The 101 Best Screenplays

The Top Ten, chosen by the Writers Guild of America

1. CASABLANCA
Screenplay by Julius J. & Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch. Based on the play "Everybody Comes to Rick's" by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison

2. THE GODFATHER
Screenplay by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola. Based on the novel by Mario Puzo

3. CHINATOWN
Written by Robert Towne

4. CITIZEN KANE
Written by Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles

5. ALL ABOUT EVE
Screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Based on "The Wisdom of Eve," a short story and radio play by Mary Orr

6. ANNIE HALL
Written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman

7. SUNSET BLVD.
Written by Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder and D.M. Marshman, Jr.

8. NETWORK
Written by Paddy Chayefsky

9. SOME LIKE IT HOT
Screenplay by Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond. Based on "Fanfare of Love," a German film written by Robert Thoeren and M. Logan

10. THE GODFATHER II
Screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo. Based on Mario Puzo's novel "The Godfather"

See the remainder of the list at the link above.

A tale of two genders: men choose novels of alienation, while women go for passion

excerts:

The novel that means most to men is about indifference, alienation and lack of emotional responses. . . .

The most frequently named book was Albert Camus's The Outsider, followed by JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.

The results are strikingly different, with almost no overlap between men's and women's taste. On the whole, men preferred books by dead white men: only one book by a woman, Harper Lee, appears in the list of the top 20 novels with which men most identify.

"We found that men do not regard books as a constant companion to their life's journey, as consolers or guides, as women do," said Prof Jardine. "They read novels a bit like they read photography manuals."

"The men's list was all angst and Orwell. Sort of puberty reading," she said. Ideas touching on isolation and "aloneness" were strong among the men's "milestone" books.

Prof Jardine said that the research suggested that the literary world was run by the wrong people. "What I find extraordinary is the hold the male cultural establishment has over book prizes like the Booker, for instance, and in deciding what is the best. This is completely at odds with their lack of interest in fiction.

"On the whole, men between the ages of 20 and 50 do not read fiction. This should have some impact on the book trade. There was a moment when car manufacturers realised that it was women who bought the family car, and the whole industry changed. We need fiction publishers - many of whom are women - to go through the same kind of recognition," Prof Jardine said.

The list in full

The Outsider by Albert Camus
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Ulysses by James Joyce
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
1984 by George Orwell
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent for The Guardian
Thursday April 6, 2006

Books are Such Magical Things

From a blog:

"Books are such magical things, and one of my greatest fears as a parent is that my children won't read as they get older. Few of my friends do. So I encourage her to read and demonstrate that a book is far better entertainment than television. Books make you think, they help you learn, and they let you experience the world in ways reality never will."

The Purpose of Writing?

I picked this up at a blog:

If you can't annoy somebody with what you write, I think there's little point in writing. (Kingsley Amis)

FINDING HER ROOTS
By Sharon Miller Cinrich

When it came time to write, [Park] relied on a combination of creativity and solid research to breathe life into the ideas that had been rolling around in her head for decades. "I definitely chose the path of fiction based on the lack of resources about Korean history," she says. "It was a conscious decision. Although I love nonfiction too, I chose fiction because I knew I'd have to fill in the gaps myself."

[Linda Sue] Park, 42, [winner of the Newbery Award for A SINGLE SHARD credits her love of reading as a child growing up in suburban Chicago and her consumption of thousands of grade-school novels for her success as a novelist. "Reading definitely motivated me toward the genre," she says. "I read so many that the pace and structure of a middle-grade novel is kind of hard-wired. It's built in and it's what comes out when I tell the story."

She advocates that aspiring writers read as much as possible. "It's really the best possible advice I could give any writer--read," says Park, who still follows her own advice as much as she can. "Whether it's a wondrous story or a hilarious passage of dialogue or a beautiful sentence ... every bit of reading I do helps my own writing. The rhythm of language and the way words combine to communicate more than their dictionary meanings infuse the serious reader's mind and emerge transformed when the reader sits down to write."

"It's really not until the story is finished and being worked on that I'm thinking about how other people will see it," she says.

"That's the wonderful thing about historical fiction," she says. "It explores the question of what it is to be human. What is it that makes a 12th-century Korean boy similar to a 21st-century American boy? Although the cultural context may be very different, they definitely have things in common. Part of what makes it interesting for me is to explore or guess what that might be."

To compensate for the unfamiliar setting and ancient time period, Park worked through her first three books using the third person past tense, a very traditional way to tell a story. "Both for me as a writer and as a reader, the settings were so unusual, so unfamiliar, that it seemed enough to have to deal with," she says. "I wasn't going to throw in flashy points of view or unusual structure."

What, then, made A Single Shard stand out from the others? Although the Newbery Award came as a welcome surprise, Park admits feeling something special about A Single Shard during the writing process. "Once I had the basic bones of the story figured out, it wrote relatively easily. I almost couldn't write fast enough to get the story out. It came out whole, like a seamless story. And I think that is reflected in the reading." And while the calendar in the book-publishing business is often characterized as slow moving, Park's editor at Houghton Mifflin read her manuscript and offered her a contract within 24 hours, another indication that there was something exceptional about this piece of work.

Superstition says the third time's a charm, but Park credits the great learning experiences she had with the first two novels as priming her for A Single Shard, and adds that like the others, this one was percolating for a while.

Park had to think out her story on paper. “Everybook has its challenges,” she says. “But this one had 37 revisions.”

Don't Edit Your Subconsious

Sometimes people edit their own subconscious and don't get the most exciting stuff out there. That's damaging to your art."

from "Home at Last: Peter Case," Acoustic Guitar (November 2002)

Women Buy More Books

Publisher Weekly stated that women buy more books than men - to the tune of 68% of all books. (no surprise here). Of books that are read, 53% are fiction and 43% nonfiction., and 64% of book buyers say the bestseller list is not important.