Go Into The Story

“Hurry up and wait!” That is one of the unfortunate mantras of screenwriting. Your agent calls and tells you that Disney is looking for a movie idea to match up Hannah Montana and Bruce Willis… “But you gotta hurry!” A producer says they can get the script you’re writing

“There’s a great story I heard the other day that I’ll rip off. I guess it’s a classic Japanese story about a tea ceremony expert who got into a spat with somebody. The guy challenged him to a sword fight, and because of his honor, he had

In addition to articles and interviews about screenwriting, a writer can learn a lot by reading about aspects of the filmmaking process — directing, editing, acting and so on. This is especially true when you have an especially insightful article like “Mike Nichols, Master of Invisibility” by Charles McGrath in Sunday’

The famous ending of “The Graduate,” for example, came about because as it came time to film the scene where Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross get on the bus, Mr. Nichols found himself growing unaccountably irritable. “I told Dustin and Katharine, ‘Look, we’ve got traffic blocked for 20 blocks,

“Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.”  — Jules Renard Comment Archive

Hannah Montana: The Movie (Buena Vista) Daily Variety (Lael Lowenstein) Hollywood Reporter (Michael Rechtshaffen) Los Angeles Times (Mary McNamara) New York Times (Jeannette Catsoulis) Observe and Report (Warner Bros.) Daily Variety (Joe Leydon) Los Angeles Times (Betsy Sharkey) New York Times (Manohla Dargis) http://video.latimes.com/global/video/flash/

Many of the best movie scenes are payoffs to plot elements that have been set up earlier in the story. Often the set-up and payoff involves a physical object, something that becomes imbued with symbolic meaning and, therefore, emotional power. An excellent example of this is in the superb

Call me Ishmael. It was cold, very cold here in the mountain of Kilimanjaroville. I could hear a bell. It was tolling. I knew exactly for who it was tolling, too. It was tolling for me, Ishmael Twist. [Author’s note: I am now stuck. I walk over to a