A short list of essential screenwriting iPhone apps (and some for iPads as well) – apps which I believe should be a part of any discerning, elitist iPhone screenwriter’s library, if he or she hopes to continues to remain the better of, and more educated than, the peasants using all of those knuckle-dragging non-Apple devices.
Racist screenwriter isn’t an archetype you see a lot of in Hollywood. But racism in screenwriting is all too common. It’s true that the film industry is taking significant steps towards diversity, and that we can discuss how big those steps are, or how late they are, or whether or … Read more
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 1980’s 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
In my line of work, script reading, we get paid to read scripts and give notes or write coverage. Which means we have to read every single page of a client’s screenplay. But, as you might imagine, it’s quite a different situation at a studio or production company, where a … 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
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 make. There simply was no point to do so, other than for us to share … 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
The two most popular screenwriting software packages – Movie Magic Screenwriter and Final Draft – are popular for many reasons: Formatting your script as you go by simply hitting the TAB key… allowing screenwriters to customize the look and feel of their screenplays… built-in index cards and scene navigation and … 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.
Regarding all your exposition, see if you can let your exposition “walk and chew gum at the same time,” so to speak. That is, if a scene is only designed to provide exposition on X, see if you can make the scene do double duty, or triple duty, and provide exposition on Y and Z as well.
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
Make sure each element you’re conveying is absolutely mandatory. Favor readability, entertainment, brevity, and audience clarity over making sure the reader and audience fully grasp the historical accuracy and detail you’ve obviously taken great effort to present.
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
Screenwriters are often malnourished. No, not in the food sense, but in the department of career orientation. Some ask “Can I make it as a screenwriter if I don’t live in LA?” (a question I answer in my article here). And some ask “What are the best day jobs for screenwriters? … 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.
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
Slugline is a screenwriting app that kind of flies under everybody’s radar. I decided I’d do a quick review of the program. The Slugline demo was easy to find on the modern, simple Slugline website, and easy to download and install. The first thing I do with any screenwriting software … 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