Some of these you've touched on somewhat already, but they could be expanded upon....

• Are movie theaters doomed?

• With VFX so much cheaper, why aren't there more good low-budget effects movies?

• Is 3D here to stay?

• How PG-13 tones down a lot of films that otherwise would have been R

• Star Trek: what next? Star Trek 2 story workshop ... Original series TV reboot?

• Genres/properties we haven't seen in a while

Round 3
JK Rowling has confirmed having written another Harry Potter novel, this one describing the death eaters' triggering of a dark threat from within Hogwarts. It reportedly includes a shocking character turn and ends with Harry's rise to youngest headmaster and the birth of his first child. It's a story that Rowling says she's been planning secretly for quite a while and for which she quietly laid in hooks and hints that she made sure were included in the the last three movies.

Rowling has worked with Kloves on the screen adaptation, so the book will be published just weeks before the film debuts. David Yates will direct again, and the whole cast is on board. Budget is 110% of Deathly Hallows 2. Initial reviews are good, and promise that the film will raise eyebrows. It's called Harry Potter and the Curse of Peladon or some such.

Are you in or out?

Let's not reopen old wounds.

What has always amazed me is how often in TV retrospectives the cast and crew say they had no idea the show was canceled until it was reported in the news.

That's so cowardly, I can't conceive of it.

I read the rest of it. He makes his case, but I'm not clear why he's so angry. Most writers have always known that three-act structure is not the be-all, end-all of storytelling, but I'm not convinced by his claims of 9-20 acts in some good movies.

Three-act structure is about the protagonist deciding to get involved in the conflict and then later deciding how to put an end to the conflict. Every good story MUST hit those two plot points. Additional plot points are just obstacles to resolving the conflict (Indy losing the Ark multiple times) or revelations that raise the stakes (losing Marion). Three-act structure is just the SIMPLEST way of describing a good story.

Hulk first says you can have any number of acts then touts 5-act structure as the right way to approach structure because it's used by Shakespeare and TV dramas. Ick.  Five-act structure won't save you from writing a bad story any more than 3-act structure will (even Shakespeare wrote some crap, after all). I've often noticed that a good movie has a major plot point or two in the middle of act 2—his example of Iron Man is a good one—but so what?

When Tony discovers that Obadiah is trying to screw him, it doesn't change Tony's ability to resolve the basic conflict (ending Stark Industries' involvement in warfare and righting its wrongs). It just raises the stakes, which is something good writers talk all the time.

There's also a moment in Iron Man's act 2 when Rhodie finds out about the suit and wants it for the military, raising the stakes majorly again and setting up the entire second movie. But Hulk ignores that development because it ruins his 5-act theory for that story. But Sid Field would say, "Great! You've chased your protagonist up a tree, and you're throwing some really big rocks at him! Bravo!"

Hulk basically states at the beginning that the act structure of a story should tell you how to write it. But that's a formula and, as an insightful man* once said, there's a difference between form and formula. Three-act structure is a convenient way to think about stories and discuss them with other people in a way that helps you understand the basic elements of the conflict and its resolution; that's all.

* BW Finifter, Down in Front: Star Wars IV: A New Hope, @0:47:30

Hulk verbose and inconveniently formatted.

Well this was entertaining, but it was an awful lot of nitpicking of details that you all would have happily overlooked if the show was any good. I watched the first half of Terra Nova, and I honestly think you're being way too hard on it about the third child thing. China doesn't sterilize families or kill extra children.

The father goes to prison for assaulting a police officer. The penalty for having an extra child is probably financial, as in China. Also, there would be plenty of doctors who disagreed with the government policy who would help with secret births. It's funny that Trey wanted that stuff explained but he was fine with the original pilot skipping over the whole of the world they left.

Regarding the pollution question, people don't seem to have a problem with Wall-E, which posits an even worse case of the same sort.

Also, about the family who goes to live on the Serengeti being a bad idea.... Is Trey aware that Daktari lasted four seasons?

Princess of Mars really is just awful. Not only does John Carter get to Mars by passing out in a cave(?!), he quickly becomes the greatest warrior in a warrior society of 15-foot tall people with four arms!

I have my fingers crossed that some of the shots got mixed up between the two movies.

Doesn't look right in Firefox 8 for me, even after restarting with plugins disabled.

I don't use Firebug, but the Firefox error console lists some issues...

Error: Components.classes['@mozilla.org/extensions/manager;1'] is undefined
Source File: chrome://jqs/content/overlay.js
Line: 9

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED) [nsIXSLTProcessor.transformToDocument]"  nsresult: "0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED)"  location: "JS frame :: chrome://format-bar/content/custom.xml :: load :: line 43"  data: no]

Error: Components.classes['@mozilla.org/extensions/manager;1'] is undefined
Source File: chrome://format-bar/content/overlay.js
Line: 231

Error: event.originalTarget.tagName is undefined
Source File: chrome://net.yellowgorilla.imagezoom/content/overlay.js
Line: 248

I thought the question was just why cast a different actor than the one used in Iron Man 1. That was Gerard Sanders. The role was just background but he looked the part. John Slattery is great, but it would have been a nice break for a guy like Sanders to carry on that little role.

Now I suppose that Howard Stark is going to become a role like Felix Leiter in the Bond films, being recast higgledy piggledy every time it comes up.

Many on this forum have probably already seen this. But for any who haven't, your nightmare is ready....

Back even before Lost started, I thought that it would be great to have a TV show about people having to create a new society out of nothing. It could be on an island, a different (Earthlike) planet, or whatever—the time-travel idea is terrific. It would be this great adventure/drama that mixes the danger of technophilic humans trying to survive in a wilderness with the drama of people forming a political and economic system.

But Terra Nova is very orderly and controlled, so they start off with pretty much everything they need. But the real problem is that it's just badly written. Even with a ready-made society, it could still be like Spartacus, but it's not.

They could still do a good Star Trek series based on that idea. A sizable starship's crew has to abandon ship and starts an impromptu colony on a planet with weird and dangerous animals. It could even be a group of actual colonists who suffer an accident with some of their equipment, cutting them off from the rest of the Federation.