Bringing Hollywood to Brattleboro

If you’re in Brattleboro this weekend and you bump into a guy who looks a lot like poet Robert Pinsky, it’s probably really him. He’s one of dozens of accomplished writers gathering in Vermont for the annual Brattleboro Literary Festival.

It’s the seventh year for the event. It includes workshops on historical fiction, nature writing, poetry, children’s books - all the stuff you’d expect at a lit fest. This year, though, the organizers added a new workshop – a session on how to get your book optioned for a film. Some purists might think that’s a bit of a sellout, but in an age of intense competition in the publishing world, getting your story on the big screen is one of the best ways to make all your hard work pay off.

William Akers teaches screenwriting at Vanderbilt University. Three of his screenplays have been turned into movies. He’s author of the book Your Screenplay Sucks: 100 Ways To Make It Great. Suzanne Kingsbury is the author of two books, The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me and The Gospel According to Gracey. Both have been optioned for films. Suzanne and William will both be talking about this topic at this weekends’ Brattleboro Literary Festival.

And, you may see yourself as a film buff, but imagine this herculean task: compiling a list – a very long list, in fact – of 1,000 significant movies for good and bad reasons, and writing a short introduction for each. That’s just what British-born American-based critic David Thomson has done with his new book, Have You Seen?, and it’s full of his unique takes on masterpieces and classics, but also oddities, and some films other critics will regard as just plain boring. The volume is huge: half a million words, and over a thousand pages. He recently visited the BBC The Ticket with Mark Coles.

(Photo by Professor Bop)