from the game but it'll still be just a tease for the full campaigns.

Here are the requirements as posted and you may also need a Yahoo! account to access the download.

Required (minimum) Specs
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 2.4 GHz or AMD(R) Athlon(TM) 64 2800+ processor or any 1.8Ghz Dual Core Processor or better supported
RAM: 512MB RAM (768MB for Windows Vista)
Hard Drive: 8GB of free space
Video card: NVIDIA(R) Geforce(TM) 6600 or better or ATI(R) Radeon(R) 9800 Pro or better

Recommended Specs
CPU: 2.4 GHz dual core or better
RAM: 1G for XP; 2G for Vista
Hard Drive: 8GB of free space
Video card: 3.0 Shader Support recommended. Nvidia Geforce 7800 or better or ATI Radeon X1800 or better

If you’re a fan of the Transformers movie, you probably already know a sequel’s on the way for June 29, 2009. The creative team of director Michael Bay, as well as screenwriting team Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman are back, along with another scribe, Ehren Kruger.

Kruger first made a big splash with his screenplay Arlington Road, which won the prestigious Nichol Fellowship Award when he was still in his twenties. Since then, he’s written the American remake of The Ring, along with its sequel, as well as The Brothers Grimm and Skeleton Key.

Above: Transformers 2 Scribe Ehren Kruger

“Essentially Arlington Road was the first screenplay I had sold,” Kruger says. “It was also the first script of mine to be optioned and ultimately made. I had written other scripts before that I thought were more commercial, but they went nowhere. I wrote Arlington Road, thinking it was not particularly commercial, that it could be made for very little money as an independent film somewhere, and that’s the one that ends up being made on a large budget / Hollywood level!”

As Kruger told me, “I hadn’t original intended to be a writer. What I really wanted to do as a kid was build and design rollercoasters. I took a few architecture and engineering courses, and there was too much math involved. So as a second choice (laughs), I had a great love for movies, and I decided that screenwriting had a lot of the same qualities in terms of engineering an emotional response from an audience.”

According to the L.A. Times, plans for a Transformers sequel started two months before the first movie was released, and DreamWorks / Paramount sees the robots in disguise “as an extended saga, with an expansive mythology built into at least two more films.”

Above: Transformers screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman

The Times also reported that all three writers will be plenty busy trying to fit Transformers into their schedules. Kurtzman and Orci are producing the next Star Trek film, and just sold a series, Fringe, to Fox TV. They’re also working on a feature called Eagle Eye, as well as producing a movie called Nightlife, which Kruger is also writing.

With the writer’s strike ready to hit on November 1, it may be some time before the Transformers troika can hammer out a script, although they’re reportedly getting their ideas together for the film before they’re forced to shut down their laptops.

Although Kruger has specialized in medium budgeted / sized movies, he says, “It’s always very invigorating to exercise different creative muscles. That’s something writers need to do, and something they need to be very aware of. Staying in the same genre for too long, or writing the same kind of stories for too long, can really sap a writer’s energy, and different parts of your imagination will start to atrophy.”

In other movie news, Reuters has reported next year’s most anticipated movie is the next Indiana Jones installment, due on May 22, with The Dark Knight, due on July 18, coming in second. I just saw Raiders of the Lost Ark again, the first time I’ve seen it in many years. Considering it still holds up damn well after all this time, and the nearly twenty years of waiting for the next Indy film, Spielberg’s certainly got his work cut out for him.

The first page of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof script has a personal note to one of his all-time favorite screenwriters, Charles B. Griffith, thanking him for inspiration. If you’re not familiar with the name, he was Roger Corman’s chief scribe for many years, and wrote such B classics as Little Shop of Horrors and Death Race 2000 (he also launched the biker film with 1966’s The Wild Angels, which featured the real Hell’s Angels).

For many years, Griffith didn’t think any of the films he wrote would have any lasting value, but the success of the Little Shop musical, and Tarantino’s praise, showed him otherwise (at one time, Tim Burton was also going to remake Griffith’s X: the Man With the X Ray Eyes).

