Saturday Hot Links

Time for the 247th installment of Saturday Hot Links, your week’s essential reading about movies, TV, streaming, Hollywood, and other things of writerly interest.

Emmys 2016: The Full List of Nominations.

2016 Emmy Nominations Breakdown by Studio: HBO, 20th Century Fox TV, FX Productions Dominate.

Emmy Nominations: ‘People v OJ Simpson’ Creators Want to ‘Stop While We’re Ahead’.

2016 Comic-Con Schedule: Saturday Has Marvel, Warner Bros. & Everything But the Kitchen Sink.

Warner Bros Reveals 2016 Comic Con Line-Up.

Highlighting Can’t Miss Comic-Con Panels.

Comic-Con 2016: THR’s Full Guide to Parties in San Diego.

Disney Hits $5B Global, $3B International Box Office In Record Time.

Top 10 Box Office Takeaways: Animation Rules as ‘The Secret Life of Pets’ Soars to Record Heights.

‘Ghostbusters’ Jillian Holtzmann and the Not-Quite-Gay Characters of Summer 2016.

Disaster looms if British film disconnects from Europe, says studio head.

Brexit: Three Possible Outcomes and What They Would Mean for the Entertainment Industry.

China Lifts Summer Blackout on Hollywood Films Amid Box-Office Slowdown.

Lionsgate Cuts Out the Middleman, Will Make a Chinese-Language Now You See Me Spinoff.

How Wanda Plans to Acquire Paramount.

Screen Australia Tackles Gender Imbalance With $2.7M in Funding for Female-Led Projects.

Warner Bros. Figures Out Who To Credit For ‘Wonder Woman’ Script.

FTC: Warner Bros. paid YouTubers for positive reviews.

Fox Reaches Settlement in Landmark Lawsuit Over Unpaid Internships.

When Agents Buy the Clients: WME, UFC and the New Hollywood Heirarchy.

AMC Entertainment to Buy Europe’s Biggest Theater Chain for $1.2 Billion.

Filming On Location in Los Angeles Increases by 5.8 Percent.

The MIT Physicists Who Infused Ghostbusters With Real Science.

Does Magic Stand for Privilege in Harry Potter.

The difference between British and American comedy might be optimism.

14 Characteristics of a Standard Action Hero.

How “Legally Blonde” Paved The Way for Today’s Female-Led Comedies.

IndieWire Turns 20: An Oral History of Supporting Filmmakers.

How Alex Gibney Is Reinventing Documentary Filmmaking.

Paul Allen’s Vulcan Productions Partners on Short-Film Series to Encourage Voters.

Charlie Kaufman Reflects On His Career: ‘I Feel Like I F*cking Blew It’.

Woody Allen’s Secret to His Success: His Sister Explains All.

Max Landis Tells Story of His Ghostbusters 3 Pitch.

On My Dad Harold Ramis and Passing the ‘Ghostbusters’ Torch to a New Generation of Fans.

Ivan Reitman on Bill Murray, Internet Trolls, and Why He Fought for the Ghostbusters Reboot.

Dwayne Johnson Is the Highest Paid Actor of the Past Year.

Studio Ghibli’s Letter to a Fan Explains the Pig Transformation in Spirited Away.

As World Events Turn Dark, Moviegoers Can’t Get Enough Talking Animals.

The Black List Interview: Pardis Parker.

The Black List Expands This Year’s Cassian Elwes Screenwriting Fellowship for 2017.

Rare Print Of Long-Lost Cult Film ‘Turkish Star Wars’ Found After 30 Years.

The Hollywood Sign Turns 93: A Brief History of the Iconic Landmark.

Screenwriting Infographic: What Scripts Win Awards and Where Do Others Fail.

Adapt or Die: 13 Steps to Adapting a Film from Something Else.

Cord Cutting Accelerates: Study Finds 25% of U.S. Homes Don’t Have Pay TV Service.

Fox Is Now Live-Streaming Its Primetime Programming.

How TBS Landed on the ‘Cutting Edge’ of Cable Comedy.

Vice Principals and The Rise of Limited Series: Trend toward shorter, more complete stories on television.

Showtime Secures Rights to Air Amblin, DreamWorks, Participant Films.

Netflix, CW Output Deal Reflects Changing Priorities for Key Players.

Sharing Netflix or HBO Go Passwords Is Technically Federal Crime Under 9th Circuit Ruling.

ABC Relaunches Free Streaming Service With 7 Short-Form Originals, Full Seasons of 38 Older Shows.

Silicon Beach 25: L.A.’s Most Powerful Digital Players.

Virtual And Augmented Reality Investments Up to $2 Billion Over Last 12 Months.

Talent Agencies Jockeying to Stake Claim in Virtual Reality.

Video Games Still Overly Sexualize Female Characters.

Nintendo Entertainment System Coming Back to Stores With HDMI and 30 Games Included.

Pokemon Go Fever Pushes Nintendo Stock Up 25%.

Pokemon Go: Mobile’s Next Billion-Dollar Bonanza.

Pokemon Go Could Set Off a New Wave of Augmented Reality Games.

How Pokemon Go revolutionized the app business.

