Saturday Hot Links

Time for the 289th installment of Saturday Hot Links, your week’s essential reading about movies, TV, streaming, Hollywood, and other things of writerly interest.

Studios Snubbed WGA’s Contract Proposal To Boost Women & Minority Writers.

Here Are the Winners of the 2017 MTV Movie and TV Awards.

Amazon Acquires Rights to 40 Films From SXSW.

Layoffs In Miramax Film, TV Production Divisions: 25+ Staffers To Exit.

16 Summer Movies That Are Not Sequels, Reboots, or Remakes.

9 Potential Breakout Stars of the Summer Movie Season.

Is the Summer Pop-Cultural Experience Still Defined by Movies?

James Gunn Shares a Message of Gratitude with ‘Guardians’ Fans: ‘We Are All Groot’.

‘Edge Of Tomorrow’ Sequel Gets A Familiar Title, Emily Blunt Returns.

How A24 is Disrupting Hollywood.

Fandor Is Moving Toward the Mainstream, and Bracing for the Backlash.

‘Get Out’ Opens Hollywood’s Doors for a Promising Director: Here’s Why Jordan Peele Should Be Wary.

Kumail Nanjiani’s Culture-Clash Comedy.

The Property Brothers Have Written a Spec Script That’s Basically ‘Hitch’.

The Bus From ‘Captain Fantastic’ Is for Sale — and Ready to Take You to Burning Man.

Network Axes Falling Hard on Multicamera Comedies.

From ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ to ‘I Love Dick,’ the female gaze is thriving on television.

Gender equity debate in Australian film and TV divides the industry.

Wall Street Fears Fall of Pay TV as Internet Offers New Bundles.

Upfronts 2017: From More ‘Big Bang Theory’ to Another ‘X-Files,’ What the Networks Have in Store.

‘Carnival Row’ Fantasy Drama From Rene Echevarria & Travis Beacham Gets Amazon Series Order.

Authors Kiwi Smith And Kurt Lustgarten On Feminist Adventure Comic MISFIT CITY.

The Identity Loss of Austin City Limits Music Festival.

The Leftovers recap: ‘G’Day Melbourne’.

The Leftovers Recap: A Sudden Departure.

‘The Leftovers’ Review: Explosive Truths Rock Episode 4, as Justin Theroux and Carrie Coon Dig Deep Down Under.

‘The Leftovers’ Recap: The Riddle of the Sphinx, a Hallucinated Ghost, and the Burning Building.

How The Leftovers Chose 5 Iconic Melbourne Locations for Kevin and Nora’s Australian Adventures.

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.”

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.

The next session which begins Monday, June 5 is the first of only 2 Prep workshops I will be teaching in 2017. 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.

Thanks, Dawn, and continued best of luck with your creative endeavors!

To learn more about the Prep: From Concept to Outline workshop , go here.