Yesterday’s story about the AP’s typographical goof reminded me of something a pretty geeky Washington Post copy editor once did on purpose in coming up for a headline for a pretty obscure story.

The article was about a South Korean high-wire championship that featured tightrope walkers performing their daring feats high above the Han River.

The headline: Skywalkers in Korea Cross Han Solo.

You can find the original story here.

While your word processor’s spell checker will help you catch a typo when your fingers are blazing away at the keyboard and you accidentally type too many letters, it will NOT correct words it recognizes that are sorely out of context.

This is a lesson the Associated Press learned recently when they ran a story earlier this month describing Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman as “the Democratic vice presidential prick in 2000 who now is an independent”.

While they meant to write “pick”, the typo made its way into early online editions of the Houston Chronicle, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Cleveland’s Plain Dealer. Then again, you have to wonder as the letter “r” is nowhere near “p” and “i” or “c” and “k” on a standard keyboard.

You can read more about this story, covered by Editor & Publisher, here.

Joe Eszterhas, the screenwriter behind Flashdance, Basic Instinct, and Showgirls, presents a tongue-in-cheek look at screenwriting in The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God! that is part autobiography and part Rough Guide.

Eszterhas shares his tips about surviving Hollywood in acerbic, bite-sized paragraphs that unabashedly praise the people he loves and mercilessly rip into those he loathes, while offering some gruff but friendly advice to both working and wannabe screenwriters.

Here are just a handful of tips I thought I’d share:

Cover yourself.
“Before each sex scene, write: ‘It is dark; you can’t see clearly.’ (Do this) just in case the director wants to shoot your script as NC-17 or ‘a deep R’… and blames you for pornography if the movie fails.”

Use the three beat.
“Three lines of dialogue - the last line (the three beat) pays the first line off.”

Shut the world down.
“I have found that for me, the best time to write is from seven in the morning till one o’clock in the afternoon. I get up at six, shower, drink some carrot juice and tea, and am at my writing desk by seven. I don’t take calls when I’m writing: my wife only disturbs me for emergencies.”

Write six pages of script a day.
“Stick to this schedule no matter what. You’ll have a finished first draft in roughly twenty days. Then go back and edit what you’ve written. Spend no more than five days on this edit.

Then rewrite your script from page one - with your edits. Spend no more than one week on this rewrite - that means twenty pages a day. Put the script away for a week; don’t even look at it. Then edit it once again. Spend no more than four days on the edit this time.

Then rewrite it again from scratch with your edits - taking another week. This will be your third draft. Now begin the process of trying to sell it - this, your official first draft.”

Welcome to Sophisticated Hokum.

Aside from acting as a showcase for my work, think of this website and blog as a virtual notebook where I will record anything interesting or useful that I encounter.

If you are new to writing and are looking for information about breaking into journalism or magazine writing, please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. I am more than happy to share my professional experience in this area with you, and may even post your answer for other wannabe writers to see.

For those who know me personally, check out my ballyhoo category to see what I’m up to and where I’ve recently been published. If you don’t know me personally, don’t be shy and introduce yourself.

And in case you were wondering, Sophisticated Hokum stems from the critique a story analyst at Warner Bros. gave to an unproduced play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s back in 1940. The analyst described it as an “excellent melodrama” and “sophisticated hokum”, and suggested the studio purchase it at once. That play became the basis for Casablanca, one of the best movies ever written.