Thankfully, Griffith, unlike Ed Wood, was able to enjoy the fact that he had fans and was influential while he was still here. He passed away on September 28 at the age of 77. Before he passed, I spoke to him several times for my former alma matter, Creative Screenwriting magazine, and learned how fun movies can come together with even the tightest schedules (and even tighter wallets).

If you think breaking into Hollywood is impossible today, it was beyond impossible back in the fifties. The only producer giving anybody a break was Roger Corman. “It was really the only place you could break in,” Griffith said. Working with Corman, you had to work fast, and Griffith wrote one script, Rock All Night, in twenty-four hours. “I think it was the second rock and roll musical after Rock Around the Clock,” Griffith recalled.

Often Corman would show Griffith a set, and ask him to write a movie for it, which he did for the comedies Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors. One day he told Griffith, “These sets will be standing for two weeks, so you’ll have to give me a script in five days, and I’ll shoot it in five days.” Roger would also have posters drawn up for movies first, then Griffith had to write the script for the poster.

As for the genesis of Little Shop, one night Corman and Griffith went out nightclubbing, and after some drinks, Griffith started throwing out ideas, including a flower shop with a man-eating plant. “Writing the script, when it came to the moment, I just automatically started the plant talking,” said Griffith. “Roger said, ‘A talking plant?’ I said, ‘Why not?’”

Little Shop of Horrors would become a cult classic decades after its release, and in addition to inspiring the musical, it also featured a memorable early role for Jack Nicholson as a masochist who loves going to the dentist. ”I was astonished at how Little Shop did,” said Griffith. “It made more money every year for twenty five years, which is phenomenal. I don’t think there’s any record in the business like that.”

Death Race 2000, which Maxim voted as the #1 B movie of all time, was pitched to Corman when the producer read about Rollerball going into production. “I want to beat them out,” Corman told him, and they did. As Corman was able to spend more money on his movies, the scripts tooks longer (Death Race took three weeks).

As for his influence on Tarantino, Griffith told me, “I’m flabbergasted. It’s really the only recognition I’ve had. I don’t know of any other writers I’ve influenced.” Sure he didn’t have the impact of a screenwriter like Robert Towne (Chinatown, and also a former Corman alumni in his early days), but Griffith in his own unique way left his mark. Goodbye Charles, you will definitely be missed.

The buzz, the heat, the word on the street, whatever you want to call it, is very strong for American Gangster, the epic crime saga starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe that opens on November 2. Gangster is the true story of Frank Lucas, played by Washington, who ran a heroin empire in Harlem, and Richie Roberts, played by Crowe, the cop determined to nail him.

If the name Nicholas Pileggi, who is executive producing the film, rings a bell, he wrote the books that became GoodFellas and Casino (Pileggi also wrote the screenplays for both films with Martin Scorsese). Pileggi first met Lucas in prison, and knew it was a great story. Instead of writing it himself, he told Mark Jacobson about Lucas, and Jacobson’s profile of the druglord, “The Return of Superfly,” appeared in the August 14, 2000 issue of New York magazine.

Lucas is one of those colorful characters that makes a great true crime story. Even Roberts, and Judge Sterling Johnson, who sentenced Lucas to prison, fell under the American Gangster’s charm. These days, Pileggi told New York, “Lucas and Roberts are closest pals!” As Lucas himself told the magazine, “You see, I never went to school even for a day, but I got a Ph.D in street. When it comes to a street atmosphere, I know I’m going to make out.”

When Lucas got sprung from jail, the GoodFellas scribe hooked him up with Jacobson, and along with Roberts, they went to Hollywood to try and sell the story. Producer Brian Grazer (A Beautiful Mind) was the one Hollywood player who responded to the project after meeting Lucas and Roberts. But the film didn’t have an easy transition to the screen. Initially Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) was going to direct, but Universal pulled the plug over budget concerns. As the L.A. Times reported, Grazer kept the project alive, and it finally landed Ridley Scott (Alien and Blade Runner) to direct.

