How to break into screenwriting

Wanted: Co-writer for high-profile Hollywood screenplay. No experience necessary.

Yep, it's for real. My friend Eric Estrin, left, has launched the "LA Observed Script Project," a collaborative venture that's partly an experiment and mostly a writing competition.

Estrin started off the project's screenplay "Right of Way" with a three-page setup. Then it was turned over to the masses. Wanna-be screenwriters are asked to submit a few pages. Each week, Estrin will pick the submission that best advances the story.

Brings to mind "Naked Came the Stranger," a sex novel written by a pack of journalists in 1969. Each writer contributed one chapter. Here, a different screenwriter adds on a few pages each week.

The first winning cowriter was Jerry Lazar, a journalist and magician who cranked out another three pages. Lazar is a man about town in L.A., but you don't have to be:

"Anyone who’s been part of a writers’ room knows how exhilarating it can be to work with a great team on an exciting project," Estrin wrote. "So picture LAObserved as the room and the whole world as the team."

The "Right of Way" story concerns an L.A. mayor dedicating to build a real transit system in that car-obsessed city. Yes, that makes the tale pure fiction.

"It’s going to be a drama, a darkish murder mystery filled with glamour, wit and big dreams, the stuff of life in Southern California," Estrin wrote in his screenplay-contest blog.

I'm thinking "Chinatown" on rails, but who knows what tone the script will take as it moves forward. Estrin seems open to radical suggestions: "If your vision goes off in an unexpected direction, and you can convince me it works in 1-5 pages, bring it on!"

Want in on the action? Next deadline for script submissions is Sunday.

Grammar police's most-wanted: bloggers

A couple of heavyweight bloggers recently had their knuckles rapped over subpar grammar skills. The debate, predictably, turned to, "If people understand what's being communicated, why does it matter?"

Of course, I march with the grammar goon squad on this one. Casual conversation doesn't requite good grammar, true, but writing for a mass audience does. (Copy editors sometimes have to silence their overzealous deskmates with, "Edit copy, not speech!" Even the correctors need a break from correction.)

Puny grammar always makes the writer look bad. If a blogger doles out information that's desperately needed, it’s a lot easier to be forgiving. But when his or her readers have other choices, the smart ones will wander off.

I can sympathize. I slept through grammar in grade school, dropped out of high school and then wrote for a half dozen years using D-student grammar and sloppy spelling. I got away with it because of my sighing editors, who wielded mighty pencils.

Somehow, I ended up teaching incoming journalism students. Motivated by fear of student revolt, I spent a couple of years studying grammar and spelling rules. (This was a lot more fun than it sounds. I have Aspergian traits.)

Before long, I found my writing was greatly improved, not only by the new clarity but by a kind of strength and confidence. Like being a play-by-ear musician and suddenly acquiring the ability to read and write the notes.

It is never too late to learn. I always recommend "The Elements of Style" as a starting point. Killer book, short read. Almost fun.

Google SEO guru talks links, anchor text, domains

I knew there was a reason I subscribe to email from Rambling About SEO. In an interview posted today, the blog managed to get some straight talk from Google's Adam Lasnik.

The Google search strategist puts out some choice information on topics often discussed by SEO bloggers. Here's a sample:

• Anchor text from inbound links: "Useful descriptive Anchor text can be great, not only for the user ... but helpful for Google to better understand what that page is likely about. On the flip side of things, (there's the) smell test, and that if something doesn't smell right, smells fishy; doesn't look or seem natural, that's going to certainly raise a red flag for us."


• Domain name wording: "I think people overemphasize the value of good domain names. ... I would say that while a domain name can be a factor in some ways how we view sites, how we view links; I would really say that it is relatively a minimal factor."


• Internal links: "What we found is that sites that have a lot of links, 200, 300, or 500, tend to have links that have not been strongly editorially vetted. We would rather see fewer links that the webmaster has actually looked over, and that they are maintaining to make sure they are still fresh."


• Dueling home-page file names: "If (the Googlebot) sees a page that is pretty much identical to something it has already seen, it will automatically make a determination regarding which page makes more sense, and it will run with this URL. ... In the vast majority of cases, it really has no negative affect at all."

Eric Enge asked the questions. Great job.

This is the kind of communication bloggers, webmasters and SEO providers need from Google, although I don't know why it usually gets done via random interviews like this and hints from Matt Cutts. The tea-leaf reading gets old.

Update: Here's an experienced SEO blogging about the same complaint.