Saturday Hot Links
Time for the 262nd installment of Saturday Hot Links, your week’s essential reading about movies, TV, streaming, Hollywood, and other…
Time for the 262nd installment of Saturday Hot Links, your week’s essential reading about movies, TV, streaming, Hollywood, and other things of writerly interest.
Google & The Black List Unveil Media Fellowship Winners.
Warner Bros. Names First Five Participants in Emerging Directors Workshop.
Announced: WGAW Feature Writer Access Project.
Top Sony Executives Disillusioned With Film Chairman Tom Rothman.
Sony Pictures Chief Tom Rothman Sets China Screenwriter Initiative.
China Film Official Insists There’s No Ban on Hollywood Movies With Chinese Villains.
Wanda Chairman Reveals Ambitious Plan to Invest Billions in “All Six” Hollywood Studios.
China Box Office Drops 19% in October.
The Difference Between China’s Movie, TV and Digital Audiences.
Disney Has Biggest Year Ever at Global Box Office With $5.85B.
14 Live-Action Disney Movies in the Works Based on Animated Classics, From ‘Mulan’ to ‘Snow White’.
Hollywood’s latest love: Gender-swapping.
Producer Roundtable: Matt Damon, Frank Marshall and 4 More.
Gun Violence in PG-13 Films Has Tripled Since 1985.
How AT&T-Time Warner Could Usher in a New Era of Megamergers.
Hollywood and the Illusion of Control.
The Movie Franchises That Died in 2016.
Can Star Power Save the American Film Market?
Why U.S. Comedy Is Falling Flat at AFM.
AFM: Why Horror Films Scare Up Big Bucks.
How Obscure Horror Film ‘Carnival of Souls’ Influenced Everything You’ve Ever Seen.
How Modern Horror Is Breaking the Rules of the 1980s.
Why So Few Horror Movies Have Good Endings.
‘The Shining’ Hotel Will Host a New Horror Film Festival.
Make Marvel Movies Great Again: An evolution against the status quo is needed.
Kevin Feige Is Ready to Move Beyond the ‘Completely White’ Casts of Comic-Book Movies.
Why ‘Rogue One’ is 2016’s most important blockbuster.
40 movies actually made better by studio interference.
How ‘La La Land’ Went From First-Screening Stumbles to Hollywood Ending.
Dueling Movies Planned About Landmark Big-Oil Court Battle.
John Cho, Alia Shawkat Honor Academy’s Nicholl Fellowships Recipients, Anton Yelchin.
Why Matt Damon Had Final Cut on ‘Manchester by the Sea’.
The Cinematic Traumas of Kenneth Lonergan.
‘Back to the Future’ Screenwriter Bob Gale Happy For Cubs, But Bummed a Good Joke is Now Spoiled.
Quentin Tarantino Confirms His Retirement After Next Two Films: ‘Drop the Mic. Boom’.
Paul Schrader’s Last Stand: How a 70-Year-Old Titan of American Cinema Is Fighting to Stay Relevant.
A New Story in Sci-Fi Writer Ted Chiang’s Life: Hollywood.
The ‘Sandman’ Movie Just Lost Another Writer, Who Thinks It’d Make a Better TV Show. But Would It?
Characters and How They Connect Us to Cinema.
The ‘Iron Giant’, Xenophobia, and Learning to Love a “Monster”.
Past Perfect: Why Back to the Future is One of the Greatest Scripts Ever.
How Women Champion Each Other in Hollywood.
Universal’s Donna Langley Says Increasing Diversity Is Good Business.
2017 Oscars: Record 70 Animated Shorts Vie for Shortlist of Ten.
Michael De Luca and Jennifer Todd in Serious Negotiations to Produce Oscars.
A Brief History Of Movie Theater Popcorn.
40 Filmmaking Podcasts You Should Be Listening To.
Amazon vs. Netflix: An Epic Oscar Battle Begins.
Making Comedy on a Budget Pays Off for Studios, Networks.
TV Diversity Hits Record Highs Onscreen in 2016–17 Season.
Is Mike Schur Becoming the Shonda Rhimes of NBC?
ABC to Charge $2.1 Million for 2017 Academy Award Ads.
TV’s New Creative Obsession: The Wide World of Sports.
The Simpsons Renewed at Fox Through Record-Setting Season 30.
This ‘Black-ish’ Writers’ Assistant’s App Is Finally Getting Hollywood to Stop Wasting Paper.
How Nickelodeon Got America Hooked on Cable.
Pivot TV Shuts Down: Why Participant Media’s Millennial Cable Network Couldn’t Survive.
Can Facebook eat into the TV advertising market?
Listen: Scriptnotes (Episodes 274).
Watch: Evidence that Westworld Is Taking Place in Two Different Timelines.
Watch: ‘Son of Frankenstein’ Uncut Trailer Hits the Web After Being Lost for 75 Years.
Watch: MATCH CUT: The Art of Cinematic Technique.
Watch: Young Storytellers 2016 Biggest Show.
Watch: Insight: Brad Bird on Animation.
Watch: Studio Ghibli in Real Life.
Screenwriting Master Class tip of the week
Time is a mystery and perhaps nowhere more than in stories. As writers, we can jump through decades with one scene transition. Conversely we can stretch out mere moments for many pages, slowing down, even stopping the clock. Indeed something so fundamental as the choice of past tense, typical of novels and short stories, and present tense, the standard for screenplays, influences how we approach our writing.
But do we as screenwriters even think about screenplay time? Consider all of these narrative devices available for us to use: Flashback, Flashforward, Set-Up / Payoff, Callback, Montage, Series of Shots, Cross Cut, Transition, Pre-Lap. All related directly to time.
Yet for all that, I don’t think I have ever seen anything of substance written about this subject — no article, no book, no class. That’s rather shocking because the simple fact that we can control time in a screenplay makes us a little like a god… but only if we know how to handle that power.
Beginning next Monday, November 14, I will be teaching Core VIII: Time. It is a 1-week online screenwriting course featuring 6 lectures, inside tips, forum discussion, writing exercises and a 90-minute teleconference. The lectures are as follows:
Lecture 1: Present: Being in the Moment and Writing in the Moment
Lecture 2: Present-Past: Backstory and Nonlinear Storytelling
Lecture 3: Present-Future: Destiny and Narrative Drive
Lecture 4: Set-Ups, Payoffs, and Callbacks
Lecture 5: Montage and Series Of Shots
Lecture 6: Flashback and Flashforward
Script excerpts we will analyze include Ordinary People, The Hangover, Big Fish, Bull Durham, The Sixth Sense, Back to the Future, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, The Apartment, The Matrix, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump and (500) Days of Summer.
This is the last of 8 Core classes I have created [Character, Plot, Concept, Theme, Scene, Dialogue, Style, Time], representing over 250 pages of theory and practice including dozens of insider writing tips and techniques. I will not be offering individual Core classes again until summer 2017, so if you have been thinking about taking a class with me, now is a great time.
To enroll, go here.
As always, I look forward to the opportunity to work with you.