Universal also brought in Jay Z to provide the soundtrack, a smart move considering the popularity of mob films in the hip-hop community, although the Times also reported Gangster as a risky bet because “without eye-popping special effects, comic book heroes or big laughs, these films don’t much interest young audiences…” On the contrary, there’s a whole new generation of young fans just getting turned on to the Godfathers, and there’s certainly a big young following for Scarface, GoodFellas, and now The Departed.

American Gangster screenwrtiter Steve Zaillian, who also wrote Awakenings and won the Academy Award for Schindler’s List, told Script Magazine, “I think it’s no accident that movies about gangsters are all successful and entertaining and fascinating.” For a lot of young filmmakers, the Godfather saga is modern Shakespeare: The rise and fall of a king, and the drama and tragedy in his kingdom.

GoodFellas did a great job of showing audiences what’s attractive about joining the mob, and the deeper you get into the movie, the uglier and darker things get. The beauty of a well-crafted mob movie is for the two to three hours you’re in your theater seat, you live vicariously like a wise guy, and thankfully don’t have to die like one.

The L.A. Times report on American Gangster also listed the top grossing crime flicks in history according to Media By Numbers. It didn’t mention if this is world-wide gross or domestic only, or if it includes DVD and all that, but anyways, here’s the biggest mob hits, on the screen that is…

The Godfather - $135 million

The Departed $132.4 million

The Untouchables - $76.3 million

The Godfather: Part III - $66.7 million

The Godfather: Part II - $47.5 million

GoodFellas - $46.8 million

Scarface - $44.7 million

Casino - $42.5 million

On October 30, a new book chronicling The Sopranos is due to be released. Well, it’s actually a book that’s already been released, but with new material, including a new interview with the show’s creator David Chase, excerpts of which have appeared in Entertainment Weekly and the Associated Press.

It is in this new interview that Chase addresses the series’ unsatisfying finish that left many fans bewildered and angry, which apparently left Chase bewildered and confused. “There was a war going on that week, and attempted terror attacks in London,” Chase is quoted as saying. “But these people were talking about onion rings.” He also claimed the fans that were angry ”were just looking for an excuse to be pissed off.”

When the Sopranos became a phenomenon, David Chase, who had previously written for The Rockford Files, Moonlighting and Northern Exposure had suddenly become a deer in the media headlights. Everyone clamored to talk to him, but he proved a difficult interview who didn’t have much to say and would only speak to the most prestigious publications that wanted him.

Oddly enough, no one tried to talk to anyone else involved with The Sopranos, especially considering there were many other writers and directors who did great work for the show. When I was writing for Creative Screenwriting magazine, I had the good fortune to talk to the writing / producing team of Mitchell Burgess and Robin Green, and talking to them ended up being so much fun, it was like talking with good friends about your favorite episodes. Here’s a recap of our talk…

Burgess and Green recalled to me that the premiere party of The Sopranos took place in the basement of Tower Records in New York with several hundred people in attendance. Of course, no one had any idea the show would eventually have its season premiere at Radio City Music Hall. No one had any idea what the public would think of the show, all Burgess and Green knew was they thought the show turned out well, and they had a lot of fun writing it. That night, Green told David Chase, “This will either change television or sink like a stone.”

And as history has proven, it did the former instead of the latter, but it was a hard won battle. Chase had been pitching the idea a mob comedy for years, but nobody was interested. When he wrote a Sopranos pilot for Fox, he asked Burgess and Green if they were interested in coming aboard. “We worked with David before on Northern Exposure, so he knew our writing and he liked working with us,” Green says.

Fox ultimately passed. So did CBS. “I think it was turned down everywhere,” says Green. Finally Brad Gray, who had a development deal with Chase, took it to HBO, who at last said yes.

