Saturday Hot Links
Time for the 147th installment of Saturday Hot Links.
Today: The We Remember Robin Williams Edition.
Robin Williams: 150 of his greatest jokes.
Robin Williams: Left 4 unreleased movies.
Robin Williams: All 5 of his HBO comedy specials on YouTube.
Robin Williams: His underrated acting legacy.
Robin Williams: His death prompts a dialogue on depression.
Robin Williams: His death rekindles discussion about creativity and depression.
Robin Williams: The Film Stage with a bunch of video clips.
Robin Williams: Watch Jimmy Fallon and Conan O’Brien remembering Williams.
Robin Williams: In tribute, Broadway dimmed lights on Wednesday.
Robin Williams: Here is how the cast of “Aladdin” honored the late actor.
Robin Williams: The biking community remembers him.
Robin Williams: The Playlist selects actor’s 10 best performances.
Robin Williams: Lives on as a character in ‘World of Warcraft’ virtual world.
Robin Williams: Video where he meets Koko the gorilla.
New York Film Festival announces its 2014 slate.
What’s the biggest challenge of being an indie filmmaker in the digital age?
Incredibly rare panda triplets born in China.
Are we in a teen sex comedy renaissance?
Nietzsche’s 10 rules for writers.
Alamo Drafthouse coming to downtown Los Angeles.
11 mundane objects that are statistically more dangerous than sharks.
Amazon Studios to bow 5 pilots in third pilot wave.
How we motivate ourselves to work.
17 copycat film spawned from Pulp Fiction.
Gillian Anderson writes a science fiction novel.
The 11 best British romantic comedies.
19 things you probably didn’t know about Beethoven.
How to create a believable world for your characters.
NBCSN expands its interest in soccer with new “Men In Blazers” programming.
And cue J.R.R. Tolkien rolling over in his grave.
Disney’s massive hit Frozen gets a sequel… in book form.
Dog elected mayor of small Minnesota town.
A Vulture chat with “The Leftovers” star Justin Theroux.
How fear of failure keeps writers from producing their best work.
Summer 2014, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the blockbuster.
Related: Destroying the world every weekend without leaving a dent.
Can a test measure your imagination.
TV: Where have all the upfront dollars gone.
Related: Television development needs to be about ideas, not ads.
Related: Showrunner’s impact report from Variety.
A complete guide to crawling inside your customers’ heads with empathy maps.
20 fictional movie bands that rocked your world.
Stanford professor first woman to win math’s top prize.
7 things you didn’t know about The Terminator [video].
The suburbs made us fat.
Have “Game of Thrones” fans already guessed the ending.
Miracle on ice: The chilling promise of cryogenics.
Reactions of a 30 year-old man who watches Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time.
Why we procrastinate.
6 filmmaking tips from John Cassevetes.
According to science, how to be optimistic.
Terry Gilliam autobiography coming out in 2015.
Terminally ill “Simpsons” co-creator Sam Simon to be subject to Fusion documentary project.
Sony altering The Interview to appease North Korea.
Want to buy a 1962 Ferarri 250 GTO? Will cost you a cool $34.65M.
Every dumb movie should be 90 minutes long.
15 fascinating explanations for how things got their colors.
5 reasons why genre films are better than ever.
Incredible photos of the world’s scariest hike.
12 film composers on the rise.
50 excellent novels by female writers under 50 everyone should read.
7 awesome movie moments for grammar nerds.
Women out-raise men on crowdfunding sites.
10 props that have been used in more than one movie.
15 excellent bits of carnival slang to add to your vocabulary.
Screenwriter Eric Heisserer on his approach to pitching.
Al Gore sues Al Jazeera over the sale of Current TV.
Every Hitchcock cameo in one video.
11 wild and crazy sandwich mashups.
7 things you didn’t know about The Wizard of Oz.
12 writers who are using Google+ in cool ways.
Did Edge of Tomorrow get a new title for home video release?
Tom Hanks launches free manual typewriter iPad app.
11 of the very best bad accents in movies.
11 smells that are slowly disappearing.
The best documentaries of 2014 so far.
11 common words that will boost your Scrabble score.
How to survive as an indie movie producer.
15 Nora Ephron quotes on life.
The Expendables 3 and how PG-13 has ruined the modern action movie.
6 fruits you’ve been eating all wrong.
The 45 greatest concert movies of all time.
Arcade Fire performs a Nirvana tribute [video].
“Silicon Valley”’s bosses break down TV smartest dick joke.
A brief recent history of Telluride and how it’s become so influential in the Oscar race.
Finally actress Lauren Bacall dead at the age of 89.
Related: A remembrance of Lauren Bacall.
Screenwriting Master Class tip of the week: Some call it breaking a story. Others cracking a story. I prefer wrangling a story. Whatever you call it, you have to do it… figure out the story. What goes where. Who does what to whom. And for most writers, the ideal time to do that work is before you type FADE IN.
What we call prep-writing.
Of the many things that can go wrong with a screenplay, perhaps the most frequent contributor to a project’s crash-and-burn is the writer not spending enough time in prep wrangling their story.
Conversely if you do spend sufficient time in the prep-writing phase of the process, you significantly increase the chances you’ll not only finish your script, but produce a draft that will be much closer to realizing your goals.
When Tom Benedek and I launched Screenwriting Master Class nearly four years ago, the very first class we offered was Prep: From Concept To Outline. I created the workshop precisely because I believe so strongly in the value of prep-writing combined with the fact there is nothing out there remotely close to the approach I had in mind.
Prep: From Concept To Outline is a 6-week online workshop in which you start with your basic idea and your story’s Protagonist, then through a series of weekly writing exercises, you develop and build your story’s structure. Not just the plot, but also what’s going on in the emotional and psychological world of your story universe, the foundation of Character Based Screenwriting.
Character work. Brainstorming. Plotting. Subplots. Connecting the dots. Mapping your narrative. In the end, you have a detailed outline providing you a foundation upon which you can craft a first draft.
What’s more, you can adopt this approach — and adapt it to your own unique skills — for every future writing project.
I will be leading the next session of Prep beginning this Monday, August 18. So if you have a great idea for a movie and want to learn a professional approach to wrangle it, sign up now for Prep: From Concept To Outline.
If you have any questions about the workshop or what we offer online through SMC, please post in comments or email me.
Amazing things happen in these workshops, so I look forward to the opportunity to dig into your story with you!