Talk is cheap - except when it comes to writing dialogue. Aspects of the Screenplay deals with film dialogue: how best to write it while also focusing on other critical aspects of the screenplay such as plot, structure, and character. No other book on writing for film concentrates solely on dialogue - despite the fact that in any 120-page screenplay, most of the pages will be predominantly filled with dialogue! Mark Axelrod, author of dozens of screenplays and teleplays, offers tips and exercises that will make the aspiring screenwriter sit down and write.
Mark Axelrod is a Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of English at Chapman University, Orange, California. Prior to teaching at Chapman, he taught at the University of East Anglia, UK and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. A graduate of both Indiana University (BA, MA) and the University of Minnesota (PhD) [Dissertation: The Politics of Style in the Fiction of Beckett, Balzac and Cortázar]. For fourteen years he has been the Director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing for which he has received 4 National Endowment Arts Grants. He is a two-time recipient of a United Kingdom Leverhulme Fellowship for Creative Writing (University of East Anglia, Edinburgh University), a three-time recipient of the Alliance Française National Writing Award, has written over 20 works of fiction including Capital Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 2000), Cloud Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 1998), Cardboard Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 1996) and Bombay California (Pacific Writers Press, 1994) and Secret Histories: Borges' Travel, Hemingway's Garage (fc2, 2005) which was published in fall, '09 in Spanish by Thule Ediciones, Barcelona as Viajes Borges, Talleres Hemingway and is currently under consideration with Grupo Editorial in Rio de Janeiro. Other books are being considered for translation in Italy.
A partial listing of his fiction writing includes: his Pan-Euro-American trilogy titled, The Posthumous Memoirs of Blase Kubash, based on the character Braz Cubas created by the 19th century Brazilian novelist, Machado de Assis, has been anthologized in The Reading Room/4 published by Great Marsh Press. In addition to Borges' Travel, Hemingway's Garage which received excellent reviews in the New York Times, the Georgia Review and Publisher's Weekly, among others, he has written three other additional Secret Histories including: Balzac's Coffee, DaVinci's Ristorante; Nietzsche's Café, Axel's Charhouse and Bartleby's Books, Gatsby's Café. He has written other short fiction as well including Dante's Foil & Other Sporting Tales and The Apotheosis of Aaron. He has been published in numerous national and international literary journals including the Iowa Review and the New York Quarterly and was a contributor to the former New York avant-garde magazine, Splash Magazine. Among the awards he has won for his fiction include: the Tim McGinnis Award (University of Iowa); Camargo Foundation Fellowship in Fiction Writing, Cassis, France (2); the Maxwell Perkins Award for Fiction Writing, New York, NY; a Bush Foundation Fellowship for Fiction Writing, St. Paul, MN; and an Award for Experimental Writing (Indiana University). He has also won an award from Western Illinois University for his play, Ti Amo Lucia Olivetti and has completed a trilogy of new one-act plays titled: Taxing Tales, that includes: Van Gogh's Audit, Superman in America and Bruno Arlt at the Grille Café as well as the play, A Colloquy of Birds all of which are being considered for production with the Arena Theatre, Washington, D.C. He has translated three works: Xavier de Maistre's novella, Un voyage autour de ma chambre, Balzac's play, Mercadet, and Baudelaire's novella, La Fanfarlo. He is currently at work on a book of memoirs titled, Posthumous Papers of a Living Writer which includes reminiscences on people from Beckett to Borges, Letterman to August Wilson. His critical books include, The Politics of Style in the Fiction of Balzac, Beckett and Cortázar (Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 1990); The Poetics of Novels (Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 1999). His latest novels include, Aleatory; or, A Day in the Life of Jürgen Jürgensen, Imaginary Cartographer A Novel in Four Cities and The Checks and Balances of Alfie Schiller, and the short story collection, Kissing Sonia Braga and Other Tales all completed in 2010. He is currently at work on four new novels, Proost's Grocery: A Novel in 14 Aisles; The Sorrows of Seymour Schreibman; Bitters & the Professor; or, A Semester in the Life of Malcolm Malarkey PhD; and Dangerous Liaisons: The Email Edition. His complete works of writing run to over 100 volumes.