It’s hard to imagine The Sopranos on network television, but as Burgess and Green recalled, it was the exact same show, just without some of the language. “The difference would have been that it would have been very hard to write the show as we subsequently wrote it for a regular network,” Green says. “I don’t know if Tony would have been allowed to kill anybody, that sort of thing. The likeability factor.”

Where shows like Deadwood and The Sopranos clearly aren’t worried about “the likeability factor,” it was still a big step when Tony finally killed someone on the show. It was the only time Burgess and Green recalled debating anything with HBO, but they had a lot of internal debate about it as well.

“We went at it with some trepidation, but it was a creative decision that was made, and I think it was the right one,” Green says. “David’s point was that it’s a mob show. These people are killers, and we wouldn’t want to lose our credibility by having a soft-hearted mob boss.”

The characters on the Sopranos often lead two separate lives, which makes writing the characters on the show an even greater challenge. “Some TV shows that we’ve written for, which shall remain nameless, you could put any line of dialog in anybody’s mouth,” says Green. “You could switch them around, and it doesn’t matter because it’s mostly a debate of ideas more than characters. But these characters are so distinctive, they all have their own voice, and that’s what makes it such a pleasure to write.”

The Sopranos often captures a great reality of the mob, that there’s usually a lot of downtime. Some of the funniest scenes on the show have the members of Tony’s crew watching T.V., hanging out at the Badda Bing, and having pseudo intellectual conversations when they’re bored. “That’s what David likes, the every day boringness of these people’s lives,” says Green. “If it weren’t so boring, we’d show it more!”

Many in the mafia loved the Godfather when it was released in 1972, and as it turns out, people on both sides of the law enjoy The Sopranos. Green and the creators of the show have heard indirectly that members of the mob as well as the FBI are fans. “They think some of the characters and incidents are based on them,” says Green with a laugh. They’ve even read FBI transcripts where real life Mafioso were caught on tape talking about the show.

Before the show finally came to an end, Burgess and Green had already moved on to a development deal at Paramount. They couldn’t talk about what their next project would be, but they assured me it won’t take place in New Jersey. Once they were able to put The Sopranos behind them for good, Burgess and Green finally took some time to decompress and switch their minds out of goomba mode. “It’s fun to think our own thoughts,” said Green.

Like most of us, I grew up watching a lot of T.V. I enjoy nostalgia as much as anyone, if not more, and watching old T.V. shows and movies that we grew up with takes us back to much simpler, easier times in our lives.

I love to write about obscure pop culture, and it’s great to know there’s an audience that enjoys reliving it, even if that audience is often small, but I often have a fear that my interests could grow so obscure that my focus could narrow to the head of a pin.

Still, when I scan sites that sell old movies and T.V. shows, like classics2dvd.com and http://videoaddicts.8m.com/tvsite.html (which will soon move to the address: http://spockvideo.com ), I’m always amazed to find how many shows and movies I’ve never even heard of.

For every show that’s a hit, there’s dozens occupying the pop culture landfill that didn’t take off. Some show and movie descriptions I’ve read in books and catalogs made me want to check them out right away, while the way other movies / shows are described, you cringe wondering how they ever got made in the first place, and often they’re just as painful to watch (Cop Rock anyone?).

Being a big Rod Serling fan, he’s a good place to start with shows I’d love to check out. I know about his little seen show, The Loner, a western, which is long lost today, but I didn’t know that Serling created a series called The New People, which many believe was the inspiration for Lost.

According to the listing for the series in The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows, The New People is about forty people left stranded on a South Pacific island after a plane crash. The island used to be a test site for atomic weapons, so it has buildings and provisions, but was uninhabited until the plane crash, and the new people start to build their own society (People in isolated places is a Serling specialty, like his Twilight Zone pilot episode Where Is Everybody?).

Cruising through the websites, all of the sudden I was shocked to see a photo of Kurt Russell with blond hair. He co-starred in a western show with Tim Matheson (Otter from Animal House) called The Quest in 1976 (the show didn’t last because it got creamed in the ratings by Charlie’s Angels).

