A Quote by Michael Mann

'Police Story' had some of the best writing on television, and one reason for that is because most of the scripts were based on real cases. — © Michael Mann
'Police Story' had some of the best writing on television, and one reason for that is because most of the scripts were based on real cases.
Essentially, the scripts are not that different. Let's say, in literary terms, it's the difference between writing horizontally and writing vertically. In live television, you wrote much more vertically. You had to probe people because you didn't have money or sets or any of the physical dimensions that film will allow you. So you generally probed people a little bit more. Film writing is much more horizontal. You can insert anything you want: meadows, battlefields, the Taj Mahal, a cast of thousands. But essentially, writing a story is writing a story.
Everything in 'The Tudors' is initially based on my historical research, and the fact is that the most unlikely scenes were the ones which were probably most based on reality. I prefer to be as real as possible, and there is so much of that story that you just can't make up.
You need better relationships between the communities and the police, because in some cases, it's not good.But you look at Dallas, where the relationships were really studied, the relationships were really a beautiful thing, and then five police officers were killed one night very violently.
I see so few scripts just because, for whatever reason, there just aren't that many good scripts with a young, teenaged girl. So it's always been sporadic. People don't know what to do when writing a story with teens that takes place now - they think you have to make a bunch of references to Facebook.
At one time my only wish was to be a police official. It seemed to me to be an occupation for my sleepless intriguing mind. I had the idea that there, among criminals, were people to fight: clever, vigorous, crafty fellows. Later I realized that it was good that I did not become one, for most police cases involve misery and wretchedness-not crimes and scandals.
At one point, I was greenlighting films and scripts that shouldn't have been made based on the fact that they had that stamp of approval of an Academy Award winner. And the good news is I got to learn the real process of filmmaking - directing, storyboarding, writing.
If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story.
There was only one investigation where some of the cases were not prosecuted. And that resulted from a disagreement between a police department and a prosecutor's office. The reality is some of the people who were in the investigation were arrested in similar stings later.
I started writing because I wanted to write scripts, but I wasn't very good at it. Then I started writing short stories, sort of as treatments for the film scripts, and I found I enjoyed writing short stories far more than I enjoyed writing film scripts. Then the short stories got longer and longer and suddenly, I had novels.
If I write a fantastic story, I'm not writing something willful. On the contrary, I am writing something that stands for my feelings, or for my thoughts. So that, in a sense, a fantastic story is as real and perhaps more real than a mere circumstantial story. Because after all, circumstances come and go, and symbols remain.
While I sat in family court, I probably heard 20 or 25,000 cases. And I am sure, during the course of those cases, there were cases that I probably would've decided differently had I had either more time or been able to explore more. But all you can do as a judge is really give a case your best effort.
You learn to do your best writing on story rather than off story. Very often at the beginning of their careers, writers including me do their best dialogue writing off story - the best lines, the best observations - but they haven't got enough to do with the plot to stay in.
The best and most sustainable love story for markets is one based on a healthy and dynamic real economy that creates jobs and opportunities for many more people.
When I first started writing the books in the 1980s, all of the female detectives were flawed in some way because they were based on noir characters.
I had written a story. I wrote the story out of some desperation, really, and I didn't know I was writing a story, and it took me years. And when I finished, a friend of mine had the idea that the story should be read as a monologue in a theater.
The hardest bits of my book to read were the easiest bits to write because they were the most immediate. Probably because I had never stopped thinking about them on some level. Those bits I was just channelling and those were the most exciting writing days. The bits I found harder were the bits that happen in between, you know, the rest of living. There were whole years, whole houses, that I just got rid of.
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