There's a line in _The Good, the Bad and the Ugly_ that lands so quietly, between bigger moments, you could almost miss it.

Blondie (Clint Eastwood's laconic bounty hunter) delivers it with the same flat affect he gives everything else. Tuco has just shot a one-armed gunslinger who had the drop on him and made the mistake of monologuing instead of pulling the trigger. Tuco says, "When you…

A field trip to the Oosterscheldekering turns into a reflection on solitude, documentation, and the role photography plays in making sense of the world.

Yesterday, June 1, 2026, marked what would have been Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday. I think it would be hard to pick a star whose career burned brighter for the short amount of time she was on this earth.

And even now, years after she's departed, we're still talking about the mark she left on Hollywood.

But if you want to understand the actual artist, the woman who walked away from…

One of the things I love about Westerns is that they're all a little bit of a deconstruction of what it means to be alive. Mostly because we're seeing people die in them all the time.

They're also some of the greatest movies ever made.

Case in point, Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western _The Good, the Bad and the Ugly_ usually gets remembered for its final shootout, its memorable score, all…

It's hard to believe that after like fifty years of dominance, the western was dead by 1990, but it was. Hollywood had totally moved on from the Americana, and no one was sure it would ever come back.

It was probably buried sometime around _Heaven's Gate_ in the 80s, but it was on its last breath with John Wayne in the 70s.

Then came Kevin Costner.

Costner was Hollywood's most famous…

I cannot tell you how exhausting it is to sit and write a screenplay to try to get it to sound both good and like real life. See, real life is boring most of the time. But movies have to be entertaining.

Even when you think you've conquered the scene and wrung all the information you need from it, there are times when I go back and see that it reads flat, predictable, and painfully…

For over four decades, the man who would become known to Western lovers as "The Duke" was the human embodiment of the American frontier and the Western movie genre.

There's not much left to say about John Wayne except for the fact that he totally lived up to the legend his characters wrote for him.

The guy had a particular way about him that allowed his personality to seamlessly transition…

Repris de l’excellent site The Conversation, cet article signé Marwan Sinaceur , Professor of Organizational Behavior à l’ESSEC, éclaire l’échec de la première session de négociations entre Washington et Téhéran, tenue à Islamabad les 11 et 12 avril. À travers les recherches en sciences comportementales, il met en évidence les erreurs de méthode commises par […]

Cet article Washington-Téhéran :…

I was working on this new screenplay and trying to get this beautiful monologue together, but after a few different drafts and passes....I would cut the whole thing down to a single word.

Sometimes, in life and in writing, less is more.

You don't have to believe me here. There's a long cinematic history of characters saying one word that carries the soul and weight of an entire…

More field trips for more interesting experiences for better stories and more interesting work.

Have you always wanted to become a screenwriter? Well, if you're starting your first spec script or just getting a little interested in dipping your toes into Hollywood, you came to the right place.

This guide is designed to walk you through the fundamentals and get you started on a journey that's both very fulfilling and very frustrating.

I'm excited for the stories you'll come up with and…

I think we can all agree that Quentin Tarantino is the master of dialogue. His movies sizzle with engaging repartee, and the way his characters speak reveals a lot about them.

One of the most famous Tarantino scenes is the "tasty burger" scene from Pulp Fiction. It involves hitmen Jules and Vincent showing up to collect a debt owed to Marcellus Wallace, and it devolves from there.

The whole…

An unplanned trip to Texel turned into a small field study of a coastline unlike any other. Being there, in the wind and water, brought back my fascination with the ocean and its edges.

Probably my favorite part of screenwriting is the dialogue. And there are very few writers who have as distinct dialogue as Aaron Sorkin.

He's known for his lightning-fast "walk and talk" scenes and razor-sharp wit in his characters...and himself.

Sorkin has a signature style that is instantly recognizable. But what is the secret sauce behind those iconic lines in _The Social Network_ or…

__Sometimes you’re reading a script or watching something, and you get the distinct impression that whoever wrote the dialogue hasn’t experienced real life in a while.

And that can happen—writers are, after all, often holed up in an office somewhere trying to conjure ideas out of thin air. But this can lead to stilted dialogue that will pull a reader or viewer right out of the story.

A long…

I've recently become unemployed, and it's fine. I enjoy it, actually. It took a month-long trip to Mexico to process it but I think I'm good now. Going for runs and calisthenics workouts multiple times a week is what keeps me there.

I am still writing my monthly newsletter, Dialogue, and "photography, exploration and other things" has become an ever better description over time. The weekly…

Writing Dialogue, my monthly newsletter about photography, exploration and other things, Closer, my weekly newsletter exploring photography in the age of AI, and Packless, the efficient travel photography toolkit.

Photographing for my long-term projects Covering (working title Things I Have Seen), where I walk every street of my hometown, Crossing, where I walk a city from North to South or…

For years I thought I was simply exploring and taking photos. Only later did I realize I was repeating a pattern: go out, collect, return, interpret, publish, repeat. This issue maps the loop that turns wandering into a creative practice.

When I was a kid, renting PG-13 movies was like a badge of honor. They were the upper limit of what I was allowed to watch, and they let me get a taste of what the R-rated world would really be like in the future.

My favorite part of this world was the idea that you got one F-bomb to use. And it felt like every PG-13 movie learned this and got really creative with how they'd use it moving…

Writing dialogue is one of the most difficult aspects of screenwriting. When it's good, it's almost invisible, but when it's bad... it's impossible to ignore. So, what are some of the factors screenwriters can focus on to take their dialogue to the next level?

Glenn Gers has spent 25 years writing for film and television, with credits including _Fracture_ and _Mad Money_ , as well as work on…