When people comment, "I thought you'd be taller", on meeting him, we may find ourselves thinking that other actors could indeed play the part. Harrison Ford would have made him fully human, Schwarzenegger fully inhuman. Russell gives the character a laconic growl that is bound to recall Eastwood, and may prompt the reflection that Eastwood has moved on, and only partly because he had to.For his new mission, Plissken is issued with a new wardrobe. The whole idea of a sequel set in a Los Angeles turned into an island prison after seismic cataclysm and social meltdown was his, inspired by the 1994 earthquake. It turns out that Russell hung on to his Plissken outfit from the first film, which he wears at the beginning of the sequel, eliciting the comment, "So retro". He wants you to know that he doesn't hoard a lot of costumes, but this one was special. He kept this trophy from the infancy of his stardom the way some people keep their baby shoes - though, if it were baby shoes, he wouldn't be quite so delighted that they still fit.But even if the star has bonded emotionally with the character's clothes, Snake Plissken is some way off being a true Hollywood icon.

Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), notorious criminal but deep-down good guy, is dispatched to rescue the president's daughter in a futuristic America gone feral. The literal time-bomb attached to the hero in the first film has been replaced by a designer virus, but the intention is the same: to provide an over-arching suspense structure for a story that tends to be episodic. Kurt Russell is unusually intensely involved in the project - he co-produced and co-wrote the screenplay with Carpenter and Debra Hill. Escape From LA, John Carpenter's not particularly prompt follow-up to 1981's Escape From New York, is almost exactly halfway between the categories. For most of the time it's an uneasy mixture of action picture and ramshackle satire, furiously inventive and not very good, until at the end it suddenly enters new territory. It's not territory you'd associate with this director - more John Milius than John Carpenter - but it's a fascinating aberration coming from someone whose first films were so confident (Dark Star, Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween), and who's lost his way so completely since then The plot outline is a photocopy of the earlier film's. There are sequels and sequels.

Some are sublime (Godfather II) and most are wretched (The Fly II or, come to that, Godfather III). The Script Factory's recorded information line is 0171-580 1052. It looks like development hell is about to be exorcised.n The Script Factory starts on Wednesday with Mark Watters's `Ballad of the Barrel Brothers'. Publishing unproduced scripts from the venerable likes of James Toback and Jules Feiffer, it, like the Script Factory, helps salvage testaments to the power of the screenwriting art.

As Martin observes: "If there is a sort of imagined way that people think of themselves and their lives now, they think of it as a screenplay rather than a novel. For instance, small talk has changed over the past few years - young girls recall some event, they include all the dialogue. Screenwriting terms are creeping into normal, everyday language but also other art forms - for instance, the poet Christopher Logue uses the terms `cut' and `flashback' in his Homeric adaptation, War Music."Meanwhile, Scenario, a New York-based magazine devoted to screenwriting, has recently been dubbed by the Washington Post as `the literary magazine of the future'. Faber's publishing director Joanna Mackle notes, "It is particularly the younger readers who are buying screenplays rather than novels."The screenwriter's language, then, is the grammar of the late 20th century. Faber & Faber, which 10 years ago was the first publishing house to add screenplays to its list, believing them as significant as other forms of literature, finds now that its screenplays outsell its fiction.