Saturday Hot Links
Time for the 226th installment of Saturday Hot Links, your week’s essential reading about movies, TV, streaming, Hollywood, and other things of writerly interest.
2015 Writers Guild Awards: Complete Winners List.
Elaine May Brings Down The House At Writers Guild Awards West.
BAFTA Awards: Full List of Winners.
Inside the BAFTA Awards.
Academy Hands Out SciTech Awards.
The 10 Best & 10 Worst Follow-Ups To Best Picture Oscar Winners.
Oscars Diversity: Only 19 Percent of Non-Acting Nominees Were Women in Last Decade.
10 Alternate Endings That Would Have Completely Changed Popular Movies.
Lena Dunham To Play Peggy Noonan In ‘Reagan’ Black List Live Reading.
‘Silence Of The Lambs’ 25th: Hannibal, Clarice, Demme, Tally, Oscar And A Scary Ending Discarded: An Homage Of Untold Tales.
‘Silence of the Lambs’ at 25: The Complete Buffalo Bill Story.
‘Silence of the Lambs’ at 25: ‘It Broke All the Rules’.
This New Artificial Intelligence Script-Reading Program Could Find Your Next Oscar Role.
Top 10 Takeaways: How R-Rated Marvel Action Comedy ‘Deadpool’ Rewrote February Box Office History.
‘Deadpool’ Was №1 in Every Foreign Market Except One.
Will ‘Deadpool’ Spawn More R-Rated Superhero Movies.
‘Deadpool’ Marks The Death Of The X-Film As We Know It.
Did ‘Deadpool’ Save the Superhero Genre From Fatigue.
James Gunn Fears ‘Deadpool’ Will Teach Hollywood Wrong Lessons.
Did ‘Deadpool’ Director Tim Miller Leak the Test Footage That Launched a Franchise.
How Adam McKay Became a Serious Oscar Contender After $7 Billion in Comedies.
What ‘Compton,’ ‘Inside Out,’ ‘Carol’s’ Oscar-Nominated Screenwriters Would Change About Their Films.
Women Activists Rocked Sundance, Celebrating a Sea Change.
Meryl Streep on Director Gender Gap: “We Need 40- to 50-Year-Old White Males to Be Interested”.
Athena Film Festival Honoring Paul Feig, Mira Nair Amid Increased Talk of Gender Issues in Hollywood.
We Asked Industry Insiders: How Can Hollywood Really Fix Its Inclusion Problem.
Berlin: Studio Deals Soar as Streamers’ Offers Sputter.
Irish Film Board Weighs In on a Charmed Oscar Year with ‘Room,’ ‘Brooklyn’.
19 Best Movies That You Didn’t See in 2015.
The Martian’: Andy Weir, Drew Goddard Discuss the Book-to-Film Journey.
Steve Martin Performed Stand-up Last Night for the First Time in 35 Years.
Disney confirms cast for Star Wars: Episode VIII, principal photography begins.
This is Hasbro’s new Rey figure for its Star Wars Monopoly game.
J.J. Abrams Launches ‘Star Wars’ Fan Film Awards.
25 Years Ago, a Guy Who Really Loved Back to the Future Co-Launched Final Draft.
John Kerry Meets With Hollywood Studio Chiefs to Discuss ISIS.
Media Stocks Aftershock: What Really Frazzled Wall Street.
Claudia Lewis Stepping Down as Fox Searchlight Production President.
How Does One Get a Job as a Writer’s Assistant.
South Korea’s Polarizing Film Market: Can Mid-Budget Genre Movies Survive.
Online Ticketseller Fandango Acquires Digital Movie Brands Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes.
ABC Chief Paul Lee Forced Out, Channing Dungey Named Entertainment President.
Paul Lee’s Exit and What Went Wrong at ABC This Season.
How the $100 Million ‘NYPD Blue’ Creator Gambled Away His Fortune.
Reboot Mania: Movies & Past TV Shows Taking Over Pilot Season.
How ‘Vinyl’ Represents The Stunted Progress of Diversity on TV.
A whole slew of early South Park scripts are now available online.
Fox Sports Inks 5-Year Virtual Reality Pact With NextVR.
TED Talks Set To Continue On PBS.
ESPN Is Talking to Dish, Others About New Streaming Packages.
Nathan Barksdale, Inspiration for ‘The Wire,’ Dies at 54.
Yahoo Shuts Down 7 Digital Magazines.
Yahoo Lays Off Top Entertainment Journalists.
Yahoo Preps for Possible Sale, Naming Financial and Legal Advisers.
Vevo Says It’s Almost Ready to Start Charging.
The Slow Death of Redbox: Why the Kiosk Colossus Is the Next Blockbuster.
Will Streaming Music Kill Songwriting.
This Is the Man Behind All Five Album of the Year Nominees.
Newsstand Sales Drop for Celebrity Mags.
The Sundance Diaries: Day One.
3rd & Fairfax (WGA): Episode 17.
Broken Projector: Vomit Draft 5:
Chicks Who Script: Episode 76.
Scriptnotes: Episode 237.
Watch: Why Jonathan Demme’s ‘Stop Making Sense’ Is a Concert Film for the Ages [video].
Watch: The “Hamilton” Performance At the Grammys [video].
Watch: All of the Grammy Winners’ Acceptance Speeches [videos].
Screenwriting Master Class tip of the week: In Hollywood, there is a saying I’ve heard more than once: “Exposition = Death.” Why? Because nothing can bore readers more than the delivery of setting, information, data and backstory. Yet every script, play or story you write requires you to include exposition.
That’s why I created the Screenwriting Master Class course Handling Exposition. In this unique 1-week online class, we will break down exposition into various types, then by analyzing numerous examples from well known movies, delve into six key principles and techniques on how to best handle it:
- Exposition as Fascination
- Exposition as Mystery
- Exposition as Revelation
- Exposition as Conflict
- Exposition as Action
- Exposition as Humor
Plus 7 insider tips on working with exposition.
In addition, you can workshop exposition in your own stories using the principles and tips you learn in the course.
And the always popular Logline Workshop.
The class consists of:
Seven lectures written by Scott Myers
Special insider tips
Daily forum Q&As
Workshop writing exercises with instructor and class feedback
A 90-minute live teleconference between instructor and class members
Trust me, you need to know how to handle exposition. That’s why I created this course. And this is the only time I’ll be teaching it in 2016!
That’s right, I’m offering this class just once this year.
So join me beginning Monday, February 22 for Handling Exposition, a 1-week immersion in this critical aspect of the screenwriting craft.
Enroll here!