Picture this:
You’ve written a great pitch. You’ve connected with a producer. You’ve set a meeting date. This is everything you’ve wanted since you started working on your gem of an idea. You’ve got a chance to grab the brass ring!
If you’re like most writers, that half-minute of joy after you land the Big Meeting is followed by ...
Indiana Jones. Hannibal Lecter. Seinfeld. Rocky Balboa. Walter White. These memorable characters are dynamic, puzzling, funny, terrifying, and inspiring by turn. Audiences crave characters that transport them to new worlds. They want characters who offer a vicarious thrill ride through lives they’ll never lead themselves – that’s part of the ...
A Ghost Story, written and directed by David Lowery, (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Pete’s Dragon) is one of the most bizarre yet beautiful films I’ve seen in a long time. It’s both clever and frustrating, both emotionally consuming and numbing, both sentimental and existential. That’s a lot of contradictions for one movie.
Spoilers ...
Every Tom, Dick and Mary in Hollywood has a screenplay. But very few writers can get one made, let alone be a critical and box office success. Even fewer writers can write two successful sequels and build a franchise. Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio are part of that elite group.
Writing team Paul and Daurio didn’t meet in film school or at a ...
For many of us, just hearing the word subtext gives us a flashback to our high school English class. In that class, the teacher probably discussed subtext in terms of dialogue and left it at that. But, subtext really refers to all that is not spoken and encompasses much more than simply dialogue. Subtext is important in all genres but works ...
For writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour, her latest screenplay, The Bad Batch, started with a single image.
“The first thing I wrote – and I didn’t know how she was going to get the skateboard – but I just had this image of a girl, missing an arm and a leg, rowing herself on a life boat in a sea of dirt in the middle of nowhere. And then ...
Everyone loves a good mystery. And My Cousin Rachel is just that – mysterious from the beginning to the end in the most delicious way. But keeping an audience in suspense for two hours is no easy task. Just ask writer/director Roger Michell. For him, it was all about character.
Shults says that when he was writing the film, he had no idea where all the dark thoughts were coming from. “But now, after talking about it so much and psychoanalyzing it, I think I understand where it all came from. It’s weird.”
You’ve polished your script, found someone interested, and gotten a meeting. A producer or buyer has invited you to come to their office and tell them a bit about your spectacular idea. This is what everyone in Hollywood is here to do. You are going to pitch your idea. Congratulations!
If you are part of the few insane people who enjoy ...
Shimmer Lake isn’t your ordinary crime drama about a bank heist gone wrong. It’s a multilayered examination of revenge, loyalty and plain old bad luck. Oh, and did I mention the story is told in reverse?
The narrative question is what’s happening in the audiences’ mind or, more specifically, what you want happening in their minds. At any given point in a film, there is a question in your audience is thinking about. As the writer, you should know what that question is. And, you should have put it there.
Hollywood has a tendency to cannibalize itself. Most of the superhero reboots are empty-calorie action flicks with too much CGI, (do we really need another Spider-Man this July?).
While superhero films are here to stay - at least for the next decade - the other recycling trend with which Hollywood seems obsessed is rebooting nostalgic TV shows ...
