Go Into The Story

Why Is This Not a Movie?

Check out my podcast conversation advocating for a sequel for one of my favorite action comedies: The Nice Guys.

What are you afraid of?

The single greatest inhibitor to creativity is fear. Do you recognize any of these negative voices?

Page One: “Lone Star” (1996)

Written by John Sayles

Screenwriting Tip: A New Angle Into an Old Story

Looking for your next spec script subject? It just might be waiting for you in a history book.

Hollywood Tales

Screenwriter Ben Maddow with a great story about 1950s Hollywood producer Philip Yordan.

Page One: “Love Is Strange” (2014)

Written by Ira Sachs & Mauricio Zacharias

Script Club: “Women Talking”

An in-depth video conversation about the Oscar-winning screenplay written by Sarah Polley.

On Writing

“It’s baseball, not football — a long season, slumps, errors, humiliations, bad feelings, bad weather, jet lag, all that stuff, and you…

Page One: “Love & Friendship” (2016)

Written by Whit Stillman, based on the novella “Lady Susan” by Jane Austen

Write a Worthy Nemesis

Workshop your story’s antagonist character in my 1-week online course. Begins Monday, October 16th.

Writing Tip: The Most Needed Quote on Writing

“The writer is both a sadist and a masochist.”

Page One: “Lone Survivor” (2013)

Written by Peter Berg, book by Marcus Luttrell and Patrick Robinson

Script To Screen: “The Lost Boys”

A pivotal scene from the 1987 movie The Lost Boys, screenplay by Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam, story by Janice Fischer…

Interview: Brian Duffield

Conversation with the writer-director of the new science fiction horror movie No One Will Save You.

Page One: “Limitless” (2011)

Screenplay by Leslie Dixon, novel by Alan Glynn

Do you write “high concept” stories or not?

And just generally, what are your thoughts about “high concept” movies?

Writing Tip: An Argument Against Screenplay Formulas

Christopher Hampton: “I don’t believe in rules for writing screenplays. What that gives you is formula, and the result will be formulaic.”

Page One: “Letters from Iwo Jima” (2006)

Screenplay by Iris Yamashita, story by Iris Yamashita & Paul Haggis, book by Tadamichi Kuribayashi and Tsuyoko Yoshido

Writing Tip: Screenplay as a Series of Event-Reactions

“A movie is — in a way — simply a continuous series of event-reactions / moment-responses.”

Dark Places

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

Page One: “Lethal Weapon 4” (1998)

Screenplay by Channing Gibson, story by Jonathan Lemkin and Alfred Gough & Miles Millar, characters created by Shane Black

Writing Tip: Focus In on Themes

Here’s a tip on how to focus in on themes. Just as you can generally surface a story’s central theme by following the Protagonist, you can…

Is “We See” Bad Writing?

Another in the terrific screenwriting series Raising the Stakes.

Page One: “Leon the Professional” (1994)

Written by Luc Besson

Screenwriting Tip: Watch movies. Read scripts. Write pages.

You can learn pretty much everything you need to know about screenwriting by doing these three things: