Saturday Hot Links
Time for the 286th installment of Saturday Hot Links, your week’s essential reading about movies, TV, streaming, Hollywood, and other things of writerly interest.
Tensions Mount as Hollywood Braces for a Possible Writers’ Strike.
WGA Members Gather as Strike Authorization Vote Begins.
Writers Guild Edges Closer to Strike With Talks Suspended Until Next Week.
With a Hollywood Writers’ Strike Looming, Here’s What to Know.
An Aggregated Oral History of 2009 Films Ruined By the Last WGA Strike.
Netflix Tells Analysts It Will Be Hurt If Writers Go On Strike.
Summer Movies 2017: Every Sequel, Reboot and Remake Hitting Theaters.
Why ‘The Fast and the Furious’ is the most important franchise around.
Can the Marvel franchise survive without Iron Man?
Why Sony Has the Advantage Over Four Studio Rivals in a James Bond Bidding War.
Holy Overkill! Are there SIX ‘Batman’ Films Planned for 2019?
Hollywood’s Strong Run at China Box Office Set to Continue.
CAA, China’s CMC Capital Form CAA China.
Academy Scrambles to Avert Museum Disaster.
14 Kickstarter-funded Films to Screen at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival.
23 Must-See Movies at Tribeca Film Festival.
The 10 Best One-Location Movies, in Order of Size.
The End of Independent Film As We Know It.
How ‘Moonlight’ Altered NYC’s Indie Scene.
Documentary Sales Are Surging, But What’s Driving the Competition?
Netflix Keeps Buying Great Movies, So It’s a Shame They’re Getting Buried.
Netflix Nears 100 Million Subscribers, But Q1 Gains Fall Short of Expectations.
Arrival’s Eric Heisserer on Diving Into the Valiant Comics Universe in Secret Weapons.
Guillermo del Toro Explains Why Making a Monster Is One of the “Hardest Forms of Creation”.
6 Filmmaking Tips from Ben Wheatley.
‘Star Wars’ Writer Shares Story of Being Harassed on Atlanta Train.
Which Broadcast TV Shows Will Be Canceled and Renewed — and Which Are at Risk.
TV Upfronts Preview: Less Glitz and More Metrics.
As TV Quality Rivals Film, Showrunners Must Stop Being Embarrassed By the Small Screen.
Comedy Central Orders 3 Series — Including ‘The New Negroes’ — and 9 Pilots.
21 NBC Pages Turned Hollywood Players Tell All: Johnny Carson Sightings, Calls From the President, TV Cameos.
How to talk like a TV writer, as explained by David Mandel of ‘Veep’.
Six great TV shows to watch now that ‘Girls’ is over.
Netflix Claims People Have Spent 500 Million Hours Watching Adam Sandler Movies.
Cleveland Murder Highlights Perils of Video for Facebook.
Facebook To Review Content Reporting System in Wake of Facebook Live Killing.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Sets Sights on Augmented Reality.
Hollywood Is Losing the Battle Against Online Trolls.
Everything You Missed at Coachella 2017.
Megan Ellison’s First Annapurna Video Game Is as Quirky as Her Movies.
The Bitter Script Reader: Why Are We Compelled to Rank Movies in a Series with Each New Release?
Chuck Wendig: What I’ve Learned After 5 Years And 20 Books: 25 Lessons.
Scriptnotes: Episode 296.
In Its Third Season, ‘The Leftovers’ Makes Agnosticism Thrilling (Flavorwire).
‘The Leftovers’: The 9 Happiest Moments You Might Have Forgotten in All the Darkness (Indiewire).
“We can’t just be going through all of this for nothing”: The final season of “The Leftovers” finds its power in the confusion of loss (Salon).
The Leftovers’ Recap: ‘The Book of Kevin’ Is Riddled With Intriguing Mysteries (Variety).
TV Review: ‘The Leftovers’ Season 3 on HBO (Variety)
‘The Leftovers’: Justin Theroux on Kevin’s Sanity, Crisis of Faith, and the ‘Gratifying’ Finale.
The Leftovers Season-Premiere Recap: Stairway to Kevin (Vulture).
The Leftovers’ shocking season 3 premiere (The Week).
How ‘The Leftovers’ Exploded The Idea Of The “Mystery Box” Show.
Watch: Studio Ghibli — A Brief History.
J.C. Spink, Producer and Master of the Script Sale, Dies at 45.
Screenwriting Master Class tip of the week
Last September, I began a new chapter in my creative journey as an assistant professor of screenwriter at the DePaul University School of Cinematic Arts. As a result, I will only offer group workshops — Prep: From Concept to Outline and Pages I: Writing the First Draft —in the summer which means the next sessions I will lead will begin in June and July.
However I do have a handful of slots available for private one-on-one workshops including the premiere program I offer: The Quest.
The Quest is an intensive 20-week online screenwriting workshop which consists of three stages:
Core [4 weeks]: Participants learn essential screenwriting principles covering Plot, Concept, Character, Style, Dialogue, Scene, Theme, Time. There are 12 written lectures each week which post daily, then a writing exercise due Sunday to put the theory into practice. I wrote all 48 lectures amounting to over 250 pages of in-depth content and believe it to represent a new, cutting edge way to think about screenwriting.
The approach presented in Core is unique in these respects:
Coherent: Rather than a writer being forced to pick a bit of screenwriting theory from this guru or that, this educational resource or that, the Core content comes from a specific perspective — my own — based on over 25 years experience as a screenwriter and over 10 years as an educator. Every concept presented in Core is tied together by an overall philosophy about screenwriting, writing and creativity.
Comprehensive: The content presented in Core provides writers all the knowledge they need to have to be able to write a professional quality screenplay.
Character-based: Whereas so much of the conversation about screenwriting is focused on structure [and by ‘structure’ most people mean ‘plot’], Core presents an approach that begins and ends with character. In my view, this is not only the best way for a writer to craft unique, compelling, and entertaining multidimensional characters, it’s also the most effective — and frankly logical — way to find your story’s plot.
For 4 weeks in Core, participants in The Quest are immersed in screenwriting theory. At the end of that time, they put their understanding of those essential principles to work writing an original screenplay of their own.
Prep [6 weeks]: Starting with an original concept, participants in The Quest develop it through a series of 6 weekly lectures and writing assignments, each building upon the other until they end up with a thorough outline of their story.
I have been teaching Prep at SMC since we launched in January 2011 and the course has proved to be extremely popular. It picks up on the theory laid out in Core and runs with it in a workshop environment. The six weeks lay out like this:
The first two weeks are about exploration, starting with the Protagonist and a series of key questions to help define some of the narrative’s fundamental elements, then a full week’s worth of brainstorming, three different ways to prompt the writer’s creativity and engage the story.
The next two weeks are about wrangling the narrative, the primary Plotline points that provide the spine of the plot, and the movements of the Themeline, the story’s emotional plot.
The final two weeks are about constructing the structure, scene by scene, sequence by sequence, subplot by subplot until the participant has a detailed outline.
Armed with their outline, the writer can approach the page-writing part of the process with confidence, primed to type FADE IN and go.
Pages [10 weeks]: Using their outline as a guide, participants pound out script pages through a series of 10 weekly lectures and writing assignments. Averaging about 10–15 pages per week, by the end of The Quest the writer has a complete first draft of their original screenplay.
Here, too, the process is founded on the principles presented in Core and put into use in Prep, all reflecting a character-based approach to screenwriting.
As noted, The Quest is a workshop and that means:
- Weekly writing exercises and assignments
- Detailed feedback on all exercises, assignments, and script pages
- Regular teleconferences
The Quest is not for everyone. It involves a big commitment in terms of time and — frankly — money. However the education gives writers a solid foundation in screenwriting theory and practice, all of it grounded in over 30 years experience as a professional writer and teacher. In my humble, it is superior to anything available. Here is one of many testimonials:
If you’re serious about screenwriting, you should already know you have a long journey ahead of you. Any chance you get to cross paths with Scott, whether it’s a one week class or The Quest, is a chance to expedite that journey.
Scott’s instincts as a mentor are spot on. He can tell the difference between when you need encouragement and when you need a good kick in the pants. Under his guidance, you become the kind of writer you want to be, the kind that doesn’t need to wait for inspiration.
The Quest changed my life. It gave me the structure to be immersed in screenwriting and the flexibility needed to write and accommodate work and family life.
The Quest exceeded my expectations. Not only did I come out with a quality screenplay, but a practical approach that I can apply to each script I write.
You can spend your time reading through screenwriting inspiration, tips or shortcuts, thinking it will help more than actually doing the work, or you can take the leap and do The Quest.
— Taylor Gordon
At present, I have room for two Questers. I also offer private programs for Prep: From Concept to Outline, Pages I: Writing the First Draft, and Pages II: Rewriting Your Script. If you’re interested, email me: scott at screenwritingmasterclass dot com. More information here.
