Writing for Netflix, and the Netflix / streaming era, is revealing itself to be a different sort of screenwriting. Be kind and rewind with me. Back to the 1980s, when the videocassette rental boom proved beyond a doubt that there was a massive public appetite for all film genres and … Read more
Like all good shows, new Netflix GLOW tv show has a lot to teach tv writers (and screenwriters), aside from being a solid, fun series with a lot of heart. It’s loosely based on the true-life 1980s wrestling tv phenomenon, The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling – a rogue’s gallery of fierce, … Read more
Sure, we all know experienced producers, agents, and name talent use screenplay coverage to separate good screenplays from bad ones. But did you know they also use it as a mechanism to keep their eye open for good screenwriters? The RECOMMEND, CONSIDER, or PASS on a script coverage is typically … Read more
What script readers love can be a very, very long list of things. But here we’ll break down just a few of the biggest. Unlike paid script coverage services like ours, Screenplay Readers, where we’re paid to read every single word of a client’s submitted script, script readers at studios … Read more
Script coverage for Boogie Nights, which I recently found on the interwebs, thanks to a sleuthy Redditor, teaches us screenwriters and script readers some key lessons that we need to keep in mind when considering script coverage for own screenplays: Lesson 1: script coverage is extremely subjective! Every reader has their … Read more
With the amount of available outlets for filmed entertainment exploding exponentially each year, the demand for screenwriters at nearly all levels below the “Studio Tentpole Writer Line” grows ever higher. But so does the number of producers and companies jumping into the filmed entertainment sector, at all levels, from Podcasters … Read more
Should I use InkTip? Should I use The Black List? Short answer: No. TLDR Answer: Not long ago the question of whether or not to upload your screenplay to an online service like InkTip or Blacklist, or a forum, paid or otherwise, was a decision that no screenwriter had to … Read more
Documentaries have one key, primary ingredient that makes them documentaries: they reveal reality. But then again, so does a security camera, propped up over a cash register in any given liquor store. So what is it that differentiates a documentary film from a security camera feed? Or the video babycam … Read more
At Roger Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons Studios in 1997, I opened a script file using Final Draft for the first time. It was on a “Macintosh” because I didn’t call them “Macs” back then. In short, with all due praise to John Hodgman, I was a “PC.” A different kind of … Read more
Screenwriting while keeping a budget in mind isn’t easy, but it can make your writing leaner and meaner, and make your film far easier and cheaper to shoot. Read more
Writing a brief synopsis for a screenplay is the act of distilling the script’s story down to its essence while maintaining absolute brevity. You may recall that Polonius told his king, amongst other things, that brevity is the soul of wit. What he failed to include, perhaps due to his … Read more
“I loved the movie Django Unchained, but the script was too long…” “The Dark Knight made us millions, but the script was 167 pages, so let’s not do that ever again…” …Said no one ever. Yet, if you’re lucky enough to get your script into the hands of someone who … Read more
With all screenwriters, it happens sooner or later. Eventually, we all get into fights with producers. Creative, financial, it doesn’t matter – if you’re writing screenplays, and you’re at all successful in getting one of your scripts into any sort of development or production pipeline, you’re going to have a … Read more
Sometimes we screenwriters, we just want to, well, screenwrite. We don’t always enjoy fussing over format or margins or how to make a parenthetical look right or whether or not writing “THE END” should be marked in Final Draft as a slugline/scene heading or an action line or just plain “general.” The … Read more
In the last century, in the year 1994, I worked at a boutique talent and literary agency in Beverly Hills called Media Artists Group. For some perspective, Dean Martin and Bob Hope were still alive, Married with Children was still on the air, and The Simpsons was only on it’s fifth season. Another … Read more
Many of the scripts that come into Screenplay Readers have a lot going for ’em: great dialogue, solid pacing, characters that leap off the page… But sometimes a screenplay can have all those things firing on all those cylinders and still come up a bit short in the RECOMMEND department. Why is that? In … Read more
If you’re like me, you want to see smart, capable, females up on that big screen. You want to see female characters through an accurate lens. To write in the dark, ignorant of 50% of the population just because that’s the way it’s always been, is no longer acceptable. Read more
Screenwriters are an unsortable, surly lot. There are as many different flavors of us as there are soldiers in the Terracotta Army, or bricks in the Great Wall of China, and frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way. But sometimes, we like to have an idea of where the heck … Read more
If I were an executive over at AMC, I’d be a little nervous. What, with Mad Men and Breaking Bad all wrapping up, and to mention the producers of The Walking Dead talking about moving the show more towards a Cop Rock vibe and all. It’s a general truism for we in the screenwriting class (or at least, … Read more
Out of the 500 or so friends and family I have in my life, approximately 498 of them are screenwriters. And of those 498, exactly one of them actually writes screenplays. The rest just want to. Real hard. Yet they don’t, because they let everything else become more important, more distracting. Wait! SQUIRREL! … Read more
As Sun Tzu once said, “There are good screenwriters, and there are bad screenwriters.” And while much of the difference between the two can only be measured with abstract criteria (such as “talent,” and “chutzpah,” and “originality,”) the fact is, there are several key criteria good screenwriters do with their screenplays that are not only concrete, … Read more
Making your script funnier is not easy. Handing a screenplay to someone and telling them it’s funny is easy. But making them laugh as they read it? That’s an entirely different kind of flying altogether. The word “funny” has a lot of different interpretations, but in the filmmaking profession, the … Read more
When asked what was the best way for an aspiring starlet to get into Hollywood, the legendary Bette Davis once famously replied “Take Fountain.” Her advice remains evergreen today, only now there are also a myriad other ways for starlets and screenwriters like us to “get into Hollywood,” so speak — … Read more
Is your screenplay about the audience? Or is it all about you? My company has read a lot of scripts. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands! (Okay, well, not hundreds of thousands, yet.) Good scripts, bad scripts, mediocre scripts. And they’ve all had their positives and minuses. And super-minuses. But there’s one major … Read more
One of my writing partners and I are working on a new horror feature script, and we’re in the outlining/beat sheeting stage right now. Our characters aren’t quite gelled yet, and we’re both firmly entrenched in the belief that character begets plot, so outside of a few key visual sequences … Read more
Here are the Screenplay Readers Top 6 most important things for us screenwriters to remember when “getting into bed” with any indie producer. And by the way, some of the rules may even apply to studio producers in some instances, so it’s good to keep all of these in your toolbox when considering any deal for your screenwriting services. Read more
Have you ever considered giving yourself script coverage? Have you ever considered reading your own script and providing script coverage for it? Lo, and yea, and verily, the benefits can be massive, not just for the script itself, but for a screenwriter’s long-term ability to distance herself from her own work. Read more
Ever since I started writing, I’ve been an introvert writer. At first, out of necessity, then out of pure mimicry of the supposed lone, struggling artist banging away on his typewriter, then, as I got older, and time grew shorter, out of the desperate pursuit pure chronological efficacy. I’ve never … Read more
If you’re lucky/skilled/badass enough to have one of your screenplays optioned/bought and kicked into production, and if they’ve invited you to be a part of the experience of filming it, you might want to keep in mind, matey, the fact that thar be only a few things an on-set screenwriter is expected to actually, well, do. Read more
I’m a huge fan of writers groups. Screenwriting, like all writing, is mostly a very lonely endeavor. One woman. One word processor. Or two, if you’re collaborating. But ironically, the end goal of all screenwriting has traditionally been a stack of pages that get turned into a film that’s projected … Read more
