Oh, and another friend and I were discussing styles of screenwriting over lunch the other day, and I mentioned the the Heinlien/Bradbury kerfluffle you guys were having...

As my friend said...

"Gosh, which creator was the greatest? DaVinci, or Michelagelo?"

Gotta admit, when it comes to knock down, drag out fights between the relative merits of apples vs oranges... you guys know how to do it up right.

But you know what I DO miss about the kind of writing Bradbury and guys like Serling and Matheson did, compared to the stuff we get today? Back then, writers understood that monologues weren't just for Bond villians. Sometimes, other characters had something to say too. They knew that an aside wasn't just a "gimmick" that was used in Ferris Buhller... That you could actually foreshadow things to come, that sometimes gags were best delivered in sets of three... and so on.

These days, with the advent of "POV" cinema, and reality TV editing... all that is lost to the popularity of listening to various participants grunt and each other and then later %$$+# to "confession cams."

The real horror facing us, gentlemen, isn't "which writer was best"... No, it's, "what the hell ever happened to good writing in film and TV?"

"[The audiance] will populate the darkness with more horrors than all the horror writers in Hollywood could think of. If you make the screen dark enough, the mind's eye will read anything into it you want! We're great ones for the dark patches." -VAL LEWTON