Adventures in Hollywood: The Doors

Before I began writing the screenplay I logged more than 50 hours of taped interviews with two dozen individuals who were close to Jim Morrison (including his parents) and The Doors.

One of the most entertaining was with UCLA film school professor Ed Brokaw. Morrison and future band-mate Ray Manzarek had been students of his in the mid-1960s – as had I in 1981.

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Adventures in Hollywood: Dudes

I was hugely influenced and inspired by the punk rock and art band explosion in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. During that time a number of bands began to weave Western imagery and country music elements into their music.

The notion of fatalistic urban punkers in a showdown with the vastness, beauty, and history of the American West amused and intrigued me.

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Short Film Writing Workshop

Writing a successful short film will be the subject of “SHORT-sighted,” a 3-hour intensive workshop being offered this Saturday, February 16 (and again on the 23rd), by pro screenwriter Randall Jahnson (The Doors, The Mask of Zorro).

The seminar will focus on how to meet the unique storytelling challenges of the short format – just in time for the 2013 Willamette Writers FilmLab’s Script-to- Screen Short Film Scriptwriting Competition!

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POV Workshop at WWC

Randall Jahnson will be leading a workshop entitled “It Depends on Your Point of View: Effective Uses of POV in Screenwriting” at the 2012 Willamette Writers Conference in the Sheraton Airport Hotel in Portland, Oregon.

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Hollywood to PDX Podcast

For those of you who just can’t get enough of my blab, now you hear me online.

Recently, I was interviewed by film maker Scott McMahon as part of his “Hollywood to Portland” series of podcasts which chronicles the experiences of “creative types” who migrate from sunny Southern California to the rainy Northwest.

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