Movie Theaters Grapple With ‘Pokemon Go’ Invasion.

‘Pokemon Go’ Is Now Responsible For Catching A Cheating Boyfriend.

Men Playing Pokemon Go Help Police Catch Attempted Murder Suspect.

40 Of The Absolute Worst Places ‘Pokemon Go’ Wants You To Visit.

June Was the Biggest Sales Month in Nearly 20 Years for the Comics Industry.

Marvel’s Comic Book Relaunch Lineup Leaked Ahead of Official Reveal.

Best-selling books of 2016: Here’s what has dominated the list so far.

The Legacy of Steve Reich, Arguably America’s Most Important Living Composer.

3rd & Fairfax (WGA Podcast): Episode 27 — Katie Dippold and Paul Feig.

Scriptnotes: Episode 258.

Watch: 5 Minute Supercut Tribute to Stanley Kubrick.

Watch: Industry Types Share What Their Favorite Movie Theater Is.

Watch: The Evolution Of Visual Effects.

Watch: A Tribute to Westerns (Supercut).

Watch: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story — Celebration Reel.

Finally Funny Or Die Remembers Matt Villines who died this week at the age of 39.

Screenwriting Master Class tip of the week

By now, most of you know I have accepted an offer to become an assistant professor at the School of Cinematic Arts at DePaul University. In the near term that means…

* I am busy packing to move our family to Chicago so…

* I have pushed back the start date of my next Prep: From Concept to Outline workshop from July 25 to August 8 and…

* This will be the last Prep workshop I will offer until the summer 2017.

That’s right, if you’ve ever thought about working with me in this unique workshop which I created and have taught with great success over the last 5+ years, this is the time.

I love teaching the course because I find it exciting to dig into a new batch of stories and because the process we use can have a transformational effect on writers, which is a wonderful thing to behold. For example, here is an email sent to me from Dawn LeFever who worked with me in the Prep workshop in October-November 2014:

Hey Scott –

Hope you and your family are well. I know you are about to begin another prep course and I thought I’d give you a little insight you might want to share with your new students.

Since taking the course last year at this time, I not only wrote the script I prepped in class, but have written three more since then, having just completed the first draft of the third one yesterday. I LOVE this process and it feels really organic to me.

Every time I begin a new project, I pull out my notebook with the reading assignments and work through the process just as we did in class. I sort of begin the brainstorming list from day one and just add to it whenever anything comes to me while working through the process. I also use note cards before going to outline because it helps me with pacing.

Then, when I’m writing, I have both my script and my outline on my screen and just write away, checking back at the outline to stay on track. More than a few times, as I’m writing, I think about a line of dialog or an action and then look back at my outline and realize what I have in the outline is much better than what was occurring to me in the moment.

At other times, while writing, I will find ways to weave moments in the script that foreshadow what happens later, because I know what’s coming thanks to the thorough prep process.

In other words, as you say, I do truly break the story in prep, which makes the writing so much easier and (hopefully) deeper and richer. I easily knock out 10 pages a day with this process.

I know there are as many different ways to approach writing as there are writers, but, for me, your process makes everything click and, even more, allows me to get really excited to finally sit down and write.

In the past year, I have had some encouraging responses — I was in the top 15% of the Nicholl Fellowship screenplays and was in the top 50 for the ISA Fast Track Fellowship. I made the quarter finals for the Screencrafting Comedy Competition with two scripts (One of them a rewritten version of Smoker’s Choice).

So… forging ahead and having a blast!

Thanks again for everything and tell the folks IT WORKS!!!

All the best,
Dawn

When Tom Benedek and I launched Screenwriting Master Class over 5 years ago, the very first course I created was Prep: From Concept to Outline. Why? Because no one else was teaching story prep for screenwriting. That struck me as crazy because most professional screenwriters I know and all TV writers break their story in prep.

Since 2010, I have led over 20 online sessions of Prep and worked privately with dozens of writers. The response has been almost universally like the sentiments expressed by Dawn above.

I literally tell writers at the beginning of every Prep workshop: “If you do the work… it works.”

In fact, Christian Contreras whose script “LAbyrinth” made the 2015 Black List is a Screenwriting Master Class alumnus, having taken this same Prep class with me back in 2014. And Verity Colquhoun, an Australian writer who did a private one-on-one version of my Prep class in 2011, let me know the script she wrote (“Wonderful Unknown”) landed a director and is slated to go into production this fall.

It’s not magic. It’s just a proven, professional approach to develop your story, stage by stage, from concept all the way to outline, beat sheet, or treatment, whichever you prefer.

Consider joining my next session of Prep. But whether you take a class with me or not, it’s imperative you learn some sort of approach to story prep.

Can you imagine routinely writing 10 pages per day? Can you imagine being able to write 3 full-length screenplays in a year? Can you imagine actually enjoying the page-writing process?

As Dawn suggests, all of that can happen if you wrangle your story before you type FADE IN.

And as I say, this is the last time I will be teaching the Prep workshop until summer 2017.

NOTE: I will cap enrollment of this session, so if you are interested in taking it, I advise you to enroll sooner rather than later.

To check out the Prep: From Concept to Outline workshop which begins Monday, August 8, go here.