524 WORDS / 4 MIN READ
Some of you will remember that I slaved ten years in the Hollywood gulag = the American entertainment industry, with only a modicum of success. When I retired, I’d acquired certain knowledge and skills which friends urged me to pass on to others, so I thought, why not? Might help somebody out.
And that’s how this book Three Filipino Screenplays came about, a compilation of three screenplays I wrote back in the day, all with the strong Filipino and Fil-American roles that were missing in the mainstream. I’d hoped that some 12-year-old in Tondo or Sampaloc would find my book and be inspired to write a script with roles that only Filipinos could play, but a script so good that the mainstream would just have to make it, forcing them to “reco’nize.”
My publisher friend Isagani Cruz agreed to publish my book, and we immediately ran into a problem: We couldn’t figure out how to offer it as an eBook but still retain the industry-standard script format. Digital readers let you change and resize fonts and do stuff that will twist and warp the script pages, resulting in weird canvases of modern art. We gave it a huge try, but gave up. So next we toyed with the idea of releasing it only as a hardcopy POD (Print on Demand), but that would’ve shot its price way up. If my Tondo 12-year-old could hardly afford a 99-cent eBook, no way could he pay for a print book.
That’s when we decided to release it only as a PDF, which retains all the original formatting. And we decided to offer it free. So all of you who could easily pay for Three Filipino Screenplays get a free pass, thanks to that 12-year-old in Tondo.
Next, following the South Korean filmmaker paradigm, I tried to find someone to write a two-page foreword, and approached many who had knowledge and skills above and beyond mine, stellar lights like Elwood Perez, Loreen Arbus, and Marlon Fuentes. I made it as easy as possible for them: They didn’t even need to read my screenplays, because any comments on my scripts were less important than some personal nugget they could pass on to that 12-year-old. To my surprise, none of them wanted to mentor. And some took really long to say no (one guy took more than a year.) And when I looked up, it was two years later.
That’s when I decided to put my eBook out without a foreword. TA–DAA ! Here it is, Three Filipino Screenplays by Xosé “X” Alzona ! DOWNLOAD IT FREE from this website; And pass the word, especially to 12-year-olds in Tondo or Sampaloc. Hey, pass the word on to EVERYBODY ! Let’s make Three Filipino Screenplays a free bestseller and get X on Jimmy Kimmel. That would be a nice breather, because it seems my work on this book isn’t done. Check out the script for Zero Dark Thirty, in standard format, on the Kindle. With their “Fixed Layout” and “Print Replica” Kindle formats, Amazon has solved the problem Isagani and I couldn’t solve. So it’s time to create a .MOBI version of my eBook.