September - 2022

Lukas Kendall, Writer/Filmmaker/Producer

lukas@filmscoremonthly.com

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Hollywood Confessional Podcast: Film Score Ghostwriting

23 hours ago
1 min

Hollywood Confessional Podcast: Film Score Ghostwriting

Hollywood Confessional is a podcast with anonymous film industry workers telling their stories about terrible treatment and bad behavior—my kinda thing! (The exposing, not the bad behavior.) Their newest installment features, in its second half, a composer talking about “The Machine”: the set-up of largely unheralded, underpaid and overworked assistants who do the lion’s share of the scoring work for numerous projects under the auspices of big-name composers. Not to mention,

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Star Trek: The Next Generation EPK

2 days ago
1 min

Star Trek: The Next Generation EPK

It’s the 35th anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the two-hour pilot, “Encounter at Farpoint.” I previously wrote my memories of watching it. Because everything’s online now, here is the premiere “EPK” (electronic press kit) that somebody uploaded. There are interviews with the cast and creators—with the exception of Brent Spiner. I wonder if they were trying to keep the Data character secret, or if Spiner just didn’t want to be interviewed (or both

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My Top 5 Film Composers

3 days ago
2 min

My Top 5 Film Composers

I have a “scratch file” of ideas for blog columns that I’ve been relying upon to put up these daily thoughts. I had one on there, “My Top 5 Film Composers”...and kept putting it off. It’s a huge topic and I never feel like I have the brain space to do it justice. So this is just the short version. These are, in my opinion, both my favorite top 5 composers, and what I think is a reasonable choice of them historically. It’s only sort of in an order... 1. John Williams. The GOAT

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Hi Joe!

4 days ago
1 min

Hi Joe!

I say “Hi Joe!” to my friend Joe Sikoryak, who designed all of our CDs and pretty much everything I worked on from 1997 until, well—anything he’s still available to do! I found the above from 1996, when Joe begged me to let him fix the terrible homemade design of the early FSM issues. Best decision I ever made! Joe has been publishing his memoirs and other creative projects via his personal site and I’m really enjoying them. Not only because I know Joe and I appreciate learni

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Clickbait

5 days ago
2 min

Clickbait

Don’t we all hate clickbait? It’s so depressing—in part because it works. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen one of those sci-fi sites post an article like “Star Wars Makes Stunning Revelation!” and it’s like, wow, I love Star Wars, what could it be? So you click and it turns out that some new Star Wars comic book just revealed the location of Lando’s middle school. I’ve said this before but there’s not really a plan to this blog. I started it because I wanted to publiciz

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Michael Piller 1994 Documentary

6 days ago
2 min

Michael Piller 1994 Documentary

I’ve long been fascinated with Michael Piller, the writer/producer who came aboard a floundering Star Trek: The Next Generation in the third season and drastically improved its quality—turning it into the beloved show it is today, and enabling its spin-off movies and sequel series. Piller died in 2005 from cancer—he was only 57. I never met him, but I was always fascinated by him because for years I read the year-end Cinefantastique articles and making-of books about the show

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Andor Premiere

7 days ago
3 min

Andor Premiere

I predicted I would love this show—and I do! What is the single most important thing to great writing? Truthful human behavior. And nobody knows it better and can execute at a higher level than Tony Gilroy. (Okay, he’s in a tie with Aaron Sorkin and the other elite screenwriters.) I understand why they premiered the first three episodes together: episodes 1 and 2 are set-up for episode 3, which features a phenomenal shoot-out set piece in an industrial location. Mild spoilers

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David Carbonara’s Back to One

Sep 23
1 min

David Carbonara’s Back to One

Just a quick plug today for composer David Carbonara’s new jazz album, Back to One. Check it out!

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I’m Searching for My People

Sep 22
3 min

I’m Searching for My People

As you can see, I’m a unicorn. So...I’m searching for “my people.” What does this mean? Like all of us, I yearn for belonging and acceptance. I am so lucky to have found it in my personal life, with my wife and kids! When I was a kid myself, loving Star Trek and film scores on Martha’s Vineyard, it was very hard to find “my people.” Even at Star Trek conventions, I was taken aback by how much fans seemed to just want to memorize trivia and buy collectibles, and not really exp

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Don’t Write a Remove on a Remove

Sep 21
2 min

Don’t Write a Remove on a Remove

Quick screenwriting tip. I was on one of the Facebook screenwriting groups—there are a bunch of them. From time to time, people post their loglines for feedback. I’ve done it, myself. Typically, the loglines you read are nowhere near anything that would garner professional consideration. Lots of reasons for that. (You can read my long series of columns here.) I’ll summarize somebody’s idea—which I probably shouldn’t do, but they posted it publicly, and it’s useful as a teachi

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House of the Dragon Midpoint

