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The ‘Dune’ Screenplay Was Written in Movie Master on MS-DOS

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Re: The ‘Dune’ Screenplay Was Written in Movie Master on MS-DOS

#71

Post by chasil »

anyfactor wrote: post #62

I often wonder this about old tech. What attracts some people to keep using it? Is it the comfort or familiarity or is it minimalism? I sometimes want to feel the experience of my Pentium 1 PC with that rubberdome keyboard and ball mouse. But I know it was a frustrating experience. The mouse didn't work exactly, we had to alt+ctrl+delete every 20-30 minutes. They keyboard felt like jello. The CRT monitor gave us head…

Just for fun, I have installed "Joe's Own Editor" by running "yum install joe" from Oracle's EPEL mirror.

Then I ran "joe /etc/passwd" (after exiting root) then pressed ^K-h, and Wordstar's help menu appeared.

Wordstar and the vi editor share evolution on serial terminals of the 70s (vi specifically on the Lear-Siegler ADM-3A). They were designed for a minimal number of keys, and thus keeping the hands on the home row, away from the function keys.

Some people grow very much accustomed to this.

    $ rpm -qi joe
    ...
    URL         : http://sourceforge.net/projects/joe-editor/
    Summary     : An easy to use, modeless text editor
    Description :
    Joe is a powerful, easy to use, modeless text editor.
    It uses the same WordStar keybindings used in Borland's development
    environment.

Re: The ‘Dune’ Screenplay Was Written in Movie Master on MS-DOS

#72

Post by scrumper »

Ciantic wrote: post #10

What I like about this is the 40 page limit. He actually considers it a kind of feature, and this arbitrary limit has contributed to his works. One would think that if 40 pages comes to full, the writer would just find a way to extend it, but instead he didn't bother and shortened instead.

I believe that with screenplays there's a fairly direct correspondence between the space taken up on paper and time in the movie. So a page is generally a minute. In the article, he talks about how it "creates acts" - each act is going to be about 40 minutes.

I'm not in the field at all so I'm hoping someone knowledgeable will confirm or refute this.

Re: The ‘Dune’ Screenplay Was Written in Movie Master on MS-DOS

#74

Post by Unklejoe »

tokai wrote: post #16
slibhb wrote: post #8

The screenplay was the worst part of the new Dune movie

Nah Zimmers atrocious score was at least a tad worse.

I normally like his stuff, but I did find relief in the one scene during the final fight where the background "music" stopped for a few seconds. That's when I realized how annoying 2 hours of continuous background pad can be.

Re: The ‘Dune’ Screenplay Was Written in Movie Master on MS-DOS

#75

Post by Unklejoe »

folli wrote: post #11
slibhb wrote: post #8

The screenplay was the worst part of the new Dune movie

I was considering to watch it this weekend. So you advise against it?

I've never read the book, and had no idea about the plot. I didn't really enjoy the movie. I'd still recommend watching it though. It was clearly done well - I just didn't personally like it. It was hard to become invested in the characters - they all seemed like they were sort of zoned out or high, if that makes any sense.

Re: The ‘Dune’ Screenplay Was Written in Movie Master on MS-DOS

#76

Post by emilecantin »

anyfactor wrote: post #52
tokai wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah Zimmers atrocious score was at least a tad worse.

I haven't seen the movie yet but I assume it has that dramatic orchestral reverbed bass that often covers dialogue?

Yes. I thought the overall "feeling" of the movie was a bit like Arrival (another Villeneuve movie).

Re: The ‘Dune’ Screenplay Was Written in Movie Master on MS-DOS

#77

Post by deanebarker »

Ciantic wrote: post #10

What I like about this is the 40 page limit. He actually considers it a kind of feature, and this arbitrary limit has contributed to his works. One would think that if 40 pages comes to full, the writer would just find a way to extend it, but instead he didn't bother and shortened instead.

I feel like Twitter does this for me. I'll go over the limit on a long tweet, and I'll go back and trim and exchange long words for short ones and remove words that don't contribute anything.

The result will fit, and basically say the same thing. I've never had to fundamentally alter the meaning of a tweet, I just make it shorter, which is a healthy writing exercise.

Re: The ‘Dune’ Screenplay Was Written in Movie Master on MS-DOS

#78

Post by dylan604 »

ericlewis wrote: post #58
dylan604 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was so disappointed after spending like 12 hours watching this film to it ending without telling the complete story. Never mind the Part 1 title card at the beginning. I just assumed they were going to expand upon the story not cut it into pieces. Then to find out that they didn't already green light the rest of the story being made. WTF? Who does this in today's movie universe? We get the full story approved to ma…

Disney. marvel. it's not new.

at the rate of Marvel movies, I think someone farts an idea and it gets greenlit. not telling me much here /s

Re: The ‘Dune’ Screenplay Was Written in Movie Master on MS-DOS

#80

Post by falcolas »

tfandango wrote: post #51
causi wrote: post #4

There's something to be said for the focused nature of older technology. If you were to set me the task of writing something long-form, and told me the faster and better I did it the more I would be rewarded, I'd be doomed with a modern laptop or a smartphone. My favorite writing tool is, frankly, an IBM TransNote from 2001.

This is why I like my Kindle so much (and other e-readers are the same presumably). It does one thing very well, and not much else. I could read the same book on my phone but it's always popping up alerts and buzzing and so forth, breaking my attention.

To be fair, even if I'm reading on my Kindle, my phone is still doing all that. I can DND my phone, but then it would have the same effect if I'm reading on the phone.
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