I was quoted in “Readers Share Their ‘Back Stage’ Stories”, an article helping celebrate the 50th anniversary of Back Stage.

A lot of people will tell you that acting is fairly straightforward, and that those who pay for or spend their time being trained in new acting methods are wasting their time. But this isn’t true at all – acting is like any other career – only by educating yourself in certain techniques can you progress to more advanced, higher-paying work.

Principal photography on Random Encounters wrapped Monday, May 10th. Besides writing the screenplay, I played the role of Nate.

Check out the website at RandomEncountersMovie.com

Imagination Pictures, which optioned my indie romantic-comedy screenplay Random Encounters at the beginning of the year, entered production on the feature film on Tuesday, April 20, 2010. You can learn more about the film here:

The Oscars are behind us, the awards season is for all intents and purposes over, and Hollywood can once again return to the business of making movies. Like all in the biz, I watched last night’s telecast intently; overall, I found it a relatively entertaining ceremony.

One of my favorite segments of the annual Academy Awards broadcast is the “In Memoriam” recognition of those notable members of the Hollywood community who passed away over the previous year. Last night was no exception, but what really stood out was the separate special tribute to director John Hughes. His sudden death was far more upsetting, far more meaningful to me than Michael Jackson’s was or ever could be. It still is stunning, all these months later.

Watching the Hughes tribute, I was left with the question: has any other director ever been the voice of a generation in the same manner and to the same extent that John Hughes was to the children of the 1980s?

I would venture to say not.

Although we frequently speak of musicians being the voice of a generation, that terminology is seldom directed to filmmakers in the same manner. Yet if you were in high school when Hughes’s films were released, his movies spoke to the reality of your circumstances in a way that no others did. If you were a few years younger, those same John Hughes movies were the blueprint of your high school years was to come.