You may know the show Get Christie Love! because Harvey Keitel mentioned this short lived series in Reservoir Dogs. He also mentioned the female, African American undercover cop’s trademark line, “You’re under arrest, sugar.”

Get Christie Love! was also nominated in the book The Worst TV Shows of All Time along with Gilligan’s Island, and You’re In the Picture, a Jackie Gleason game show that only lasted two shows (the second episode was a half-hour apology from Gleason). It’s not that bad, Christe Love! that is. It’s kitschy retro ‘70’s fun, and has even been called a blaxploitation T.V. series.

Speaking of Tarantino, I had no idea David Carradine, Bill himself, played Shane in the T.V. spin-off of the movie of the same name. There were also T.V. spin offs of the films Walking Tall, Blue Thunder (with Dana Carvey), Star Man, Serpico, Casablanca (with David Soul?!), and Planet of the Apes, to name a few.

Here’s some more random searching through the T.V. show sites…Quark? Anyone see that show back in the ‘70’s? Richard Benjamin played a garbage collector in space. The Fifth Corner? Never even heard of it (I have heard of Quark though…). A guy wakes up next to a dead woman, he doesn’t remember who he is, or anything else, and there’s bad people after him (sounds a bit like Memento, no?).

I do remember The Master, the martial arts show starring Lee Van Cleef, because a junior high school friend of mine liked ninjas. That show didn’t last very long, and when I was a kid, I didn’t know what cancellations meant, and couldn’t understand why shows just all of the sudden disappeared.

Being a fan of monsters as a kid, there were several short-lived shows I watched in my youth including the pilot for Spectre, a Gene Roddenberry pilot that didn’t take off about an occult detective played by Robert Culp. I also liked Lucan, about a boy raised by wolves, and Cliffhangers, which was an attempt at modern day serials you’d see every week in the theater. One of the Cliffhanger episodes was The Curse of Dracula, a modern day take on the famous vampire, which was the only serial on the show to complete from beginning to end before it was cancelled.

Speaking of horror shows, I didn’t watch Kolchak the Nightstalker back then, I was too young, but in recent years I finally saw the wonderful cult show about the reporter who has a knack for uncovering the supernatural, and his long suffering editor who doesn’t believe his stories of vampires, werewolves and demons. Kolchak, which reportedly was the inspiration for The X-Files, still holds up well after all these years, and now you can get the complete series in a DVD box-set.

Now back to the ridiculous ideas that belong in the What Were They Thinking category. How about Claws, a sitcom where Dennis Miller was one of the voices for three talking cats? Or Poochinski, where Peter Boyle plays a cop who dies, and is reincarnated as a dog? I hadn’t heard of those shows, no one else has either, but for fans of bad T.V., there were a number of infamous network bombs that were the television equivalent of the Hindenburg.

How about Supertrain, the 1979 series which the Prime Time TV Show Directory called “one of the most expensive failures in the history of network television.” The Supertrain was a nuclear powered American bullet train of the future that speeds 200 miles an hour, and also has a swimming pool, gym, hair salon and disco. TV Guide wrote of the show, “Think The Love Boat was bad? Picture it clanking across the country. Or picture Fantasy Island on wheels.”

I finally saw an episode of Supertrain recently, and the rumors of its awfulness are not exaggerated, although it’s certainly entertaining in a Plan 9 From Outer Space kinda way. The same year, on the same network, NBC, there was also the Plan 9 of variety shows, Pink Lady and Jeff, hosted by an Asian singing duo and comedian Jeff Altman, that was mercifully killed after six months (Believe it or not, you can also get this complete series in a DVD box set).

I wonder if one day these shows, and many others, could make their own cable channel. The really bad shows would be perfect for a Mystery Science Theater scenario, with a bunch of comedians heckling them off the screen. Having not seen many of the shows I mentioned here, I’ll bet some of them will turn out to be great lost gems, and many of them will speak for themselves why they never made it.