Sep 20
1 min

House of the Dragon Midpoint

I wrote a bit dismissively about the Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon, when it premiered. Halfway through the first season—as the two main female characters are about to be recast with older actors—I was wrong. It’s good. And it reminded me why I loved Game of Thrones so much in the first place, before they ran out of source material to adapt: the focus on relatable human characters, in the medieval fantasy setting. No surprise, because we’ve gone back to an adapt

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Lukas and Charlie Interview MICHAEL LEHMANN

Sep 19
1 min

Lukas and Charlie Interview MICHAEL LEHMANN

Lukas and Charlie are back (sorry for the gap) and we interview director MICHAEL LEHMANN (Heathers, The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window). I love Michael’s work—Heathers is a classic—and The Woman in the House... had me in stitches. It’s so absurd, but my wife and I were watching and agreed, “I’m really invested in this story!” And that’s the highest compliment. It was great fun to be able to ask Michael about his sensibility, which he characte

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ST:TMP Deleted Scenes, Part 2

Sep 18
2 min

ST:TMP Deleted Scenes, Part 2

Another deleted scene from Star Trek: The Motion Picture has been teased online, from the new super-special-edition home video release. (I wrote about a different one here.) This is the demise of Security Guard Phillips, in the goofy Starfleet “red shirt” armor. We knew of this from the novelization and Marvel comic adaptation: Unfortunately, and I hate to say this about Bob Wise...it just doesn’t seem to be shot right. It’s too abrupt and oblique. There needed to be some emp

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Martha’s Vineyard Migrants

Sep 17
1 min

Martha’s Vineyard Migrants

My hometown was in the news this past week, when Florida governor Ron DeSantis evidently arranged to lure under false pretenses newly arrived migrants in Texas and fly them to Martha’s Vineyard as a media stunt. I know that political topics are divisive. I have lots of friends on “the other side” so I try not to wade into these waters. But when I do, I won’t hide from the fact that I’m a liberal Democrat. That’s who I am, so I mostly have liberal opinions (although more on th

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Black Belt Jones

Sep 16
3 min

Black Belt Jones

I have a confession to make. All those blaxploitation movies—and all those kung fu movies—and, especially, all those blaxploitation + kung fu movies—I always found them really boring. Even the so-called classics. I never encountered them at the right impressionable age, I guess. Or I just wasn’t into exploitation movies where the fun seems to be about killing a million bad guys. I still don’t like those movies. I honestly find it disturbing when John Wick shoots a hundred peo

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Get Back Documentary

Sep 15
2 min

Get Back Documentary

I finished watching Get Back on Disney+. I am so glad this exists. It took me a while to get through because I could only watch so much in one sitting. The “fly on the wall” approach recalls a dispiriting truth of recording sessions: if you don’t have anything to actually do, they can get boring, no matter how special the artist. But what a treat! Like almost all reasonable people, I love the Beatles, adore their music, and am in awe of who they were and everything that they

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R.I.P. Jean-Luc Godard

Sep 14
1 min

R.I.P. Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard has died at the age of 91. The New York Times obituary has a pretty good rundown of his remarkable life and movies. I was exposed to his work primarily in college film studies in the 1990s: Breathless, Le Mépris, Pierrot le fou—his early classics. What I remember the most is that I found the films, well, rather slow and hard to get into. Their jumble of scenes and cinematic rule-breaking made the watching experiences very start-stop (which was the point). But,

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Misc. Screenwriting Tips Pt. 4

Sep 13
4 min

Misc. Screenwriting Tips Pt. 4

Continued from yesterday. QUICK GUIDE: Secret of Screenwriting 1, 2 and 3. Misc. Tips 1, 2, 3, 4. Above: Reddit/screenwriting. Very dangerous. You go first. THE BLACK LIST WEBSITE Having spent way too much money at the Black List website, and even gotten the coveted “8” once, I would caution against using it. The readers tend to elevate material with a high amount of noble social value (causes). And they tend not to understand subversive content. While the Black List does sta

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Misc. Screenwriting Tips Pt. 3

Sep 12
3 min

Misc. Screenwriting Tips Pt. 3

QUICK GUIDE: Secret of Screenwriting 1, 2 and 3. Misc. Tips 1, 2, 3, 4. Some more notes from my own experience in this crazy field. BUSINESS Aspiring screenwriters get super interested in the business side of the craft. This is, of course, essential to know. But unless you have an actionable script, it’s all just a fantasy. It’s imaginary problems—sandcastles in the sky. Many times when I interact with aspiring writers, it feels like they put 95% of their effort into being re

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Misc. Screenwriting Tips Pt. 2

Sep 11
2 min

Misc. Screenwriting Tips Pt. 2

Above: a random Aliens page by the master, James Cameron. QUICK GUIDE: Secret of Screenwriting 1, 2 and 3. Misc. Tips 1, 2, 3, 4. ACTION WRITING Top-end scripts have action writing that is so engaging, it’s actually fun to read. But when you try, it comes out purple—why? Amateurs just describe stuff. Professionals filter all the prose through a human lens. They write about people. They make it experiential. Read anything by James Cameron, the all-time master. If you’re just d

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