Historically, short stories were a rich source of successful movies and significant films. Classics such as Rear Window, High Noon, Psycho, All About Eve, and Blade Runner began as short stories. Unfortunately, many of the major venues for discovering new talent—The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, and Mademoiselle—are gone. Today, short stories are again becoming an important basis for major motion pictures and television, with films such as BrokebackMountain, Good Will Hunting, and Minority Report.
One reason short stories are making a Hollywood comeback is Next Stop Hollywood, an organization dedicated to finding both new talent and terrific material. This volume, selected by more than sixty movie-buff readers and advised by an editorial board of Hollywood insiders, collects X stories that blah blah [read the introduction to find out the point of the anthology]. For more information, visit the website at www.nextstophollywood.org.
"The 'secret' to great motion pictures has always been great stories. Steve Cohen has created an innovative forum in which emerging storytellers can develop and flourish. This is wonderful news for readers and filmmakers.—Simcha Jacobovici, two-time Emmy award-winning producer/director
About the Author
Next Stop Hollywood (NSH) is an an organization founded by STEVE COHEN that searches for unpublished short stories that have the potential to be transformed into great motion pictures. The authors will range from a Edgar-winning mystery writer to an aspiring author and recent college graduate.
Product Details
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; 1st edition (May 29, 2007)
Perry is the author of DANGEROUS PLACES, a collection of short fiction that received the 2008 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize from BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In 2009 the book was named the recipient of the National "Best Books 2009" Award--Fiction & Literature: Short Story Fiction by USA Book News. Two novellas were featured in NEXT STOP HOLLYWOOD, a collection of fiction from St. Martin's Press in 2007. He has also published two prior collections of short fiction, SUSPICIOUS ORIGINS (St. Paul: New Rivers Press) and SINGING ON THE TITANIC (Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press), a book recorded by the Library of Congress for the blind. His work has twice been read on National Public Radio's "The Sound of Writing" and has three times won P.E.N. Syndicated Fiction Awards. He has been named at fellow at Ucross, Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, was a scholar at Bread Loaf, and in consecutive years was named a winner of the annual Boston Fiction Festival prize. His memoir, "Iowa Black Dirt," about being a single parent, won First Prize in a contest sponsored by The Good Men Foundation, and appears in that anthology (November, 2009). In 1994, Perry was named a Contributing Editor of North American Review. His consumer freelance magazine journalism has appeared in such venues as The Chronicle of Higher Education, Poets & Writers, Phi Delta Kappan, and Dads; his book reviews have been featured in The New York Times Book Review and The Chicago Tribune's Sunday Review of Books. Perry began his teaching career with a decade before the chalkboards of Bay Ridge High School in his hometown, Brooklyn. After leaving public school teaching, Perry earned his MFA degree in Fiction Writing at the University of Arizona. He then taught writing and literature at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, followed by a decade at Bradford College in Haverhill, Massachusetts, where he became a Professor of English. He left teaching in 1995 to edit and write in the private sector; Perry worked as a staff writer and editor for business and consumer magazines, including a stint as Editor in Chief of Web Guide. He covered finance, the business of information technology, and knowledge management, reporting on those topics in the US and in China. Perry returned to academe with a one-year position as Director of the Writing Program and Visiting Professor of English at Wichita State University from 2002-2003. In 2003 he accepted appointment to the faculty of Salem State College as Coordinator of Professional Writing. F. Scott Fitzgerald is reported to have said there are no second acts in American lives, but Perry's literary career seems to be entering Act II. Since his return to academe and literary writing, in the past few years his memoirs, essays, and fiction have appeared in or are forthcoming in such journals as Utne, Northwest Review, The Antioch Review, Confrontation, Salamander, The North American Review, Hanging Loose, Flint Hills Review, Passages North, B-Far (Boston Fiction Annual Review), ACM, GSU Review, and Portland Review. DANGEROUS PLACES appears more than twenty years after his most immediate prior fiction collection. Perry is available for talks with student and adult groups about fiction and memoir writing, magazine journalism, or education. (see also: www.perryglasser.com.)
This review is from: Next Stop Hollywood: Short Stories Bound for the Screen (Paperback)
This amazing short-story collection both promises to give Hollywood green-lighters terrific material, each of the stories is an entertaining read in and of itself. Kudos all around!
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This review is from: Next Stop Hollywood: Short Stories Bound for the Screen (Paperback)
The premise is that many popular movies were based on short stories; but magazines don't publish short stories as often as they used to, so the editors of this volume selected (#?) stories that they feel have movie potential.
My cousin Jerry Ryan (future famous writer) has a story in this collection so of course I had to read it.
His story is A.K.A. and it is an Elmore Leonard like hard boiled tale. Very good.
The other stories in the book are mostly good and it was fun reading so many different types of stories.
They are all sort of short. I think they must have been limited to twenty pages for this collection. I always think of one page of text being about one minute on film which is why novels adapted to the screen are almost always lacking in the movie version. An example of a novella that transferred nearly perfectly to the film version was The Body by Stephen King (which became Stand By Me when it was a movie.)
But then again twenty pages is probably all a producer has time to read, so there you go.
Are any of these stories going to become movies? I don't know.
Best of luck Jerry and the rest of you guys!
By the way - I am the only reviewer here that, so far, admits to being related to one of the featured authors; but if you read the rest of the review it is pretty obvious that I am not the only friend or relative posting here - you know who you are!
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This review is from: Next Stop Hollywood: Short Stories Bound for the Screen (Paperback)
Though the other stories have much cinematic potential, my favorite of this collection has to be "Dirk Snigby's Guide To The Afterlife." Funny and snarkily irreverent, it is full of the absurdities that is the currency of organized religion. In the right hands, "Dirk" could be the next "Dr. Strangelove" -- a chilling satire on what we fear most after taking that final breath in this life as we open the door to the next. Who knows, perhaps Dirk might in fact be our Guide. Pick up a copy of this anthology for this story alone.
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