8 from the heart.

Storytelling for film, or screenwriting, came to me not because I was a genius with magical narrative gifts, but because I was willing to try things out, rewrite continually, steal ideas, veer in strange directions, and make use of accidents and my own intuition.... This issue of stories by filmmakers is, for the most part, an inversion of my original idea for Zoetrope. It features the work of writers who have already been cultivated and who have already gone out and made films, as well as written scripts and novels. But it shows they still have the desire to tell a story solely with words, so as to allow the readers to supply the pictures in their minds.

It's quite a package for seven bucks, designed by his son, Roman Coppola, and what's more, here's a pleasant surprise: the online appetizers are pretty filling on their own. Abbas Kiarostami's story, for example, "After the Rain," is there in full. So is Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's story, "Refuge in London." There are ample beginnings of stories by Neil Jordan and Neil LaBute, and the others, by Coppola, Eric Bogosian, Tamara Jenkins and Michael Tolkin, are blurbed.

Steve Rhodes attended Tolkin's reading of his story, "The Return of the Player," on Wednesday at the Café Niebaum-Coppola in San Francisco. Steve sez Tolkin sez that it's "part of a work-in-progress novel which is a sequel to The Player. He said the original inspiration for Griffin was Elliot Abrams, particularly seeing him lie. He transposed the character to the more familiar landscape (for him) of Hollywood. And now that Abrams is back in the Bush administration, Griffin is back, too."

Coppola... well, I suppose, these days, you have to specify which one: Francis Ford Coppola also talks to USA Today's Andy Seiler, prepping for the re-release of the digitally restored, recut and remastered One From the Heart and dropping a few more hints of what we might have to look forward to in Megolopolis: "The older I get, I realize that all the conflicts in the world can be examined in your own family. It really deals with the question: What if we all got together and chose to make an extraordinary future we could live in?"

Of related interest will definitely be the clips and links from this entry back in July.

Short shorts, with a heavy emphasis on the 80s, as it happens: