Everyone in Hollywood wants to write a cult classic. Who doesn’t want a crazed fandom going berserk over your movie and watching it obsessively while memorizing every single line and getting permanent tattoos on their arms in the shape of your main character’s face? That’s the dream, folks.
Cult classics aren’t always the ones that garnered critical acclaim when they hit the theatres, but they’ve all found an extraordinary afterlife in the imagination of their viewers. If you’re one of those writers who dreams of writing a cult classic, let’s take a look at some of our favorites and see what makes them tick.
I’ve found four examples of movie dialogue I believe encompass all these requirements. They are: The Social Network written by Aaron Sorkin; Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino; Casablanca by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch and The Silence of the Lambs by Ted Tally and Thomas Harris.
The first scene in a movie has many jobs to do. Not only must it nail down the tone, time and place where the story is being told, it must also tease the journey ahead. It’s no wonder some writers spend months conceiving and writing the first five pages of their screenplay.
One of the biggest mistakes screenwriters can make is overwriting their screenplay. Unless you’re Aaron Sorkin, whose screenplay for The Social Network was a whopping 164 pages with scenes lasting eight pages, you need to keep the dialogue, scene descriptions and page count as short and tight as possible. It’s worth repeating that film is a visual form of storytelling and we want to support the images with our screenplay, not the other way around. Here are a few guidelines to keep you from writing too much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcthOOSCO3Y
No. 1 - Aaron Sorkin, Matthew Weiner, Vince Gilligan Roundtable
This Hollywood Reporter roundtable pulls together some of the greatest showrunners in modern times. Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, Moneyball, The West Wing) discusses The Newsroom and so much more. Matthew Weiner (The Sopranos, Are ...
