The Business of Screenwriting: Everything You Wanted to Know About Specs Part 7: Attaching producers.
Page One: “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (1971) Novel by Edmund Naughton, screenplay by Robert Altman and Brian McKay
I watched the movie and read the script at the same time (this is a great exercise, one I heartily… I have three observations about the plot:
Hollywood has a long history of movie adaptations of stage plays. On Day 3 of this series in which we focus on Characters, there is a video interview with Powers and the film's director Regina King in…
Script Analysis: “One Night in Miami” — Part 3: Characters A week-long analysis of this Oscar-nominated screenplay. Reading scripts. Absolutely critical to learn the craft of screenwriting. The focus of this bi-weekly series is a deep structural and thematic analysis of each script we read. Our daily schedule: Monday: Scene-By-Scene Breakdown Tuesday: Plot Wednesday: Characters
Go Into The Story Resource: Screenwriting Advice From The Past A series analyzing screenwriting advice from the book “How to Write Photoplays” written in 1920 by Anita Loos and her husband John Emerson.
Scene Description Spotlight: “Titanic” Before Avatar went on to gross $2.72B worldwide, writer-director James Cameron created another movie phenomenon called Titanic (1997) which…
How They Write A Script: Paul Schrader In a previous post, I noted two radically different approaches to writing as represented by Neil Simon, who doesn’t “make outlines at all”…
Page One: “The Mask of Zorro” (1998) Screenplay by John Eskow and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio, story by Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio and Randall Jahnson, character created by…
Alexander Payne on appealing characters vs. sympathetic characters “I hate when movie people say, ‘Your lead character has to be sympathetic,’ which for them means ‘likeable.’ I don’t give a shit about…
Go Into The Story Resource: Great Scenes When you boil it down, screenwriting is scene-writing. Hone your scene-writing ability by studying these scenes.
Script Analysis: “One Night in Miami” — Part 2: Plot A week-long analysis of this Oscar-nominated screenplay. Reading scripts. Absolutely critical to learn the craft of screenwriting. The focus of this bi-weekly series is a deep structural and thematic analysis of each script we read. Our daily schedule: Monday: Scene-By-Scene Breakdown Tuesday: Plot Wednesday: Characters
Screenwriting 101: William Goldman “Nobody sets out to fuck up your movie. It’s not like the director or the star wake up in the morning and say, ‘Let me screw up this scene…
Go Into The Story Resource: Screenwriting 101 Hundreds of observations about the craft of screenwriting from professional writers.
Script Analysis: “One Night in Miami” — Part 1: Scene-By-Scene Breakdown A week-long analysis of this Oscar-nominated screenplay. Reading scripts. Absolutely critical to learn the craft of screenwriting. The focus of this bi-weekly series is a deep structural and thematic analysis of each script we read. Our daily schedule: Monday: Scene-By-Scene Breakdown Tuesday: Plot Wednesday: Characters
Video: Industry Wisdom Bits With yours truly offering a “golden nugget of wisdom” about screenwriting. I summed it up in one word. Can you guess what that word is?
On Writing “You cannot impose anything on characters. They help you, they give you all, but you have to respect them.”
Sundays with Stephen King’s “On Writing” A series featuring reflections on writing from the famed author’s memoir.
Go Into The Story Resource: An Argument Against Screenplay Formulas We end up with a ceaseless cesspool of formulaic crap carving its way into and ultimately out of Hollywood movie and TV development…
How to Use Dashes and Ellipses in a Screenplay Examples from movie scripts demonstrate these two tiny forms of punctuation can be a valuable asset for a screenwriter.
Page One: “Manhunter” (1986) Screenplay by Michael Mann, based on the book “Red Dragon” by Thomas Harris.
Go Into The Story Resource: Black List Writers on the Craft Some of Hollywood’s top screenwriters share insights from my interviews.
