Thomas Pope
Presenter:
“Understanding Character and How a Story Evolves”
Thomas Pope is a screenwriter whose credits include Someone to Watch Over Me, F/X, Lords of Discipline, Bad Boys, Hammett, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. He is also the author of Good Scripts, Bad Scripts (Random House). Thomas has worked for Francis Ford Coppola, Barry Levinson, Robert Redford, Ridley Scott, Frank Oz, and Penny Marshall, among others. Pope is a Star Speaker at the Los Angeles Screenwriting Expo and judge of the Canadian National Screenwriting Contest. He was co-producer and script consultant on Ali Selim’s Sweet Land.
“I’ve spent most of my free time thinking about how stories work. What mechanisms, structures and forces are at play when a story really moves us?” To answer his own question, Pope has devised two theories that offer a new way of “understanding the secret, hidden mechanisms that make a story sing.” He will present both ideas during his presentation using power points and allowing time for questions and reactions.
In the first part of Pope’s presentation, “A New Way of Understanding Character,” he notes that, in any story, novel, script or play, a character finds themselves in situations that accelerates or slows time. This serves to contract or expand the plot. Though this may sound theoretical, Pope’s power point presentation is both funny, practical and easy to understand.
The second segment of his presentation, “How a Story Evolves and Grows,” explores how a character in a story can evolve and change in much the same way that a species evolves and changes. Pope points out that, in the end, a story is about a character’s evolution. Hamlet, for example, evolves to see how to gather the strength, courage and cunning to defeat wicked King Claudius.
About his two-topics in one presentation, Tom notes that “Participants will leave this presentation seeing story telling and characters in an entirely new light. They will never look at both the same way again. The power points are fun, visual and entertaining and offer everyone a new way of seeing how a story works.”