His history plays are ripped directly from history.īut in order to transcend the experience of someone having already seen this movie before, you have to have an extraordinarily strong take on the material– a take that is different from the take of the previous writers. And Midsummer Night’s Dream is yet another totally different callback to the exact same source material! Hamlet is just an adaptation of The Ur Hamlet. Romeo and Juliet is actually just a different version of Pyramus and Thisbe. William Shakespeare stole all of his stories. So if that question’s got you paralyzed, don’t worry! There is a long history of this happening.Īnd having a story related to one we’ve already seen doesn’t mean you’re doomed to failure. What if it’s not good enough? What if it’s all been done before? A question that many of us face at some point in the writing of our stories: In fact, Whitey Bulger was in many ways the inspiration for the Jack Nicholson character in The Departed.Īnd despite Black Mass’s true-life story pedigree, well written script, and excellent direction and performances this poses a real challenge for the screenwriter. You’ve seen this story before, in a much more complicated form, in Martin Scorcese’s The Departed. If it sounds familiar, that’s because it is. If you haven’t seen Black Mass yet, please be aware that there are spoilers ahead.Īt the center of Black Mass is Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger, a psychotic gangster, played by Johnny Depp who is playing both sides, secretly betraying his mafia enemies as an FBI informant at the same time he plays the FBI, by using his connections to run rampant in the world of organized crime. So I also want to talk about what got in the way with Black Mass, and how you can learn from both its strengths and failures in your own screenwriting, particularly when it comes to revision. And we’re going to be discussing some of its most compelling scenes and the elements that made them work in this podcast.Īnd yet, at the same time, despite the power of Johnny Depp’s and the supporting cast’s stellar performances, there is something about Black Mass that just leaves you (or at least left me) a little hollow– a little bit unsatisfied. Now this is a really extraordinary true story, based on the life of Whitey Bulger, and featuring one of Johnny Depp’s all time best performances. Today we’re going to be looking at the new Johnny Depp movie, Black Mass.
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