Saturday Hot Links

Time for the 290th installment of Saturday Hot Links, your week’s essential reading about movies, TV, streaming, Hollywood, and other things of writerly interest.

Cannes: 10 Indian Filmmakers That Should Be on the Festival’s Radar.

Why ‘King Arthur’ Flopped: You Can’t Make a $300 Million Movie Without Women, and Three More Reasons.

‘King Arthur’ Bombed: 6 Reasons Why.

Hollywood fearing worst box office summer in a decade.

Hollywood Doomsday Preppers Need A Better Argument Than “Franchise Fatigue”.

How Disney is treating Star Wars like Marvel… in the wrong way.

How Pixar Lost Its Way.

Sony for Sale: What’s Next for the Studio Under New Chief Tony Vinciquerra.

Hollywood Remembers Former Paramount Chief Brad Grey.

LAFF 2017 Announces Full Slate, Including Competition and Episodic Offerings.

A requiem for medium-sized movies: Why have mid-budget films all-but disappeared from today’s cinematic landscape?

Could ‘Get Out’ Win an Oscar?

‘Alien’ Revisited: Nearly Four Decades Later, Ripley Is Still the Boundary-Busting Heroine We Deserve.

How Agencies Became So Vital To The Indie Film Ecosystem.

With The Story Factory, Shane Salerno Is “Revolutionizing The Way Authors Can Be Represented”.

“Wakefield” Writer-Director Robin Swicord on How She Got the Movie Made and Breaking into Directing.

An Oral History of ‘River’s Edge,’ 1987’s Most Polarizing Teen Film.

China’s Blockbuster-Fed Box Office Could Still Go Bust.

Hindi Indies Find New Ways to Get Trendy.

Beyond Bollywood: Where India’s biggest movie hits really come from.

Texas Man Sues His Date for Texting During ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ Screening.

10 Things to Know Before Shooting Your Microbudget, Part 1: Budgeting and Pre-Pro.

10 Things to Know Before Shooting Your Microbudget, Part 2: Financing and Hidden Costs.

The 2016–2017 TV Season in 5 Really Depressing Charts.

TV Ratings Are Way Down, But Does It Even Matter Anymore?

How Robert Greenblatt Took NBC From Worst to First.

Showrunners Sound Off: Judd Apatow, Ryan Murphy and Ava DuVernay on Empire-Building, Pigeonholing and Saying No.

Fox Is Making a Big Sci-Fi Play This Fall.

Every Superhero Show Currently On or Coming to TV.

Women Leads on TV Decline As Networks Discover White Dudes in Crisis.

How Agencies Are Combatting TV’s “Spec Script Fatigue”.

Television’s Best Shows Are Taking Their Cues From Literature.

Facebook is tapping Hollywood filmmakers ahead of its venture into TV.

Streaming Services Will Pay A Lot More Residuals Under New WGA Pact.

The 21st Annual Webby Awards Honor This Year’s Internet VIPs.

Top 75 Screenwriters And TV Writers To Follow On Twitter.

‘Show me the money!’: The self-published authors being snapped up by Hollywood.

Chris Hicks: Foul language is just lazy screenwriting, in movies and TV/streaming shows.

Scriptnotes: Episode 300.

Watch: Journey Through Twin Peaks.

Watch: From Seven Samurai to Fury Road.

The Leftovers episode 5 recap: What happens when Matt meets God.

The Leftovers Recap: In the Lion’s Den.

‘The Leftovers’ Recap: Reverend Matt Heads Down Under to Save the World.

‘The Leftovers’ Review: The Most Profoundly Moving Boat Orgy Honoring a 92-Year-Old Lion You’ll Ever See.

Why The Leftovers’ ‘Sex on a Boat’ Episode Was So Expensive.

Screenwriting Master Class tip of the week

The next session of my Prep: From Concept to Outline workshop begins Monday, June 5. I love teaching it 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 m 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 7years 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 nearly 30 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. 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. And David Broyles, who participated in the very first Prep workshop I led back in 2010, was named as one of 25 Screenwriters to Watch in 2016 by the Austin Film Festival. When I emailed David to congratulate him, he sent back a note with this comment about Prep: From Concept to Outline: “I loved that workshop!”

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.

I WILL ONLY BE TEACHING THIS PREP WORKSHOP TWICE IN 2017!

The first session starts June 5. The second session begins July 17.

To check out the Prep: From Concept to Outline workshop, go here.

I look forward to the opportunity to work with you!