From 2005-2007 he was a judge on the Fulbright Commissions Panel for Creative Writing from 2005-2007. In spring, 2002, he was honored as a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Pitzer College, Claremont, CA and was a featured speaker at the Hugh C. Hyde Living Writers Series at San Diego State University in October, 2003. In 2005, he was a guest professor of Creative Writing-Fiction at Pomona College, Claremont, CA and was invited to return in spring, 2006. In June 2005, he was invited to teach at the 65th Annual Indiana University Writers Conference in Bloomington. In November, 2008, he was invited by the Museum of Latin American Art, Buenos Aires, to participate in the 1st Annual FILBA International Literary Festival there where he read from his fiction and sat on a panel devoted to creative writing. He is currently working on a literary anthology devoted to world hunger with contributions from such writers as J.M Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Doris Lessing, Luisa Valenzuela, Ariel Dorfman, Martin Amis, and JP Donleavy just to mention a few. He is a regular political blogger for the HuffingtonPost.com and his non-fiction and reviews have appeared in such periodicals and magazines as the Times Literary Supplement, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, the American Book Review, OC Weekly, Irish America, MSP Magazine, Indianapolis Monthly, Playboy and others.
A corresponding member of the international film organization, CILECT, he is a practicing screenwriter and has won awards for his writing from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the Writers Guild of America, East; the Screenwriters Forum (University of Wisconsin); and the Sundance Institute. He has written over twenty screenplays and teleplays and his adaptation and co-production of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "An Author's Mother" won awards from the Scottish Association of Filmmakers, the London International Film & Video Festival, and the Festival Internacional de Video do Algarve, Portugal. He has taught or conducted screenwriting seminars and workshops throughout Latin America, Europe, and the United Kingdom as well as the United States including stints at: the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba [the school founded by García Márquez]; the Goethe Institute, Santiago, Chile (with Antonio Skármeta [author of Il Postino]); with both SICA, the Cinematographer's Union of Argentina, and Proyectos Culturales in Buenos Aires; at the National Film School of Denmark, Copenhagen; the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland; the Grimme Akadamie, Cologne; the Flemish Film Academy, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium; PILOTS, Barcelona, Spain; Edinburgh University, Scotland; the University of Belgrano, Buenos Aires; the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK; Columbia College, Chicago; Independent Features North, Minneapolis; Western Washington University, Bellingham; Elmira College, Elmira, NY; Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, CA; University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and Paris Writers Workshop, Paris. For four years, he was a regular visiting adjunct professor of screenwriting at the Hamburg Media School, Hamburg, Germany.
In May, 2006, he was invited by the United States Embassy, Berlin to speak on screenwriting and to conduct screenwriting lectures at a number of German universities in Munich, Berlin, Leipzig and Cologne among other places. Since 2006, he has been invited annually to lecture at UNIACC in Santiago, Chile and PEN International asked him to be the lead judge for the 2006 Best Original Screenplay Award. In addition, he has been invited to conduct screenwriting lectures the John Huston School of Film and Digital Media, Galway, Ireland as well as at the Baltic Film School, Tallinn University, Estonia; UIAH, Helsinki, Finland; FAMU, Prague; and Black Coffee Films, Mumbai, India. In August, 2008 he was invited to teach at ARCOS Film School in Santiago, Chile at the invitation of the United States Embassy, Santiago and also gave film lectures in Buenos Aires at the invitation of the United States Embassy, Buenos Aires. In September, 2008 he was invited by UNIACC Film School, Santiago, to participate in a major Latin American screenwriting conference sponsored by IBERMEDIA. Most recent, he was invited to be a screenwriting mentor at Hatchfest 2010 in Bozeman, Montana where he also lectured at Montana State University.
His film books include: Aspects of the Screenplay (Heinemann, 2001); Character & Conflict: Cornerstones of Screenwriting (Heinemann, 2004); I Read It at the Movies: Screen Adaptation (Heinemann, 2006) and Look Who's Talking & Why: Dialogue which will be published by Continuum. His latest scripts include an adaptation of the Yasujiro Ozu film, Tokyo Story. In December, 2009 he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to teach screenwriting at the University of São Paulo, Brazil in August, 2010 & in August, 2011.
